As far as I know, the traditional method to view the costs is that the subscribers pay for the journalists, and the ads pay for the distribution, etc.
This so that the actual content of the newspaper would as be free from influence from the advertisers as possible
I really love my HTC Hero. I've got all of the above, + IP telephony (through sipdroid, or Google Voice if you're in the US).
I've been abroad for almost 2 months, and make quite a few calls per day back to Norway - and I'm usually around a WiFi spot:-)
Can make do with just a prepaid subscription on the side - saves me quite a bit of money:-)
Oh, and the next HTC Android - the Dragon - will have 1Ghz processor... We're talking about apps that'll make iPhone look slow and clumsy:-)
LeGuin isn't just classics - or, rather, some of her classics are almost brand new.
When I bought Voices, which was my first one, I wasn't aware of the teen theme here. Voices is my absolute favorite of the three, which are all quite stunning feats of literature by an author who seems to be growing only stronger as she keeps writing.
Voices, especially, matters to me. It speaks of growing up in a city where books are banned, where the occupying forces worship fire and the spoken word. It speaks of growing up in a culture under occupation quite well, and it speaks of the gift of words possibly better than anything else I've read.
All three books are highly recommended, but given the theme of the class, I'd definitively go with Voices, and let the interested ones pick up the other two on their own.
Oh, and if you're adult, read them anyhow. I expect half the people here are reading this thread looking for book recommendations;-)
I'd also recommend some Dan Simmons - probably Hyperion. It's the first book of his best series, it has a clear ancestry with Cantebury Tales etc, and it has influenced a LOT of current SF.
And, of course, if you're not including a lot of Heinlein, you're missing half the history of modern SF right there. Maybe watch Starship Troopers in class, and then read and contrast with the novel - should be a bit of an eye-opener;-)
I think the way to move into the Cloud is simply not buying your next server. Keep the old stuff around - the migration is going to take you some time - but you don't need to buy more hardware after a while.
And if you're quick about the migration, you could always just link the existing hardware up with some other company that's also running surplus servers from moving to the cloud, and build your own little backup cloud that you can also sell access to... Maybe even back to whichever cloud company you're running on.
I mean, this is young(ish) tech still, so there's plenty of room for more clouds in our sky. Even little ones.
But you can't make it redundant, back it up, give it high-bandwidth connectiontivity, or maintain it for that price. The hardware itself, is by far the cheapest part of any server room.
Nor can you with a single out-of-the-box Amazon EC2 instance. Your instance fails more often than a physical server, due to the nature of virtualization. (One hardware bug = many instances fail)
True, there are crisis management tools, and you can have several instances and just fire up a new one whenever the old one fails.
But then you still have the issues of corrupt data, etc - meaning you need continual backups (snapshots), meaning you need S3 space and SimpleDB access because it turns out that running an actual redundant relational DB on the cloud requires quite a bit of development and more cost than you were ready to sink...
Or third party tools, there are more of those every day, too - but *don't* think that your physical server can be simply replaced by a similar EC2 instance, or that the costs are directly translatable.
I love the cloud, though. Massively deployed virtualized/easy-access processing, storage and bandwidth is the stuff of *real* science fiction - the kind that's actually happening right now and in the next single-digit years.
It's gonna change our world and our technology in a process comparable to the introduction of widespread GSM.
I can't wait until the clouds grow up, get thick enough and start merging into the Datasphere.
So when the sea wrarms up and starts releasing massive amounts of Co2 and Methane, then even more of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere won't have been released (directly) by humans! Won't we all feel *so much* better then?
You mean the bombings that essentially saved hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of civilian lives? Which were legal under the then-current laws of war?
Japan was already suing for peace through Russia.
The US nuked Japan to ensure total capitulation - something Japan was unable to culturally accept until after the nukes. They were already defeated, though, and they knew it.
The nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are two of the biggest crimes against humanity ever commited. Even if it saved a few hundred thousand GIs from overzealous generals.
The moon won't be practical for a penal colony until we've got a space elevator.
I mean, up until then the cost of getting these warm bodies into orbit still living (and useful for mining, building luxury hoteÃs for rich tourists, building the walls that'll keep themselves out, later on...) is way too expensive...
It'd get practical real quick with a space elevator on the earth & one on the moon, though...
Do you trust your bank with your money? [...] Why do you trust them?
In my country, my bank is under constant scrutiny by governmental and other financial institutions. They all have risk invested, and the system is solid.
Do you trust your grocer to give you clean, fresh meats? Even though you can't go in the back,
see how they're stored and watch them being cut? Your health is at stake. Why do you trust them?
Again, extremely clear rules and regulations that are enforced by a governmental agency that regularily shuts down places. (But things usually work out fine for most people, even if the conditions arn't strictly sanitary).
Do you trust your pharmacy to give you the correct medication? Even though you dropped the prescription off, will pick it up later and don't know the look of one pill from another? Your life is at stake. Why do you trust them?
Yes, yes. And the pharmacists I know generally have nightmares about poisoning patients, and 0.0X% (can't be bothered to look up the number) of medicated people die each year from medicine causes.
I trust I've answered your question.
I trust you haven't.
System administration is an area under far, far less scrutiny than any of the above institutions.
Offshoring generally is a legally very poorly covered area.
Outsourcing, if you're doing it within your country, will be covered by your country's (lack of) rules concerning system administration - something, in fact, as vital as any of the above examples to the health of society.
Maybe we're asking the wrong question here, maybe we should look at creating a set of rules and regulations for system administrators on a nationwide/global setting.
I mean, they've got all the power, and who watches them?
"A group of prostitutes thought to be immune to HIV have now become infected, causing dismay to scientists hoping to develop an Aids vaccine.
It was thought that exposure to HIV on a regular basis created immunity, but six Kenyan women previously thought to be resistant are now HIV-positive. "
If even a quarter of the population does something illegal, prosecuting them all is impractical, and prosecuting a few to "set an example" is unlikely to be effective. Thus, unless the goal is to make revenue (speeding tickets, catching tax cheats, etc.), it just doesn't make sense.
A recent questionnaire revealed that 1/3 of South African males have committed rape. Think rape should be legalized there?
Note: I'm *not* comparing file sharing/copyright infringement with rape, only that part of your argument seems to fall through in this particular scenario...
Even if you can cut your CPU power consumption by 50%, you're only cutting overall system power consumption by perhaps 10%. The display obviously dominates, and there's no sign of any near-future technology that will substantially reduce that power requirement by a significant amount.
Full color "Electronic paper" (a.la Kindle) with decent response times. Nearly everything I do professionally is text-based, and what images are needed will be shown as well. The lack of video and gaming will be a clear boost to my productivity.
... On my new and shiny laptop. Which is the way most people get their Windows 7.
The UI improvements over Vista are enormous.
It's like Vista started exercising, took off 250 pounds, got a job, a house and a car. Finally met the girl he wanted to spend his life with, and got married. She's got expensive habits, but she's a devil in bed and it feels like it's worth it.
Older systems? Yes. By all means, stick to XP.
But Windows 7 has come to the point where phasing out XP seems inevitable.
Or linux... I tried for two weeks, and going to Vista felt like coming home, but that's probably because this is a system I feel familiar with. (Unlike Vista, which never felt like "home")
Do a search on 'homosexuality' on the main page of Amazon now. If that's a genuine search result, Amazon has issues above and beyond just delisting books.
"A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality " as the #1 result? Now that's what I'd call a really offensive book.
Your source is a mailing list post referencing an article not supporting it in any way, and an unnamed and unlinked Dept. of Justice study.
The first reply to the post (properly) cites a study saying the opposite, and is not in any way refuted.
It restricts your rights digitally/manages digital restrictions on your software, so it's just a different kind of Digital Restrictions Management. Calling it "Rights management" lends them half the victory. They're taking away rights (fair use, etc), not "managing" them.
Slashdot Mirror
As far as I know, the traditional method to view the costs is that the subscribers pay for the journalists, and the ads pay for the distribution, etc.
This so that the actual content of the newspaper would as be free from influence from the advertisers as possible
I really love my HTC Hero. I've got all of the above, + IP telephony (through sipdroid, or Google Voice if you're in the US). I've been abroad for almost 2 months, and make quite a few calls per day back to Norway - and I'm usually around a WiFi spot :-)
Can make do with just a prepaid subscription on the side - saves me quite a bit of money :-)
Oh, and the next HTC Android - the Dragon - will have 1Ghz processor... We're talking about apps that'll make iPhone look slow and clumsy :-)
LeGuin isn't just classics - or, rather, some of her classics are almost brand new.
When I bought Voices, which was my first one, I wasn't aware of the teen theme here. Voices is my absolute favorite of the three, which are all quite stunning feats of literature by an author who seems to be growing only stronger as she keeps writing.
Voices, especially, matters to me. It speaks of growing up in a city where books are banned, where the occupying forces worship fire and the spoken word. It speaks of growing up in a culture under occupation quite well, and it speaks of the gift of words possibly better than anything else I've read. All three books are highly recommended, but given the theme of the class, I'd definitively go with Voices, and let the interested ones pick up the other two on their own.
Oh, and if you're adult, read them anyhow. I expect half the people here are reading this thread looking for book recommendations ;-)
I'd also recommend some Dan Simmons - probably Hyperion. It's the first book of his best series, it has a clear ancestry with Cantebury Tales etc, and it has influenced a LOT of current SF.
And, of course, if you're not including a lot of Heinlein, you're missing half the history of modern SF right there. ;-)
Maybe watch Starship Troopers in class, and then read and contrast with the novel - should be a bit of an eye-opener
I think the way to move into the Cloud is simply not buying your next server.
Keep the old stuff around - the migration is going to take you some time - but you don't need to buy more hardware after a while.
And if you're quick about the migration, you could always just link the existing hardware up with some other company that's also running surplus servers from moving to the cloud, and build your own little backup cloud that you can also sell access to... Maybe even back to whichever cloud company you're running on.
I mean, this is young(ish) tech still, so there's plenty of room for more clouds in our sky. Even little ones.
But you can't make it redundant, back it up, give it high-bandwidth connectiontivity, or maintain it for that price. The hardware itself, is by far the cheapest part of any server room.
Nor can you with a single out-of-the-box Amazon EC2 instance. Your instance fails more often than a physical server, due to the nature of virtualization. (One hardware bug = many instances fail)
True, there are crisis management tools, and you can have several instances and just fire up a new one whenever the old one fails.
But then you still have the issues of corrupt data, etc - meaning you need continual backups (snapshots), meaning you need S3 space and SimpleDB access because it turns out that running an actual redundant relational DB on the cloud requires quite a bit of development and more cost than you were ready to sink...
Or third party tools, there are more of those every day, too - but *don't* think that your physical server can be simply replaced by a similar EC2 instance, or that the costs are directly translatable.
I love the cloud, though. Massively deployed virtualized/easy-access processing, storage and bandwidth is the stuff of *real* science fiction - the kind that's actually happening right now and in the next single-digit years.
It's gonna change our world and our technology in a process comparable to the introduction of widespread GSM.
I can't wait until the clouds grow up, get thick enough and start merging into the Datasphere.
So when the sea wrarms up and starts releasing massive amounts of Co2 and Methane, then even more of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere won't have been released (directly) by humans! Won't we all feel *so much* better then?
You mean the bombings that essentially saved hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of civilian lives? Which were legal under the then-current laws of war?
Japan was already suing for peace through Russia.
The US nuked Japan to ensure total capitulation - something Japan was unable to culturally accept until after the nukes. They were already defeated, though, and they knew it.
The nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are two of the biggest crimes against humanity ever commited. Even if it saved a few hundred thousand GIs from overzealous generals.
Mod parent up
The moon won't be practical for a penal colony until we've got a space elevator.
I mean, up until then the cost of getting these warm bodies into orbit still living (and useful for mining, building luxury hoteÃs for rich tourists, building the walls that'll keep themselves out, later on...) is way too expensive...
It'd get practical real quick with a space elevator on the earth & one on the moon, though...
Do you trust your bank with your money? [...] Why do you trust them?
In my country, my bank is under constant scrutiny by governmental and other financial institutions. They all have risk invested, and the system is solid.
Do you trust your grocer to give you clean, fresh meats? Even though you can't go in the back, see how they're stored and watch them being cut? Your health is at stake. Why do you trust them?
Again, extremely clear rules and regulations that are enforced by a governmental agency that regularily shuts down places. (But things usually work out fine for most people, even if the conditions arn't strictly sanitary).
Do you trust your pharmacy to give you the correct medication? Even though you dropped the prescription off, will pick it up later and don't know the look of one pill from another? Your life is at stake. Why do you trust them?
Yes, yes. And the pharmacists I know generally have nightmares about poisoning patients, and 0.0X% (can't be bothered to look up the number) of medicated people die each year from medicine causes.
I trust I've answered your question.
I trust you haven't.
System administration is an area under far, far less scrutiny than any of the above institutions.
Offshoring generally is a legally very poorly covered area.
Outsourcing, if you're doing it within your country, will be covered by your country's (lack of) rules concerning system administration - something, in fact, as vital as any of the above examples to the health of society.
Maybe we're asking the wrong question here, maybe we should look at creating a set of rules and regulations for system administrators on a nationwide/global setting.
I mean, they've got all the power, and who watches them?
"A group of prostitutes thought to be immune to HIV have now become infected, causing dismay to scientists hoping to develop an Aids vaccine.
It was thought that exposure to HIV on a regular basis created immunity, but six Kenyan women previously thought to be resistant are now HIV-positive. "
From BBC News
If even a quarter of the population does something illegal, prosecuting them all is impractical, and prosecuting a few to "set an example" is unlikely to be effective. Thus, unless the goal is to make revenue (speeding tickets, catching tax cheats, etc.), it just doesn't make sense.
A recent questionnaire revealed that 1/3 of South African males have committed rape. Think rape should be legalized there?
Note: I'm *not* comparing file sharing/copyright infringement with rape, only that part of your argument seems to fall through in this particular scenario...
Even if you can cut your CPU power consumption by 50%, you're only cutting overall system power consumption by perhaps 10%. The display obviously dominates, and there's no sign of any near-future technology that will substantially reduce that power requirement by a significant amount.
Full color "Electronic paper" (a.la Kindle) with decent response times. Nearly everything I do professionally is text-based, and what images are needed will be shown as well.
The lack of video and gaming will be a clear boost to my productivity.
Customer who bought World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King also bought...
"Those who don't study history are doomed to repeat it"
"In summer school"
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/23/another-blanket-denial-by-lastfm/
Mod parent up
Ahem. Going to Windows 7 felt like coming home, rather.
... On my new and shiny laptop. Which is the way most people get their Windows 7.
The UI improvements over Vista are enormous.
It's like Vista started exercising, took off 250 pounds, got a job, a house and a car. Finally met the girl he wanted to spend his life with, and got married.
She's got expensive habits, but she's a devil in bed and it feels like it's worth it.
Older systems? Yes. By all means, stick to XP.
But Windows 7 has come to the point where phasing out XP seems inevitable.
Or linux... I tried for two weeks, and going to Vista felt like coming home, but that's probably because this is a system I feel familiar with. (Unlike Vista, which never felt like "home")
Mod parent up, government spending should increase in bust times and shrink during booms.
I laughed. Out loud. Would say "mod parent up", but you're already at +5 :-P
Do a search on 'homosexuality' on the main page of Amazon now. If that's a genuine search result, Amazon has issues above and beyond just delisting books.
"A Parent's Guide to Preventing Homosexuality " as the #1 result? Now that's what I'd call a really offensive book.
The first reply to the post (properly) cites a study saying the opposite, and is not in any way refuted.
Please mod parent down.
It restricts your rights digitally/manages digital restrictions on your software, so it's just a different kind of Digital Restrictions Management.
Calling it "Rights management" lends them half the victory. They're taking away rights (fair use, etc), not "managing" them.
Realistically I might be able to delay it another five years.
And with the ever-increasing speeds of medical research those last 5 years might be what lets you live a full-length life
That's kinda what I'm hoping. I'm 27 and have a life expectancy of 20 more years due to my heart condition :-P
What do you say we meet up in 25 and make a toast to medicine?