This reminds me of a time that I showed picture of the LHC to a few (ahem Republican) colleagues and lamented that we stopped work on the SSC. That started a debate and they started lecturing me that the SSC was a frivolous waste of tax payer money.
FYI, at the same time the SSC was killed, Bush and the Republican Congress passed the biggest increase in non-defense science spending in decades (I usually link directly to aaas.org, but their site appears to be down). Only the space race in the 1960s was bigger.
But because the press leans left, that never made the news, while the SSC cancellation was shoved in all our faces at every opportunity as an "example" of how Bush was "anti-science". Bush and Congress decided (correctly IMHO) that funding R&D in health and medicine was a better investment than R&D into subatomic particles, when the U.S. was already contributing to an essentially duplicate project in the LHC.
And FWIW, I was opposed to the 2nd Iraq war, albeit for entirely different reasons. It reinforced a bad socio-political precedent that a powerful nation could "legitimately" go traipsing into war for its own reasons even when it failed to get UN support. If the rest of the world is telling you don't do it, you probably shouldn't do it. Economically, it may have been a negative for the U.S., but in the long term it should turn out to be a positive for Iraq and hopefully a net positive for the world overall. (The current situation is what you get when you set about nation-building, then decide halfway through that you don't want to do it anymore. I expected us to have to be there 1-2 decades if not permanently like Korea. I didn't expect the U.S. public to have the patience to stay there that long, which was yet another reason to oppose the war.)
The problem is that MB/s is the inverse of the figure we're actually interested in. When you're sitting at a computer waiting for it to finish doing something, you measure it in seconds. But HDD manufacturers chose to rate their drives in terms of disk speeds (MB/s), rather than wait times (sec/MB)
The tl;dr version if you want to skip everything below is that because MB/s is the inverse, the bigger the MB/s gets, the less difference it makes. Let me repeat because it's so counter-intuitive: The bigger the MB/s gets, the less difference it makes.
There are two effects going on here. First , because MB/s is the inverse of what you're really interested in (sec), as it gets bigger its benefit to wait times is actually becoming smaller. Imagine you need to read 1000 MB of data.
10 sec = 100 MB/s HDD
4 sec = 250 MB/s SATA2 SSD; a 150 MB/s increase yields a 6 sec time savings
2 sec = 500 MB/s SATA3 SSD; a 250 MB/s increase yields a 2 sec time savings
1 sec = 1000 MB/s PCIe SSD; a 500 MB/s increase yields a 1 sec time savings
0.1 sec = 10 GB/s 20-drive RAID 0 SSD; a 9000 MB/s increase yields a 0.9 sec time savings
Or in terms of time savings per constant MB/s:
4 sec saved per 100 MB/s increase (100 -> 250 MB/s, HDD to SATA2)
0.8 sec saved per 100 MB/s increase (250 -> 500 MB/s, SATA2 to SATA3)
0.2 sec saved per 100 MB/s increase (500 -> 1000 MB/s, SATA3 to PCIe)
0.01 sec saved per 100 MB/s increase (1000 MB/s -> 10 GB/s, PCIe to something ridiculous)
See how the bigger the drive's MB/s gets, the less time savings you get per 100 MB/s increase? That's because MB/s the inverse of what we're really interested in - sec/MB. Beyond about SATA3 or even SATA2 speeds, you've pretty much passed the point of diminishing returns and there's very little meaningful time saved by going faster (for tasks
The second effect has to do with which disk operations take more time. Everyone looks at sequential read/write speeds, when they should actually be concentrating on the 4k random speeds. Why? Say your SATA3 drive gets 500 MB/s sequential speeds, and 50 MB/s 4k speeds. Because the 500 MB/s figure is 10x bigger than the 50 MB/s figure, people assume that means it's 10x more important.. In fact, the opposite is true - the smaller MB/s figure matters 10x more. Imagine this drive has to read 1000 MB of sequential data + 1000 MB of 4k data.
2 sec = 1000 MB sequential data @ 500 MB/s
20 sec = 1000 MB 4k data @ 50 MB/s
22 sec = total read time
Surprise! Your drive spends 91% of its time doing the 4k read task, and only 9% of its time doing the sequential read task. Consequently, the smaller MB/s figure matters a lot more in terms of how long you wait for the drive to finish doing something. Which is just another way of saying: The bigger the MB/s gets, the less difference it makes.
So why do HDD manufacturers and review sites insist on using MB/s? Marketing. Because it exaggerates the impact of faster drives, it makes you want to pay more money for the latest and greatest drive. The jump from 500 MB/s to 1000 MB/s by going to PCIe SSDs seems like a huge increase, when in fact it's a miniscule tiptoe. And review sites are complicit because if word got out that there's really not much difference between using a budget SSD and the latest and greatest PCIe SSD, people would stop reading reviews and they'd lose advertising revenue. (That's not to say this is always true - certain specialized tasks benefit disproportionately from the high sequential speeds on large files. Real time video editing is a good example.)
So if you want a fast SSD, you should be obsessing over the smallest MB/s figures, not the biggest ones; the 4k speeds, not the sequential speeds. 10 MB/s faster 4k speeds makes about 10x as much difference as 100 MB/s faster sequential speeds. (The same thing is true for car MPG. MPG i
What do you think would happen to the number of English Lit majors if high school teachers had to say, "We're going to study Shakespeare, but we're not going to be reading any of his plays. Instead we're going to read a computer-generated play in the Shakespearean style."
The weird thing is this type of traditional snooping will be defeated as more content providers are switching over to HTTPS. AT&T aren't technical dummies, so they know that. I'm wondering if their scheme doesn't require a special browser plugin that automates an MITM attack on https....
Why would they need a browser plugin? A third only needs the plugin to insert themselves in the middle. As an ISP, AT&T is already in the middle. They could simply redirect all your https queries to their own server, which executes a MITM attack and contacts the real server on your behalf. A lot of employers already do this to track and discourage employees using work computers for personal tasks.
It has been proven over and over that the only people who always behave according to game theory are economists and sociopaths.
You're misunderstanding the game theory - you're assuming that everyone needs to behave according to the theory for it to be correct. The game theory merely says that people who behave a certain way tend to enjoy better outcomes. Are economists and sociopaths doing better in society than the average person (after controlling for other factors like education and family wealth)? If yes, then the theory has some basis.
People can behave all sorts of ways. The theory merely states that certain types of behaviors aren't as constructive or are self-destructive, and end up filtering themselves out. The behaviors which don't get filtered out are the successful ones. Economists exhibit them because they (think they) know better. Psychopaths exhibit them because these behaviors work.
It's the same process as evolution. Evolution doesn't "pick" winning life strategies. It simply filters out losing strategies, which results in the winning ones seeming to be picked out by an invisible hand. The "invisible hand" of the free market works exactly the same way. Or if you want a strictly mathematical example, there's the Sieve of Eratosthenes, where an algorithm which focuses solely on filtering out non-prime numbers ends up "picking out" prime numbers.
People seem rather keen to rush towards a future where you pay - either in money or time or experience - for more freedom. Either freedom of privacy, or simply ability (like paying more to avoid internet content blocks).
You're thinking of it backwards. People willingly give up their privacy for convenience. e.g. Letting Google see all their emails because they don't want to go through the trouble of setting up and running their own mail server. Or letting Facebook see everything they post or comment on because they don't want to go through the trouble of setting up and running their own website.
Getting things done without giving up your privacy is more complicated. e.g How do you get merchants to ship stuff to you without giving up your home address? You have to rent space at a mailbox store, which can act as a proxy to accept your packages. That complication incurs additional cost which someone (i.e. you) has to pay for. It's completely illogical to think you can get things done the harder way for the same price (free).
Even here in wifi-heavy Portland, OR, you're going to have a hard time finding wifi signals you can glom onto w/o either knowing the WPA2 password, or going through some sort of web-based login screen - especially in the suburbs.
The second problem will arise when all those wifi WAP owners decide that they don't want their bandwidth sucked down by non-customers
The cable companies are hard at work "solving" that problem. They'll turn your home cable modem into a wifi hotspot whether you want to or not.
It's a weird situation because cable companies suck, and cellular carriers suck. But if the two were to begin fighting each other, magic things could happen.
video was on the net much much earlier than a decade ago. I recall watching video on my computer as amiddle school kid, so at least as early as 97-98. yeah quality was trash, and clips were small. but thats what youtube was in V1 as well.
Yes video was on the net before YouTube. But the problem was hosting videos. It cost $$ for the storage space a video occupied on your web server, and $$$ for the bandwidth to send it to anyone who requested it. If a site had a video on it and it went viral (either by email or IM word of mouth, or a slashdotting), you'd get the all-too-familiar "this site has exceeded its monthly bandwidth quota" page if you didn't visit it before it hit about 100,000 page hits.
I recognized what YouTube was the moment I first saw it - a way for anyone to host a video without having to own a website nor pay for bandwidth. In fact that was my main concern about YouTube's survivability at first: how were they going to make enough money to pay for all the bandwidth they used? In a way, YouTube is what made the "viral hit" possible - because it eliminated bandwidth quota exceeded messages for online videos.
Even if it did, I doubt Kim Dotcom said "hey, how'd you like to join a conspiracy to enable copyright infringement?"
It's pretty clear from the internal emails released that that's basically what went on. Everyone there knew the service was being used for massive copyright infringement, and on some levels they actually encouraged it.
The reason Kim Dotcom got off (or should get off) has to do with legal procedure and extradition treaties. Basically in their zeal to reel him in, the U.S. DoJ ignored its prior agreements with New Zealand, and pressured NZ police into taking actions which violated their own laws. That's why he's getting off, not because he didn't infringe copyright. Most people here hardly consider him a champion of their pet causes. They just happen to side with him in this case because they're opposed to Hollywood leveraging its political influence to commit illegal acts under the color of law enforcement.
They can't find obvious things, things any driver in their home city should know.
A dude in a car would be better in most cases.
Metropolitan Seoul has a population of 25 million. Furthermore, unlike New York City which is laid out in a nice grid, the streets in Seoul are a byzantine mess of turns, angles, and alleyways. Also, as per Asian custom, most of the streets don't have names - the destinations do. (Kinda like Squares in Boston - instead of the street being called Boylston St, it'd simply be called "To Copley Square".) I'm frankly amazed at how many streets the taxicab drivers there know. GPS is a convenience in the U.S., but it's practically required in cities like Seoul which originally grew organically without central planning.
You also have to understand the historical pretext. South Korea, and Seoul in particular, has one of the highest population densities on earth. Of countries with more than 5 million people and excluding city-states, only Bangladesh and Taiwan have higher population density. Space, and especially road space is a premium.
Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, they had a pretty good system. The government taxed cars so that the cost about $40,000 (about $90,000 in 2014 dollars) as a way to discourage car ownership. Instead, people were encouraged to take public transportation and taxis. Even traveling between cities was simple with an extensive express bus system with departures every 5 minutes between major cities. It worked pretty well - I hardly recall seeing any traffic jams during that time, and you could flag down a taxi literally within 30 seconds.
All that fell apart n the late 1980s, one of the U.S. Presidential candidates made an issue of this tax. He complained that Hyundai was allowed to sell its cars in the U.S. for $5,000, while an equivalent U.S. car cost $40,000 in Korea. He conveniently omitted that the same Hyundai cost $40,000 in Korea as well. The huge uproar in the U.S. eventually led to the South Korean government repealing the tax in order to protect its fledgling overseas car sales industry.
What happened next was predictable. Car prices dropped like a rock in Korea, and Koreans bought cars. Tens of millions of them. Way more than the road infrastructure could handle. The streets became parking lots. During the lunar new year, it wasn't uncommon for a 400km road trip to take more than 24 hours - as slow as a fast marathon runner. And not only did it negatively impact car travel, it also slowed down public bus transportation since they were stuck on the streets with the cars.
During the 1990s and 2000s, Korea worked its ass off to expand and improve its roads to handle all these cars. It's still nowhere near as good as it was in the 1970s, but at least traffic moves now, with just the regular traffic jams like you'd expect in any modern urbanized country. There is no way in hell they're going to allow millions more drivers roaming the streets trying to make some extra pocket change with Uber.
But so what? The cost of 'a' Powerball ticket, $2, is trivial. If $2 really makes that much difference in your budget....even $2 a week, every week....then you do not need to do it, whatever the percentages say.
$2 a week over a working lifetime of 45 years is $4696. Or in the context of annual income, if you make the U.S. average of $50,000/yr, $2/week works out to 0.21% of your gross income. Factor in taxes and living expenses like housing, transportation, and food, and it's probably close to 1% of your disposable income. It is not trivial.
Your reasoning is also why most people don't bother saving/investing their money, and instead spend it on toys like iPads, HDTVs, and playing the lottery. The interest earned each month seems like a pittance, and not worth the tradeoff of being unable to use your money. But over 45 years, it adds up to tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars (factoring in compound interest). It's decisions like this which help make the 1% the 1%. 99% would rather blow the $2 a week. The 1% would rather invest it in something with a positive ROI, because they understand that every little bit counts.
Maybe the best of all worlds is as described above... a HTPC + a large monitor. Smart TVs seem dumb to me, as they don't add any useful features, but seem be another vector for ad-slinging and invading privacy.
From a manufacturing standpoint, Smart TVs aren't dumb. If you've ever taken apart a modern HDTV, it's basically a monitor plus a small computer which does the image decoding and processing. On some HDTVs the computer half even plugs into the monitor half with a DVI cable.
For the manufacturer, it's trivial to beef up the computer with $10-$20 of extra hardware (faster CPU and more RAM), add some software, and charge an extra $200 for it being a Smart TV. As you surmise, the buyer is much better off buying a "dumb" TV and adding a HTPC (I recommend an old laptop so you don't kill your dollar savings with extra electricity burned by a 100 Watt old desktop).
Replying to OP to clarify the figures for all the replies who clearly don't know how these things are measured.
130 MW is the nameplate capacity, aka peak generating capacity. i.e. If the sun were directly overhead on a cloudless day and the panels had just been cleaned, how much power would they generate?
Actual production over a year is the nameplate capacity times capacity factor times one year. PV solar's capacity factor for the continental U.S. averages about 0.145. It peaks in the desert southwest at about 0.185. Places like Germany and France are closer to 0.10. Capacity factor takes into account night, movement of the sun across the sky, clouds and weather, dirt building up on the panels, downtime for maintenance, etc. Everything that on average diminishes production below the peak.
Using the 0.185 figure, the annual production of this array is (130MW) * (0.185) * (8766 hours) = 210822 MWh. At California's average retail electricity price of $0.1353 / kWh, this works out to $28.5 million dollars of electricity generated per year. Break-even period for the $850 construction cost (excluding financing) is then 29.8 years. Financing (either taking out a loan to pay for the panels up-front, or the opportunity cost of investing cash on hand into something with a payback time in decades) is a factor which should be taken into account, but whose exact impact depends on interest and inflation rates over those 30 years.
$ per watt is a shortcut used to quickly gauge installation costs. It's just the $ cost for installation divided by the nameplate capacity in Watts. OP correctly calculated this as $6.54. The $1-$2 per Watt figure commonly quoted by PV salesman for economy panels is just the cost of the panels. You also need framework to mount the panels on, as well as regulation electronics to even out the voltage, and disconnect the array from the grid during a power failure so you don't electrocute the utility worker who's trying to fix a downed power line. That typically increases the cost to the $3-$7 per Watt range. My guess is the $ per Watt is so high because Apple is opting for higher efficiency panels, which are more expensive. (That doesn't change any of the above math though, since it's based on nameplate capacity which already accounts for panel efficiency.)
The essential / recommended / avoid rating only works if you happen to find a reviewer whose tastes exactly match yours. Which granted given the enormous number of reviews on the Internet is a lot easier now than in the dead tree gaming magazine days. But the key thing to take from that should be that you need to somehow take advantage of the large number of reviews, not simplify the scoring system. The review site should use pattern matching where you list which games you liked, the site searches for other users who liked the same games, and makes recommendations to you based on games those people liked but weren't on your list. Like what Netflix does for its movie recommendations. Essentially, the entire population of game players registered with the site becomes your review database, and the system is set up to weigh more heavily the opinions of gamers who have similar tastes to yours.
Youtube videos of gameplay are good if you already know you might be interested in a game. But just as the Internet has led to the balkanization of reviews so you can now find thousands of reviews, game development is slowly going down the same path (have you ever browsed through all the titles available on Steam?). Consequently, there are a helluva lot more games out there to consider (unless you artificially limit yourself to just the big titles), and some sort of review/rating system is needed to help people sift through them quickly. Watching a youtube video of each one is out of the question. Same goes for free trials - the time investment makes it unwieldy as the number of available games increases.
The same solutions can be applied to electricity. We can improve storage, by using things like flow batteries.
Once you factor in charging and discharging losses, batteries end up cutting solar's already-abysmal energy per $ ratio nearly in half. Pumped storage (pumping water uphill into a dam) is currently the best energy storage option, and even it sits at between 70%-80% efficiency.
Using the energy as it's produced (or in the case of fossil fuels and nuclear, producing the energy as it's needed) is always the best option. I mean hypothetically, if you're going to use PV solar to pump water uphill for storage, it's really no different from installing thousands of square km of cheap black-painted panels just underneath the ocean surface, raising the temperature of the top layer of ocean water, increasing the evaporation rate, resulting in more rainfall, giving you the same increase in water stored behind dams for probably a lot less cost. Why even bother with the intermediate lossy steps of converting solar to electricity, then electricity to mechanical motion?
The juxtaposition of this article with the previous one on hacking cars made me realize: If you can hack into a self-driving car, you could steal it without having to physically break into it.
Since I prefer Linux, and run it on my development machine, I have to boot up my VPN to do Windows based tasks. Running their apps on the browser would be more convenient for me.
That's actually one of the big challenges Microsoft is facing. They have an internal conflict of interest between their OS division and apps division (mostly Office). From the viewpoint of the apps division, they are best off making Office available for all platforms. From the viewpoint of the OS division, they are best off making Office available only for Windows, so people are forced to buy a Windows license to use Office.
For about 7 years, the OS division won that argument, and Office was only available on Windows and Windows Mobile (plus a slightly out-of-date version for OS X). That changed last year and they're now making Office available on Android, iOS, and the cloud. Basically this means you no longer need to buy Windows to run Office, so Windows will have to sell on its own merits.
If you've been following Microsoft since the monopoly lawsuits in the 1990s, it's ironic. Many of us back then felt the best solution would've been to break up Microsoft into two companies - an OS company and an apps company - to eliminate the conflict of interest created by their near-monopoly position. It didn't happen then, but it looks like after a couple decades the market is pushing them in that direction anyway.
I have my doubts about large customers also. Many stick with a single version of windows for years and years because they want a stable computing environment.
Microsoft already tried the corporate subscription model with Win XP. Their marketing division talked a lot of their corporate customers into signing on to a 3 year contract instead of outright buying XP. The contract promised an upgrade to their next version of Windows, which was expected to happen 2-3 years after XP was released. Previous releases of Windows had been:
Windows 3.0 - May 1990
Windows 3.1 - March 1992
Windows 95 - August 1995
Windows 98 - June 1998
Windows 2000 - Feb 2000
Windows XP - Oct 2001
So roughly 2-3 years between releases. Most companies knew full well Microsoft was pushing a subscription model, and were wary. But Microsoft priced it so that considering you were getting two releases of Windows, it was a good deal compared to buying the licenses outright. Most signed the 3 year contracts in 2002-2003.
Vista wasn't released until Nov 2006 (volume licensing) and Jan 2007 (retail). More than 5 years after XP, and 1-2 years after most of those 3 year contracts expired. There were howls, mudslinging in corporate press, and lawsuits. I think Microsoft ended up extending those contracts by an extra year for free, which still left some customers out in the cold. And on top of that, Vista wasn't considered a very good upgrade so most companies ended up sticking with XP until Windows 7 was released in Oct 2009.
The companies which signed up for Microsoft's subscription model 3-year support contract felt they'd been royally screwed. It will be a cold day in Hell before they ever sign up for a Windows 365. This is also the best argument against a subscription model - the constant revenue stream makes life easier for accounting, but it destroys the market incentive for the company to make improvements, add new features, and release them on a timely schedule.
Whether or not this incurs a cost on society or is a benefit to society depends on the law being enforced. If it's to stop organized crime, then it's probably a net benefit to society. If it's to enforce a law prohibiting you from putting coins in someone else's parking meter, then it's probably a net detriment to society.
The world does not divide up into neat and tidy categories of behaviors which are always good or always bad. Sometimes the benefit is worth the price paid, sometimes it's not.
In your gold rush scenario, domain squatters would be people who bought out the stores of all their goods, then opened their own store with prices inflated by around 1,000 percent and up (judging by responses I've got from domain squatters when I've poked at them just to see what kind of assholes they were.)
That's not how economics works. If you buy all the stores in the area and inflate the prices by 1000%, that presents a business opportunity for someone to open up a new store with prices inflated by 500%. It won't be as convenient to get to, but the substantially lower price means customers will make the trek out there because the savings is worth their time. The squatter is then forced to lower his prices to a 250% markup, the new store lowers to a 125% markup, etc. This continues until the prices are the minimum markup the store owners are willing to accept.
Huge markups only persist if you manage to convince people that the markup is somehow worth it. e.g. Become a status symbol like Gucci, or Mercedes, or Apple. Or you resort to illegal means to stifle competition (threaten to break the legs of the new storeowner's kids).
For example, a squatter owns cardot.com, which would obviously be a cool place to put slashcode (or something like it, of course, since slashcode HAHAHAHA) and talk about cars. Well, they want $19,000.00 for it.
Same deal here. Just because they're asking fro $19,000 doesn't mean someone is going to pay them for it. Just like if someone marked up the store prices by 1000% doesn't mean customers are going to pay for it. It just creates an opportunity for a new entrant in the market with a smaller markup.
Domain names are (were) like real estate. The better domain names are like waterfront property. Except everything was originally sold for the flat rate of $10/yr per domain name regardless of if it was waterfront property or not. Squatting exists because of a disparity between the original price and its actual value. Unfortunately, there's no simple way to determine the value of any domain name except via this market mechanic (i.e. however much someone is willing to pay for it). So this type of markup is inevitable. A solution, as someone pointed out above, is property taxes. You tax domains based on the number of visitors they get to the site, so the net income to a squatter is much less (or even negative) than to someone using the domain name for actual productive purposes. Unfortunately, there is no global authority which has the power to tax domain name holders.
What kind of startup would trade part of themselves for gouda.com?
I looked through my bookmarks and I didn't find a single instance that would be considered "generic".
A friend of mine is in the generic domain name business. The point wasn't to get a generic domain name for your company. The point was that a surprisingly large number of people would type their search phrase into the URL bar of the browser, instead of into the search field or going to Google or Yahoo and typing it there. So a large number of people searching for gouda cheese would just type "gouda.com" into the URL field. Some browsers would even helpfully append.com if it detected a non-TLD typed into the URL field, so typing in "gouda" would take you to gouda.com. Colombia and Cameroon make a not-trivial amount of money because their TLDs (.co and.cm) are common typos of.com, and their governments own many of the domain names which are typos of common sites, or sold them to the actual sites for a pretty penny.
Once you get a user to your gouda.com page, you present them with a list of sites about gouda cheese. To the user, this looks like a helpful list of sites similar to if they'd typed "gouda" into a search engine. In reality, the sites have paid the owner of gouda.com for prominent placement on the landing page. They pay the owner a small referral fee for every user which gets to their site by clicking through a link on gouda.com.
The efficacy of these generic domain names has decreased substantially in the last 5 years. So many users treated the URL field as another search field that the browsers adapted to the behavior. They now detect if what's typed into the URL field isn't a TLD, and redirect it to your default search engine. Also, Google's and Yahoo's ranking algorithms no longer give much higher rankings to domain names which matched the search term. In the past, if the browser forwarded "gouda" to Google, the top result used to have a high probability of being gouda.com. FInally, most ISPs have gotten into the monetizing game by tweaking their DNS so it directs common typos and incomplete URLs to their own monetizing landing pages.
OP is correct about TDMA being phased out for data services on cell phones. TDMA is a terrible way to share bandwidth because you have to allocate bandwidth to devices which may not need to transmit anything during their timeslice. In CDMA and OFDMA, phones transmit simultaneously, and the bandwidth is automatically divided between them. The transmissions from other phones are just an increase in the noise floor for the orthogonal signal of your phone. So each additional phone transmitting decreases the SNR for any individual phone, thus automatically dividing up the bandwidth.
GSM voice calls are still done over TDMA though. It limits the number of and range at which phones can communicate with a single tower. But voice is low bandwidth enough that these drawbacks haven't been as limiting as for data services.
You jest, but it's actually a valid point. Watch Blendtec's video of the Nexus 7, Kindle Fire, and iPad Mini.
The moment he hits the tablet against the blender, the (plastic) Nexus 7 and Kindle bend and bounce back close to their original shape. The much thinner (metal) iPad Mini instantly suffers permanent deformation.
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FYI, at the same time the SSC was killed, Bush and the Republican Congress passed the biggest increase in non-defense science spending in decades (I usually link directly to aaas.org, but their site appears to be down). Only the space race in the 1960s was bigger.
But because the press leans left, that never made the news, while the SSC cancellation was shoved in all our faces at every opportunity as an "example" of how Bush was "anti-science". Bush and Congress decided (correctly IMHO) that funding R&D in health and medicine was a better investment than R&D into subatomic particles, when the U.S. was already contributing to an essentially duplicate project in the LHC.
And FWIW, I was opposed to the 2nd Iraq war, albeit for entirely different reasons. It reinforced a bad socio-political precedent that a powerful nation could "legitimately" go traipsing into war for its own reasons even when it failed to get UN support. If the rest of the world is telling you don't do it, you probably shouldn't do it. Economically, it may have been a negative for the U.S., but in the long term it should turn out to be a positive for Iraq and hopefully a net positive for the world overall. (The current situation is what you get when you set about nation-building, then decide halfway through that you don't want to do it anymore. I expected us to have to be there 1-2 decades if not permanently like Korea. I didn't expect the U.S. public to have the patience to stay there that long, which was yet another reason to oppose the war.)
The tl;dr version if you want to skip everything below is that because MB/s is the inverse, the bigger the MB/s gets, the less difference it makes. Let me repeat because it's so counter-intuitive: The bigger the MB/s gets, the less difference it makes.
There are two effects going on here. First , because MB/s is the inverse of what you're really interested in (sec), as it gets bigger its benefit to wait times is actually becoming smaller. Imagine you need to read 1000 MB of data.
Or in terms of time savings per constant MB/s:
See how the bigger the drive's MB/s gets, the less time savings you get per 100 MB/s increase? That's because MB/s the inverse of what we're really interested in - sec/MB. Beyond about SATA3 or even SATA2 speeds, you've pretty much passed the point of diminishing returns and there's very little meaningful time saved by going faster (for tasks
The second effect has to do with which disk operations take more time. Everyone looks at sequential read/write speeds, when they should actually be concentrating on the 4k random speeds. Why? Say your SATA3 drive gets 500 MB/s sequential speeds, and 50 MB/s 4k speeds. Because the 500 MB/s figure is 10x bigger than the 50 MB/s figure, people assume that means it's 10x more important.. In fact, the opposite is true - the smaller MB/s figure matters 10x more. Imagine this drive has to read 1000 MB of sequential data + 1000 MB of 4k data.
Surprise! Your drive spends 91% of its time doing the 4k read task, and only 9% of its time doing the sequential read task. Consequently, the smaller MB/s figure matters a lot more in terms of how long you wait for the drive to finish doing something. Which is just another way of saying: The bigger the MB/s gets, the less difference it makes.
So why do HDD manufacturers and review sites insist on using MB/s? Marketing. Because it exaggerates the impact of faster drives, it makes you want to pay more money for the latest and greatest drive. The jump from 500 MB/s to 1000 MB/s by going to PCIe SSDs seems like a huge increase, when in fact it's a miniscule tiptoe. And review sites are complicit because if word got out that there's really not much difference between using a budget SSD and the latest and greatest PCIe SSD, people would stop reading reviews and they'd lose advertising revenue. (That's not to say this is always true - certain specialized tasks benefit disproportionately from the high sequential speeds on large files. Real time video editing is a good example.)
So if you want a fast SSD, you should be obsessing over the smallest MB/s figures, not the biggest ones; the 4k speeds, not the sequential speeds. 10 MB/s faster 4k speeds makes about 10x as much difference as 100 MB/s faster sequential speeds. (The same thing is true for car MPG. MPG i
I wonder if there's a link between things like that and the decrease in percentage of students pursuing STEM careers.
What do you think would happen to the number of English Lit majors if high school teachers had to say, "We're going to study Shakespeare, but we're not going to be reading any of his plays. Instead we're going to read a computer-generated play in the Shakespearean style."
Swimming pools - kill about 130 children aged 0-14 each year.
Why would they need a browser plugin? A third only needs the plugin to insert themselves in the middle. As an ISP, AT&T is already in the middle. They could simply redirect all your https queries to their own server, which executes a MITM attack and contacts the real server on your behalf. A lot of employers already do this to track and discourage employees using work computers for personal tasks.
You're misunderstanding the game theory - you're assuming that everyone needs to behave according to the theory for it to be correct. The game theory merely says that people who behave a certain way tend to enjoy better outcomes. Are economists and sociopaths doing better in society than the average person (after controlling for other factors like education and family wealth)? If yes, then the theory has some basis.
People can behave all sorts of ways. The theory merely states that certain types of behaviors aren't as constructive or are self-destructive, and end up filtering themselves out. The behaviors which don't get filtered out are the successful ones. Economists exhibit them because they (think they) know better. Psychopaths exhibit them because these behaviors work.
It's the same process as evolution. Evolution doesn't "pick" winning life strategies. It simply filters out losing strategies, which results in the winning ones seeming to be picked out by an invisible hand. The "invisible hand" of the free market works exactly the same way. Or if you want a strictly mathematical example, there's the Sieve of Eratosthenes, where an algorithm which focuses solely on filtering out non-prime numbers ends up "picking out" prime numbers.
You're thinking of it backwards. People willingly give up their privacy for convenience. e.g. Letting Google see all their emails because they don't want to go through the trouble of setting up and running their own mail server. Or letting Facebook see everything they post or comment on because they don't want to go through the trouble of setting up and running their own website.
Getting things done without giving up your privacy is more complicated. e.g How do you get merchants to ship stuff to you without giving up your home address? You have to rent space at a mailbox store, which can act as a proxy to accept your packages. That complication incurs additional cost which someone (i.e. you) has to pay for. It's completely illogical to think you can get things done the harder way for the same price (free).
The cable companies are hard at work "solving" that problem. They'll turn your home cable modem into a wifi hotspot whether you want to or not.
http://www.cablewifi.com/
It's a weird situation because cable companies suck, and cellular carriers suck. But if the two were to begin fighting each other, magic things could happen.
Smarter Every Day did a video on tattoo removal. Not as much slow-motion video as in their other videos, but still very informative.
Yes video was on the net before YouTube. But the problem was hosting videos. It cost $$ for the storage space a video occupied on your web server, and $$$ for the bandwidth to send it to anyone who requested it. If a site had a video on it and it went viral (either by email or IM word of mouth, or a slashdotting), you'd get the all-too-familiar "this site has exceeded its monthly bandwidth quota" page if you didn't visit it before it hit about 100,000 page hits.
I recognized what YouTube was the moment I first saw it - a way for anyone to host a video without having to own a website nor pay for bandwidth. In fact that was my main concern about YouTube's survivability at first: how were they going to make enough money to pay for all the bandwidth they used? In a way, YouTube is what made the "viral hit" possible - because it eliminated bandwidth quota exceeded messages for online videos.
It's pretty clear from the internal emails released that that's basically what went on. Everyone there knew the service was being used for massive copyright infringement, and on some levels they actually encouraged it.
The reason Kim Dotcom got off (or should get off) has to do with legal procedure and extradition treaties. Basically in their zeal to reel him in, the U.S. DoJ ignored its prior agreements with New Zealand, and pressured NZ police into taking actions which violated their own laws. That's why he's getting off, not because he didn't infringe copyright. Most people here hardly consider him a champion of their pet causes. They just happen to side with him in this case because they're opposed to Hollywood leveraging its political influence to commit illegal acts under the color of law enforcement.
Metropolitan Seoul has a population of 25 million. Furthermore, unlike New York City which is laid out in a nice grid, the streets in Seoul are a byzantine mess of turns, angles, and alleyways. Also, as per Asian custom, most of the streets don't have names - the destinations do. (Kinda like Squares in Boston - instead of the street being called Boylston St, it'd simply be called "To Copley Square".) I'm frankly amazed at how many streets the taxicab drivers there know. GPS is a convenience in the U.S., but it's practically required in cities like Seoul which originally grew organically without central planning.
You also have to understand the historical pretext. South Korea, and Seoul in particular, has one of the highest population densities on earth. Of countries with more than 5 million people and excluding city-states, only Bangladesh and Taiwan have higher population density. Space, and especially road space is a premium.
Back in the 1970s and early 1980s, they had a pretty good system. The government taxed cars so that the cost about $40,000 (about $90,000 in 2014 dollars) as a way to discourage car ownership. Instead, people were encouraged to take public transportation and taxis. Even traveling between cities was simple with an extensive express bus system with departures every 5 minutes between major cities. It worked pretty well - I hardly recall seeing any traffic jams during that time, and you could flag down a taxi literally within 30 seconds.
All that fell apart n the late 1980s, one of the U.S. Presidential candidates made an issue of this tax. He complained that Hyundai was allowed to sell its cars in the U.S. for $5,000, while an equivalent U.S. car cost $40,000 in Korea. He conveniently omitted that the same Hyundai cost $40,000 in Korea as well. The huge uproar in the U.S. eventually led to the South Korean government repealing the tax in order to protect its fledgling overseas car sales industry.
What happened next was predictable. Car prices dropped like a rock in Korea, and Koreans bought cars. Tens of millions of them. Way more than the road infrastructure could handle. The streets became parking lots. During the lunar new year, it wasn't uncommon for a 400km road trip to take more than 24 hours - as slow as a fast marathon runner. And not only did it negatively impact car travel, it also slowed down public bus transportation since they were stuck on the streets with the cars.
During the 1990s and 2000s, Korea worked its ass off to expand and improve its roads to handle all these cars. It's still nowhere near as good as it was in the 1970s, but at least traffic moves now, with just the regular traffic jams like you'd expect in any modern urbanized country. There is no way in hell they're going to allow millions more drivers roaming the streets trying to make some extra pocket change with Uber.
$2 a week over a working lifetime of 45 years is $4696. Or in the context of annual income, if you make the U.S. average of $50,000/yr, $2/week works out to 0.21% of your gross income. Factor in taxes and living expenses like housing, transportation, and food, and it's probably close to 1% of your disposable income. It is not trivial.
Your reasoning is also why most people don't bother saving/investing their money, and instead spend it on toys like iPads, HDTVs, and playing the lottery. The interest earned each month seems like a pittance, and not worth the tradeoff of being unable to use your money. But over 45 years, it adds up to tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars (factoring in compound interest). It's decisions like this which help make the 1% the 1%. 99% would rather blow the $2 a week. The 1% would rather invest it in something with a positive ROI, because they understand that every little bit counts.
From a manufacturing standpoint, Smart TVs aren't dumb. If you've ever taken apart a modern HDTV, it's basically a monitor plus a small computer which does the image decoding and processing. On some HDTVs the computer half even plugs into the monitor half with a DVI cable.
For the manufacturer, it's trivial to beef up the computer with $10-$20 of extra hardware (faster CPU and more RAM), add some software, and charge an extra $200 for it being a Smart TV. As you surmise, the buyer is much better off buying a "dumb" TV and adding a HTPC (I recommend an old laptop so you don't kill your dollar savings with extra electricity burned by a 100 Watt old desktop).
Replying to OP to clarify the figures for all the replies who clearly don't know how these things are measured.
130 MW is the nameplate capacity, aka peak generating capacity. i.e. If the sun were directly overhead on a cloudless day and the panels had just been cleaned, how much power would they generate?
Actual production over a year is the nameplate capacity times capacity factor times one year. PV solar's capacity factor for the continental U.S. averages about 0.145. It peaks in the desert southwest at about 0.185. Places like Germany and France are closer to 0.10. Capacity factor takes into account night, movement of the sun across the sky, clouds and weather, dirt building up on the panels, downtime for maintenance, etc. Everything that on average diminishes production below the peak.
Using the 0.185 figure, the annual production of this array is (130MW) * (0.185) * (8766 hours) = 210822 MWh. At California's average retail electricity price of $0.1353 / kWh, this works out to $28.5 million dollars of electricity generated per year. Break-even period for the $850 construction cost (excluding financing) is then 29.8 years. Financing (either taking out a loan to pay for the panels up-front, or the opportunity cost of investing cash on hand into something with a payback time in decades) is a factor which should be taken into account, but whose exact impact depends on interest and inflation rates over those 30 years.
$ per watt is a shortcut used to quickly gauge installation costs. It's just the $ cost for installation divided by the nameplate capacity in Watts. OP correctly calculated this as $6.54. The $1-$2 per Watt figure commonly quoted by PV salesman for economy panels is just the cost of the panels. You also need framework to mount the panels on, as well as regulation electronics to even out the voltage, and disconnect the array from the grid during a power failure so you don't electrocute the utility worker who's trying to fix a downed power line. That typically increases the cost to the $3-$7 per Watt range. My guess is the $ per Watt is so high because Apple is opting for higher efficiency panels, which are more expensive. (That doesn't change any of the above math though, since it's based on nameplate capacity which already accounts for panel efficiency.)
The essential / recommended / avoid rating only works if you happen to find a reviewer whose tastes exactly match yours. Which granted given the enormous number of reviews on the Internet is a lot easier now than in the dead tree gaming magazine days. But the key thing to take from that should be that you need to somehow take advantage of the large number of reviews, not simplify the scoring system. The review site should use pattern matching where you list which games you liked, the site searches for other users who liked the same games, and makes recommendations to you based on games those people liked but weren't on your list. Like what Netflix does for its movie recommendations. Essentially, the entire population of game players registered with the site becomes your review database, and the system is set up to weigh more heavily the opinions of gamers who have similar tastes to yours.
Youtube videos of gameplay are good if you already know you might be interested in a game. But just as the Internet has led to the balkanization of reviews so you can now find thousands of reviews, game development is slowly going down the same path (have you ever browsed through all the titles available on Steam?). Consequently, there are a helluva lot more games out there to consider (unless you artificially limit yourself to just the big titles), and some sort of review/rating system is needed to help people sift through them quickly. Watching a youtube video of each one is out of the question. Same goes for free trials - the time investment makes it unwieldy as the number of available games increases.
Once you factor in charging and discharging losses, batteries end up cutting solar's already-abysmal energy per $ ratio nearly in half. Pumped storage (pumping water uphill into a dam) is currently the best energy storage option, and even it sits at between 70%-80% efficiency.
Using the energy as it's produced (or in the case of fossil fuels and nuclear, producing the energy as it's needed) is always the best option. I mean hypothetically, if you're going to use PV solar to pump water uphill for storage, it's really no different from installing thousands of square km of cheap black-painted panels just underneath the ocean surface, raising the temperature of the top layer of ocean water, increasing the evaporation rate, resulting in more rainfall, giving you the same increase in water stored behind dams for probably a lot less cost. Why even bother with the intermediate lossy steps of converting solar to electricity, then electricity to mechanical motion?
The juxtaposition of this article with the previous one on hacking cars made me realize: If you can hack into a self-driving car, you could steal it without having to physically break into it.
That's actually one of the big challenges Microsoft is facing. They have an internal conflict of interest between their OS division and apps division (mostly Office). From the viewpoint of the apps division, they are best off making Office available for all platforms. From the viewpoint of the OS division, they are best off making Office available only for Windows, so people are forced to buy a Windows license to use Office.
For about 7 years, the OS division won that argument, and Office was only available on Windows and Windows Mobile (plus a slightly out-of-date version for OS X). That changed last year and they're now making Office available on Android, iOS, and the cloud. Basically this means you no longer need to buy Windows to run Office, so Windows will have to sell on its own merits.
If you've been following Microsoft since the monopoly lawsuits in the 1990s, it's ironic. Many of us back then felt the best solution would've been to break up Microsoft into two companies - an OS company and an apps company - to eliminate the conflict of interest created by their near-monopoly position. It didn't happen then, but it looks like after a couple decades the market is pushing them in that direction anyway.
Microsoft already tried the corporate subscription model with Win XP. Their marketing division talked a lot of their corporate customers into signing on to a 3 year contract instead of outright buying XP. The contract promised an upgrade to their next version of Windows, which was expected to happen 2-3 years after XP was released. Previous releases of Windows had been:
Windows 3.0 - May 1990
Windows 3.1 - March 1992
Windows 95 - August 1995
Windows 98 - June 1998
Windows 2000 - Feb 2000
Windows XP - Oct 2001
So roughly 2-3 years between releases. Most companies knew full well Microsoft was pushing a subscription model, and were wary. But Microsoft priced it so that considering you were getting two releases of Windows, it was a good deal compared to buying the licenses outright. Most signed the 3 year contracts in 2002-2003.
Vista wasn't released until Nov 2006 (volume licensing) and Jan 2007 (retail). More than 5 years after XP, and 1-2 years after most of those 3 year contracts expired. There were howls, mudslinging in corporate press, and lawsuits. I think Microsoft ended up extending those contracts by an extra year for free, which still left some customers out in the cold. And on top of that, Vista wasn't considered a very good upgrade so most companies ended up sticking with XP until Windows 7 was released in Oct 2009.
The companies which signed up for Microsoft's subscription model 3-year support contract felt they'd been royally screwed. It will be a cold day in Hell before they ever sign up for a Windows 365. This is also the best argument against a subscription model - the constant revenue stream makes life easier for accounting, but it destroys the market incentive for the company to make improvements, add new features, and release them on a timely schedule.
Whether or not this incurs a cost on society or is a benefit to society depends on the law being enforced. If it's to stop organized crime, then it's probably a net benefit to society. If it's to enforce a law prohibiting you from putting coins in someone else's parking meter, then it's probably a net detriment to society.
The world does not divide up into neat and tidy categories of behaviors which are always good or always bad. Sometimes the benefit is worth the price paid, sometimes it's not.
That's not how economics works. If you buy all the stores in the area and inflate the prices by 1000%, that presents a business opportunity for someone to open up a new store with prices inflated by 500%. It won't be as convenient to get to, but the substantially lower price means customers will make the trek out there because the savings is worth their time. The squatter is then forced to lower his prices to a 250% markup, the new store lowers to a 125% markup, etc. This continues until the prices are the minimum markup the store owners are willing to accept.
Huge markups only persist if you manage to convince people that the markup is somehow worth it. e.g. Become a status symbol like Gucci, or Mercedes, or Apple. Or you resort to illegal means to stifle competition (threaten to break the legs of the new storeowner's kids).
Same deal here. Just because they're asking fro $19,000 doesn't mean someone is going to pay them for it. Just like if someone marked up the store prices by 1000% doesn't mean customers are going to pay for it. It just creates an opportunity for a new entrant in the market with a smaller markup.
Domain names are (were) like real estate. The better domain names are like waterfront property. Except everything was originally sold for the flat rate of $10/yr per domain name regardless of if it was waterfront property or not. Squatting exists because of a disparity between the original price and its actual value. Unfortunately, there's no simple way to determine the value of any domain name except via this market mechanic (i.e. however much someone is willing to pay for it). So this type of markup is inevitable. A solution, as someone pointed out above, is property taxes. You tax domains based on the number of visitors they get to the site, so the net income to a squatter is much less (or even negative) than to someone using the domain name for actual productive purposes. Unfortunately, there is no global authority which has the power to tax domain name holders.
A friend of mine is in the generic domain name business. The point wasn't to get a generic domain name for your company. The point was that a surprisingly large number of people would type their search phrase into the URL bar of the browser, instead of into the search field or going to Google or Yahoo and typing it there. So a large number of people searching for gouda cheese would just type "gouda.com" into the URL field. Some browsers would even helpfully append .com if it detected a non-TLD typed into the URL field, so typing in "gouda" would take you to gouda.com. Colombia and Cameroon make a not-trivial amount of money because their TLDs (.co and .cm) are common typos of .com, and their governments own many of the domain names which are typos of common sites, or sold them to the actual sites for a pretty penny.
Once you get a user to your gouda.com page, you present them with a list of sites about gouda cheese. To the user, this looks like a helpful list of sites similar to if they'd typed "gouda" into a search engine. In reality, the sites have paid the owner of gouda.com for prominent placement on the landing page. They pay the owner a small referral fee for every user which gets to their site by clicking through a link on gouda.com.
The efficacy of these generic domain names has decreased substantially in the last 5 years. So many users treated the URL field as another search field that the browsers adapted to the behavior. They now detect if what's typed into the URL field isn't a TLD, and redirect it to your default search engine. Also, Google's and Yahoo's ranking algorithms no longer give much higher rankings to domain names which matched the search term. In the past, if the browser forwarded "gouda" to Google, the top result used to have a high probability of being gouda.com. FInally, most ISPs have gotten into the monetizing game by tweaking their DNS so it directs common typos and incomplete URLs to their own monetizing landing pages.
OP is correct about TDMA being phased out for data services on cell phones. TDMA is a terrible way to share bandwidth because you have to allocate bandwidth to devices which may not need to transmit anything during their timeslice. In CDMA and OFDMA, phones transmit simultaneously, and the bandwidth is automatically divided between them. The transmissions from other phones are just an increase in the noise floor for the orthogonal signal of your phone. So each additional phone transmitting decreases the SNR for any individual phone, thus automatically dividing up the bandwidth.
GSM voice calls are still done over TDMA though. It limits the number of and range at which phones can communicate with a single tower. But voice is low bandwidth enough that these drawbacks haven't been as limiting as for data services.
You jest, but it's actually a valid point. Watch Blendtec's video of the Nexus 7, Kindle Fire, and iPad Mini.
The moment he hits the tablet against the blender, the (plastic) Nexus 7 and Kindle bend and bounce back close to their original shape. The much thinner (metal) iPad Mini instantly suffers permanent deformation.