Have you seen the pilots that get sent to networks? They look like crap. Cheap sets, no special effects shots. Funding them is very cheap. That's the point of the pilot: it's a cheap demo that shows that you need the money and can make something worthwhile with it.
Virgin's 50Mb/s and 100Mb/s connections have no caps. Their slower connections don't have monthly caps, but they have peak amounts (which generally total something like 5-10GB/day) that will result in your connection being throttled to 25% speed if you exceed them.
10Mb/s at the moment is fine. Much faster and the bottleneck just moves off the last mile. I'd much rather have a 10Mb/s up, 20Mb/s down connection than the 5Mb/s up, 50Mb/s down that Virgin offers. Sure, I can get 10Mb/s down if I pay for the 100Mb/s connection, but with that sort of speed the bottleneck for most things becomes my 802.11g network. Until I get around to upgrading everything to 802.11n, there's no advantage in more than 20Mb/s. What I would be willing to pay more for:
Static IPv4 address
Full IPv6 support
More upstream
What Virgin Media offers me on the more expensive tariffs is more downstream and a tiny bit more upstream. So I've gone from subscribing to their most expensive plan in 2003 to subscribing to their least expensive one in 2011.
Obama: "Vlad, man, what the fuck is up wit' yo' spaceship, man?"
Ah, because Obama is black he speaks like ghetto trash, I see. Very witty. An incisive commentary on his Harvard education. It must have taken you quite a long time to come up with it.
Apparently Genesi paid Canonical to port Ubuntu to the Efika (ARM-based netbook). The result of this payment was a UI where large amounts of screen real estate are wasted, system dialogs (not obscure ones, things like the standard update dialog) that don't fit on the screen and require you to know about alt-drag to be able to click okay, and a standard system that uses 300MB of the machine's 512MB before you've even launched a single application. Oh, and a kernel that sucks at power saving. With a similar-sized battery, a bigger screen, and a much faster CPU, my TouchPad can spend days in standby and about twice as long in active use as the Efika.
Take a look at the pkgng project. It's currently in testing. Ports are great for source installs, but binary packages on FreeBSD can be a bit problematic. The pkgng project looks like it's doing a pretty good job of addressing this. There are also plans to do complete package builds on a weekly basis, which should fix some of the headaches with binary packages.
HTML5 includes SVG for retained-mode 2D vector animations, canvas for immediate mode 2D vector animations (with raster compositing), WebGL for 3D effects, video and audio tags for video and audio. There are two things that you can do with flash that you can't do with HTML5:
Put your entire applet into a single file.
(Currently) use RTMP or similar for streaming video (nothing stops you doing this, but most browsers only support HTTP streams).
Why? Decent HTML5 tools are no harder to write than decent Flash tools. Back in the '90s, Macromedia made the flash spec open for people creating tools to export Flash. A few years ago it was made open for implementing for any purpose. There are already competing Flash authoring tools and have been for over a decade. People pay for Adobe's because they are (at least, perceived to be) better. Deemphasising Flash just means that Adobe gets to outsource the client development to browser makers and doesn't even have to pay for it.
The way to improve the content is to improve the distribution mechanism. I only watch TV these days by renting DVDs or streaming, and most of the shows I watch have been cancelled before they're even available in this channel. They're not cancelled because they're unprofitable, they're cancelled because space on broadcast TV is very limited and something else could be more profitable in that slot. With online distribution, you have two advantages. The first is that you are being paid directly by the people who want to watch it, you don't have to convince advertisers that it's sufficiently popular first. The second is that if something else is more profitable, then you can make both.
Shares are issued in different categories. The founders typically have one category that is not diluted. In broad terms, one category may be shares that add up to 51% of the value of the company, the second category add up to 49%. When new shares are issued, they are from the second category. Most companies have some protection like this set up so that they can issue more shares without diluting the founders' share. If they're not willing to give you shares from the same category (or one that is similarly protected, so it's only diluted by shares issued to new employees, not by ones issued to the general public) then it's probably better to ask for money.
TA runs fine in WINE. I owned the original on CD, but I bought it and the expansion packs on gog.com and played through both campaigns in WINE on OS X. I didn't try playing it in multiplayer, but single player and skirmish work fine. The other advantage of playing it in WINE is that I can run it in an emulated desktop, so the game thinks it's fullscreen but it sits nicely in a window and I can still reach IM windows and keep an eye on compile jobs running in the background and needing attention when they've finished.
I last tried setting off a fork bomb on FreeBSD on 4.8. It ran for a couple of seconds, hit the per-user process limit, and then just sat there. The system stayed responsive. You can raise that limit, but it's already high enough that the only time you notice it is when you're trying to break the system.
An ISP shall not use this ability to promote one service over their competitors.
That's where it gets tricky though. For example, Skype obfuscates its traffic to get through firewalls. If you have a traffic management rule that prioritises SIP traffic, and you run a SIP to POTS gateway, then are you prioritising your own traffic over your competitor's? Are you now required to treat Skype traffic the same as SIP traffic? What about Jingle? Does prioritising RTMP over HTTP count as penalising HTML5 video sites in favour of Flash ones?
Government intervention preventing you from stealing from or killing your fellow citizens is also effectively authorising the use of force against fellow citizens. Whether that force is used to coerce an action force "limits" doesn't matter, it is still an immoral use of force, by your reasoning. And yet you call my post the most idiotic thing you've read? I get the feeling that I've just been trolled...
The more important limitation is not human perception, it's cost. Remember the models in Quake? Remember the mods? A fairly competent 3D artist could knock out something like the Quake guy in a day or two. Now compare that to a modern game. A single tree in a modern FPS has more complexity than every model on a Quake level combined. That all translates to vastly more artist time, which translates to greater expense. For a Pixar film, you can spend a huge amount developing and texturing every model, but for a game the upper limit is a lot lower.
I think you misunderstand ARM's market. ARM is not in the desktop market, or even in the laptop market except at the low end. They do, however, completely own the embedded market right up to the top end of the smartphone and table markets. This kind of core will end up in smartphones and tablets. You will be able to run PS2-era graphics on something that fits in your pocket and work from batteries (and probably has Thunderbolt or HDMI output for connecting it up to a big screen). It isn't competing with some energy-guzzler on the desktop, it's reducing the need for such a thing to exist at all. PS3 graphics aren't as good as they can possibly be, but they're a lot better than is required for a host of applications, and now you can do all of those with a pocket-sized device.
There is no modern OS that can mitigate an application that is bad
Of course there is! That's the entire point of the OS. If an application can bring down the OS, then that's an OS bug. The responsibility of a time sharing system is to ensure that no process and no user monopolises the resources to the extent that others are unable to do anything. The correct behaviour in this case (and the behaviour I've seen on Solaris, recent OS X, and FreeBSD), is for the Apache process to slow right down and other users to experience a noticeable amount of degraded performance (unless they're running with elevated privileges). Being unable to log in from the console because of the actions of an unrelated userspace process is simply unacceptable.
Not in law. There is in practice, because patent lawsuits are generally based on actual losses, and it's hard to demonstrate that you've made a real loss from someone making something for personal use. The cost of the lawsuit would generally be prohibitive, especially when combined with the bad PR that it would cause.
No, not really. China is not more free than the west, its citizens just give up different freedoms. I prefer the freedoms that I have and would have to give up to live in China to the ones I lack and would gain. Of course, a large part of that is due to cultural indoctrination during my childhood, but that doesn't alter the fact of my preference.
You could also say that "despite the fact that the government has pretty much destroyed our economy, you are okay with them controlling the Internet, too?"
When most of the damage that the government did was through removing regulations... yes. Especially since we're not talking about the government controlling the Internet, we're talking about the government imposing limits on how much private enterprises can control it.
Nobody would complain about FTP traffic being slowed during busy bursts to avoid interfering with voice traffic
As you've phrased it, several people would. What they probably wouldn't complain about is respecting the flags in the packet header that tell you whether the packet cares more about throughput, latency, or jitter, and assigning them to the correct queues as appropriate. Voice is typically under 10KB/s, so making it higher priority has very little impact on something like FTP, which can be transferring over 1MB/s easily. If, however, a VoIP packet is delayed by 100ms, the end user will notice. If an FTP packet is delayed by this much, the user probably won't. If the jitter between VoIP packets is high, the user will notice. If the jitter between FTP packets is high, no one will care.
If an ISP decides that one type of traffic is more important than another, users will care. If an ISP decides that different types of traffic are equally important, but in different ways, then that's advantageous. FTP traffic wants lots of bandwidth, live streaming (voice or video) wants low jitter, teleconferencing (voice or video) wants low latency and low jitter.
Standard of living doesn't have to correlate directly with energy consumption. For example, I now have three computers that I use regularly that, between them, use less power than the one that I was using a decade ago. The amount of energy I use for lighting is down by about two thirds in the last decade. The energy I use for heating has dropped quite a bit since I moved somewhere with decent insulation (and my standard of living has improved because now my house gets warm after running the heating for 20 minutes, rather than not-so-cold after running it for 3-4 hours). In a new build, I'd put solar water heating in from the start and that would cut my energy usage even more.
I no longer go to a supermarket, I place my order online and a van delivers shopping to me and about 40 other people, taking a fairly optimal route, and using a lot less energy than if we all drove to the supermarket and back.
An increasing number of new homes are being heated by waste heat from electricity generation (and from other industries), while a hundred years ago almost all domestic heat was created by burning coal or wood.
People in the USA tend to use a lot more energy because most of them live in stupidly-zoned cities (planning law: you may not live near where you work), which is a problem that's easy to avoid.
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Where do you get for the money for the pilot?
Have you seen the pilots that get sent to networks? They look like crap. Cheap sets, no special effects shots. Funding them is very cheap. That's the point of the pilot: it's a cheap demo that shows that you need the money and can make something worthwhile with it.
Virgin's 50Mb/s and 100Mb/s connections have no caps. Their slower connections don't have monthly caps, but they have peak amounts (which generally total something like 5-10GB/day) that will result in your connection being throttled to 25% speed if you exceed them.
What Virgin Media offers me on the more expensive tariffs is more downstream and a tiny bit more upstream. So I've gone from subscribing to their most expensive plan in 2003 to subscribing to their least expensive one in 2011.
Obama: "Vlad, man, what the fuck is up wit' yo' spaceship, man?"
Ah, because Obama is black he speaks like ghetto trash, I see. Very witty. An incisive commentary on his Harvard education. It must have taken you quite a long time to come up with it.
More importantly, all of the current systems are set up so you pay for copies, not for creation. The current system works something like this:
I would like to see something like this:
Apparently Genesi paid Canonical to port Ubuntu to the Efika (ARM-based netbook). The result of this payment was a UI where large amounts of screen real estate are wasted, system dialogs (not obscure ones, things like the standard update dialog) that don't fit on the screen and require you to know about alt-drag to be able to click okay, and a standard system that uses 300MB of the machine's 512MB before you've even launched a single application. Oh, and a kernel that sucks at power saving. With a similar-sized battery, a bigger screen, and a much faster CPU, my TouchPad can spend days in standby and about twice as long in active use as the Efika.
Take a look at the pkgng project. It's currently in testing. Ports are great for source installs, but binary packages on FreeBSD can be a bit problematic. The pkgng project looks like it's doing a pretty good job of addressing this. There are also plans to do complete package builds on a weekly basis, which should fix some of the headaches with binary packages.
The thing HTML5 lacks is authoring tools.
Why? Decent HTML5 tools are no harder to write than decent Flash tools. Back in the '90s, Macromedia made the flash spec open for people creating tools to export Flash. A few years ago it was made open for implementing for any purpose. There are already competing Flash authoring tools and have been for over a decade. People pay for Adobe's because they are (at least, perceived to be) better. Deemphasising Flash just means that Adobe gets to outsource the client development to browser makers and doesn't even have to pay for it.
The way to improve the content is to improve the distribution mechanism. I only watch TV these days by renting DVDs or streaming, and most of the shows I watch have been cancelled before they're even available in this channel. They're not cancelled because they're unprofitable, they're cancelled because space on broadcast TV is very limited and something else could be more profitable in that slot. With online distribution, you have two advantages. The first is that you are being paid directly by the people who want to watch it, you don't have to convince advertisers that it's sufficiently popular first. The second is that if something else is more profitable, then you can make both.
No, the iMac is Apple's version of the Telescreen
Shares are issued in different categories. The founders typically have one category that is not diluted. In broad terms, one category may be shares that add up to 51% of the value of the company, the second category add up to 49%. When new shares are issued, they are from the second category. Most companies have some protection like this set up so that they can issue more shares without diluting the founders' share. If they're not willing to give you shares from the same category (or one that is similarly protected, so it's only diluted by shares issued to new employees, not by ones issued to the general public) then it's probably better to ask for money.
TA runs fine in WINE. I owned the original on CD, but I bought it and the expansion packs on gog.com and played through both campaigns in WINE on OS X. I didn't try playing it in multiplayer, but single player and skirmish work fine. The other advantage of playing it in WINE is that I can run it in an emulated desktop, so the game thinks it's fullscreen but it sits nicely in a window and I can still reach IM windows and keep an eye on compile jobs running in the background and needing attention when they've finished.
I last tried setting off a fork bomb on FreeBSD on 4.8. It ran for a couple of seconds, hit the per-user process limit, and then just sat there. The system stayed responsive. You can raise that limit, but it's already high enough that the only time you notice it is when you're trying to break the system.
An ISP shall not use this ability to promote one service over their competitors.
That's where it gets tricky though. For example, Skype obfuscates its traffic to get through firewalls. If you have a traffic management rule that prioritises SIP traffic, and you run a SIP to POTS gateway, then are you prioritising your own traffic over your competitor's? Are you now required to treat Skype traffic the same as SIP traffic? What about Jingle? Does prioritising RTMP over HTTP count as penalising HTML5 video sites in favour of Flash ones?
Government intervention preventing you from stealing from or killing your fellow citizens is also effectively authorising the use of force against fellow citizens. Whether that force is used to coerce an action force "limits" doesn't matter, it is still an immoral use of force, by your reasoning. And yet you call my post the most idiotic thing you've read? I get the feeling that I've just been trolled...
Someone who is prejudiced in favour of (or possibly against) education?
The more important limitation is not human perception, it's cost. Remember the models in Quake? Remember the mods? A fairly competent 3D artist could knock out something like the Quake guy in a day or two. Now compare that to a modern game. A single tree in a modern FPS has more complexity than every model on a Quake level combined. That all translates to vastly more artist time, which translates to greater expense. For a Pixar film, you can spend a huge amount developing and texturing every model, but for a game the upper limit is a lot lower.
I think you misunderstand ARM's market. ARM is not in the desktop market, or even in the laptop market except at the low end. They do, however, completely own the embedded market right up to the top end of the smartphone and table markets. This kind of core will end up in smartphones and tablets. You will be able to run PS2-era graphics on something that fits in your pocket and work from batteries (and probably has Thunderbolt or HDMI output for connecting it up to a big screen). It isn't competing with some energy-guzzler on the desktop, it's reducing the need for such a thing to exist at all. PS3 graphics aren't as good as they can possibly be, but they're a lot better than is required for a host of applications, and now you can do all of those with a pocket-sized device.
There is no modern OS that can mitigate an application that is bad
Of course there is! That's the entire point of the OS. If an application can bring down the OS, then that's an OS bug. The responsibility of a time sharing system is to ensure that no process and no user monopolises the resources to the extent that others are unable to do anything. The correct behaviour in this case (and the behaviour I've seen on Solaris, recent OS X, and FreeBSD), is for the Apache process to slow right down and other users to experience a noticeable amount of degraded performance (unless they're running with elevated privileges). Being unable to log in from the console because of the actions of an unrelated userspace process is simply unacceptable.
Not in law. There is in practice, because patent lawsuits are generally based on actual losses, and it's hard to demonstrate that you've made a real loss from someone making something for personal use. The cost of the lawsuit would generally be prohibitive, especially when combined with the bad PR that it would cause.
No, not really. China is not more free than the west, its citizens just give up different freedoms. I prefer the freedoms that I have and would have to give up to live in China to the ones I lack and would gain. Of course, a large part of that is due to cultural indoctrination during my childhood, but that doesn't alter the fact of my preference.
You could also say that "despite the fact that the government has pretty much destroyed our economy, you are okay with them controlling the Internet, too?"
When most of the damage that the government did was through removing regulations... yes. Especially since we're not talking about the government controlling the Internet, we're talking about the government imposing limits on how much private enterprises can control it.
Nobody would complain about FTP traffic being slowed during busy bursts to avoid interfering with voice traffic
As you've phrased it, several people would. What they probably wouldn't complain about is respecting the flags in the packet header that tell you whether the packet cares more about throughput, latency, or jitter, and assigning them to the correct queues as appropriate. Voice is typically under 10KB/s, so making it higher priority has very little impact on something like FTP, which can be transferring over 1MB/s easily. If, however, a VoIP packet is delayed by 100ms, the end user will notice. If an FTP packet is delayed by this much, the user probably won't. If the jitter between VoIP packets is high, the user will notice. If the jitter between FTP packets is high, no one will care.
If an ISP decides that one type of traffic is more important than another, users will care. If an ISP decides that different types of traffic are equally important, but in different ways, then that's advantageous. FTP traffic wants lots of bandwidth, live streaming (voice or video) wants low jitter, teleconferencing (voice or video) wants low latency and low jitter.
Standard of living doesn't have to correlate directly with energy consumption. For example, I now have three computers that I use regularly that, between them, use less power than the one that I was using a decade ago. The amount of energy I use for lighting is down by about two thirds in the last decade. The energy I use for heating has dropped quite a bit since I moved somewhere with decent insulation (and my standard of living has improved because now my house gets warm after running the heating for 20 minutes, rather than not-so-cold after running it for 3-4 hours). In a new build, I'd put solar water heating in from the start and that would cut my energy usage even more.
I no longer go to a supermarket, I place my order online and a van delivers shopping to me and about 40 other people, taking a fairly optimal route, and using a lot less energy than if we all drove to the supermarket and back.
An increasing number of new homes are being heated by waste heat from electricity generation (and from other industries), while a hundred years ago almost all domestic heat was created by burning coal or wood.
People in the USA tend to use a lot more energy because most of them live in stupidly-zoned cities (planning law: you may not live near where you work), which is a problem that's easy to avoid.