CentOS installations use either a local repository or they connect to a mirror. No "central server"
Mine connect to mirrors as well. They tell the mirror, "HTTP GET/distros/ubuntu/yakkety/pool/p/pornview-2.1.3.deb" and so forth. One GET request per file being downloaded.
I don't think that they query the yum server for every package installed on the system: instead, they download a single file that lists all the available packages in that particular repository, then they download only the necessary packages.
So, when you download installation packages beyond what's installed by default--of which they know every single package already--it doesn't transmit to one of the CentOS mirrors a list of some subset of packages, the total from installation to decommission will necessarily detail every single package you install by virtue of telling them what software you install outside the default set--and even by virtue of pointedly not updating software you've since uninstalled?
There's enough going out to archive.ubuntu.com and us.archive.ubuntu.com pools for the Canonical secret NDA conspiracy to track my every software selection and update. This is approximately the same reality as what's going on with Microsoft, aside from that Microsoft doesn't see every piece of software you install--you only get Microsoft software updates through MS, plus anything you installed through the Windows store--yet nobody panics about their distro or some untrusted third-party Government-controlled university (what do you think gatech.edu is in the CentOS mirror list?) getting their IP and the names of arbitrary software applications they update.
You leak information like a sieve, and your best argument about why it's okay sometimes is apparently that you leak that information to more people in those cases.
It depends. Software is technology, too. From that end, Windows 10 actually has some pretty awesome features.
A while back, I installed Gitlab on a server with 1GB RAM. That server immediately went 700MB into swap and... proceeded to behave as if nothing had happened. 40MB of reclaimable memory, but no problem. That was a Linux server with 1GB of zram allowed to use up to 50% of memory, compressing its load to less than 1/3 its original size--about 700MB open RAM, and 300MB housing 700MB of compressed RAM swapped out. The compression algorithm is about as fast as a worst-case cache miss, and programs tend to do more computation than that on a given block of RAM: it didn't add any significant performance overhead (like, less than 1%). This will balloon out of control when you get to a tight enough RAM-to-swap ratio, of course.
Windows 10 has an internal caching system that's quite similar and implemented extremely well. Because of this, Windows 10 can allocate around 24-32GB of RAM in a 16GB system and not care. It won't touch disk, at all, and it won't appear to slow down. With the right precaching algorithms, access to this kind of compressed area takes only twice as much time as access to raw RAM--that is, the same situations where CPU prefetch kicks in, the OS can decompress a few swap pages into a hot area of RAM before they're needed if there's any CPU downtime at all (there almost always is, even under heavy load from high-intensity gaming or server applications).
That's not just powerful technology; it's a response to fear of swap areas destroying SSDs. You don't need to write swap to disk ever, and you still get the benefit of taking long-unused data out of RAM and idling it on a slower medium. In this case, you trade 500MB of idle RAM out for 160MB of idle RAM, giving you an extra 340MB for stuff that actually matters. A good deal of RAM is never touched again, or is in a working set less-frequently-used than block cache, so it's actually faster to swap in some cases where you could actually reclaim usable RAM.
A lot of scheduler and memory management changes went into Windows 10, and they're actually great features--some of which I'd wanted on Linux for years and just barely got a couple years ago. If Microsoft gets a new BFS-type scheduler in before CK's goes mainline, it'll actually be a stronger server and desktop OS than Linux--that hasn't happened yet, and MS continues to trail in that respect, but they're quickly catching up on all kinds of failures and rough edges that have historically put them far beyond modern Linux distributions. Windows 10 doesn't even need a reboot when you power off an HDMI display (8.1 loses the ability to play sound through HDMI).
So Windows 10 makes better use of RAM, avoids wearing out SSDs, can handle HDMI displays properly, and has some scheduling and memory management improvements that more-optimally leverage modern processors and high-speed disks. It's not yet on-par with the latest in Linux technology--but neither is Linux mainline kernel or any Linux distribution to date; and nothing's caught up to DragonflyBSD in a few key areas. Still, it's better able to leverage modern machines than any prior OS.
I'll be excited to see BFS and BFQ in Linux mainline, and similarly-excited if we start getting Dragonfly-esque features like process freezing and, thus, the ability to just store a software session and reload the underlying system on a new kernel. If Windows can catch up, good for them.
The simple problem is that telemetry has been overstated and overblown. Try to find a comprehensive description of what Microsoft captures about users. What you get is things about Windows making DNS lookups against hundreds of domains, some chatter about what Windows 10 could be doing, and some criticisms of ill-thought-out features like Wifi network password sharing. Nobody knows what's happening, but they've all assumed so.
The result is a bunch of people talking about how Microsoft is spying on you by doing such things as identifying all software installed, based on Windows Update removing 6 particular softwares (something that can be done locally, without sending information about them back to Microsoft); meanwhile when you run yum or apt, it sends an HTTP request for each individual piece of software you're updating or installing back to a central server--which actually does what people said Windows 10 does, but doesn't freak anybody out because... reasons. EVERYBODY PANIC!
Every keystroke you enter into your browser's search bar is sent to a remote server, where it's logged in Web server logs. Every domain you look up goes back to a Malware service to block bad sites. Cortana used to search the web if you typed search terms into the Cortana search bar, and people freaked out.
To be fair, people freaked out when Ubuntu started searching Amazon through the Unity bar. It's not that they have legitimate fears; it's that they fear new things, and confusion in groups turns into mass hysteria. You get a few people suggesting folks are just afraid Amazon will see them trying to look for their child porn collection, but that's retarded; the truth is everyone's scared because the next ten people are scared and nobody is inclined to take the time to verify that the next ten people aren't idiots, so they do the reasonable thing and assume (incorrectly) that a million people who have no fucking clue what they're talking about can't be wrong or someone would have told them by now.
Putting aside my opinions about "platforms" I can go anywhere and purchase software for Wii, Xbox, PS4. Not sure what your trying to say
Actually, Wii, Xbox, and PS4 software has to be licensed and signed by the platform producer--that is: you can't buy Wii or PS4 software that Nintendo and Sony haven't allowed to be sold. In effect, Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft get paid to allow certain software on their platforms, giving you a curated catalog to purchase from; you can chose a delivery vendor--an ISP to download from or a store through which to ship the software on physical media--but you have to buy what's available from the Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft store.
There have been lawsuits about this--re: Tengen.
The point is that *Apple users* can't buy software from anywhere else.
I've had many Apple users tell me Android is a cesspool of diseased malware and Apple is secure because of its walled garden. Security via the app store is apparently a primary feature in many users's minds; although I imagine most simply don't care one way or the other.
If you bought a house in a certain neighborhood you wouldn't accept being limited to only purchasing physical goods from one specific store as a condition of living in that neighborhood.
True, although I apparently have consented to buying only those products Nintendo sells on the Wii on my Wii. I might go to Gamestop to pick them up--after Nintendo allows them to be sold on the Wii. GameStop is a local front for the Nintendo store, selling software made by companies which paid Nintendo for the right to sell said software.
Incorrect. A Big Mac cost 49 cents in 1967. 49 cents in 1967 has the same buying power, today, as $3.54 according to the BLS (prices are all in USD btw). Today's Big Mac costs $3.99. That's roughly a 12% increase in price. This is with inflation already calculated as well.
The median income in 1967 was $26,100 2011 dollars. The 1967 Big Mac thus cost 0.0135% of the median income. The 2015 median income is $56,500, and the 2016 Big Mac costs 0.00706% of the median income.
So in 2015, a Big Mac cost 52% of what it cost in 1967. The Big Mac today costs half as much as it did in 1967.
You will work for half as many hours today to make the wage required to buy a Big Mac as you would have worked in 1967 to bu ya Big Mac at that time.
A Big Mac in 2015 costs half as much as a Big Mac in 1967. Cool, huh?
The pneumatic air gun thing was a typo--it's redundant. Pneumatic nail gun was what I was going for.
I'd guess a whole load of people lost their jobs.
They did. We have 4.9% unemployment today.
The point is their work gets displaced. If you cause a 10% uptick in unemployment, your economy has a bad time; if you cause a 1% uptick spread across 1 year, your economy hardly actually notices.
People notice. Someone loses his job and he sure as hell notices. Welfare is supposed to cover for that, and stronger welfare is possible today--the inflection point for America is 2013, so excuse the politicians for not quite catching up yet--and that's supposed to patch up the other side. It's what we exchange: sometimes you lose your job, and you get to have running water and spend less than half your income on food because people have lost their jobs over the years. As a participant in this system, you deserve some just compensation; and it turns out the economy is more-efficient when we have stable welfare (but not welfare beyond the means to which we can supply).
Folks like to imagine businesses can take profits forever, and see a business cutting off 10% of its workforce as a business that just got $1,000,000 of additional profit forever. That might actually be true: that business might get $1,000,000 of additional profit which they never give back--not until it's eaten away by inflation over the next few years. More than likely, it'll keep those profits for 2-3 years at best--most likely, not longer than it takes the competition to catch up. In active, quickly-changing economies, the change is often rapid.
The other factor is growth. The Nest Protect smoke and CO2 detector didn't get any cheaper--it's still $100--but it now lasts 10 years instead of 7. It got a redesigned, upgraded sensor. It's now $10/year, essentially, which is better. Cars come packed with fancy new traction control systems, complex suspensions, and other upgrades not available in earlier models. Essentially, as labor became cheaper, they employed more labor to build more stuff--cars still cost damn near 56% of the income of the purchaser, on average, by sale price.
So sometimes those added profits go away when competition comes up. Sometimes the company supplies a higher-end good, trying to be the leading-edge supplier selling what's still a $100 widget but with so many more features that you wouldn't spend the $100 for the last-generation competition's product. They slim their margin, capture a market, and dominate their competitors. Adding all that crap creates cost because it creates replacement jobs.
It happens. It's happened since the beginning of human history. It will continue to happen.
Oh god not the money argument. Let me explain money to you.
You make $20/hr. Some other person makes $10/hr. Well, as it turns out, for every 1 hour you work, you can induce that person to work 2 hours. Wage inequality.
So to make a thing, someone has to work. They have to labor in the fields to make food, they have to spin thread and sew cloth to make clothing, and so forth. This, of course, means that your work--which produces--can be traded for their work, in the same way: your hours versus their hours, exchanged in "Money".
So we find a way to get the seamstresses to make clothing in 1/10 the time by inventing the "sewing machine". Instead of hand-sewing, they just buzz shit off the line using sergers and the like. Now the seamstress works 40 hours still, but produces 10 times the garments. People buy about 5 times as many clothes... but we still only need 1/2 as many seamstresses; and those clothes only weigh your hours against 1/10 as many of their hours per unit clothing.
That is to say: where it took 10 hours of work to make a shirt, it takes 1, and so you pay $10 instead of $100 for that shirt. Where we used to need 10 seamstresses to make 10 shirts in 10 hours, we now only need 1. Where we used to buy 10 shirts, we buy 5, so... we need 5 seamstresses.
That leaves you with $50, so you buy more of something else.
So money doesn't do anything but represent labor; and what labor can make changes as we increase technology.
We used to spend 90% of our time making food. In 1900, we spent 40% of our time making food. Today, it's under 12% of our time.
The cost of clothing has plummeted dramatically--the industrial revolution, then later with the basic sewing machine and the serger, and then again with the trade advantages provided by globalization. Chinese manufacture isn't just about cheap labor; they're very good at what they do, and the Chinese can optimize an assembly line to any quality specifications with minimal cost to retool--which means they can hit ROI on smaller batch runs, too.
Costs of construction fell with the invention of iron furnaces that cut labor requirements by over 99.5% (yes, they made 216 times as much iron with the same labor when they brought out the hot blast furnace), pneumatic and electric power tools (nail guns and circular saws versus hammers and handsaws), and big machinery like excavators (because fuck shovels).
The wooden shipping pallet allowed a crew to carry out the loading and unloading of canned goods in 4 hours--a task which took the same crew three 16-hour days, or twelve times as long.
Costs have fallen dramatically over the years. Go back two centuries and you'll find a world that can't produce enough food to feed a billion people. Go back to 1900 and you'll find a world that's facing famine as it races past a population of 2 billion. Agricultural technological advances in the 1900s and 1920s won Nobel prizes for saving billions from starvation.
Since the late 1800s, we've cut the working week from 100 hours to 40, eliminated child labor, and dramatically increased productivity. We live in a ridiculous caricature of society in which stuff just appears out of nowhere as people go through the motions of waving a magic stick at a voodoo apparatus that just spits out piles of completed product. The army of horses and postal workers required to deliver this message to its readers all over the world has been replaced by a fraction of a fraction of a second of labor share in a network that, for each hour of human effort, can deliver literally billions of such messages to billions of people.
How do we quantify that?
I pay $83/month for 200Mbit/s Internet service and probably have a data cap of around 200GB/month. By cap, that's 284MB per hour. Comcast has something like a 10% profit margin overall, but that doesn't help us here: the gross profit margin on Internet service would translate to labor
People seem to think front brakes are dangerous--especially on motorcycles. This is such a common belief that some people disable the front brakes entirely; there was even a safety campaign to do that.
No company has ever passed on the savings out of good will; the pressure mounts over time, and time is vicious.
As technology has made manufacturing cheaper than even, the price of my Levi's has only grown. As has the price of my car, the price of a drill, and even the price of nails
These things have all gotten cheaper over the time span you discuss.
For your 40 hours, your income has grown by 10 times. Meanwhile, these prices have grown by 5. Do you know what that means? A half hour of your labor buys what an hour's work used to buy. That means the price has gone down.
You're essentially moving from a house 10 miles from your job to a house 5 miles from your job, and then complaining that you now drive 8,000 meters instead of 10 miles, and so it's gotten farther because 8,000 is more than 10.
So, yeah, a 1940 dollar is smaller than a 1960 dollar; a 2000 dollar is smaller than a 2015 dollar; and something in 2015 which isn't bought for a 2015 price proportionally larger than its 1990 price is cheaper, even if the price tag displays a value numerically-greater.
All you have to do is look at the history of the ice industry. You'll also notice that there are no seamstresses with wooden looms anymore either.
We also have 4.7% unemployment in a ridiculous labor force with a high participation rate.
The purpose of technological innovation is to improve the quality of life of human beings.
Technical progress is, exclusively, the reduction of labor to reach an end. It took 40 hours before, now it takes 20 hours, costs half as much. Sometimes we invent new things, but why? Why did we create the railroad after the hot blast furnace allowed us to create 86,000 tonnes of iron using the same labor that used to create just 200 tonnes? Why GMOs, fertilizer, irrigation? Why computers, spreadsheets, and accounting software?
One of the main reasons there is a raging debate about this in terms of what happens to jobs is because some people can't stomach the idea of us having innovative technology to the point that it doesn't require every citizen to participate in the labor force.
it never has. Our labor force participation rate in 1948 and for decades up to then was measured substantially-close to 58%, with little fluctuation; it ballooned rapidly after the 60s. The peak near-70% participation rate was a bubble spanning decades--it literally spans multiple generations, and now people think that's normal.
What would a world look like where there is little or no resource scarcity and there is a limited need for labor
You're living in it.
90% of US workers were farm laborers in 1790. People hunted and homesteaded. Housewives would do a little knitting and such at home and make a little income that way; largely, they handled the household--repairing and making clothes for everyone in the house, cooking, cleaning, all those things that are hard when you don't have $18 shirts at WalMart and an automated Roomba and dishwasher.
Our parents and grandparents bitched a lot about work.
They bitched a hell of a lot.
The standard work week was 6 days per week, 10-16 hour days, back a century and a half ago. 90 hours was a normal work week. The demand for a 60-hour and then a 40-hour week, for a 12-hour day 6-days (2 hour-long meals) and then for 8 hours, it was incredible. People whined that they had to work so damned much.
Here you are talking about a world with a limited need for labor--a world where the labor force in 1940 and 1950 was 58% of the adult population, working 8 hour days, leading history from an 1880s and 1900s world where people worked twice that and... cried about how unfair it was.
I can probably actually engineer an American economic plan that gets us down to 28-32 hour work weeks (3.5-4 days) without reducing the available wealth--in the next decade, no less. You'd think it's great; 40 years from now, someone will be working 3 days a week, 24 hours total, talking about the way we're driven as slaves by greedy employers and overpaid CEOs.
Why some people don't ever want to get here is beyond me
They don't want to lose their jobs today for a world that fundamentally can't exist without far-future technology; and, when a world like that exists, we'll stagnate as a species and a culture. Even if we didn't, we'd end up with the worthless and useless masses kept like cattle or pets by the oligarchy of the elite.
Get the audiobook from Audible for Perfect State. It's performed quite well, and you'll get the idea by the time you finish.
There are some people that think that it's noble to dig a ditch with a spoon when a free back hoe is available. There is nothing noble about that. It's pure stupidity. We have better uses for our time and energy.
Yes: digging a million ditches with automated, controlled, maintained backhoes; building floating platform environments for Venus and deep-gro
The point is there aren't 4.9% of people unemployed because they are too lazy to get jobs; 100% of unemployment is essentially unemployable at the given moment because the consumers spending money and buying things aren't [capable of] buying enough to require their employment.
This has to do with how people economize: they allocate means (resources) to maximize ends. That means they'll allocate time (labor) and money to maximize stability and amount purchased. People won't work 60 hours for 40 hours of pay (lower wages) so that other people can afford to purchase more and thus spend their money giving others jobs. They seek the lowest-cost goods, which stems from lower-cost wages (wage inequality) as much as it does from fewer labor-hours involved (technology).
Ultimately, though, population still grows to the limit of economy, which leaves some people with partial unemployment--they on and off have jobs, they work less than full time, and they may have trouble actually surviving on that. This happens because, again, there isn't enough purchasing ability to require them: we aren't capable of paying their wages, thus we can't buy the things they'd make if they had jobs.
Welfare basically preempts this by cutting a chunk of what we can buy away and using it to cover the stable point reached on what's left. Some people care because it's humane; others care because it's efficient (welfare makes sense to supply when we're more-wealthy supplying welfare than not supplying welfare).
yeah, I'm getting tired of trying to teach an entire course of economics in a slashdot comment. The long and short of it is replacing 50% of your workforce in a week with machines is bad juju; replacing 100% of your jobs repeatedly over a couple decades is awesome. GDP-per-capita doubles when you replace 50% of work with technology--which means your ability to buy things (complicated technology and just "more stuff") goes up.
For example: between 1970 and 1990, we about tripled the amount of food produced per labor-hour worked on the farm or in the supply chain feeding into the farm. That has reduced the percentage of American employment invested in food production, shifting it to other jobs in that time. Note that's 20 years of time, impacting some 15% of jobs--less than 1% per year, and the population has grown in that time and so the actual amount of worker displacement is not exactly "X million jobs were there, then got lost" (we actually have more farm-related jobs than we did in 1970, because we have more than double the population).
It would be like assuming Comcast would drop its data cap since it costs them next to nothing to provide infrastructure. Yet here we are with data caps in 2016.
Actually, Comcast has increased bandwidth speeds from about 1.5Mbit/s in 1998 to 200Mbit/s in 2016. A 128k ISDN line cost $35/month in 1998, and now I pay $83/month for 1,500 of those--that is to say, I pay $83/month for $52,500/month of bandwidth. Even Comcast charged $40/month for their 1.5Mbit/s in 1998, meaning I'm sitting on a connection Comcast would have sold me for $5,300/month in 1998 and paying $83/month for it in 2016--BLS says I should be paying Comcast about $8,000/month.
Comcast has an actual total corporate profit average of something like 7% across 10 years. The gross profit on bandwidth is considerably-high and used as a political talking point by people who would like you to ignore the cost of running the rest of the supporting business (gross profits just take an arbitrary set of inputs as costs to outputs, while ignoring all other business activities related to and required for the production of those outputs). The truth is Comcast is charging me $83/month for what costs them $77 to supply.
Those bandwidth caps are there because Comcast has to provide additional infrastructure to keep up with that kind of bandwidth usage. They're new because people found new ways to consume faster than Comcast could find cheaper ways to supply, and Comcast can cheaply supply the capacity for high throughput but not the capacity for high total volume--they can supply a 10Mbit/s network where you can't even hardly watch an HD stream, or they can allow you to download system updates in 1 minute but not allow too many people to download that much shit continuously without buying and maintaining more infrastructure and raising the price.
Verizon thinks they have a better way to do it, or at least that they can pretend to without actually incurring too much amortized cost. Maybe they're right.
So yes, those data caps are there because we can't actually afford to provide the kind of service nobody has ever had before, but somehow everyone expects to materialize.
What happens when you only need 1 human to maintain 300 machines who can each do the work of 500 people?
You mean a $78,000 Tesla is only going to cost 52 cents, and I can now afford to add third floor to my house, buy a few musical instruments, and hire a couple private tutors?
It's not people who refuse so much as who can't; and that doesn't mean automation will wipe all jobs away, either, regardless of what the doomsday predictors who fear the pneumatic air gun and wooden shipping pallet say.
Wages are paid from revenue--from what's spent. Savings is made by keeping wage instead of spending, and spending more than wages means cutting into savings or creating debt. Wages represent labor time, and form the basis of price: if you need 10 hours of $10/hr work to make a thing, it can't sell for any less than $100 (although it can sell for more than that), else you can't pay your workers at all.
There are a lot of weird economics involved; one of them is that the money transfer only supports so many jobs at a given time, and that trade and technical progress make temporary unemployment. Technical progress is the purer form: internally, new technology means some people become unemployed for a few months or so, and your unemployment bumps by 0.1% until the prices fail to keep with inflation and the consumers buy more stuff with the money they're no longer spending--which requires more labor, thus replacing the jobs. Trade resolves itself in 1-3 years generally, and causes more or less labor force growth--early or late retirement, grad school versus employment, birth rate changes, more or fewer immigrant workers (trade uses outsourced workers--sending money away, not bringing workers here), and the like.
During these temporary transitions, some people can't get jobs. Some people need to be around when we suddenly need more laborers, but also will only work half the time as a result of our fickle economy and their happenstance place in it. As trade and technical progress increase the purchasing power of our same amount of labor, a smaller fraction of our income represents the necessary funds to support these people, and thus the general welfare; eventually, that fraction is smaller than the economic cost of not supporting them (e.g. if a transient laborer dies homeless, then you need to replace him by raising a child--a useless human being who only consumes for 15-20 years, providing no wealth of labor back to the economy during this time).
90% of the workforce was farmers in 1870. It's 2% now, with a total of about 10% of all work supporting that (chemists, GMO, shipping, irrigation, fuel for all this shit...).
Economic growth is basically either "we have more people, so we make more stuff, because more people work more" or "we figured out how to use the same people to make the same shit in half the time, so we made twice as much shit." Wages essentially represent time.
Apple should have used the argument that they sell devices which run controlled sets of software, with part of their product being a best-effort attempt at device security via application white listing managed remotely through the Apple store.
Because developers make "iPhone Apps", they have to sell onto the iPhone platform, the same as with Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony locking out their console platforms. This is not unusual in the device market.
Because Apple does not sell software outside the core system software available on the phone and supplying Apple services, it isn't abusing a device monopoly to gain a software monopoly. Further, Apple allows various software in its store, such as Spotify and Google Maps, which competes with Apple's own software and thus precludes the leveraging of a device monopoly to expand a monopoly of a particular bundled software or service.
Because Android phones are available, Apple is not locking consumers into its platform by controlling the market: software developers can produce equivalent software for Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, or any combination thereof, and sell in one, several, or all of the available markets for all devices.
True. I meant by form factor; and the Wiimotes I still feed with EBL or Eneloop batteries, which will last like 180 years in that use continuously (most of them are going to last me 3,000 years--by then the batteries will have decayed into dust, so the fact they can hold 80% of their charge and can carry 70% of that for 1 year at that point is moot). Rechargeable battery is just a matter of form factor.
The 3DS was like $200. In the past decade, the median income in current dollars has increased (~2% inflation per year, but dollar income goes faster); so more like $225 vs $300. Neither is really much money.
Its clamshell design is a bane; the Gameboy Advance was the best Gameboy, except the SP had a better D-pad. Damaged screens have never been a problem in the Gameboy line; Nintendo wanted a larger system that still fit in your pocket, and went with the DS design.
Battery life doesn't seem like an issue when you're constantly surrounded by charging ports.
Performance is unlikely to be an issue. "Game runs at 60FPS" is about a constant, whether you're running a DSi or the OmenX with Intel Core i7 processor; the games just won't try to reticulate splines in realtime at 4K resolution. Performance is the kind of thing PC gamers complain about because they're used to everything being fickle and hardly ever working if they don't keep up on a $3,000/year upgrade cycle.
Well, the Game Gear ate batteries like a motherfucker. Six batteries. In three hours.
This pulls power from anywhere, such as the USB port in modern cars. Did your Game Gear recharge every time you got in the car, sat down at a desk, or otherwise spent more than a few minutes near an electrical port?
Browser cache is an interesting consideration. I bet if you google image search for some freaky shit like chicks in dog collars you might find chicks with dogs in them in some of the results--you know, the results displayed as images, downloaded and cached to your hard drive along the way. Are they downloaded scaled down, or sent as full size (well, GIS scales to something like 300-400 pixels) and displayed scaled down by the browser?
They also ignored technical progress. Supply-and-demand is a far-downstream economics behavior that everyone somehow got to thinking is a core economic tenant.
Technical progress is core. If you have an assembly line with 100 people making 10 things per hour, that's 10 hours of work per thing--ignoring the cost of tools on the line, organization (management), shipping, materials (which are produced by labor--how do you have stone when it's in a giant chunk 500 meters below the ground?), etc. That's a limiting factor on price.
How is it limiting?
Let's say you make $20/hr, and those line workers make $10/hr. Well, their 100 hours of work make 10 things; 10 hours of their work makes 1 thing; and you can buy that 1 thing with 5 hours of your work. Put another way: you can work 1 hour and induce those people to work 2. That's wage-inequality--it sucks, and it's also kind of required for a functional economy (it's the interaction between the microeconomy and the macroeconomy: humans economize by expending the least of their effort for the most benefit, and society economizes by expending the least of all its resources for the most benefit--which means inefficient businesses fail while better ones make the same products cheaper).
So to make a thing, you need 10 hours of labor at $10/hr, or $100. Ouch. That thing can't be priced for under $100 if you want to keep paying your laborers. Laborers need to eat, so they need enough money to pay the farmers, shippers, and super market retailers to get them food, too, so that $10/hr wage can be lowered... some; it can't be lowered indefinitely.
So there's a lower bound on price. That bound I just gave doesn't include the cost of payroll taxes, benefits, administration, risk, tools, supply chain, materials themselves, and so forth; and my explanation of the wage gap correctly displays your take-home wage of $20/hr after all taxes and the $10/hr supposed wage of the workers (failing to account for the things I just mentioned), but fails to point out that you had a wage of more than $20/hr and only have to pay to cover the pre-income-tax wage of $10/hr.
In the macroeconomy, those taxes end up spent on other government services, or pay debts that were accrued earlier to spend on other services, so cycle through the economy--not necessarily efficiently or inefficiently, depending on whether a private-market supplier is more-efficient than a government supplier, which is itself dependent on economic situation (e.g. various types of welfare reduce the general economic costs of things like unemployment or healthcare, but reflect a larger chunk of the total production of an economy for lower levels of technical progress and thus become more-efficient as technical progress increases--or, to show by example, unemployment and public healthcare are efficient for wealthy economies and inefficient for poor ones).
For our purposes, however, this all means that you have to pay the workers, That is, you have to pay the workers. You're buying the product of their labor; you supply the pay for that time.
Technical progress means we get those 100 workers to assemble 20 things per hour, and now it's $50 instead of $100.
You make it sound like our taxes are going down so we'll have more disposable income
Oh, no, you'll still pay the same taxes.
The school will simply not grow its prices as rapidly, as its costs won't escalate as fast to shave down its profit margins below what they'll tolerate (which, barring brutal competition, is going to be at least slightly higher than what's required to buffer against risks--and will be a point value dependent on the time and circumstances).
What do you think would happen if that school had $683 billion of operating expenses? Do you think they'd take a $100 billion loss every year charging the current tuition? Of course not; they'd raise prices, and then either fold due to sheer incompetence (everyone else operates at a lower cost per student-hour, why can't they?) or continue to compete in a market that just is (everyone else's operating expenses are also 17% higher, so they haven't lost any competitive advantage).
This is the opposite effect. It's slower; the pressure mounts over time--they'll try to not lower their margins as long as they can, but even an extra 0.1% of profit over what they'd normally make can't endure for more than a few years, assuming it can make it out a few months. For a school selling services on the order of months and years, it probably can endure for a year or two.
This is why, for example, food was 40% of median-income-household consumer expenses in 1900, 33% in 1950, and about 12% today: it got cheaper to make, and it's basically impossible to keep enormous margins. Farmers complain because they believe they should have a 20% profit margin, and instead operate in 8%-10% because market forces kick them in the balls repeatedly if they try to charge more. (An enormous amount of the price of goods comes from domestic shipping; even importing e.g. pants from China costs 6 cents per pair in trans-Atlantic shipping, while getting them from the pier to WalMart is half the price of the damned pants).
That is how the past 6,000 years of history has operated--as in, the past 6,000 years right up to today, now, currently. That's not a projection from ancient history ending a hundred years ago, or from some trend that we have data on for a 40-year window of history; it's how every economy has always behaved. These basic economic behaviors can abstract even to biology and describe higher evolution, although that gets into loopy land (mind you, explaining how dogs and humans co-evolved for maximal economy is often fun, because dogs are awesome).
Put another way, saving the cost of $5.8 million is like saving the cost of 355 minimum-wage jobs. In the span of 1-3 years, the labor force will shift around--early retirement, longer time spent in school, less immigration for H1B work due to less demand for workers--and the job losses will be buffed out; meanwhile, across 2-10 years, the span of $5.8 million annually that Americans spend on going to this school will instead be spent on shoes, phones, hamburgers, and other things.
In other words: the end result is a null impact on American employment rate and an increase in the wealth of individual Americans--particularly, in the wealth of those Americans who buy some sort of service from this school (I assume tuition).
Slashdot Mirror
CentOS installations use either a local repository or they connect to a mirror. No "central server"
Mine connect to mirrors as well. They tell the mirror, "HTTP GET /distros/ubuntu/yakkety/pool/p/pornview-2.1.3.deb" and so forth. One GET request per file being downloaded.
I don't think that they query the yum server for every package installed on the system: instead, they download a single file that lists all the available packages in that particular repository, then they download only the necessary packages.
So, when you download installation packages beyond what's installed by default--of which they know every single package already--it doesn't transmit to one of the CentOS mirrors a list of some subset of packages, the total from installation to decommission will necessarily detail every single package you install by virtue of telling them what software you install outside the default set--and even by virtue of pointedly not updating software you've since uninstalled?
There's enough going out to archive.ubuntu.com and us.archive.ubuntu.com pools for the Canonical secret NDA conspiracy to track my every software selection and update. This is approximately the same reality as what's going on with Microsoft, aside from that Microsoft doesn't see every piece of software you install--you only get Microsoft software updates through MS, plus anything you installed through the Windows store--yet nobody panics about their distro or some untrusted third-party Government-controlled university (what do you think gatech.edu is in the CentOS mirror list?) getting their IP and the names of arbitrary software applications they update.
You leak information like a sieve, and your best argument about why it's okay sometimes is apparently that you leak that information to more people in those cases.
Some nerds want to discuss shit like this. We take stuff from Linus and from some African who bought Debian for loosechange all the time.
It depends. Software is technology, too. From that end, Windows 10 actually has some pretty awesome features.
A while back, I installed Gitlab on a server with 1GB RAM. That server immediately went 700MB into swap and... proceeded to behave as if nothing had happened. 40MB of reclaimable memory, but no problem. That was a Linux server with 1GB of zram allowed to use up to 50% of memory, compressing its load to less than 1/3 its original size--about 700MB open RAM, and 300MB housing 700MB of compressed RAM swapped out. The compression algorithm is about as fast as a worst-case cache miss, and programs tend to do more computation than that on a given block of RAM: it didn't add any significant performance overhead (like, less than 1%). This will balloon out of control when you get to a tight enough RAM-to-swap ratio, of course.
Windows 10 has an internal caching system that's quite similar and implemented extremely well. Because of this, Windows 10 can allocate around 24-32GB of RAM in a 16GB system and not care. It won't touch disk, at all, and it won't appear to slow down. With the right precaching algorithms, access to this kind of compressed area takes only twice as much time as access to raw RAM--that is, the same situations where CPU prefetch kicks in, the OS can decompress a few swap pages into a hot area of RAM before they're needed if there's any CPU downtime at all (there almost always is, even under heavy load from high-intensity gaming or server applications).
That's not just powerful technology; it's a response to fear of swap areas destroying SSDs. You don't need to write swap to disk ever, and you still get the benefit of taking long-unused data out of RAM and idling it on a slower medium. In this case, you trade 500MB of idle RAM out for 160MB of idle RAM, giving you an extra 340MB for stuff that actually matters. A good deal of RAM is never touched again, or is in a working set less-frequently-used than block cache, so it's actually faster to swap in some cases where you could actually reclaim usable RAM.
A lot of scheduler and memory management changes went into Windows 10, and they're actually great features--some of which I'd wanted on Linux for years and just barely got a couple years ago. If Microsoft gets a new BFS-type scheduler in before CK's goes mainline, it'll actually be a stronger server and desktop OS than Linux--that hasn't happened yet, and MS continues to trail in that respect, but they're quickly catching up on all kinds of failures and rough edges that have historically put them far beyond modern Linux distributions. Windows 10 doesn't even need a reboot when you power off an HDMI display (8.1 loses the ability to play sound through HDMI).
So Windows 10 makes better use of RAM, avoids wearing out SSDs, can handle HDMI displays properly, and has some scheduling and memory management improvements that more-optimally leverage modern processors and high-speed disks. It's not yet on-par with the latest in Linux technology--but neither is Linux mainline kernel or any Linux distribution to date; and nothing's caught up to DragonflyBSD in a few key areas. Still, it's better able to leverage modern machines than any prior OS.
I'll be excited to see BFS and BFQ in Linux mainline, and similarly-excited if we start getting Dragonfly-esque features like process freezing and, thus, the ability to just store a software session and reload the underlying system on a new kernel. If Windows can catch up, good for them.
The simple problem is that telemetry has been overstated and overblown. Try to find a comprehensive description of what Microsoft captures about users. What you get is things about Windows making DNS lookups against hundreds of domains, some chatter about what Windows 10 could be doing, and some criticisms of ill-thought-out features like Wifi network password sharing. Nobody knows what's happening, but they've all assumed so.
The result is a bunch of people talking about how Microsoft is spying on you by doing such things as identifying all software installed, based on Windows Update removing 6 particular softwares (something that can be done locally, without sending information about them back to Microsoft); meanwhile when you run yum or apt, it sends an HTTP request for each individual piece of software you're updating or installing back to a central server--which actually does what people said Windows 10 does, but doesn't freak anybody out because... reasons. EVERYBODY PANIC!
Every keystroke you enter into your browser's search bar is sent to a remote server, where it's logged in Web server logs. Every domain you look up goes back to a Malware service to block bad sites. Cortana used to search the web if you typed search terms into the Cortana search bar, and people freaked out.
To be fair, people freaked out when Ubuntu started searching Amazon through the Unity bar. It's not that they have legitimate fears; it's that they fear new things, and confusion in groups turns into mass hysteria. You get a few people suggesting folks are just afraid Amazon will see them trying to look for their child porn collection, but that's retarded; the truth is everyone's scared because the next ten people are scared and nobody is inclined to take the time to verify that the next ten people aren't idiots, so they do the reasonable thing and assume (incorrectly) that a million people who have no fucking clue what they're talking about can't be wrong or someone would have told them by now.
Someone like me.
Do you see the problem?
Putting aside my opinions about "platforms" I can go anywhere and purchase software for Wii, Xbox, PS4. Not sure what your trying to say
Actually, Wii, Xbox, and PS4 software has to be licensed and signed by the platform producer--that is: you can't buy Wii or PS4 software that Nintendo and Sony haven't allowed to be sold. In effect, Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft get paid to allow certain software on their platforms, giving you a curated catalog to purchase from; you can chose a delivery vendor--an ISP to download from or a store through which to ship the software on physical media--but you have to buy what's available from the Nintendo/Sony/Microsoft store.
There have been lawsuits about this--re: Tengen.
The point is that *Apple users* can't buy software from anywhere else.
I've had many Apple users tell me Android is a cesspool of diseased malware and Apple is secure because of its walled garden. Security via the app store is apparently a primary feature in many users's minds; although I imagine most simply don't care one way or the other.
If you bought a house in a certain neighborhood you wouldn't accept being limited to only purchasing physical goods from one specific store as a condition of living in that neighborhood.
True, although I apparently have consented to buying only those products Nintendo sells on the Wii on my Wii. I might go to Gamestop to pick them up--after Nintendo allows them to be sold on the Wii. GameStop is a local front for the Nintendo store, selling software made by companies which paid Nintendo for the right to sell said software.
Incorrect. A Big Mac cost 49 cents in 1967. 49 cents in 1967 has the same buying power, today, as $3.54 according to the BLS (prices are all in USD btw). Today's Big Mac costs $3.99. That's roughly a 12% increase in price. This is with inflation already calculated as well.
The median income in 1967 was $26,100 2011 dollars. The 1967 Big Mac thus cost 0.0135% of the median income. The 2015 median income is $56,500, and the 2016 Big Mac costs 0.00706% of the median income.
So in 2015, a Big Mac cost 52% of what it cost in 1967. The Big Mac today costs half as much as it did in 1967.
You will work for half as many hours today to make the wage required to buy a Big Mac as you would have worked in 1967 to bu ya Big Mac at that time.
A Big Mac in 2015 costs half as much as a Big Mac in 1967. Cool, huh?
The pneumatic air gun thing was a typo--it's redundant. Pneumatic nail gun was what I was going for.
I'd guess a whole load of people lost their jobs.
They did. We have 4.9% unemployment today.
The point is their work gets displaced. If you cause a 10% uptick in unemployment, your economy has a bad time; if you cause a 1% uptick spread across 1 year, your economy hardly actually notices.
People notice. Someone loses his job and he sure as hell notices. Welfare is supposed to cover for that, and stronger welfare is possible today--the inflection point for America is 2013, so excuse the politicians for not quite catching up yet--and that's supposed to patch up the other side. It's what we exchange: sometimes you lose your job, and you get to have running water and spend less than half your income on food because people have lost their jobs over the years. As a participant in this system, you deserve some just compensation; and it turns out the economy is more-efficient when we have stable welfare (but not welfare beyond the means to which we can supply).
Folks like to imagine businesses can take profits forever, and see a business cutting off 10% of its workforce as a business that just got $1,000,000 of additional profit forever. That might actually be true: that business might get $1,000,000 of additional profit which they never give back--not until it's eaten away by inflation over the next few years. More than likely, it'll keep those profits for 2-3 years at best--most likely, not longer than it takes the competition to catch up. In active, quickly-changing economies, the change is often rapid.
The other factor is growth. The Nest Protect smoke and CO2 detector didn't get any cheaper--it's still $100--but it now lasts 10 years instead of 7. It got a redesigned, upgraded sensor. It's now $10/year, essentially, which is better. Cars come packed with fancy new traction control systems, complex suspensions, and other upgrades not available in earlier models. Essentially, as labor became cheaper, they employed more labor to build more stuff--cars still cost damn near 56% of the income of the purchaser, on average, by sale price.
So sometimes those added profits go away when competition comes up. Sometimes the company supplies a higher-end good, trying to be the leading-edge supplier selling what's still a $100 widget but with so many more features that you wouldn't spend the $100 for the last-generation competition's product. They slim their margin, capture a market, and dominate their competitors. Adding all that crap creates cost because it creates replacement jobs.
It happens. It's happened since the beginning of human history. It will continue to happen.
Oh god not the money argument. Let me explain money to you.
You make $20/hr. Some other person makes $10/hr. Well, as it turns out, for every 1 hour you work, you can induce that person to work 2 hours. Wage inequality.
So to make a thing, someone has to work. They have to labor in the fields to make food, they have to spin thread and sew cloth to make clothing, and so forth. This, of course, means that your work--which produces--can be traded for their work, in the same way: your hours versus their hours, exchanged in "Money".
So we find a way to get the seamstresses to make clothing in 1/10 the time by inventing the "sewing machine". Instead of hand-sewing, they just buzz shit off the line using sergers and the like. Now the seamstress works 40 hours still, but produces 10 times the garments. People buy about 5 times as many clothes... but we still only need 1/2 as many seamstresses; and those clothes only weigh your hours against 1/10 as many of their hours per unit clothing.
That is to say: where it took 10 hours of work to make a shirt, it takes 1, and so you pay $10 instead of $100 for that shirt. Where we used to need 10 seamstresses to make 10 shirts in 10 hours, we now only need 1. Where we used to buy 10 shirts, we buy 5, so ... we need 5 seamstresses.
That leaves you with $50, so you buy more of something else.
So money doesn't do anything but represent labor; and what labor can make changes as we increase technology.
We used to spend 90% of our time making food. In 1900, we spent 40% of our time making food. Today, it's under 12% of our time.
The cost of clothing has plummeted dramatically--the industrial revolution, then later with the basic sewing machine and the serger, and then again with the trade advantages provided by globalization. Chinese manufacture isn't just about cheap labor; they're very good at what they do, and the Chinese can optimize an assembly line to any quality specifications with minimal cost to retool--which means they can hit ROI on smaller batch runs, too.
Costs of construction fell with the invention of iron furnaces that cut labor requirements by over 99.5% (yes, they made 216 times as much iron with the same labor when they brought out the hot blast furnace), pneumatic and electric power tools (nail guns and circular saws versus hammers and handsaws), and big machinery like excavators (because fuck shovels).
The wooden shipping pallet allowed a crew to carry out the loading and unloading of canned goods in 4 hours--a task which took the same crew three 16-hour days, or twelve times as long.
Costs have fallen dramatically over the years. Go back two centuries and you'll find a world that can't produce enough food to feed a billion people. Go back to 1900 and you'll find a world that's facing famine as it races past a population of 2 billion. Agricultural technological advances in the 1900s and 1920s won Nobel prizes for saving billions from starvation.
Since the late 1800s, we've cut the working week from 100 hours to 40, eliminated child labor, and dramatically increased productivity. We live in a ridiculous caricature of society in which stuff just appears out of nowhere as people go through the motions of waving a magic stick at a voodoo apparatus that just spits out piles of completed product. The army of horses and postal workers required to deliver this message to its readers all over the world has been replaced by a fraction of a fraction of a second of labor share in a network that, for each hour of human effort, can deliver literally billions of such messages to billions of people.
How do we quantify that?
I pay $83/month for 200Mbit/s Internet service and probably have a data cap of around 200GB/month. By cap, that's 284MB per hour. Comcast has something like a 10% profit margin overall, but that doesn't help us here: the gross profit margin on Internet service would translate to labor
So the average income can buy more stuff today than in, say, 2005... how?
People seem to think front brakes are dangerous--especially on motorcycles. This is such a common belief that some people disable the front brakes entirely; there was even a safety campaign to do that.
No company has ever passed on the savings out of good will; the pressure mounts over time, and time is vicious.
As technology has made manufacturing cheaper than even, the price of my Levi's has only grown. As has the price of my car, the price of a drill, and even the price of nails
These things have all gotten cheaper over the time span you discuss.
For your 40 hours, your income has grown by 10 times. Meanwhile, these prices have grown by 5. Do you know what that means? A half hour of your labor buys what an hour's work used to buy. That means the price has gone down.
You're essentially moving from a house 10 miles from your job to a house 5 miles from your job, and then complaining that you now drive 8,000 meters instead of 10 miles, and so it's gotten farther because 8,000 is more than 10.
So, yeah, a 1940 dollar is smaller than a 1960 dollar; a 2000 dollar is smaller than a 2015 dollar; and something in 2015 which isn't bought for a 2015 price proportionally larger than its 1990 price is cheaper, even if the price tag displays a value numerically-greater.
All you have to do is look at the history of the ice industry. You'll also notice that there are no seamstresses with wooden looms anymore either.
We also have 4.7% unemployment in a ridiculous labor force with a high participation rate.
The purpose of technological innovation is to improve the quality of life of human beings.
Technical progress is, exclusively, the reduction of labor to reach an end. It took 40 hours before, now it takes 20 hours, costs half as much. Sometimes we invent new things, but why? Why did we create the railroad after the hot blast furnace allowed us to create 86,000 tonnes of iron using the same labor that used to create just 200 tonnes? Why GMOs, fertilizer, irrigation? Why computers, spreadsheets, and accounting software?
One of the main reasons there is a raging debate about this in terms of what happens to jobs is because some people can't stomach the idea of us having innovative technology to the point that it doesn't require every citizen to participate in the labor force.
it never has. Our labor force participation rate in 1948 and for decades up to then was measured substantially-close to 58%, with little fluctuation; it ballooned rapidly after the 60s. The peak near-70% participation rate was a bubble spanning decades--it literally spans multiple generations, and now people think that's normal.
What would a world look like where there is little or no resource scarcity and there is a limited need for labor
You're living in it.
90% of US workers were farm laborers in 1790. People hunted and homesteaded. Housewives would do a little knitting and such at home and make a little income that way; largely, they handled the household--repairing and making clothes for everyone in the house, cooking, cleaning, all those things that are hard when you don't have $18 shirts at WalMart and an automated Roomba and dishwasher.
Our parents and grandparents bitched a lot about work.
They bitched a hell of a lot.
The standard work week was 6 days per week, 10-16 hour days, back a century and a half ago. 90 hours was a normal work week. The demand for a 60-hour and then a 40-hour week, for a 12-hour day 6-days (2 hour-long meals) and then for 8 hours, it was incredible. People whined that they had to work so damned much.
Here you are talking about a world with a limited need for labor--a world where the labor force in 1940 and 1950 was 58% of the adult population, working 8 hour days, leading history from an 1880s and 1900s world where people worked twice that and... cried about how unfair it was.
I can probably actually engineer an American economic plan that gets us down to 28-32 hour work weeks (3.5-4 days) without reducing the available wealth--in the next decade, no less. You'd think it's great; 40 years from now, someone will be working 3 days a week, 24 hours total, talking about the way we're driven as slaves by greedy employers and overpaid CEOs.
Why some people don't ever want to get here is beyond me
They don't want to lose their jobs today for a world that fundamentally can't exist without far-future technology; and, when a world like that exists, we'll stagnate as a species and a culture. Even if we didn't, we'd end up with the worthless and useless masses kept like cattle or pets by the oligarchy of the elite.
Get the audiobook from Audible for Perfect State. It's performed quite well, and you'll get the idea by the time you finish.
There are some people that think that it's noble to dig a ditch with a spoon when a free back hoe is available. There is nothing noble about that. It's pure stupidity. We have better uses for our time and energy.
Yes: digging a million ditches with automated, controlled, maintained backhoes; building floating platform environments for Venus and deep-gro
The point is there aren't 4.9% of people unemployed because they are too lazy to get jobs; 100% of unemployment is essentially unemployable at the given moment because the consumers spending money and buying things aren't [capable of] buying enough to require their employment.
This has to do with how people economize: they allocate means (resources) to maximize ends. That means they'll allocate time (labor) and money to maximize stability and amount purchased. People won't work 60 hours for 40 hours of pay (lower wages) so that other people can afford to purchase more and thus spend their money giving others jobs. They seek the lowest-cost goods, which stems from lower-cost wages (wage inequality) as much as it does from fewer labor-hours involved (technology).
Ultimately, though, population still grows to the limit of economy, which leaves some people with partial unemployment--they on and off have jobs, they work less than full time, and they may have trouble actually surviving on that. This happens because, again, there isn't enough purchasing ability to require them: we aren't capable of paying their wages, thus we can't buy the things they'd make if they had jobs.
Welfare basically preempts this by cutting a chunk of what we can buy away and using it to cover the stable point reached on what's left. Some people care because it's humane; others care because it's efficient (welfare makes sense to supply when we're more-wealthy supplying welfare than not supplying welfare).
yeah, I'm getting tired of trying to teach an entire course of economics in a slashdot comment. The long and short of it is replacing 50% of your workforce in a week with machines is bad juju; replacing 100% of your jobs repeatedly over a couple decades is awesome. GDP-per-capita doubles when you replace 50% of work with technology--which means your ability to buy things (complicated technology and just "more stuff") goes up.
For example: between 1970 and 1990, we about tripled the amount of food produced per labor-hour worked on the farm or in the supply chain feeding into the farm. That has reduced the percentage of American employment invested in food production, shifting it to other jobs in that time. Note that's 20 years of time, impacting some 15% of jobs--less than 1% per year, and the population has grown in that time and so the actual amount of worker displacement is not exactly "X million jobs were there, then got lost" (we actually have more farm-related jobs than we did in 1970, because we have more than double the population).
It would be like assuming Comcast would drop its data cap since it costs them next to nothing to provide infrastructure. Yet here we are with data caps in 2016.
Actually, Comcast has increased bandwidth speeds from about 1.5Mbit/s in 1998 to 200Mbit/s in 2016. A 128k ISDN line cost $35/month in 1998, and now I pay $83/month for 1,500 of those--that is to say, I pay $83/month for $52,500/month of bandwidth. Even Comcast charged $40/month for their 1.5Mbit/s in 1998, meaning I'm sitting on a connection Comcast would have sold me for $5,300/month in 1998 and paying $83/month for it in 2016--BLS says I should be paying Comcast about $8,000/month.
Comcast has an actual total corporate profit average of something like 7% across 10 years. The gross profit on bandwidth is considerably-high and used as a political talking point by people who would like you to ignore the cost of running the rest of the supporting business (gross profits just take an arbitrary set of inputs as costs to outputs, while ignoring all other business activities related to and required for the production of those outputs). The truth is Comcast is charging me $83/month for what costs them $77 to supply.
Those bandwidth caps are there because Comcast has to provide additional infrastructure to keep up with that kind of bandwidth usage. They're new because people found new ways to consume faster than Comcast could find cheaper ways to supply, and Comcast can cheaply supply the capacity for high throughput but not the capacity for high total volume--they can supply a 10Mbit/s network where you can't even hardly watch an HD stream, or they can allow you to download system updates in 1 minute but not allow too many people to download that much shit continuously without buying and maintaining more infrastructure and raising the price.
Verizon thinks they have a better way to do it, or at least that they can pretend to without actually incurring too much amortized cost. Maybe they're right.
So yes, those data caps are there because we can't actually afford to provide the kind of service nobody has ever had before, but somehow everyone expects to materialize.
What happens when you only need 1 human to maintain 300 machines who can each do the work of 500 people?
You mean a $78,000 Tesla is only going to cost 52 cents, and I can now afford to add third floor to my house, buy a few musical instruments, and hire a couple private tutors?
Sounds great to me. We'll all drive Teslas.
It's not people who refuse so much as who can't; and that doesn't mean automation will wipe all jobs away, either, regardless of what the doomsday predictors who fear the pneumatic air gun and wooden shipping pallet say.
Wages are paid from revenue--from what's spent. Savings is made by keeping wage instead of spending, and spending more than wages means cutting into savings or creating debt. Wages represent labor time, and form the basis of price: if you need 10 hours of $10/hr work to make a thing, it can't sell for any less than $100 (although it can sell for more than that), else you can't pay your workers at all.
There are a lot of weird economics involved; one of them is that the money transfer only supports so many jobs at a given time, and that trade and technical progress make temporary unemployment. Technical progress is the purer form: internally, new technology means some people become unemployed for a few months or so, and your unemployment bumps by 0.1% until the prices fail to keep with inflation and the consumers buy more stuff with the money they're no longer spending--which requires more labor, thus replacing the jobs. Trade resolves itself in 1-3 years generally, and causes more or less labor force growth--early or late retirement, grad school versus employment, birth rate changes, more or fewer immigrant workers (trade uses outsourced workers--sending money away, not bringing workers here), and the like.
During these temporary transitions, some people can't get jobs. Some people need to be around when we suddenly need more laborers, but also will only work half the time as a result of our fickle economy and their happenstance place in it. As trade and technical progress increase the purchasing power of our same amount of labor, a smaller fraction of our income represents the necessary funds to support these people, and thus the general welfare; eventually, that fraction is smaller than the economic cost of not supporting them (e.g. if a transient laborer dies homeless, then you need to replace him by raising a child--a useless human being who only consumes for 15-20 years, providing no wealth of labor back to the economy during this time).
90% of the workforce was farmers in 1870. It's 2% now, with a total of about 10% of all work supporting that (chemists, GMO, shipping, irrigation, fuel for all this shit...).
Economic growth is basically either "we have more people, so we make more stuff, because more people work more" or "we figured out how to use the same people to make the same shit in half the time, so we made twice as much shit." Wages essentially represent time.
Apple should have used the argument that they sell devices which run controlled sets of software, with part of their product being a best-effort attempt at device security via application white listing managed remotely through the Apple store.
Because developers make "iPhone Apps", they have to sell onto the iPhone platform, the same as with Nintendo, Microsoft, and Sony locking out their console platforms. This is not unusual in the device market.
Because Apple does not sell software outside the core system software available on the phone and supplying Apple services, it isn't abusing a device monopoly to gain a software monopoly. Further, Apple allows various software in its store, such as Spotify and Google Maps, which competes with Apple's own software and thus precludes the leveraging of a device monopoly to expand a monopoly of a particular bundled software or service.
Because Android phones are available, Apple is not locking consumers into its platform by controlling the market: software developers can produce equivalent software for Android, iOS, Windows Mobile, or any combination thereof, and sell in one, several, or all of the available markets for all devices.
There's no case here.
True. I meant by form factor; and the Wiimotes I still feed with EBL or Eneloop batteries, which will last like 180 years in that use continuously (most of them are going to last me 3,000 years--by then the batteries will have decayed into dust, so the fact they can hold 80% of their charge and can carry 70% of that for 1 year at that point is moot). Rechargeable battery is just a matter of form factor.
We could have put a light into the GBA.
The 3DS was like $200. In the past decade, the median income in current dollars has increased (~2% inflation per year, but dollar income goes faster); so more like $225 vs $300. Neither is really much money.
Its clamshell design is a bane; the Gameboy Advance was the best Gameboy, except the SP had a better D-pad. Damaged screens have never been a problem in the Gameboy line; Nintendo wanted a larger system that still fit in your pocket, and went with the DS design.
Battery life doesn't seem like an issue when you're constantly surrounded by charging ports.
Performance is unlikely to be an issue. "Game runs at 60FPS" is about a constant, whether you're running a DSi or the OmenX with Intel Core i7 processor; the games just won't try to reticulate splines in realtime at 4K resolution. Performance is the kind of thing PC gamers complain about because they're used to everything being fickle and hardly ever working if they don't keep up on a $3,000/year upgrade cycle.
Well, the Game Gear ate batteries like a motherfucker. Six batteries. In three hours.
This pulls power from anywhere, such as the USB port in modern cars. Did your Game Gear recharge every time you got in the car, sat down at a desk, or otherwise spent more than a few minutes near an electrical port?
Browser cache is an interesting consideration. I bet if you google image search for some freaky shit like chicks in dog collars you might find chicks with dogs in them in some of the results--you know, the results displayed as images, downloaded and cached to your hard drive along the way. Are they downloaded scaled down, or sent as full size (well, GIS scales to something like 300-400 pixels) and displayed scaled down by the browser?
They also ignored technical progress. Supply-and-demand is a far-downstream economics behavior that everyone somehow got to thinking is a core economic tenant.
Technical progress is core. If you have an assembly line with 100 people making 10 things per hour, that's 10 hours of work per thing--ignoring the cost of tools on the line, organization (management), shipping, materials (which are produced by labor--how do you have stone when it's in a giant chunk 500 meters below the ground?), etc. That's a limiting factor on price.
How is it limiting?
Let's say you make $20/hr, and those line workers make $10/hr. Well, their 100 hours of work make 10 things; 10 hours of their work makes 1 thing; and you can buy that 1 thing with 5 hours of your work. Put another way: you can work 1 hour and induce those people to work 2. That's wage-inequality--it sucks, and it's also kind of required for a functional economy (it's the interaction between the microeconomy and the macroeconomy: humans economize by expending the least of their effort for the most benefit, and society economizes by expending the least of all its resources for the most benefit--which means inefficient businesses fail while better ones make the same products cheaper).
So to make a thing, you need 10 hours of labor at $10/hr, or $100. Ouch. That thing can't be priced for under $100 if you want to keep paying your laborers. Laborers need to eat, so they need enough money to pay the farmers, shippers, and super market retailers to get them food, too, so that $10/hr wage can be lowered... some; it can't be lowered indefinitely.
So there's a lower bound on price. That bound I just gave doesn't include the cost of payroll taxes, benefits, administration, risk, tools, supply chain, materials themselves, and so forth; and my explanation of the wage gap correctly displays your take-home wage of $20/hr after all taxes and the $10/hr supposed wage of the workers (failing to account for the things I just mentioned), but fails to point out that you had a wage of more than $20/hr and only have to pay to cover the pre-income-tax wage of $10/hr.
In the macroeconomy, those taxes end up spent on other government services, or pay debts that were accrued earlier to spend on other services, so cycle through the economy--not necessarily efficiently or inefficiently, depending on whether a private-market supplier is more-efficient than a government supplier, which is itself dependent on economic situation (e.g. various types of welfare reduce the general economic costs of things like unemployment or healthcare, but reflect a larger chunk of the total production of an economy for lower levels of technical progress and thus become more-efficient as technical progress increases--or, to show by example, unemployment and public healthcare are efficient for wealthy economies and inefficient for poor ones).
For our purposes, however, this all means that you have to pay the workers, That is, you have to pay the workers. You're buying the product of their labor; you supply the pay for that time.
Technical progress means we get those 100 workers to assemble 20 things per hour, and now it's $50 instead of $100.
You make it sound like our taxes are going down so we'll have more disposable income
Oh, no, you'll still pay the same taxes.
The school will simply not grow its prices as rapidly, as its costs won't escalate as fast to shave down its profit margins below what they'll tolerate (which, barring brutal competition, is going to be at least slightly higher than what's required to buffer against risks--and will be a point value dependent on the time and circumstances).
What do you think would happen if that school had $683 billion of operating expenses? Do you think they'd take a $100 billion loss every year charging the current tuition? Of course not; they'd raise prices, and then either fold due to sheer incompetence (everyone else operates at a lower cost per student-hour, why can't they?) or continue to compete in a market that just is (everyone else's operating expenses are also 17% higher, so they haven't lost any competitive advantage).
This is the opposite effect. It's slower; the pressure mounts over time--they'll try to not lower their margins as long as they can, but even an extra 0.1% of profit over what they'd normally make can't endure for more than a few years, assuming it can make it out a few months. For a school selling services on the order of months and years, it probably can endure for a year or two.
This is why, for example, food was 40% of median-income-household consumer expenses in 1900, 33% in 1950, and about 12% today: it got cheaper to make, and it's basically impossible to keep enormous margins. Farmers complain because they believe they should have a 20% profit margin, and instead operate in 8%-10% because market forces kick them in the balls repeatedly if they try to charge more. (An enormous amount of the price of goods comes from domestic shipping; even importing e.g. pants from China costs 6 cents per pair in trans-Atlantic shipping, while getting them from the pier to WalMart is half the price of the damned pants).
That is how the past 6,000 years of history has operated--as in, the past 6,000 years right up to today, now, currently. That's not a projection from ancient history ending a hundred years ago, or from some trend that we have data on for a 40-year window of history; it's how every economy has always behaved. These basic economic behaviors can abstract even to biology and describe higher evolution, although that gets into loopy land (mind you, explaining how dogs and humans co-evolved for maximal economy is often fun, because dogs are awesome).
Put another way, saving the cost of $5.8 million is like saving the cost of 355 minimum-wage jobs. In the span of 1-3 years, the labor force will shift around--early retirement, longer time spent in school, less immigration for H1B work due to less demand for workers--and the job losses will be buffed out; meanwhile, across 2-10 years, the span of $5.8 million annually that Americans spend on going to this school will instead be spent on shoes, phones, hamburgers, and other things.
In other words: the end result is a null impact on American employment rate and an increase in the wealth of individual Americans--particularly, in the wealth of those Americans who buy some sort of service from this school (I assume tuition).