Take advertising and wikipedia out of the search results and US$50 would pay for itself in a day, at work.
As much as I hate to say this since I hate advertising... the ads on Google when I'm looking for a product to buy are almost always relevant. I almost always Google an IT product before I buy it, and I almost always buy a product from the vendor Google sends me to (or Newegg!).
As for wikipedia, find it a reliable source but take all sources of information with a grain of salt. Sometimes I even salt the soup so as I like it.
I always Google potential hires. I hope my boss doesn't, because this post will shortly be somewhere in the Googleplex.;-)
Anyway, the tyranny of Google is that they are relentlessly focused on delivering my heart's desire, wherever it's located on the Internet. I would be seriously twisted to oppose that.
Some friends and I were discussing general utility questions and the issue of what we'd be willing to pay for Google (the search engine) and Gmail (the email service) if we had to.
The consensus opinion was $50/year for search, $20/year for email. Take that for what you will: it's a water cooler discussion.
For Yahoo mail and search, MSN anything, or ownership of all of AOL free and clear, $0. Give or take a nickel.
Seems like for the last ten years or so, that's not even been on the table. It's just one more service that people expect, and expect to run with utter reliability
Since I've had it my gmail has been available whenever and wherever I wanted it. All the time. Everywhere. If it has failed in the last five years, it failed somebody else. AFAIC it's got nine nines of reliability. In the hypothetical future where they let me down maybe I'll consider somebody else for my important stuff. Frankly I'd forgive them for quite a lot today, since every other service has let me down quite a lot in the mean time.
I hope you have carefully considered your position here. The first rule of an revolutionary is plausible deniability.
Times are changing. Everything here is well recorded. If you would continue in this vein I would recommend at least that you get some offshore hosting and anonymous accounts.
Over a day and a half of downtime in a given month makes less than 95% uptime so you get the compensation of two free weeks of service - if you ask for it. At a rate of $50/yr that's like, uh, $2 worth.
Sounds fair. Will they turn it off on purpose for a fee too? Some of us could use a break from email.
No, it's cooler than that. And by cooler I mean "flashy".
We've got these and they do look pretty wicked. Probably fit right in your basic C-level executive conference room, but not the casual lounge set aside for Very special guests.
Support doesn't come cheap, in Victoria schools share one government provided technician amongst a local cluster of schools and the hours assigned per week are assessed on how many students are in the school.
If this was an elementary in East Timor or a government department in Iowa, you might have a point about support. But it's a high school in a reasonably developed nation. Providing support is educational. Broken computers are good course material. Some of the students are probably more proficient than the quality of for-pay support they could buy. I really can't see the support argument flying here.
I've been using XP for years and it has never crashed. Never seen a BSoD, never froze, software has never stopped working. Completely smooth. Stop promoting the instability stereotype. Windows ME was years ago, times have changed.
Just so you know what one is if you should ever see one, they look like this. Apparently times have not changed quite that much.
From now until the end of time Microsoft's cross platform adventures should be tagged "Works For Now". As their DRM brand "Plays For Sure" should have been called "Plays For Now", as their "Internet Explorer" languished free of development until a challenger arose, the only thing certain about Microsoft product development is that there will come a day when utility is deprecated to further Microsoft's perceived economic interests. As soon as they perceive that either they have market ownership or that market ownership cannot be achieved they abandon further development. This is not progress.
Absurd limit theory: Where software imposes a limit the limit should be so large that uses outside the limit are not merely implausible, but absurd.
Here I'll use n=2^256 to represent a reasonable representation of an absurd limit, though time may spell the doom of that estimate. The universe is presumably 2e52 kg, so while this seems reasonable for now n=2^2^2^2^2^2 bits may be our ultimate answer for the addressing of normal data.
The right size for a limit on the size of data that can be stored in a field is "all of it", but n bytes should do for now. The right size for a limit on the number of tuples in a row is "all of them", but again, n should do. The right limit for the possible number of rows (or free tuples) is also "all of them" but n is a good number here. The right size for a "time" variable is enough bits to cover the number of seconds from the big bang to the heat death of the universe squared for the whole part and as many bits for the fractional part - n.n should do well here too. Since the nth particle at the n.nth moment in the n.nth frame of reference can be used to specifically identify any particle potentially extant in the metaverse indices of this size should suffice for real objects. You can add values for energy level, vector, phase and accrued entropy or other issues as required for your application. These are not infinite values, but they are fairly large. If you use smaller units than n common software will eventually need to be rewritten to use larger units. No matter what units you use, eventually some theoretical applications will require specially designed units. The idea is that where there is a limit on the number of objects measured or contained, the limit should be absurd. Likewise for the divisions of units.
We have moved from 4 bit computing to in some cases 256 bit. We may be aproaching the limit of utility in this "bitness".
In short, I agree with you that the limits in MySQL are pretty tiny. You don't use MySQL for that. You use MySQL for speed on smaller databases. For heavy work you use PostgresSQL. If you need absurd limits, well... you have access to the source code for both of them. It's not like you can't just build it. Remember to submit patches back to the tree, ok? Eventually somebody will and then everyone will have the option of units that should have been available to start with.
BTW, financial calculations will require larger bit fields for US federal computations because on the current trend line the US national debt overflows $2^n in 2016, before which time some long term debts will be due.
"At present the holder of copyright has the public feeling on his side. Those who invade copyright are regarded as knaves who take the bread out of the mouths of deserving men. Everybody is well pleased to see them restrained by the law, and compelled to refund their ill-gotten gains. No tradesman of good repute will have anything to do with such disgraceful transactions. Pass this law: and that feeling is at an end. Men very different from the present race of piratical booksellers will soon infringe this intolerable monopoly. Great masses of capital will be constantly employed in the violation of the law. Every art will be employed to evade legal pursuit; and the whole nation will be in the plot.
On which side indeed should the public sympathy be when the question is whether some book as popular as Robinson Crusoe, or the Pilgrim's Progress, shall be in every cottage, or whether it shall be confined to the libraries of the rich for the advantage of the great-grandson of a bookseller who, a hundred years before, drove a hard bargain for the copyright with the author when in great distress? Remember too that, when once it ceases to be considered as wrong and discreditable to invade literary property, no person can say where the invasion will stop. The public seldom makes nice distinctions.
The wholesome copyright which now exists will share in the disgrace and danger of the new copyright which you are about to create. And you will find that, in attempting to impose unreasonable restraints on the reprinting of the works of the dead, you have, to a great extent, annulled those restraints which now prevent men from pillaging and defrauding the living." - Thomas Macaulay, 1841
Ask yourself if he wasn't right: Does your local department store not stock blank DVD's and CD's in bare pallets of 100 packs because they move too fast to put on the shelves? Do you know anybody who doesn't have an MP3 player large enough to store more music than they can afford to buy? Is there not a vast network of servers from which any copyrighted work extant can be received without compensation for the creator, available in nearly every home?
By making stupid laws that should not and will not be obeyed and cannot be enforced we train the citizen from his youth to scoff at the law. That is far more damage than even the most egregious piracy can cause - it's promotion of anarchy. It would be better to do away with copyright entirely than to do further damage to social order.
Before the "war on drugs" we had a "war on poverty". They both had czars, and each was as effective as the other. Allow me to predict that the copyright czar will rise to unprecedented levels of negative success. I think something was lost in translation here. In the original russian I don't believe the word "czar" means "ineffectual idiot tasked with the impossible". I could be wrong about that.
No, let's be fair. The blame is with those who voted them in.
This failure happened before the voting. The candidates for public office that don't support this are filtered out before the elections. To reverse this within the system would take a huge grass roots effort to keep these people off the ballot in the first place, or to support the ones who oppose this nonsense, despite their stands on other issues. Unfortunately those other issues do matter too and this isn't enough of a hot button issue to get a rational stance built into a plank of one of the major parties.
In short, it isn't in us. We have lost this one. We lose several other important issues this way.
LTSP is pretty cool. It's an install option on the Alternate Install CD for Ubuntu. I use it at home because I like to have the option to netboot to linux if a guest needs a desktop. I don't like guests messing up my real desktops.
I combined it with two other projects: DRBL for on demand clustering when I want to do a little light rendering, and Clonezilla to enable any PC that connects to the network to make an image backup to a network share.
Works for me, it doesn't cost extra over the cost of the server, and it's fully licensed.
Maybe either or isn't the thing. A regular desktop can be a thin client too, and that's added utility at no or little added cost.
Microsoft's home server was an interesting little blit.
Instead I set up at home a DRBL server with the LTSP option. It was more work, but it has some advantages:
My files aren't corrupted
my server's not vulnerable to any known virus
good backup software is included
Every PC can network boot to a server desktop. We often have the family kids over, and this is more handy than standing over them making sure they're not downloading malware to an XP PC.
The net cost was some of my time. Since I enjoyed it, and thus avoided some entertainment expense, I saved twice.
But about their language. Yeah, programming languages that need to be tied to some proprietary service or product have so cleanly missed the point you have to wonder why they bothered. If you're retarded enough to buy into this plan, can you even write useful code accidently? I doubt it.
Look, both parties and both candidates are deep in the pockets of the industry here, and they both have platform planks for furthering their mission. One is not better than the other on this issue.
I know it's getting close to the peak of silly season, but can we limit the injection of partisan politics to issues or individuals where there's a real difference? Please?
There's just no way they're getting out of this without rewriting the pick-a-pay mortgages with market rate principal and low fixed rates. The inflated market prices and "earned" interest will just have to be written off as a loss due to poor judgement. Even then there will be folks that can't pay - the ones who should never have been loaned so much money against their income.
Home prices are going to continue go down. There's already a huge glut of homes. The smart thing to do would be to limit starts through permitting. The idiots in my area are still breaking ground in a glutted market.
Slashdot Mirror
As much as I hate to say this since I hate advertising ... the ads on Google when I'm looking for a product to buy are almost always relevant. I almost always Google an IT product before I buy it, and I almost always buy a product from the vendor Google sends me to (or Newegg!).
As for wikipedia, find it a reliable source but take all sources of information with a grain of salt. Sometimes I even salt the soup so as I like it.
I always Google potential hires. I hope my boss doesn't, because this post will shortly be somewhere in the Googleplex. ;-)
Anyway, the tyranny of Google is that they are relentlessly focused on delivering my heart's desire, wherever it's located on the Internet. I would be seriously twisted to oppose that.
Some friends and I were discussing general utility questions and the issue of what we'd be willing to pay for Google (the search engine) and Gmail (the email service) if we had to.
The consensus opinion was $50/year for search, $20/year for email. Take that for what you will: it's a water cooler discussion.
For Yahoo mail and search, MSN anything, or ownership of all of AOL free and clear, $0. Give or take a nickel.
Since I've had it my gmail has been available whenever and wherever I wanted it. All the time. Everywhere. If it has failed in the last five years, it failed somebody else. AFAIC it's got nine nines of reliability. In the hypothetical future where they let me down maybe I'll consider somebody else for my important stuff. Frankly I'd forgive them for quite a lot today, since every other service has let me down quite a lot in the mean time.
Twitter, I like you.
I hope you have carefully considered your position here. The first rule of an revolutionary is plausible deniability.
Times are changing. Everything here is well recorded. If you would continue in this vein I would recommend at least that you get some offshore hosting and anonymous accounts.
Also, recommend you read Heinlein's early works.
Are they not dead yet? Next you'll tell me AOL is still around.
This is a primary source of what you're talking about.
Membership is expensive, but well worth it IMHO. They've been offering free access to their library to a limited pool of people for the last year too.
Some few diggers do work this mine still.
Over a day and a half of downtime in a given month makes less than 95% uptime so you get the compensation of two free weeks of service - if you ask for it. At a rate of $50/yr that's like, uh, $2 worth.
Sounds fair. Will they turn it off on purpose for a fee too? Some of us could use a break from email.
No, it's cooler than that. And by cooler I mean "flashy".
We've got these and they do look pretty wicked. Probably fit right in your basic C-level executive conference room, but not the casual lounge set aside for Very special guests.
If this was an elementary in East Timor or a government department in Iowa, you might have a point about support. But it's a high school in a reasonably developed nation. Providing support is educational. Broken computers are good course material. Some of the students are probably more proficient than the quality of for-pay support they could buy. I really can't see the support argument flying here.
sorry.
Just so you know what one is if you should ever see one, they look like this. Apparently times have not changed quite that much.
From now until the end of time Microsoft's cross platform adventures should be tagged "Works For Now". As their DRM brand "Plays For Sure" should have been called "Plays For Now", as their "Internet Explorer" languished free of development until a challenger arose, the only thing certain about Microsoft product development is that there will come a day when utility is deprecated to further Microsoft's perceived economic interests. As soon as they perceive that either they have market ownership or that market ownership cannot be achieved they abandon further development. This is not progress.
Absurd limit theory: Where software imposes a limit the limit should be so large that uses outside the limit are not merely implausible, but absurd.
Here I'll use n=2^256 to represent a reasonable representation of an absurd limit, though time may spell the doom of that estimate. The universe is presumably 2e52 kg, so while this seems reasonable for now n=2^2^2^2^2^2 bits may be our ultimate answer for the addressing of normal data.
The right size for a limit on the size of data that can be stored in a field is "all of it", but n bytes should do for now. The right size for a limit on the number of tuples in a row is "all of them", but again, n should do. The right limit for the possible number of rows (or free tuples) is also "all of them" but n is a good number here. The right size for a "time" variable is enough bits to cover the number of seconds from the big bang to the heat death of the universe squared for the whole part and as many bits for the fractional part - n.n should do well here too. Since the nth particle at the n.nth moment in the n.nth frame of reference can be used to specifically identify any particle potentially extant in the metaverse indices of this size should suffice for real objects. You can add values for energy level, vector, phase and accrued entropy or other issues as required for your application. These are not infinite values, but they are fairly large. If you use smaller units than n common software will eventually need to be rewritten to use larger units. No matter what units you use, eventually some theoretical applications will require specially designed units. The idea is that where there is a limit on the number of objects measured or contained, the limit should be absurd. Likewise for the divisions of units.
We have moved from 4 bit computing to in some cases 256 bit. We may be aproaching the limit of utility in this "bitness".
In short, I agree with you that the limits in MySQL are pretty tiny. You don't use MySQL for that. You use MySQL for speed on smaller databases. For heavy work you use PostgresSQL. If you need absurd limits, well... you have access to the source code for both of them. It's not like you can't just build it. Remember to submit patches back to the tree, ok? Eventually somebody will and then everyone will have the option of units that should have been available to start with.
BTW, financial calculations will require larger bit fields for US federal computations because on the current trend line the US national debt overflows $2^n in 2016, before which time some long term debts will be due.
Ask yourself if he wasn't right: Does your local department store not stock blank DVD's and CD's in bare pallets of 100 packs because they move too fast to put on the shelves? Do you know anybody who doesn't have an MP3 player large enough to store more music than they can afford to buy? Is there not a vast network of servers from which any copyrighted work extant can be received without compensation for the creator, available in nearly every home?
By making stupid laws that should not and will not be obeyed and cannot be enforced we train the citizen from his youth to scoff at the law. That is far more damage than even the most egregious piracy can cause - it's promotion of anarchy. It would be better to do away with copyright entirely than to do further damage to social order.
Before the "war on drugs" we had a "war on poverty". They both had czars, and each was as effective as the other. Allow me to predict that the copyright czar will rise to unprecedented levels of negative success. I think something was lost in translation here. In the original russian I don't believe the word "czar" means "ineffectual idiot tasked with the impossible". I could be wrong about that.
Any russian linguists in the house?
This failure happened before the voting. The candidates for public office that don't support this are filtered out before the elections. To reverse this within the system would take a huge grass roots effort to keep these people off the ballot in the first place, or to support the ones who oppose this nonsense, despite their stands on other issues. Unfortunately those other issues do matter too and this isn't enough of a hot button issue to get a rational stance built into a plank of one of the major parties.
In short, it isn't in us. We have lost this one. We lose several other important issues this way.
LTSP is pretty cool. It's an install option on the Alternate Install CD for Ubuntu. I use it at home because I like to have the option to netboot to linux if a guest needs a desktop. I don't like guests messing up my real desktops.
I combined it with two other projects: DRBL for on demand clustering when I want to do a little light rendering, and Clonezilla to enable any PC that connects to the network to make an image backup to a network share.
Works for me, it doesn't cost extra over the cost of the server, and it's fully licensed.
Maybe either or isn't the thing. A regular desktop can be a thin client too, and that's added utility at no or little added cost.
Microsoft's home server was an interesting little blit.
Instead I set up at home a DRBL server with the LTSP option. It was more work, but it has some advantages:
But about their language. Yeah, programming languages that need to be tied to some proprietary service or product have so cleanly missed the point you have to wonder why they bothered. If you're retarded enough to buy into this plan, can you even write useful code accidently? I doubt it.
Look, both parties and both candidates are deep in the pockets of the industry here, and they both have platform planks for furthering their mission. One is not better than the other on this issue.
I know it's getting close to the peak of silly season, but can we limit the injection of partisan politics to issues or individuals where there's a real difference? Please?
That was a fun clip. Here is the YouTube version, for people who can't play MP4s.
It was actually Thomas McCauley in 1841.
And yes, he considered these issues and came to the same conclusions as Mr. Lessig over 150 years ago.
Maybe we should just do away with copyright. That would solve this problem permanently without consuming the precious resources of the courts.
So you're a speculator then? Because the long term money is in tribbles.
I remember printing earlier versions on an old Okidata tractor fed serial printer. I think it was V 0.91.
Of course I had to do some coding to get the printer to form feed, but that's what it cost back then to be on the bleeding edge.
/you had to put the printer in compressed mode first because some of the lines were too long.
<sigh> There was a lot to learn in that code. For an eager student it was like being a kid in a candy store. And much of it was very, very bad.
There's just no way they're getting out of this without rewriting the pick-a-pay mortgages with market rate principal and low fixed rates. The inflated market prices and "earned" interest will just have to be written off as a loss due to poor judgement. Even then there will be folks that can't pay - the ones who should never have been loaned so much money against their income.
Home prices are going to continue go down. There's already a huge glut of homes. The smart thing to do would be to limit starts through permitting. The idiots in my area are still breaking ground in a glutted market.
Again you're right. I should have given more credit to GNU, the FSF, and the thousands of projects built upon their foundation do the useful stuff.
There we go. Much better. Thanks.