The most amusing part of this argument is that the laws against holocaust denial in Germany date back to the time when the USA was running the country (or, at least, the part of the country that this law is inherited from).
Let's just look at that 3.7 billion figure for 2006. I couldn't find a figure for 2006, but in 2010 nuclear power accounted for 22.4% of the total electricity consumption in Germany. I couldn't find the 2010 figure for electricity consumption, but in 2008 it was 544,500,000MWh, and I doubt it's decreased since then so I'll use that figure. That works out at 121,968,000MWh of nuclear power consumed. So, 3.7 billion Euros subsidising 122 billion kWh of electricity, works out at about 3.3 eurocents per kWh. Put like that, it doesn't seem too unreasonable - it's an amount that could be lost in the noise of fluctuating electricity prices over the past few years if it were not subsidised.
A couple of car companies have demonstrated plug-in electric cars that can be used for electricity storage and power your house while sitting plugged in. If every household has an electric car and 20% of them are plugged in at any time, 50% plugged in at night, then that would go a long way towards helping even out the difference between supply and demand.
Other companies do build better machines for a premium price, but it doesn't work as well because they're competing in a commodity market. Most people who buy Macs want to run OS X. They have a clear choice of cheap(er) or pro lines. In some ways, the commodity models are intentionally crippled to make the decision easier (fewer people are on the line, because there's a fairly big gap between the capabilities of the two lines). With other manufacturers, the average consumer plans on running Windows, and can find another machine with the same checklist of features that will do exactly the same thing but at a lower price.
Forget the need to compare drive spin speeds and CPU MHz and what not
Why? This Mac has a 2.2GHz quad-core i7, and a 256GB SSD. Work just bought me a Linux desktop with a quad core i5, also with an SSD, and this machine can still complete big build jobs in a VM in less time than the desktop can running natively.
I wish someone would print out the quoted section and staple it to the forehead of the COO of every major laptop and mobile phone manufacturer. I had a similar experience a few months ago trying to decide which phone to buy. The manufacturers all have a vast array of models without any clear differentiation. Except Apple, which sells new-iPhone and old-iPhone. It was very easy to see why people look at them all and say 'fuck this, i'm getting an iPhone'. It was a perfect example of the Paradox of Choice.
Last time I bought a phone, Nokia had a thing on their web site that asked you questions and gave you a small number of choices based on your replies, which was slightly better, but given how similar the models are I can't help thinking that manufacturers would save money and make customers happy by having no more than six models of phone, no more than one per market segment, and maybe the option of buying them in different colours.
Unless you're in the EU, where you pay a lot just to get extra telephone support, and Apple will honour their statutory obligations if you quote the relevant laws at them and repair things for free out of warranty. Oh, and if you buy through the education store, then you get the 3 year warranty as standard (as well as a 10-20% discount).
Are those mutually exclusive options? The industrial revolution resulted in a lot of reforms in the UK, including the beginnings of the process that ended with universal suffrage. It was also a time when the poor were exploited and oppressed, although this time by the upper middle classes rather than (or, more accurately, as well as) the aristocracy. Given the end results, I think most of us living in the countries that benefitted from this process are glad that it did, as well as being glad that we can look back on it as a transitional step. Given the choice, I'd much rather that we had gone straight to a post-scarcity utopia in 1750, but as far as I know no one has yet come up with a way of making that happen...
Oh bullcrap. The west built it's industry through the industrial revolution - machines increasing productivity.
You might want to check the history of the industrial revolution a bit more carefully. Worker conditions in Foxconn factories look like paradise in comparison to conditions in England back then.
I actually did see someone using one of them last week, but he was a tango teacher who also DJ'd. If you'd asked me the same question a week ago, I'd have said over a year ago. I rarely see people with stand-alone MP3 players now that a cheap smartphone and a decent sized SD card can be had for about the same price as an MP3 player.
SSDs have been roughly doubling in capacity for the same price every 9 months for the last 15 years. If that continues, then they'll be where hard drives are now in 2-3 years in terms of price per GB. It's important to remember, however, that a more important metric than price per GB is price of the smallest drive bigger than what I need. For a lot of corporate desktops, 40GB hard drives are big enough. They get re-imaged periodically, so a larger hard drive isn't that important, and everything except the OS and a few apps is stored on a file server. The cheapest hard drive I can buy is 1TB at £60. The cheapest SSD I can buy is 32GB at £35. I can also get a 60GB SSD for £40. If I am buying 1,000 machines that are going to need under 40GB of local storage, I save £20,000 by going with the SSD.
Unlike hard drives, it's quite easy to make smaller-and-cheaper flash drives: just put fewer chips in the enclosure.
You are conflating a bus address width with a storage technology. There is no currently-planned 1TB SD card, there is just a plan for the next generation of the standard to support addressing up to 1TB. If you made the same assumption about addressability equalling shipping products, then most current laptops would have 256TB of RAM...
I was at a talk buy some guys from FusionIO a few weeks ago. They said a lot of interesting things, but one of the points that they made was that every generation of flash was slower than the last, as well as less reliable. That's the trade you make for greater capacity, but it's not sustainable in the long term. It's not that flash is worse but getting better, it's that flash is better (but more expensive) and getting worse.
If current trends continue, then in a few years the improvements in capacity will be lost completely to the extra duplication required to achieve reliability. Flash is basically a dead end at this point. It will almost certainly be replaced by PCRAM, MRAM, memristors, or some hybrid, although I wouldn't be surprised if the the result is marketed as flash...
It's a mistake to think of Samsung as a single company. It's more a tightly-cooperating group of businesses. Departments try hard to buy components from other Samsung departments, and to cooperate on mutually relevant projects, but aside from that they're run more or less independently. This is, in part, why Samsung suing Apple while selling them a load of components makes sense: the part suing Apple and the part selling to them are almost separate entities. The CPU and flash manufacturer parts sell to both Apple and the phone-making part of Samsung and has no interest in the lawsuits in either direction except as far as it changes the amount that their customers are willing and able to buy.
Possibly. Given Intel's failure to produce compilers that gave good performance on Itanium, however, it is more likely that we'd have seen a bit more competition in the 64-bit arena. HP had committed to killing Alpha and PA-RISC, but POWER, SPARC and MIPS were both doing quite well until x86-64 squeezed them out. If they'd only been competing against Itanium, they'd have had a much better chance.
He could be right. The hard drive makers have all invested a lot in SSD manufacturing capabilities over the past few years. It's entirely possible that they're not interested in upgrading their spinning-rust factories and are putting all of their money into their SSD facilities. That would cause a gradual increase in their HD production costs as undermaintained factories slowly went offline. In the meantime, they have no incentive to lower prices, knowing that they will have to raise them again in a year or two, and knowing that the higher the HD price the more attractive the SSD price is. If profit-per-drive is still greater for SSDs (I would be surprised if it isn't) then pushing people in that direction makes good business sense.
Most of the civilised world has rough analogues of PIPEDA, such as the EU Data Protection Directive. If your data is hosted in companies with similar laws to yours with respect to access, it is less important if the wording is exactly the same. It's only when you host it in a company that has no equivalent and does have laws that directly contradict the ideas of these laws that it becomes a problem.
Assuming, of course, that not only is the underlying encryption algorithm that TrueCrypt uses secure (it probably is), but that the implementation is 100% bug free. Given the complexity of the code, I would hate to bet anything too important on that.
You mean that stopped? Product placements in films make me cringe. Fortunately, they're so unsubtle that I can actively avoid the companies that buy them. Any time someone takes a drink, they need to zoom in on the bottle or can so that you can read the cocoa cola company logo, any time someone uses a computer they zoom in to the bottom of the screen so that you can read the Dell logo...
I haven't owned a TV for quite a few years (cue The Onion reference), and the frequency of adverts was the main factor in abandoning it - and this is in the UK, where we see about half as much TV advertising as in the USA. My TV broke and I realised that my housemates had watched it infrequently and I hadn't watched it at all for several months, so I didn't bother replacing it.
In the last few years, I've watched quite a lot of TV shows, but all on iPlayer or on rented DVDs. Being able to watch the shows when I want, without being interrupted by adverts actually makes TV viewing enjoyable again. I would much rather pay the studios for shows (and, hopefully, therefore have them make more shows that I want to watch) than have some companies pay an intermediary to show adverts, that intermediary buy the TV shows and hope that I buy enough of the things that they're advertising to recoup the costs.
That wasn't the BBC, it was ITV. The signal was there because they used a national signal but local advertising, so they needed some mechanism for cutting in the adverts. Putting it in-band eliminate the possibility of it losing synchronisation with the rest of the series. By the time there were better ways of doing this available, they'd already invested in equipment all of the country and there wasn't much point in changing it.
You see something similar on films. A cigarette burn (black circle) appears in one corner just before it's time to change reels, so the projectionist who is watching the film can go and do his job.
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I won't contribute to his next Kickstarter project. (Unless the Kickstarter project was for funding hookers and blow, of course.)
I may have an exciting investment opportunity for you.
The most amusing part of this argument is that the laws against holocaust denial in Germany date back to the time when the USA was running the country (or, at least, the part of the country that this law is inherited from).
1,000 for one hour, 500 for two hours, 250 for four hours, and so on.
Let's just look at that 3.7 billion figure for 2006. I couldn't find a figure for 2006, but in 2010 nuclear power accounted for 22.4% of the total electricity consumption in Germany. I couldn't find the 2010 figure for electricity consumption, but in 2008 it was 544,500,000MWh, and I doubt it's decreased since then so I'll use that figure. That works out at 121,968,000MWh of nuclear power consumed. So, 3.7 billion Euros subsidising 122 billion kWh of electricity, works out at about 3.3 eurocents per kWh. Put like that, it doesn't seem too unreasonable - it's an amount that could be lost in the noise of fluctuating electricity prices over the past few years if it were not subsidised.
A couple of car companies have demonstrated plug-in electric cars that can be used for electricity storage and power your house while sitting plugged in. If every household has an electric car and 20% of them are plugged in at any time, 50% plugged in at night, then that would go a long way towards helping even out the difference between supply and demand.
Other companies do build better machines for a premium price, but it doesn't work as well because they're competing in a commodity market. Most people who buy Macs want to run OS X. They have a clear choice of cheap(er) or pro lines. In some ways, the commodity models are intentionally crippled to make the decision easier (fewer people are on the line, because there's a fairly big gap between the capabilities of the two lines). With other manufacturers, the average consumer plans on running Windows, and can find another machine with the same checklist of features that will do exactly the same thing but at a lower price.
Forget the need to compare drive spin speeds and CPU MHz and what not
Why? This Mac has a 2.2GHz quad-core i7, and a 256GB SSD. Work just bought me a Linux desktop with a quad core i5, also with an SSD, and this machine can still complete big build jobs in a VM in less time than the desktop can running natively.
I wish someone would print out the quoted section and staple it to the forehead of the COO of every major laptop and mobile phone manufacturer. I had a similar experience a few months ago trying to decide which phone to buy. The manufacturers all have a vast array of models without any clear differentiation. Except Apple, which sells new-iPhone and old-iPhone. It was very easy to see why people look at them all and say 'fuck this, i'm getting an iPhone'. It was a perfect example of the Paradox of Choice.
Last time I bought a phone, Nokia had a thing on their web site that asked you questions and gave you a small number of choices based on your replies, which was slightly better, but given how similar the models are I can't help thinking that manufacturers would save money and make customers happy by having no more than six models of phone, no more than one per market segment, and maybe the option of buying them in different colours.
Unless you're in the EU, where you pay a lot just to get extra telephone support, and Apple will honour their statutory obligations if you quote the relevant laws at them and repair things for free out of warranty. Oh, and if you buy through the education store, then you get the 3 year warranty as standard (as well as a 10-20% discount).
Are those mutually exclusive options? The industrial revolution resulted in a lot of reforms in the UK, including the beginnings of the process that ended with universal suffrage. It was also a time when the poor were exploited and oppressed, although this time by the upper middle classes rather than (or, more accurately, as well as) the aristocracy. Given the end results, I think most of us living in the countries that benefitted from this process are glad that it did, as well as being glad that we can look back on it as a transitional step. Given the choice, I'd much rather that we had gone straight to a post-scarcity utopia in 1750, but as far as I know no one has yet come up with a way of making that happen...
Oh bullcrap. The west built it's industry through the industrial revolution - machines increasing productivity.
You might want to check the history of the industrial revolution a bit more carefully. Worker conditions in Foxconn factories look like paradise in comparison to conditions in England back then.
Hiring good MS admins is hard too. Possibly harder, because, although there are more, the signal-to-noise ratio is lower.
I actually did see someone using one of them last week, but he was a tango teacher who also DJ'd. If you'd asked me the same question a week ago, I'd have said over a year ago. I rarely see people with stand-alone MP3 players now that a cheap smartphone and a decent sized SD card can be had for about the same price as an MP3 player.
I think endurance and reliability of the drives needs to improve before they will really be mainstream.
Just to clarify: you are talking about mechanical hard disks there, right?
SSDs have been roughly doubling in capacity for the same price every 9 months for the last 15 years. If that continues, then they'll be where hard drives are now in 2-3 years in terms of price per GB. It's important to remember, however, that a more important metric than price per GB is price of the smallest drive bigger than what I need. For a lot of corporate desktops, 40GB hard drives are big enough. They get re-imaged periodically, so a larger hard drive isn't that important, and everything except the OS and a few apps is stored on a file server. The cheapest hard drive I can buy is 1TB at £60. The cheapest SSD I can buy is 32GB at £35. I can also get a 60GB SSD for £40. If I am buying 1,000 machines that are going to need under 40GB of local storage, I save £20,000 by going with the SSD.
Unlike hard drives, it's quite easy to make smaller-and-cheaper flash drives: just put fewer chips in the enclosure.
You are conflating a bus address width with a storage technology. There is no currently-planned 1TB SD card, there is just a plan for the next generation of the standard to support addressing up to 1TB. If you made the same assumption about addressability equalling shipping products, then most current laptops would have 256TB of RAM...
I was at a talk buy some guys from FusionIO a few weeks ago. They said a lot of interesting things, but one of the points that they made was that every generation of flash was slower than the last, as well as less reliable. That's the trade you make for greater capacity, but it's not sustainable in the long term. It's not that flash is worse but getting better, it's that flash is better (but more expensive) and getting worse.
If current trends continue, then in a few years the improvements in capacity will be lost completely to the extra duplication required to achieve reliability. Flash is basically a dead end at this point. It will almost certainly be replaced by PCRAM, MRAM, memristors, or some hybrid, although I wouldn't be surprised if the the result is marketed as flash...
It's a mistake to think of Samsung as a single company. It's more a tightly-cooperating group of businesses. Departments try hard to buy components from other Samsung departments, and to cooperate on mutually relevant projects, but aside from that they're run more or less independently. This is, in part, why Samsung suing Apple while selling them a load of components makes sense: the part suing Apple and the part selling to them are almost separate entities. The CPU and flash manufacturer parts sell to both Apple and the phone-making part of Samsung and has no interest in the lawsuits in either direction except as far as it changes the amount that their customers are willing and able to buy.
Possibly. Given Intel's failure to produce compilers that gave good performance on Itanium, however, it is more likely that we'd have seen a bit more competition in the 64-bit arena. HP had committed to killing Alpha and PA-RISC, but POWER, SPARC and MIPS were both doing quite well until x86-64 squeezed them out. If they'd only been competing against Itanium, they'd have had a much better chance.
He could be right. The hard drive makers have all invested a lot in SSD manufacturing capabilities over the past few years. It's entirely possible that they're not interested in upgrading their spinning-rust factories and are putting all of their money into their SSD facilities. That would cause a gradual increase in their HD production costs as undermaintained factories slowly went offline. In the meantime, they have no incentive to lower prices, knowing that they will have to raise them again in a year or two, and knowing that the higher the HD price the more attractive the SSD price is. If profit-per-drive is still greater for SSDs (I would be surprised if it isn't) then pushing people in that direction makes good business sense.
Most of the civilised world has rough analogues of PIPEDA, such as the EU Data Protection Directive. If your data is hosted in companies with similar laws to yours with respect to access, it is less important if the wording is exactly the same. It's only when you host it in a company that has no equivalent and does have laws that directly contradict the ideas of these laws that it becomes a problem.
Assuming, of course, that not only is the underlying encryption algorithm that TrueCrypt uses secure (it probably is), but that the implementation is 100% bug free. Given the complexity of the code, I would hate to bet anything too important on that.
You mean that stopped? Product placements in films make me cringe. Fortunately, they're so unsubtle that I can actively avoid the companies that buy them. Any time someone takes a drink, they need to zoom in on the bottle or can so that you can read the cocoa cola company logo, any time someone uses a computer they zoom in to the bottom of the screen so that you can read the Dell logo...
I haven't owned a TV for quite a few years (cue The Onion reference), and the frequency of adverts was the main factor in abandoning it - and this is in the UK, where we see about half as much TV advertising as in the USA. My TV broke and I realised that my housemates had watched it infrequently and I hadn't watched it at all for several months, so I didn't bother replacing it.
In the last few years, I've watched quite a lot of TV shows, but all on iPlayer or on rented DVDs. Being able to watch the shows when I want, without being interrupted by adverts actually makes TV viewing enjoyable again. I would much rather pay the studios for shows (and, hopefully, therefore have them make more shows that I want to watch) than have some companies pay an intermediary to show adverts, that intermediary buy the TV shows and hope that I buy enough of the things that they're advertising to recoup the costs.
You see something similar on films. A cigarette burn (black circle) appears in one corner just before it's time to change reels, so the projectionist who is watching the film can go and do his job.