http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/leg al/plan-terms.jsp contains the usual cellular crap language. Basically, you can't use it for video, movies, music, aka "any service we'd like to gouge you for because we don't believe in net neutrality." I suspect that this clause is legally unenforceable and eventually a suit will go forward on this. It seems like if you ran a VPN (which is allowed) that handled all your traffic, they wouldn't be able to discern the type of data you were transferring. Bits are bits GD it!
I think you're forgetting the other company involved here: Apple. They're not going to allow any trickery, that is obscenely bad user experience. I'm sure Jobs nipped any such sneakiness early on.
Sexual reproduction I believe came after asexual reproduction in evolution. Certainly many organisms, mostly single cell (and even our own cells), reproduce asexually. Sexual reproduction seems to have in evolutionary advantage in that it increases variation from one generation to the next. Essentially, sexual reproduction tends to increase the speed of evolution through trait selection.
Organisms that reproduce asexually won't have this mixing of genetic traits, but will still evolve as a result of random mutations during DNA transcription. It sort of makes sense in terms of sexual reproduction that you tend to end up with a better organism if you cross the traits of two successful individuals. Hopefully through the combination you get the union of the set of winning traits from each organism.
Very good point. Just a small note is that actually Larry and Sergey have enough votes themselves to exercise voting control over Google. Although economically they don't have a majority of the company. They have over 60% of the votes, although only have shares worth 20-25% of the company.
As a commercial corporation they are legally mandated to put making money for their stockholders at the top of their priority list.
Your failure here is to believe that making money and serving your customers interests are mutually exclusive goals. Think how silly that notion is "I aim to stay in business by pissing off my customers." I would say that in the long run the best way to make money is to make your customers happy. I can make a lot of money today by over charging my customers, but I will make more money over my expanse of time as a business by charging fair prices or by engaging in any customer-concerned decision you can think of.
Google in their registration statement basically said "We're going to make the best long-term decisions for the company, it may cause us to lose money in the short term or have wildly erratic earnings, but if you don't like it, take your money elsewhere. If you want a quick buck, leave, we don't want or need you."
My experience is that Cingular and Verizon have roughly equivilant coverage. There are places, however, where ones works and the other doesn't and I think these just about wash out. If you happen to be one of those people that live or work in one of their dead zones, of course you're going to think it sucks. So, pick the service that works best for you in your tiny subset of the coverage area, but don't extend this to make general conclusions about coverage. Besides, EVERY company in the US sucks incredibly large donkey balls compared to the coverage offered by European carriers.
No, everything has to be XML to be understood by humans and machines. If I'm just looking at the response {"John Smith", 34, 'M'} from the server, what does this information mean? If its in XML I can skim the structure that the values are returned in and know what these values are. With just three pieces of data returned, this doesn't mean much, but what if my data structure has hundreds of values returned? Or what if ten integers are returned, I'm going to easily confuse whether the piece of data I want is in slot 5 or slot 6. So, what I'll probably do is build a converter that puts these values in a hashmap (in java) or associative array (in php) or a set of constants to index the return value array (in c[++] or java). Now, if I'm using SOAP, the library probably is going to do this conversion for me, and it can only do that because it can read the XML tags in the response.
With JavaScript most stuff is done with JSON now anyway, so your arguments don't really apply.
I don't care at all about a vendor's excuses, I care about their reasons. If the reason there is a bug that hasn't been fixed is that they were working on something more important, good. Its all a matter of priorities. If there is a bug in the airport implementation that only occurs when doing something obscure like roaming across access points and transitioning from an 802.11a to an 802.11g connection while using certificate authentication, big deal that you didn't catch it. I'm glad Apple didn't waste resources trying to find it, I'm happy they spent time building ZFS drivers.
Let me know the first time you build a bug free device driver, let along an operating system and then you can open your trap.
BZZZZZZ! WRONG! Processors from Intel and AMD both execute in a RISC-like fashion in their core. They crack x86 instructions into smaller "micro-ops" (what Intel calls them) and then execute these. What the programmer sees may be CISC, but what happens inside is RISC.
Your comment about mass I don't believe is correct. Titan has one tenth the mass of Mars and has a thick nitrogen atmosphere. It could be this is possible because Titan is so much colder than Mars, but I'm not sure that explains it either.
This was actually one of my thoughts as well. We're starting to build up an ecosystem of equipment out there. MRO helping determine the problem with MGS. MGS acting a comm relay for the rovers, etc. This is where you can see that more pieces add flexibility to the system.
In its day Apple/ClarisWorks was a great product. It did what it needed to do, didn't have Mac-y SE, and didn't have magic formatting tricks that ruined your document. The only problem with AppleWorks right now is that Apple hasn't put serious effort into it in a long time. Pages is the successor, I haven't used it, but clearly it hasn't killed MS Office. What got Mac users to use MS Office is mostly that the entire Windows world used it, so for compatibility you had to, and that the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft turns out a very nice product within the bounds of what MS itself will allow.
You missed my point a bit. Spam is a problem of the internet community in general. If we're all using the same tactic to try to thwart it no one is bearing an inordinate amount of the burden of solving the problem. This doesn't address your problem, but it wasn't meant to.
No, this is not always the case. Spammers tend to forge the "from" address. So the message is actually sent from billys-compromised-computer.dsl.att.net with the form field is "george@example.com". In this case GMail attemps to send a message to "george@example.com". If the message doesn't bounce, hooray, maybe this isn't spam. So this actually takes the resources of example.com not billys-compromised-computer.dsl.att.net. Now, if everyone is doing this, everyone is using up additional resources for verification to solve a spam problem we all have, so it kind of evens out. What might be a good idea is a sort of email reverse dns lookup. So you can lookup the IP of the sending server and see if its registered to the domain that the message appears to be from. This probably opens up a world of other problems that I don't have time to consider though.
Yes, but most biological systems come at a price. To continue with the gills analogy, a fish with even better gills than the versatile fish could cause extiniction of the more adaptable fish. Adaptability is important, but in the short run may make no difference to other organisms that use their biological resources more directly to the current environment, its a balance of both.
To talk a bit more about humanity's being special, its in large part in the brain. I would wager that almost every other bioligical system we have is bested by others in the animal kingdom. The brain turned adaptability from hardware to software. With a brain that can reason, the long process of evoultionary selection is not so necessary for short term environmental changes. Some of the environmental changes can be compensated for be behavioral (software) changes. This gives our species orders of magnitude greater adaptability.
If you think that AJAX is just some catch-phrase or piece of eye canding, then I think you misunderstand a lot of human interface principals. The Click-Submit-Reload pattern that is required without something like AJAX is very disruptive to the user experience. AJAX can eliminate this cycle to produce a much more fluid experience. AJAX can be over-used or used badly, but when used correctly, is much more than just some cool toy.
I think that you've hit on something that makes Google unique, in that they are like a giant collection of startups. Google is organized into a variety of teams that operate in relative autonomy to the whole. They do stay in touch with the "mothership" and cooperate where it makes sense and will enhance their products, but most of their products are relatively standalone, or at least start that way. A lot of web companies (Yahoo) try to tightly integrate all their services from the get-go, if a service can't be made to drive more traffic to the rest of the portal, its a no-go. Google's products tend to start out as islands and gradually be drawn into the Google network (notice the increasing integration of Gmail with other services). I think the benefit here is then the links with the rest of the product portfolio grow organically where it makes sense rather than where people guess it will make sense or the marketing people think it'll work to drive cross traffic.
I also think that, while unstated, one of Google's philosophies with hiring is to just get a bunch of smart people together in a room, give them resources, and say, "Make whatever you want, because probably other people want it too." This requires one thing primarily, an ability to find just the right people who will use this environment and not exploit it. The key to continuing Google success is being able to find the right people.
It takes a set of balls a mile wide for Google to throw out this report that basically says "If you had access to our secret click data, you'd know how completely wrong you are about clickfraud." "Oh, I'm sorry, you don't have access to our secret click data? Tough shit."
If you would read TFA you would realize this statement is incorrect. The click auditing firms and site owners themselves have the necessary data to filter out page reload double clicks. The problem is the auditing firms are typically only collecting data from the landing page for the ad and not tracing subsequent user activity around the site. Furthermore, you can only be charged once per generated ad. Clicking on the same instance of an add multiple times will only charge the advertiser once, since each time an ad is generated its link has a unique URL. Finally, while I can't be sure, I think your advertising account on Google shows exactly how many clicks an add has gotten and and timestamps for each click. This should be all the information you need.
Its also pretty ballsy for an "auditing" firm to issue an opinion on how much click fraud there is when (assuming they've got two neurons to rub together) they know they don't have sufficient information to reach these conclusions. If you don't have sufficient data to do a proper analysis, you shouldn't try to pass your results off as some sort of fact.
Your statement assumes that price/performance is the only factor involved in picking AMD vs Intel. You forget about reliability, availability of other components (specifically just the right motherboard), future upgradeability, and specific strength (perhaps your software relies heavily on a specific operation or set of operations where Intel's SIMD implementation is better). To assume these factors account for nothing is naive.
Well, no, its usually the way of flipping the bird to the shareholders while bending over for the creditors. Often the pre-bankruptcy shareholders are left with nothing and the debt is converted to equity and the previous debt holders own most of the company.
There are reasons for this growing similarity, density and cost (somewhat related to density). Laptops have always had to pack more into a smaller space, and heat was therefore a big concern. This concern has come to the server world because of racks and blades. Previously, servers were towers, you stacked a bunch in a room, not very dense, fine. Now you pack a rack full of "pizza boxes" and end up with an oven pretty quickly. Cost, I would say, is a secondary factor. Previously you needed computing power, damn the cost, you had to have it. Now you can have almost more than you'll ever need, so now people want it to not run their electric bill through the roof. Cost is also related to heat, because just expensive as the hardware or electricity needed to run the computers can be the cooling system or electricity to run it! In some sense, server have become more like laptops in their requirements. You'd like them to be small (so you can pack them together, not for transport) and you'd like them to by stingy on electricity (for cost, not battery life).
Yes, but you're missing something here. Would you rather have to wait a relatively long peirod of time for infrequently used files or have to a relatively short period of time for every time you use a file that you use frequently? The theory is that the (relatively) long pause to get little-used files is shorter than the aggregate delays of loading frequently-used files. Also, I think the amount of time you'd have to wait for even your least frequently used files would be relatively low. In the worst case they would be stored somewhere across the Internet and retrieved over a broadband link, which is getting broader all the time. In the case of streaming-type (movies and music) your only real delay is the latency, since you can start using them even while they continue to download.
We all pay for the bandwidth we use. Google pays for the bandwidth it uses to send us information and receive our requests. In the inverse, I pay to access Google and get the response. Why should Google (and ultimately I) pay to make sure that access to Google is just as fast as access to SBCSearch or ComcastSearch? Bandwidth is bandwidth and it doesn't effect the carriers one iota where the packets come from. If you want to charge me more for more packets, that's fine. Or, if you want to charge me more for a network that provides QoS guantees for packets where I assign the priority, fine. I guess it comes down to that I'd love an end-to-end QoS aware network, just not one where the provider sets the QoS level for different packets based on the origin of the packet and the ransom the originator has paid. QoS costs more, more bandwidth costs more, carrying packets from Google or from anywhere else costs the same. Charge me for services that cost you (the provider) money, not for where I choose to get packets from.
There are two problems with your logic. One is that they aren't going to use this hard drive flash cache just for hibernation, but rather as a general purpose cache, probably controlled by software on the drive itself. Secondly, even if it were used for hibernation, sectors would fail at different times due to manufacturing variations between them, although you'd probably expect something like a normal distribution curve of failures.
Slashdot Mirror
http://www.wireless.att.com/cell-phone-service/leg al/plan-terms.jsp contains the usual cellular crap language. Basically, you can't use it for video, movies, music, aka "any service we'd like to gouge you for because we don't believe in net neutrality." I suspect that this clause is legally unenforceable and eventually a suit will go forward on this. It seems like if you ran a VPN (which is allowed) that handled all your traffic, they wouldn't be able to discern the type of data you were transferring. Bits are bits GD it!
I think you're forgetting the other company involved here: Apple. They're not going to allow any trickery, that is obscenely bad user experience. I'm sure Jobs nipped any such sneakiness early on.
Sexual reproduction I believe came after asexual reproduction in evolution. Certainly many organisms, mostly single cell (and even our own cells), reproduce asexually. Sexual reproduction seems to have in evolutionary advantage in that it increases variation from one generation to the next. Essentially, sexual reproduction tends to increase the speed of evolution through trait selection.
Organisms that reproduce asexually won't have this mixing of genetic traits, but will still evolve as a result of random mutations during DNA transcription. It sort of makes sense in terms of sexual reproduction that you tend to end up with a better organism if you cross the traits of two successful individuals. Hopefully through the combination you get the union of the set of winning traits from each organism.
Very good point. Just a small note is that actually Larry and Sergey have enough votes themselves to exercise voting control over Google. Although economically they don't have a majority of the company. They have over 60% of the votes, although only have shares worth 20-25% of the company.
As a commercial corporation they are legally mandated to put making money for their stockholders at the top of their priority list.
Your failure here is to believe that making money and serving your customers interests are mutually exclusive goals. Think how silly that notion is "I aim to stay in business by pissing off my customers." I would say that in the long run the best way to make money is to make your customers happy. I can make a lot of money today by over charging my customers, but I will make more money over my expanse of time as a business by charging fair prices or by engaging in any customer-concerned decision you can think of.
Google in their registration statement basically said "We're going to make the best long-term decisions for the company, it may cause us to lose money in the short term or have wildly erratic earnings, but if you don't like it, take your money elsewhere. If you want a quick buck, leave, we don't want or need you."
My experience is that Cingular and Verizon have roughly equivilant coverage. There are places, however, where ones works and the other doesn't and I think these just about wash out. If you happen to be one of those people that live or work in one of their dead zones, of course you're going to think it sucks. So, pick the service that works best for you in your tiny subset of the coverage area, but don't extend this to make general conclusions about coverage. Besides, EVERY company in the US sucks incredibly large donkey balls compared to the coverage offered by European carriers.
No, everything has to be XML to be understood by humans and machines. If I'm just looking at the response {"John Smith", 34, 'M'} from the server, what does this information mean? If its in XML I can skim the structure that the values are returned in and know what these values are. With just three pieces of data returned, this doesn't mean much, but what if my data structure has hundreds of values returned? Or what if ten integers are returned, I'm going to easily confuse whether the piece of data I want is in slot 5 or slot 6. So, what I'll probably do is build a converter that puts these values in a hashmap (in java) or associative array (in php) or a set of constants to index the return value array (in c[++] or java). Now, if I'm using SOAP, the library probably is going to do this conversion for me, and it can only do that because it can read the XML tags in the response.
With JavaScript most stuff is done with JSON now anyway, so your arguments don't really apply.
I don't care at all about a vendor's excuses, I care about their reasons. If the reason there is a bug that hasn't been fixed is that they were working on something more important, good. Its all a matter of priorities. If there is a bug in the airport implementation that only occurs when doing something obscure like roaming across access points and transitioning from an 802.11a to an 802.11g connection while using certificate authentication, big deal that you didn't catch it. I'm glad Apple didn't waste resources trying to find it, I'm happy they spent time building ZFS drivers.
Let me know the first time you build a bug free device driver, let along an operating system and then you can open your trap.
BZZZZZZ! WRONG! Processors from Intel and AMD both execute in a RISC-like fashion in their core. They crack x86 instructions into smaller "micro-ops" (what Intel calls them) and then execute these. What the programmer sees may be CISC, but what happens inside is RISC.
Your comment about mass I don't believe is correct. Titan has one tenth the mass of Mars and has a thick nitrogen atmosphere. It could be this is possible because Titan is so much colder than Mars, but I'm not sure that explains it either.
This was actually one of my thoughts as well. We're starting to build up an ecosystem of equipment out there. MRO helping determine the problem with MGS. MGS acting a comm relay for the rovers, etc. This is where you can see that more pieces add flexibility to the system.
In its day Apple/ClarisWorks was a great product. It did what it needed to do, didn't have Mac-y SE, and didn't have magic formatting tricks that ruined your document. The only problem with AppleWorks right now is that Apple hasn't put serious effort into it in a long time. Pages is the successor, I haven't used it, but clearly it hasn't killed MS Office. What got Mac users to use MS Office is mostly that the entire Windows world used it, so for compatibility you had to, and that the Mac Business Unit at Microsoft turns out a very nice product within the bounds of what MS itself will allow.
You missed my point a bit. Spam is a problem of the internet community in general. If we're all using the same tactic to try to thwart it no one is bearing an inordinate amount of the burden of solving the problem. This doesn't address your problem, but it wasn't meant to.
No, this is not always the case. Spammers tend to forge the "from" address. So the message is actually sent from billys-compromised-computer.dsl.att.net with the form field is "george@example.com". In this case GMail attemps to send a message to "george@example.com". If the message doesn't bounce, hooray, maybe this isn't spam. So this actually takes the resources of example.com not billys-compromised-computer.dsl.att.net. Now, if everyone is doing this, everyone is using up additional resources for verification to solve a spam problem we all have, so it kind of evens out. What might be a good idea is a sort of email reverse dns lookup. So you can lookup the IP of the sending server and see if its registered to the domain that the message appears to be from. This probably opens up a world of other problems that I don't have time to consider though.
Yes, but most biological systems come at a price. To continue with the gills analogy, a fish with even better gills than the versatile fish could cause extiniction of the more adaptable fish. Adaptability is important, but in the short run may make no difference to other organisms that use their biological resources more directly to the current environment, its a balance of both.
To talk a bit more about humanity's being special, its in large part in the brain. I would wager that almost every other bioligical system we have is bested by others in the animal kingdom. The brain turned adaptability from hardware to software. With a brain that can reason, the long process of evoultionary selection is not so necessary for short term environmental changes. Some of the environmental changes can be compensated for be behavioral (software) changes. This gives our species orders of magnitude greater adaptability.
If you think that AJAX is just some catch-phrase or piece of eye canding, then I think you misunderstand a lot of human interface principals. The Click-Submit-Reload pattern that is required without something like AJAX is very disruptive to the user experience. AJAX can eliminate this cycle to produce a much more fluid experience. AJAX can be over-used or used badly, but when used correctly, is much more than just some cool toy.
I think that you've hit on something that makes Google unique, in that they are like a giant collection of startups. Google is organized into a variety of teams that operate in relative autonomy to the whole. They do stay in touch with the "mothership" and cooperate where it makes sense and will enhance their products, but most of their products are relatively standalone, or at least start that way. A lot of web companies (Yahoo) try to tightly integrate all their services from the get-go, if a service can't be made to drive more traffic to the rest of the portal, its a no-go. Google's products tend to start out as islands and gradually be drawn into the Google network (notice the increasing integration of Gmail with other services). I think the benefit here is then the links with the rest of the product portfolio grow organically where it makes sense rather than where people guess it will make sense or the marketing people think it'll work to drive cross traffic.
I also think that, while unstated, one of Google's philosophies with hiring is to just get a bunch of smart people together in a room, give them resources, and say, "Make whatever you want, because probably other people want it too." This requires one thing primarily, an ability to find just the right people who will use this environment and not exploit it. The key to continuing Google success is being able to find the right people.
It takes a set of balls a mile wide for Google to throw out this report that basically says "If you had access to our secret click data, you'd know how completely wrong you are about clickfraud." "Oh, I'm sorry, you don't have access to our secret click data? Tough shit."
If you would read TFA you would realize this statement is incorrect. The click auditing firms and site owners themselves have the necessary data to filter out page reload double clicks. The problem is the auditing firms are typically only collecting data from the landing page for the ad and not tracing subsequent user activity around the site. Furthermore, you can only be charged once per generated ad. Clicking on the same instance of an add multiple times will only charge the advertiser once, since each time an ad is generated its link has a unique URL. Finally, while I can't be sure, I think your advertising account on Google shows exactly how many clicks an add has gotten and and timestamps for each click. This should be all the information you need.
Its also pretty ballsy for an "auditing" firm to issue an opinion on how much click fraud there is when (assuming they've got two neurons to rub together) they know they don't have sufficient information to reach these conclusions. If you don't have sufficient data to do a proper analysis, you shouldn't try to pass your results off as some sort of fact.
Your statement assumes that price/performance is the only factor involved in picking AMD vs Intel. You forget about reliability, availability of other components (specifically just the right motherboard), future upgradeability, and specific strength (perhaps your software relies heavily on a specific operation or set of operations where Intel's SIMD implementation is better). To assume these factors account for nothing is naive.
Well, no, its usually the way of flipping the bird to the shareholders while bending over for the creditors. Often the pre-bankruptcy shareholders are left with nothing and the debt is converted to equity and the previous debt holders own most of the company.
Don't you mean, "That's the way the NUMA flexes"?
There are reasons for this growing similarity, density and cost (somewhat related to density). Laptops have always had to pack more into a smaller space, and heat was therefore a big concern. This concern has come to the server world because of racks and blades. Previously, servers were towers, you stacked a bunch in a room, not very dense, fine. Now you pack a rack full of "pizza boxes" and end up with an oven pretty quickly. Cost, I would say, is a secondary factor. Previously you needed computing power, damn the cost, you had to have it. Now you can have almost more than you'll ever need, so now people want it to not run their electric bill through the roof. Cost is also related to heat, because just expensive as the hardware or electricity needed to run the computers can be the cooling system or electricity to run it! In some sense, server have become more like laptops in their requirements. You'd like them to be small (so you can pack them together, not for transport) and you'd like them to by stingy on electricity (for cost, not battery life).
Yes, but you're missing something here. Would you rather have to wait a relatively long peirod of time for infrequently used files or have to a relatively short period of time for every time you use a file that you use frequently? The theory is that the (relatively) long pause to get little-used files is shorter than the aggregate delays of loading frequently-used files. Also, I think the amount of time you'd have to wait for even your least frequently used files would be relatively low. In the worst case they would be stored somewhere across the Internet and retrieved over a broadband link, which is getting broader all the time. In the case of streaming-type (movies and music) your only real delay is the latency, since you can start using them even while they continue to download.
We all pay for the bandwidth we use. Google pays for the bandwidth it uses to send us information and receive our requests. In the inverse, I pay to access Google and get the response. Why should Google (and ultimately I) pay to make sure that access to Google is just as fast as access to SBCSearch or ComcastSearch? Bandwidth is bandwidth and it doesn't effect the carriers one iota where the packets come from. If you want to charge me more for more packets, that's fine. Or, if you want to charge me more for a network that provides QoS guantees for packets where I assign the priority, fine. I guess it comes down to that I'd love an end-to-end QoS aware network, just not one where the provider sets the QoS level for different packets based on the origin of the packet and the ransom the originator has paid. QoS costs more, more bandwidth costs more, carrying packets from Google or from anywhere else costs the same. Charge me for services that cost you (the provider) money, not for where I choose to get packets from.
There are two problems with your logic. One is that they aren't going to use this hard drive flash cache just for hibernation, but rather as a general purpose cache, probably controlled by software on the drive itself. Secondly, even if it were used for hibernation, sectors would fail at different times due to manufacturing variations between them, although you'd probably expect something like a normal distribution curve of failures.