Considering that they're using color filters to create composites from B/W images, none of this is very surprising. If you use a 1Mp CCD with A color filters and B offsets, you will get A*B Mp of information.
Uhm, no, I'm saying it's a completely asinine idea and a total waste of resources. Moreover, if one gets passed the science-fiction sex appeal and looks at the political economic side of it, this proposition is in perfect Bush character and is just a signature Republican cash grab. Get the bulk of society to foot the bill for a "mission to Mars" and just gloss over the bottom line: hundreds of billions of dollars of your hard-earned tax dollars going straight into the bank accounts of the contractors whether or not a single human foot ever touches Martian dirt. It's a cash give away designed to appeal to American pride. Oh, the surprise at the timing. Just in case "the war on terror" goes south in six months as Iraq descends into greater chaos --POOF-- "WE'RE GOING TO CONQUER MARS!" Oh, friggen brilliant and people are eating it up.
...funny, I didn't mention anything about price or quality... just that they don't tend to make many gas guzzlers. One could say the same thing about Lotus...except that one might have more doubts about its quality than with a VW equivalent.
Incidentally, VW does as much marketing b.s. as Lexus and Jaguar or anyone else by incessantly upselling their cars as lifestyle purchases, neohippie budvases and all.
...obviously this doesn't work inductively. The lower-end (as in "insanely high-end" from a consumer point of view) DLT drives run at around 5MB/s. However, many autoload libraries run considerably higher than that, but still 55MB/s. This is why I took exception to the parent poster's statement that 55MB/s was unacceptable for what is CLEARLY a consumer/"prosumer" device. The off-line (and near on-line) storage options out there just don't function at the speeds the poster seems to think are to be expected for backup purposes.
It's overdue? We've only been able to get twelve feet off the ground for 100 years and have only had things in orbit for 50, have only had a reusable vehicle, which pretty much functions as an orbital chunk of shot that needs to be catapulted into orbit, for 20 and we (the United States) still haven't accepted the fact that it makes more sense to drink filtered urine than to haul up tons of water and you think it's "long overdue" that we should be living on the Moon and freaking MARS?!
Beyond the obvious questions of budgetary priorities, really even "only" $17B/year adds up fast after a couple years, the experience closer to home just isn't there. Hell, after twenty-five years we still can't even make atmospheric supersonic flight on our own planet economically viable. Sure, we can hurl an unmanned probe the size of a Mini pretty well these days, but permanent human population is a massively different story. For god's sake, we've spent billions on a space station that sustains a handful of people and we're already springing leaks just after their shuttle burst into flames. Howsabout we worry about how to keep people alive within a few miles of the dirt before we shoot for Mars?
...that's great, but if the device in question (a DLT system) can only do 22MB/s, you're not going to magically get 68MB/s. That's like putting a VW Beetle engine in a Laborghini and expecting to break 120Mph.
...of course. That tape is ultimately cheaper is pretty obvious. Sure, once you've spent the $6,000 necessary for a tape system that handles >1TB per cartridge, tape is cheaper for scheduled backups. But, really, if you have such a subsystem in place, you're not going to use a primary storage medium with the same transfer rate. The point I was countering was that 55MB/s was problematic in terms of backup. Unless you're backing up to another RAID or JBOD, 55MB/s is hardly limiting.
For it's purpose and form-factor, it's still a nice desktop workstation device that could be backed-up to tape just as well as anthing else and certainly at a competetive price. Obviously, this is not going to make it into the server racks, but that's hardly where it is being marketed to.
...and what would you be backing up TO that five hours would be considered slow for a terabyte? A SCSI RAID? If you had another SCSI RAID, why would you use a firewire device as your primary? What say you're doing this to a standard backup medium like DLT. Most DLT subsystems that can handle this capacity run below 55MB/s, in fact most are FAR below that (like 11MB/s)--and they cost several times what this device does, so why not just buy two? Even if this thing connected via Ultra-320 SCSI, you'd still be backing up slower than FireWire 800, unless your backup device was another RAID on the same SCSI chain. In either case, would you be buying this thing? Clearly, the Firewire interface in this drive is hardly the bottleneck in terms of backing up its contents. At the price in question, it's a damned good buy, even if you needed a second for backup.
It's infuriating that companies cannot seem to wrap their collective brains around the implications of having "exempt" salaried employees. They are _not_ paid by they hour, damn it. If they work 37 hours or 370 hours, they get paid the same. Docking them by the minute is just petty.
Although seven hours seems generous, I've often put in FAR more than seven hours per month of overtime. I've also had known variables in coming months where I knew and my employer knew that I would be putting in 12 hour days for the entire month and travelling to boot. So big deal, a month is about 173 hours. One month I happen to work 108 hours, but the next month I work 260 hours. Of the 346 hours I should have but in, I actually worked 433, 87 hours of overtime in two months, but during the first month, I "owed" the company 65 hours. So now the company suckers me for two grand because I worked 87 hours of overtime that didn't fit the same timeslicing as some nitwit MBA thought was truly inspired.GREAT. So you get better attendance and *poof* now all your salaried employees give you _exactly_ 37.50 hours per week of work. If you have 100 employees who routinely give you two free days per month of overtime,you've now pissed off your employees to the tune of 19,200 hours of annual work they used to gleefully give because you're so gosh darn nice to work with. In effect, by insulting them, they have reduced efficiency by 10% (or fired the additional 10 full-time employees their overtime represented), but now everyone *looks* 100% effective because they're leaving RIGHT on schedule now. This exact scenario happened at a previous employer of mine as soon as management started treating everyone like we were at bootcamp. Fine. We'll work EXACTLY 7.5 hours per day and we'll come in precisely at 8:00am and leave at 4:30pm on the dot. Of course, we used to come in at 9:30-10am and leave at 7:30-8pm, sometimes much later. But fine, 7.5 hours it is. Congratulations.
By signing an employment contract on salary, you are agreeing that for an entire year of work, you will be paid a certain amount of money. It could be 2000 hours, it could be 3000 hours. Either way, same pay. It's the blasted accountants and MBA's looking at "FTE's" and silly assumptions of the 2080 hour year that come up with this stopwatch bullshit. If at the end of the year, I put in 2500 hours, but got docked $1000 because I "lost" 40 hours over the entire year that were then made up with 460 hours of uncompensated overtime, I'm going to be rightfully pissed off.
If a company wants to pull this salary-deducting crap, fine, put your employees on hourly and pay them overtime--THEN you can start nickel-diming them by the minute when they drop under full-time for an arbitrary period.
A better comparison would be to motion picture film. How many movies are shot in digital? There have been all of several--most of them highly oriented to CGI (read: Star Wars). It's not about "warmth" or some other esoteric artsy bullshit, it's about the underlying technology itself and the associated costs. To get the same quality as a $10 roll of film and a $200 SLR takes a $5,000 digital camera. If you're talking about high-end professional photography, you'd have to come up with a CCD capable of reproducing at least the same level of detail as 220 film, which is about four times the resolution of 35mm film. The CCD equivalent of 35mm would be about 12Mp. For high-end photography, you'd need one capable of 60Mp. Certainly, many professional jobs are fine in 35mm or equivalent, but you can get a very nice 220 camera for a few thousand dollars. A 16Mp digital back for a 220 camera will cost about $6,000 (keep in mind, you still need to spend a few grand on the rest of the camer)--and yield results better than 35mm film, but far shy of 220 film. 22Mp backs are available, but it takes 2 seconds to process each frame--and they cost over $20,000. Besides, without doing multiple exposures through color filters, you're still at 1/3 the resolution of 110/220 film. Don't even think about what it would take for work usually shot with 8x10" because 640mp digital backs are a LONG way off, let alone from being anywhere near the price of the film equivalent.
That's $3,833 to repair a $1,000 machine not including labor, tax or shipping. This is why I buy cheap-ass laptops and use them primarily as X terminals, rather than workstations. SSH'ing into the big guns provides far more power than the biggest baddest laptop that will be worth a buck fifty in six months anyway, only if it bursts into flames I'm out hundreds, not thousands, of dollars.
And if Democracy was designed like the/. moderation system, all dissent to line items in the National Security Appropriations bill would be modded "-1 Offtopic" and henceforce thrown into the memory hole.
Thou shalt not slander the Libertarian party on/. Apparently people think "Libertarianism" is the foundation of OSS/EFF/whatever leftish cyberpunkish philosophy. Just because they are hot on ONE of the issues dear to/. (free speech) does not mean you should support the rest of their platform, which to many even center-left is positively repugnant--e.g. completely abandon ALL social welfare, double policing, increase incarceration lengths. So between "you have the right to remain silent" and "you have the right to die" they throw in "feel free to say anything you want, subject to my double-barreled shotgun." Oh, YAY! They're GREAT!
Friggen scary, more like. And YES this is ON-TOPIC as if the solution to frightful government incursions on privacy is FARKING VOTING then arguments about the political parties that might solve that is relevant, damn it. Christ, sometimes this place amazes me.
Funny, I thought this looked EXACTLY like the apartments of all the egocentric rich phuckwads I've ever known. Form before function, price before practicality. It makes the very strong statement of "I'm a self-involved trust fund baby with no common sense." It's called the VosPAD. I in addition to being slang for apartment, "pad" is an old term for highway robbery.
Besides, if you're voting Libertarian, just vote Republican. There isn't a hell of a lot of difference. You know, "no new taxes," "screw the poor," "me wantum guns" etc. etc. Oh, there's a real "splinter" platform there. Guffaw.
I dunno, do you consider it misleading when you buy Grade A vs. AA vs. AAA eggs that came out of the same chicken or USDA Select vs. Prime from the same cow?
What is really asinine in the whole works is the consumers manufacturers are targeting this "deception" at are the ones least likely to have any reason to care, since they haven't much capcity to tell the difference beyond the label. They buy more because there are more of them, so their absurd perceptions determine the labeling, like the !@$#ing "megabyte" crisis where we got freaking lawsuits because "mega" means "million" and humans are seemingly incapable of working in base two and somehow Joe and Joan Asshat thought their own incompetence worth wasting millions of dollars in legal expenses.
Should they sue their clothing manufacturers when they find out they're just buying for $50 the same marked-up shit being sold in the stalls of Bangladesh for a nickel or because their beauty products are priced like precious metals? I was at the grocery store and happened to glance at some upper-lower grade "lip balm" that was five hundred bucks per gallon (of course, it was being sold in some small number of ounces). Chateau Laffitte Rothschild 1965 Bordeaux costs roughly the same price by volume as that lip balm. Should I sue? No. The information is there in all its ridiculousness and I can choose to buy a really good wine or a really overpriced tin of wax.
In the end, as long as the real specs are plainly stated for those who understand them to evaluate, who cares what they name it? Personally, I wish evererything came in a plain brown box with nothing but technical specs so idiots with no business arguing about them would have nothing to go on and, hence, would have no basis for getting their lawyers involved. They might just have to LEARN and we'd be rid of all the dreck that fills the stores engineered purely to be purchased by those who have no idea what they're purchasing in the first place.
Until the cost of Tier-1 access goes down, your price will not go down. Simple as that. Threaten away if it makes you happy, but it won't make a difference. Considering the amount of bandwidth you can suck up for $40, you're practically stealing it already.
I think that Jamaica is probably an unfair testbed for market economics for infrastructure services. Really, how many competitors can you have in such a confined space for a product with such a high initial cost, especially given the broader economic conditions of the area. The average American can stomach the idea of $40/month (and, obviously from this thread, they still bitch about it), but what would the price point have to be for the average Jamaican who makes less than $500/month? However, satellite service isn't impacted by local economics and is available in Jamaica for $39.99.
...which is generally fixed to the ambient color temperature to render "white" as, well, "white." Of course, if the ambient color is "fuscia," "white" should be rendered not as "white," but as, roughly, "fuscia," if you want a true representation. Filtering that back to white would be the equivalent of adjusting your bathroom scale to zero while standing on it.
Of course it doesn't cost anything to run a LAN. If you're sucking off the local net, you're still using resources, damn it. I think I'll use that argument to say to my corporate IT department, hey, let's all use full-frame 30fps video conferencing 24/7--it's on the LAN, so we shouldn't have any bandwidth issues.
What say we assume you have a 100Mbit link to your CO. That's roughly 300 people at 300k sustained and it's all gone, regardless of what's on the other side. My previous employer had a 60Km 10G link. Relatively unlimited until you consider that 47,000 people were connected to it. Even spread across that many users the cost per user was hardly trivial.
You cannot possibly think that only your "internet" traffic is costly. Oh wait, you just said precisely that.
Procure a color chart. If you cannot, procure a box of crayons and make several large marks of relatively uniform saturation using the colors "Red" "Green" and "Blue." If you're truly adventurous, you may try a nice burnt umber or perhaps attempt various gradations from black to white.
Place this color chart on the ground.
Using the exact same settings on your camera, photograph this chart at sunrise, high noon and sunset. Do this on days of varying weather conditions.
If possible, start a large brush fire. Wait for large reddish clouds to filter the sunlight. Photograph your chart again. This is probably illegal, so wait until someone else does this for you.
Now wait until midnight. Photograph your chart using a flash.
In Photoshop, adust the color balance of all of your photos to match the last image.
Voila, all of your images are now completely indistinguishable from each other and you have lost all of the information you recorded by making photographs in varying lighting conditions.
Not the least because every major and many minor law enforcement agencies have installed dashboard laptops for years, but because of the massive commercial use (read:FedEx, UPS etc.) to say nothing of the implications for systems like BMW's IDrive, which is arguably a more complex computer (or, rather, LAN) than an average laptop
That's what I did. They start at just over $100/month from most carriers.
Really, if you're sucking up 300kb/s upstream and downstream every single second of the day, you're transferring a terabit per month. If you think that's only worth $49.95, methinks thou doth protest too much. I mean, really, a 155Mbps OC-3 costs, what, $30k/month? That would support roughly 500 people with a sustained suck of 300kbps. That's about $60 each, meaning your ISP would lose about $5,000 for every 500 users who think they should only pay $0.03/Gb/month. Come on. THREE CENTS Gigabit? Regardless of if they say "unlimited," try to be real here.
You can get a 384kbps synchronous line with a service level agreement from Covad for like $160/month. That's 2Tb/month for $160 or roughly 12Gb/$1 or EIGHT CENTS per gigabit. Oh, the pain, the pain.
Think of how many WinMX/Gnutella/Kazaa users are out there before you think "but I'm an ubergeek, I'm the exception not the rule." Everytime you're using a WiFi hotspot and feel like you're on a 300bps analog modem because there are fifteen !#^%!ing Kazaa idiots sucking up the entire outbound line, just multiply that over your ISP. When you're done, write the stinking $160 check and get over it.
Here it is quite common for students of Law or Medicine to run up debt on the order of $140,000. In the case of George Washington, an on-campus year now costs in excess of $41,000. Get your bachelor's and master's for a mere $247,620. By the time the current undergraduate students (about 8500 of 'em) have graduated, they will have topped $1.3 billion in expenses. That's more than the GNP of Andorra and they have a population of 69,000. They must be fucking joking. I know Foggy Bottom real estate is pricy, but geezuz.
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Considering that they're using color filters to create composites from B/W images, none of this is very surprising. If you use a 1Mp CCD with A color filters and B offsets, you will get A*B Mp of information.
>shock
Uhm, no, I'm saying it's a completely asinine idea and a total waste of resources. Moreover, if one gets passed the science-fiction sex appeal and looks at the political economic side of it, this proposition is in perfect Bush character and is just a signature Republican cash grab. Get the bulk of society to foot the bill for a "mission to Mars" and just gloss over the bottom line: hundreds of billions of dollars of your hard-earned tax dollars going straight into the bank accounts of the contractors whether or not a single human foot ever touches Martian dirt. It's a cash give away designed to appeal to American pride. Oh, the surprise at the timing. Just in case "the war on terror" goes south in six months as Iraq descends into greater chaos --POOF-- "WE'RE GOING TO CONQUER MARS!" Oh, friggen brilliant and people are eating it up.
...funny, I didn't mention anything about price or quality... just that they don't tend to make many gas guzzlers. One could say the same thing about Lotus...except that one might have more doubts about its quality than with a VW equivalent.
Incidentally, VW does as much marketing b.s. as Lexus and Jaguar or anyone else by incessantly upselling their cars as lifestyle purchases, neohippie budvases and all.
But think how perty a big 'ol rack of these would look next to a stack of MAC XServes.
I'm sure there will be stacks of these appearing in CTU on "24" for exactly that reason.
So buy a Phaeton.
Scary. A VW with a $3,000 gas guzzler tax. Who knew?
...obviously this doesn't work inductively. The lower-end (as in "insanely high-end" from a consumer point of view) DLT drives run at around 5MB/s. However, many autoload libraries run considerably higher than that, but still 55MB/s. This is why I took exception to the parent poster's statement that 55MB/s was unacceptable for what is CLEARLY a consumer/"prosumer" device. The off-line (and near on-line) storage options out there just don't function at the speeds the poster seems to think are to be expected for backup purposes.
It's overdue? We've only been able to get twelve feet off the ground for 100 years and have only had things in orbit for 50, have only had a reusable vehicle, which pretty much functions as an orbital chunk of shot that needs to be catapulted into orbit, for 20 and we (the United States) still haven't accepted the fact that it makes more sense to drink filtered urine than to haul up tons of water and you think it's "long overdue" that we should be living on the Moon and freaking MARS?!
Beyond the obvious questions of budgetary priorities, really even "only" $17B/year adds up fast after a couple years, the experience closer to home just isn't there. Hell, after twenty-five years we still can't even make atmospheric supersonic flight on our own planet economically viable. Sure, we can hurl an unmanned probe the size of a Mini pretty well these days, but permanent human population is a massively different story. For god's sake, we've spent billions on a space station that sustains a handful of people and we're already springing leaks just after their shuttle burst into flames. Howsabout we worry about how to keep people alive within a few miles of the dirt before we shoot for Mars?
The word of the day is: HUBRIS
...that's great, but if the device in question (a DLT system) can only do 22MB/s, you're not going to magically get 68MB/s. That's like putting a VW Beetle engine in a Laborghini and expecting to break 120Mph.
DUH.
...of course. That tape is ultimately cheaper is pretty obvious. Sure, once you've spent the $6,000 necessary for a tape system that handles >1TB per cartridge, tape is cheaper for scheduled backups. But, really, if you have such a subsystem in place, you're not going to use a primary storage medium with the same transfer rate. The point I was countering was that 55MB/s was problematic in terms of backup. Unless you're backing up to another RAID or JBOD, 55MB/s is hardly limiting.
For it's purpose and form-factor, it's still a nice desktop workstation device that could be backed-up to tape just as well as anthing else and certainly at a competetive price. Obviously, this is not going to make it into the server racks, but that's hardly where it is being marketed to.
...and what would you be backing up TO that five hours would be considered slow for a terabyte? A SCSI RAID? If you had another SCSI RAID, why would you use a firewire device as your primary? What say you're doing this to a standard backup medium like DLT. Most DLT subsystems that can handle this capacity run below 55MB/s, in fact most are FAR below that (like 11MB/s)--and they cost several times what this device does, so why not just buy two? Even if this thing connected via Ultra-320 SCSI, you'd still be backing up slower than FireWire 800, unless your backup device was another RAID on the same SCSI chain. In either case, would you be buying this thing? Clearly, the Firewire interface in this drive is hardly the bottleneck in terms of backing up its contents. At the price in question, it's a damned good buy, even if you needed a second for backup.
Now _that's_ Draconian.
It's infuriating that companies cannot seem to wrap their collective brains around the implications of having "exempt" salaried employees. They are _not_ paid by they hour, damn it. If they work 37 hours or 370 hours, they get paid the same. Docking them by the minute is just petty.
Although seven hours seems generous, I've often put in FAR more than seven hours per month of overtime. I've also had known variables in coming months where I knew and my employer knew that I would be putting in 12 hour days for the entire month and travelling to boot. So big deal, a month is about 173 hours. One month I happen to work 108 hours, but the next month I work 260 hours. Of the 346 hours I should have but in, I actually worked 433, 87 hours of overtime in two months, but during the first month, I "owed" the company 65 hours. So now the company suckers me for two grand because I worked 87 hours of overtime that didn't fit the same timeslicing as some nitwit MBA thought was truly inspired.GREAT. So you get better attendance and *poof* now all your salaried employees give you _exactly_ 37.50 hours per week of work. If you have 100 employees who routinely give you two free days per month of overtime,you've now pissed off your employees to the tune of 19,200 hours of annual work they used to gleefully give because you're so gosh darn nice to work with. In effect, by insulting them, they have reduced efficiency by 10% (or fired the additional 10 full-time employees their overtime represented), but now everyone *looks* 100% effective because they're leaving RIGHT on schedule now. This exact scenario happened at a previous employer of mine as soon as management started treating everyone like we were at bootcamp. Fine. We'll work EXACTLY 7.5 hours per day and we'll come in precisely at 8:00am and leave at 4:30pm on the dot. Of course, we used to come in at 9:30-10am and leave at 7:30-8pm, sometimes much later. But fine, 7.5 hours it is. Congratulations.
By signing an employment contract on salary, you are agreeing that for an entire year of work, you will be paid a certain amount of money. It could be 2000 hours, it could be 3000 hours. Either way, same pay. It's the blasted accountants and MBA's looking at "FTE's" and silly assumptions of the 2080 hour year that come up with this stopwatch bullshit. If at the end of the year, I put in 2500 hours, but got docked $1000 because I "lost" 40 hours over the entire year that were then made up with 460 hours of uncompensated overtime, I'm going to be rightfully pissed off.
If a company wants to pull this salary-deducting crap, fine, put your employees on hourly and pay them overtime--THEN you can start nickel-diming them by the minute when they drop under full-time for an arbitrary period.
A better comparison would be to motion picture film. How many movies are shot in digital? There have been all of several--most of them highly oriented to CGI (read: Star Wars). It's not about "warmth" or some other esoteric artsy bullshit, it's about the underlying technology itself and the associated costs. To get the same quality as a $10 roll of film and a $200 SLR takes a $5,000 digital camera. If you're talking about high-end professional photography, you'd have to come up with a CCD capable of reproducing at least the same level of detail as 220 film, which is about four times the resolution of 35mm film. The CCD equivalent of 35mm would be about 12Mp. For high-end photography, you'd need one capable of 60Mp. Certainly, many professional jobs are fine in 35mm or equivalent, but you can get a very nice 220 camera for a few thousand dollars. A 16Mp digital back for a 220 camera will cost about $6,000 (keep in mind, you still need to spend a few grand on the rest of the camer)--and yield results better than 35mm film, but far shy of 220 film. 22Mp backs are available, but it takes 2 seconds to process each frame--and they cost over $20,000. Besides, without doing multiple exposures through color filters, you're still at 1/3 the resolution of 110/220 film. Don't even think about what it would take for work usually shot with 8x10" because 640mp digital backs are a LONG way off, let alone from being anywhere near the price of the film equivalent.
Yeah, Compaq/HP are AWFUL. I bought a cheap Compaq laptop a whole ONE YEAR AGO for a grand total of $1100.
Replacement parts are:
LCD: $836
30GB HD: $372
DVD: $382
Battery: $180
Clock battery: $102
$1872 so far.
Fan: $59
Heatsink: $90
Keyboard: $72
Screws: $80
256MB: $293
Logo: $59
HD interface: $100
Modem: $84
Motherboard: $538
LCD Inverter: $151
Power cord: $46
Athlon 1500: $322
Speaker: $67
That's $3,833 to repair a $1,000 machine not including labor, tax or shipping. This is why I buy cheap-ass laptops and use them primarily as X terminals, rather than workstations. SSH'ing into the big guns provides far more power than the biggest baddest laptop that will be worth a buck fifty in six months anyway, only if it bursts into flames I'm out hundreds, not thousands, of dollars.
And if Democracy was designed like the /. moderation system, all dissent to line items in the National Security Appropriations bill would be modded "-1 Offtopic" and henceforce thrown into the memory hole.
/. Apparently people think "Libertarianism" is the foundation of OSS/EFF/whatever leftish cyberpunkish philosophy. Just because they are hot on ONE of the issues dear to /. (free speech) does not mean you should support the rest of their platform, which to many even center-left is positively repugnant--e.g. completely abandon ALL social welfare, double policing, increase incarceration lengths. So between "you have the right to remain silent" and "you have the right to die" they throw in "feel free to say anything you want, subject to my double-barreled shotgun." Oh, YAY! They're GREAT!
Thou shalt not slander the Libertarian party on
Friggen scary, more like. And YES this is ON-TOPIC as if the solution to frightful government incursions on privacy is FARKING VOTING then arguments about the political parties that might solve that is relevant, damn it. Christ, sometimes this place amazes me.
Funny, I thought this looked EXACTLY like the apartments of all the egocentric rich phuckwads I've ever known. Form before function, price before practicality. It makes the very strong statement of "I'm a self-involved trust fund baby with no common sense." It's called the VosPAD. I in addition to being slang for apartment, "pad" is an old term for highway robbery.
It's PERFECT.
And where on the primary ballot would you find your Libertarian candidate, hmmm?
2 00 4.html
Go Badnarik, GO! Huh? Who the F@#$ is Badnarik?
For anyone wondering, here are the Libertarian candidates:
http://www.dehnbase.org/lpus/library/pres-cand-
Besides, if you're voting Libertarian, just vote Republican. There isn't a hell of a lot of difference. You know, "no new taxes," "screw the poor," "me wantum guns" etc. etc. Oh, there's a real "splinter" platform there. Guffaw.
I dunno, do you consider it misleading when you buy Grade A vs. AA vs. AAA eggs that came out of the same chicken or USDA Select vs. Prime from the same cow?
What is really asinine in the whole works is the consumers manufacturers are targeting this "deception" at are the ones least likely to have any reason to care, since they haven't much capcity to tell the difference beyond the label. They buy more because there are more of them, so their absurd perceptions determine the labeling, like the !@$#ing "megabyte" crisis where we got freaking lawsuits because "mega" means "million" and humans are seemingly incapable of working in base two and somehow Joe and Joan Asshat thought their own incompetence worth wasting millions of dollars in legal expenses.
Should they sue their clothing manufacturers when they find out they're just buying for $50 the same marked-up shit being sold in the stalls of Bangladesh for a nickel or because their beauty products are priced like precious metals? I was at the grocery store and happened to glance at some upper-lower grade "lip balm" that was five hundred bucks per gallon (of course, it was being sold in some small number of ounces). Chateau Laffitte Rothschild 1965 Bordeaux costs roughly the same price by volume as that lip balm. Should I sue? No. The information is there in all its ridiculousness and I can choose to buy a really good wine or a really overpriced tin of wax.
In the end, as long as the real specs are plainly stated for those who understand them to evaluate, who cares what they name it? Personally, I wish evererything came in a plain brown box with nothing but technical specs so idiots with no business arguing about them would have nothing to go on and, hence, would have no basis for getting their lawyers involved. They might just have to LEARN and we'd be rid of all the dreck that fills the stores engineered purely to be purchased by those who have no idea what they're purchasing in the first place.
Until the cost of Tier-1 access goes down, your price will not go down. Simple as that. Threaten away if it makes you happy, but it won't make a difference. Considering the amount of bandwidth you can suck up for $40, you're practically stealing it already.
I think that Jamaica is probably an unfair testbed for market economics for infrastructure services. Really, how many competitors can you have in such a confined space for a product with such a high initial cost, especially given the broader economic conditions of the area. The average American can stomach the idea of $40/month (and, obviously from this thread, they still bitch about it), but what would the price point have to be for the average Jamaican who makes less than $500/month? However, satellite service isn't impacted by local economics and is available in Jamaica for $39.99.
...which is generally fixed to the ambient color temperature to render "white" as, well, "white." Of course, if the ambient color is "fuscia," "white" should be rendered not as "white," but as, roughly, "fuscia," if you want a true representation. Filtering that back to white would be the equivalent of adjusting your bathroom scale to zero while standing on it.
Again, DUH.
Of course it doesn't cost anything to run a LAN. If you're sucking off the local net, you're still using resources, damn it. I think I'll use that argument to say to my corporate IT department, hey, let's all use full-frame 30fps video conferencing 24/7--it's on the LAN, so we shouldn't have any bandwidth issues.
What say we assume you have a 100Mbit link to your CO. That's roughly 300 people at 300k sustained and it's all gone, regardless of what's on the other side. My previous employer had a 60Km 10G link. Relatively unlimited until you consider that 47,000 people were connected to it. Even spread across that many users the cost per user was hardly trivial.
You cannot possibly think that only your "internet" traffic is costly. Oh wait, you just said precisely that.
Ok, here's a little experiment for 'ya.
Procure a color chart. If you cannot, procure a box of crayons and make several large marks of relatively uniform saturation using the colors "Red" "Green" and "Blue." If you're truly adventurous, you may try a nice burnt umber or perhaps attempt various gradations from black to white.
Place this color chart on the ground.
Using the exact same settings on your camera, photograph this chart at sunrise, high noon and sunset. Do this on days of varying weather conditions.
If possible, start a large brush fire. Wait for large reddish clouds to filter the sunlight. Photograph your chart again. This is probably illegal, so wait until someone else does this for you.
Now wait until midnight. Photograph your chart using a flash.
In Photoshop, adust the color balance of all of your photos to match the last image.
Voila, all of your images are now completely indistinguishable from each other and you have lost all of the information you recorded by making photographs in varying lighting conditions.
DUH.
Not the least because every major and many minor law enforcement agencies have installed dashboard laptops for years, but because of the massive commercial use (read:FedEx, UPS etc.) to say nothing of the implications for systems like BMW's IDrive, which is arguably a more complex computer (or, rather, LAN) than an average laptop
Purchase a business-grade account.
That's what I did. They start at just over $100/month from most carriers.
Really, if you're sucking up 300kb/s upstream and downstream every single second of the day, you're transferring a terabit per month. If you think that's only worth $49.95, methinks thou doth protest too much. I mean, really, a 155Mbps OC-3 costs, what, $30k/month? That would support roughly 500 people with a sustained suck of 300kbps. That's about $60 each, meaning your ISP would lose about $5,000 for every 500 users who think they should only pay $0.03/Gb/month. Come on. THREE CENTS Gigabit? Regardless of if they say "unlimited," try to be real here.
You can get a 384kbps synchronous line with a service level agreement from Covad for like $160/month. That's 2Tb/month for $160 or roughly 12Gb/$1 or EIGHT CENTS per gigabit. Oh, the pain, the pain.
Think of how many WinMX/Gnutella/Kazaa users are out there before you think "but I'm an ubergeek, I'm the exception not the rule." Everytime you're using a WiFi hotspot and feel like you're on a 300bps analog modem because there are fifteen !#^%!ing Kazaa idiots sucking up the entire outbound line, just multiply that over your ISP. When you're done, write the stinking $160 check and get over it.
Here it is quite common for students of Law or Medicine to run up debt on the order of $140,000. In the case of George Washington, an on-campus year now costs in excess of $41,000. Get your bachelor's and master's for a mere $247,620. By the time the current undergraduate students (about 8500 of 'em) have graduated, they will have topped $1.3 billion in expenses. That's more than the GNP of Andorra and they have a population of 69,000. They must be fucking joking. I know Foggy Bottom real estate is pricy, but geezuz.
http://gwired.gwu.edu/adm/financial/costs.html