If you are concerned about your identity, do you think your domain registrar would give it up if somebody claimed that massive spam was coming out of that interface?
Well sure, but that's a bit of a different issue. That's a question of whether companies that you have private transactions can be trusted to keep your information private. My point was that with social networking sites, you're posting information in a public forum and then expecting privacy-- which doesn't make a lot of sense.
Also in the "what do you expect?" vein, you're putting lots of personal information on various websites that are publicly available worldwide. What kind of privacy are you expecting?
Hell, I maintain totally different personas on several sites and in many cases have different lies about my identity on each site, and I can still see how people would put the pieces together.
Wow, and I bet you also explained to me before how it made sense for the government to invest in infrastructure, and how hamburgers weren't investments. Please, explain more.
I suppose the change has sort of increased the respect the IT people around here get though: you definitely notice all the stuff that used to Just Work after the IT staff gets canned.
I'm not going to tell the whole story this time since I've posted variations on/. before, but essentially I've had a few people in my career inform me that I have an easy job. They explain, "I've seen other companies where their IT people are working their asses off all day because things are constantly breaking. You're lucky you work here where everything always works!"
RAID isn't the issue, since RAID isn't a backup. It doesn't serve the same purpose that a backup serves. Ultimately, think of RAID 1 as just a normal hard drive that's extremely unlikely to fail. You should still have a backup.
Now you can still use hard drives for backups, but they're heavier, more likely to break in transport (you will be sending them offsite, right?) and if they to break, they're harder to salvage.
As long as engineers build faster chips, software and systems geeks will find a way to add new (useful or flashy) features that the public wants.
Well that's long been the assumption, since it has largely been the case so far, but wonder whether we've seen a new function that will really drive adoption. You mention movie editing and dictation, but my question would be, what percentage of the computer-using user-base will actually use those features?
Maybe it will be a large percentage, but I don't think so. At least not as large a percentage as those who use e-mail or those who have their music collection on their computers. In spite of all the hype around voice recognition, keyboard remain an incredibly efficient input mechanism. Videos-- I know lots of people with digital cameras that do video, and a lot of those people barely use those digital cameras for still frame pictures; none use them for video.
I just think most people that I meet and talk to and support aren't really using their computer to be creative, and so video editing probably won't be the thing. Most people are just using them to organize things, which doesn't require all that much processing power. But then again, the YouTube generation is still up and coming. Who knows?
Speaking of face recognition, I could see a certain level of AI being the "function" that drives adoption. Not AI like the computer talks to you, but where it's able to search for things better, interpret what you're trying to do and help you, etc. Things like the facial recognition, but like what if iPhoto could interpret lots of things about your photos? Like you somehow input, "I'm looking for a picture of my brother-- it's a bright photo where he's wearing a green shirt, and I think it's at Disneyland." (though not necessarily in such natural language) And then the computer comes back and says (basically), "Well I found a picture with of your brother wearing a red shirt in Disneyland, but I also found this picture of him wearing a green shirt at Six Flags." Or whatever.
That might not be a great example, but I guess my point is that most people don't really use their computers to make media as much as they use it to consume media or to organize their own data. One of the problems that everyone sees coming is that since we're accruing so much data as we go, it's going to get harder and harder to sort through it all. One feature that I think can still be improved (even though it has been improved over the past few years) is being able to sort through that stuff, automatically attach metadata and tags, back it up and archive it, and do it all intelligently so you don't end up with a big mess.
But even that-- I don't know how much processor that will take.
What would keep Google from taking Firefox's source code and copying it or using it as a reference for upcoming features? Could google decide to "borrow" the code/technology for Firefox's awesome bar?
Firefox as an "awesome bar"? Is that like a spacebar, but it makes things awesome?
I'm no expert, but I don't see why they couldn't use Firefox code. They're both open source, so it's just an issue of whether the licenses are compatible, and they probably are.
On the other hand, if Google really wanted to be like Firefox, they could have started with Firefox code to begin with. It seems like maybe they just don't want to do that?
I'm considering what you're saying, you're just saying silly things. In the simplest form: just because you buy something for $10 doesn't mean that you'll be able to turn around and sell it for $10 at any point in time. I know, you don't like money, so if you really want: just because you can trade 10 grapes to get an object doesn't mean you'll be able to get 10 grapes back by trading that object away at any point in time.
It's not hard. Really, buddy, I'm trying to make this as simple as possible.
Ok, if you don't believe me, try an experiment: go to McDonalds and buy a hamburger. Take that hamburger out onto the street and try to sell it to people coming into McDonalds for the same price that you bought it. Now do the same thing, but wait 1 day between buying it and trying to sell it, and see how much money you can get for the hamburger. Now eat the hamburger, and see how much money you can get from selling that hamburger. Report back when you've done all that.
If your hamburger hasn't lost any value at any point during that entire process, then you'll get to be right that there's no consumption going on and that the whole thing is a zero-sum game. And then, when you've succeeded in doing that, you'll have also proven that the government should be allowed to spend however much money they want on whatever they want, because nothing will have ultimately be lost.
MY ENTIRE POINT is that the same rules SHOULD apply to government
I KNOW. That's what makes it SO STRANGE that you're also arguing that THERE'S NO SUCH THING as loss or creation of WEALTH. WHY are we CAPitaLIZING thingS?
Yeah, I know, you used the word "microeconomics", which means you must be brilliant. Your arguments throughout this whole discussion have been inconsistent if not self-contradictory. Don't blame me for that.
No doubt new machines are more responsive, but I know plenty of still people working on 256 MB of RAM without complaining too much. But 512 MB wasn't that rare in 2003.
You shouldn't be concerned, as long as the government is getting "back" what they should be getting back for the dollars they are giving to rich business owners
Oh, but according to your mindset, they would never spend the money if they didn't get something equally valuable in return-- because people don't do that. Right?
Oh right, I guess special rules apply to "the government" which give them magical abilities to do things the rest of us can't. They can "spend" money on roads with no return, but the individuals can't buy a hamburger without it being an "investment".
> I had $10, I've eaten my hamburger, and now I am $10 poorer
My comment before that you obviously didn't understand was that if this were true, no one would ever consume anything.
That's only if you assume that people always behave in such a way to optimally accrue wealth without any other consideration, which they obviously don't. Along with everything else, wealth isn't wealth without expenditure-- which is to say that if you never intend to spend your wealth, then it effectively has no value. If I take all my riches and throw them into a vault, never to see the light of day ever again, then with regards to the economic context, I may as well have destroyed it all.
I don't know where you took your Economics 101, but if they taught you that wealth cannot be transfered, created, or destroyed, then they did a terrible disservice to your education.
Or if you still disagree, then tell me why we should be at all concerned with the government spending money, since they'll always get something back of equal value in return? I mean, really, this is silly.
Yeah, I know... but then again, of all the people with cameras in their phones today, I don't know many who actually make much use of them. There are people who take lots of pictures, but it always seems to me like the vast majority take a few pictures when they fist get their phone, mostly forget about them after a couple weeks, and remember they have a camera in their phone long enough to take a couple pictures every few months.
And even then, they don't go home and do anything with those pictures. They just store them on their hard drive.
Oh, I'm not denying that there are applications out there that can make good use of extra processing power, but only that they aren't really what most people use their computers for. I know some pretty young and tech-savvy people, and almost none of them do anything with video on their computers beyond occasional Netflix streaming.
Camcorders aren't by any means rare, but they aren't all that incredibly common either that I'd expect it to drive the mass market. And that opinion isn't formed from any thought that camcorders are too expensive or difficult to operate, but rather that they're the sort of gadgets that people buy and don't really use as much as they expected to.
Your problem is your narrow view of what "wealth" is, your ridiculous focus on government currency as the only measure of value
No, I focus on the ability to trade it for something as "value". If you're a resteraunt buying a bunch of hamburger meat, then that might be an investment. If you're buying a hamburger to eat and you eat it, that is not an investment. On that level, consumption of that hamburger does lead to a loss of wealth-- I had $10, I've eaten my hamburger, and now I am $10 poorer (and less any return an investment of that $10 might have earned).
I know you apparently think it's all the same thing (because you took Econ 101 at a community college and never proceeded to anything more advanced?) but wealth can be created and destroyed. It's not a zero-sum game. If it were a zero-sum game, then it wouldn't matter what we spent money on, and your whole argument that the government was going to waste money would become eve *more* baseless.
The thing really is though is that the Core2 and the X2 really are still "good enough". Most people really are not dieing for a faster PC.
The Atom is the right now the most interesting CPU around.
Yeah, I've been thinking about that. For most businesses and individuals I talk to (and/or support), do you know what they use their computer for? Checking e-mail, surfing the web, writing papers/letters, holding their music collection and loading their iPods, and storing their digital pictures. They don't do much else.
Now how fast of a processor do you need to do that? I'll give you a hint-- a lot of them are doing it on computers that are >5 years old, and they aren't complaining about speed unless they're loaded down with malware.
I wonder where the computing industry is going next, because I feel like it's been a while since anyone came up with a new use for PCs that the masses were clamoring for. MP3s were the last one, and IIRC that's been commonplace for almost a decade now.
It seems like where computers are going is not to be bigger/better/faster, but rather smaller/cheaper/more energy efficient. Something might break that trend, but until it does, I wonder how important it will actually be to be the "performance king".
you don't have to sell the hamburger to realize its value....no one would ever buy anything because they would lose an amount of wealth equal to the price of the good.
You're assuming that people are at all times driven by no desires other than to accrue wealth? People buy hamburgers so they can eat them, not to hoard them as "wealth". Upon consumption, their value goes to approximately zero. If they're not eaten, they spoil and their value goes to approximately zero. Buying hamburgers is consumption, not investment.
Good god, no wonder our economy is in such bad shape. We have maniacs like you running around pretending to understand how things work.
Palm announced what promises to be the product that finally matches and even betters the Apple iPhone
What does that even mean? Match and better the iPhone in what sense? Will it be smaller/lighter, have a brighter screen, better apps, better integration with the largest music retailer in the US? Will it be easier to use and more responsive? Give me something.
I see in the article that it will be "more than a bundle of apps bolted on top of a phone", and have support for Exchange and Facebook. Nothing really new there. It seems to me like this "news story" amounts to an ad for an unreleased product.
On the other hand, it's nice to hear Palm is finally maybe going to actually release a new OS. WebOS is a stupid name, but the videos make it look ok.
It may be just a rumor but I've read Snow Leopard will have out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange Server.
Not just a rumor, that's what I was referring to. Apple already has mail, calendaring, and directory services built into Leopard server, but supposedly they're going to be upgraded to be more competitive with Exchange in Snow Leopard. Also, Snow Leopard on the desktop will support those services as well as Exchange.
Well as I said earlier a big reason I'd setup a Linux server instead of getting a Mac for one is because I have a Linux PC.
Well I'm not talking about my personal use or anything-- I'm talking about businesses who have a budget to buy new servers. If you don't have an Exchange server and don't have a budget to buy an Exchange server, then you're simply in a different market.
The Beatles aren't on iTunes because Apple is pissed at Apple.
I thought that was all settled. At least, it's settled enough that Apple (the computer company) can now be officially just known as "Apple, Inc" instead of "Apple Computer, Inc". I think the deal was the computer company bought the rights to the name, and is now licensing it back to the record label-- something like that.
Anyway, that wouldn't explain why the Beatles don't have their catalog on Amazon's MP3 store. I assume they're not just stupidly dragging their feet, either, but that their marketing people think they'll make less money if they do online distribution.
So it doesn't matter at all if somehow the return on your "investment" is in the form of dollars, gold, bread, enjoyment, or pig farts. Wealth is independent of its form (that's not to say all forms have the same transaction costs, though).
Maybe you're playing dumb, but it's obviously not that simple. If you spend $10 on a hamburger expecting to sell it back in a year for >$10, then you're obviously stupid. If you spend $10 on gold and expect to be able to sell it for >$10 in a year, I might be on to something.
When I spend $10 on a hamburger, it's generally not for the sake of investment. I'm going to eat it. When I buy a TV, I'm buying it so I can use it, not so I can sell it in several years for more than I payed. Wealth isn't independent of form.
Like I said before, maybe you're some great misunderstood genius. If so, you can mock me when you win the Nobel prize in economics for your incredible ideas which everyone else on the planet thinks is nonsense. In the mean time, I'll settle for listening to people who make a modicum of sense according to any conventional thought.
Let me try to break this down: all I'm saying is that someone needs to show that the benefits outweigh the costs. My strong guess is that they DO NOT because if they did, the plans to do them would probably already be on the books.
Well by that logic, no one should have ever made any laws or built any infrastructure ever because, if it made sense to do it, it would have already been done. Great! Lets all live in caves!
Of course for any given project, you have to justify the cost. Do you think you're the only person who's ever thought about that? I mean, seriously, you've been arguing all this time that fixing our bridges is equivalent to buying everyone booze, and you're saying now that you were just saying that you should be doing a cost/benefit analysis before fixing a given bridge, and you expect to be taken seriously?
Yeah, I came in here to point out how silly this is. There's no announcement about any hardware in the pipeline. They're planning on using a filesystem built on FAT but with a 2TB theoretical limit? Who cares? There are better filesystems than FAT with theoretical limits much higher than 2TB.
In fact, the bigger question in my mind is, why is Microsoft coming out with a new version of FAT to support bigger filesystems? Wouldn't the effort be better spent on figuring out how to kill FAT once and for all and replace it with something that doesn't completely suck?
Slashdot Mirror
If you are concerned about your identity, do you think your domain registrar would give it up if somebody claimed that massive spam was coming out of that interface?
Well sure, but that's a bit of a different issue. That's a question of whether companies that you have private transactions can be trusted to keep your information private. My point was that with social networking sites, you're posting information in a public forum and then expecting privacy-- which doesn't make a lot of sense.
Also in the "what do you expect?" vein, you're putting lots of personal information on various websites that are publicly available worldwide. What kind of privacy are you expecting?
Hell, I maintain totally different personas on several sites and in many cases have different lies about my identity on each site, and I can still see how people would put the pieces together.
Wow, and I bet you also explained to me before how it made sense for the government to invest in infrastructure, and how hamburgers weren't investments. Please, explain more.
I suppose the change has sort of increased the respect the IT people around here get though: you definitely notice all the stuff that used to Just Work after the IT staff gets canned.
I'm not going to tell the whole story this time since I've posted variations on /. before, but essentially I've had a few people in my career inform me that I have an easy job. They explain, "I've seen other companies where their IT people are working their asses off all day because things are constantly breaking. You're lucky you work here where everything always works!"
They fail to see the irony...
RAID isn't the issue, since RAID isn't a backup. It doesn't serve the same purpose that a backup serves. Ultimately, think of RAID 1 as just a normal hard drive that's extremely unlikely to fail. You should still have a backup.
Now you can still use hard drives for backups, but they're heavier, more likely to break in transport (you will be sending them offsite, right?) and if they to break, they're harder to salvage.
Oh, wait, you mean it's really called the "awesome bar"? That's kind of retarded.
As long as engineers build faster chips, software and systems geeks will find a way to add new (useful or flashy) features that the public wants.
Well that's long been the assumption, since it has largely been the case so far, but wonder whether we've seen a new function that will really drive adoption. You mention movie editing and dictation, but my question would be, what percentage of the computer-using user-base will actually use those features?
Maybe it will be a large percentage, but I don't think so. At least not as large a percentage as those who use e-mail or those who have their music collection on their computers. In spite of all the hype around voice recognition, keyboard remain an incredibly efficient input mechanism. Videos-- I know lots of people with digital cameras that do video, and a lot of those people barely use those digital cameras for still frame pictures; none use them for video.
I just think most people that I meet and talk to and support aren't really using their computer to be creative, and so video editing probably won't be the thing. Most people are just using them to organize things, which doesn't require all that much processing power. But then again, the YouTube generation is still up and coming. Who knows?
Speaking of face recognition, I could see a certain level of AI being the "function" that drives adoption. Not AI like the computer talks to you, but where it's able to search for things better, interpret what you're trying to do and help you, etc. Things like the facial recognition, but like what if iPhoto could interpret lots of things about your photos? Like you somehow input, "I'm looking for a picture of my brother-- it's a bright photo where he's wearing a green shirt, and I think it's at Disneyland." (though not necessarily in such natural language) And then the computer comes back and says (basically), "Well I found a picture with of your brother wearing a red shirt in Disneyland, but I also found this picture of him wearing a green shirt at Six Flags." Or whatever.
That might not be a great example, but I guess my point is that most people don't really use their computers to make media as much as they use it to consume media or to organize their own data. One of the problems that everyone sees coming is that since we're accruing so much data as we go, it's going to get harder and harder to sort through it all. One feature that I think can still be improved (even though it has been improved over the past few years) is being able to sort through that stuff, automatically attach metadata and tags, back it up and archive it, and do it all intelligently so you don't end up with a big mess.
But even that-- I don't know how much processor that will take.
What would keep Google from taking Firefox's source code and copying it or using it as a reference for upcoming features? Could google decide to "borrow" the code/technology for Firefox's awesome bar?
Firefox as an "awesome bar"? Is that like a spacebar, but it makes things awesome?
I'm no expert, but I don't see why they couldn't use Firefox code. They're both open source, so it's just an issue of whether the licenses are compatible, and they probably are.
On the other hand, if Google really wanted to be like Firefox, they could have started with Firefox code to begin with. It seems like maybe they just don't want to do that?
I'm considering what you're saying, you're just saying silly things. In the simplest form: just because you buy something for $10 doesn't mean that you'll be able to turn around and sell it for $10 at any point in time. I know, you don't like money, so if you really want: just because you can trade 10 grapes to get an object doesn't mean you'll be able to get 10 grapes back by trading that object away at any point in time.
It's not hard. Really, buddy, I'm trying to make this as simple as possible.
Ok, if you don't believe me, try an experiment: go to McDonalds and buy a hamburger. Take that hamburger out onto the street and try to sell it to people coming into McDonalds for the same price that you bought it. Now do the same thing, but wait 1 day between buying it and trying to sell it, and see how much money you can get for the hamburger. Now eat the hamburger, and see how much money you can get from selling that hamburger. Report back when you've done all that.
If your hamburger hasn't lost any value at any point during that entire process, then you'll get to be right that there's no consumption going on and that the whole thing is a zero-sum game. And then, when you've succeeded in doing that, you'll have also proven that the government should be allowed to spend however much money they want on whatever they want, because nothing will have ultimately be lost.
MY ENTIRE POINT is that the same rules SHOULD apply to government
I KNOW. That's what makes it SO STRANGE that you're also arguing that THERE'S NO SUCH THING as loss or creation of WEALTH. WHY are we CAPitaLIZING thingS?
Yeah, I know, you used the word "microeconomics", which means you must be brilliant. Your arguments throughout this whole discussion have been inconsistent if not self-contradictory. Don't blame me for that.
If people are siding with Microsoft because they're afraid of Google taking anti-competitive actions, then either:
I'd bet that Microsoft is paying more.
Yeah, but most phones are pretty retarded.
No doubt new machines are more responsive, but I know plenty of still people working on 256 MB of RAM without complaining too much. But 512 MB wasn't that rare in 2003.
You shouldn't be concerned, as long as the government is getting "back" what they should be getting back for the dollars they are giving to rich business owners
Oh, but according to your mindset, they would never spend the money if they didn't get something equally valuable in return-- because people don't do that. Right?
Oh right, I guess special rules apply to "the government" which give them magical abilities to do things the rest of us can't. They can "spend" money on roads with no return, but the individuals can't buy a hamburger without it being an "investment".
> I had $10, I've eaten my hamburger, and now I am $10 poorer
My comment before that you obviously didn't understand was that if this were true, no one would ever consume anything.
That's only if you assume that people always behave in such a way to optimally accrue wealth without any other consideration, which they obviously don't. Along with everything else, wealth isn't wealth without expenditure-- which is to say that if you never intend to spend your wealth, then it effectively has no value. If I take all my riches and throw them into a vault, never to see the light of day ever again, then with regards to the economic context, I may as well have destroyed it all.
I don't know where you took your Economics 101, but if they taught you that wealth cannot be transfered, created, or destroyed, then they did a terrible disservice to your education.
Or if you still disagree, then tell me why we should be at all concerned with the government spending money, since they'll always get something back of equal value in return? I mean, really, this is silly.
Just wait until cellphones come with HD video.
Yeah, I know... but then again, of all the people with cameras in their phones today, I don't know many who actually make much use of them. There are people who take lots of pictures, but it always seems to me like the vast majority take a few pictures when they fist get their phone, mostly forget about them after a couple weeks, and remember they have a camera in their phone long enough to take a couple pictures every few months.
And even then, they don't go home and do anything with those pictures. They just store them on their hard drive.
Oh, I'm not denying that there are applications out there that can make good use of extra processing power, but only that they aren't really what most people use their computers for. I know some pretty young and tech-savvy people, and almost none of them do anything with video on their computers beyond occasional Netflix streaming.
Camcorders aren't by any means rare, but they aren't all that incredibly common either that I'd expect it to drive the mass market. And that opinion isn't formed from any thought that camcorders are too expensive or difficult to operate, but rather that they're the sort of gadgets that people buy and don't really use as much as they expected to.
Your problem is your narrow view of what "wealth" is, your ridiculous focus on government currency as the only measure of value
No, I focus on the ability to trade it for something as "value". If you're a resteraunt buying a bunch of hamburger meat, then that might be an investment. If you're buying a hamburger to eat and you eat it, that is not an investment. On that level, consumption of that hamburger does lead to a loss of wealth-- I had $10, I've eaten my hamburger, and now I am $10 poorer (and less any return an investment of that $10 might have earned).
I know you apparently think it's all the same thing (because you took Econ 101 at a community college and never proceeded to anything more advanced?) but wealth can be created and destroyed. It's not a zero-sum game. If it were a zero-sum game, then it wouldn't matter what we spent money on, and your whole argument that the government was going to waste money would become eve *more* baseless.
The thing really is though is that the Core2 and the X2 really are still "good enough". Most people really are not dieing for a faster PC. The Atom is the right now the most interesting CPU around.
Yeah, I've been thinking about that. For most businesses and individuals I talk to (and/or support), do you know what they use their computer for? Checking e-mail, surfing the web, writing papers/letters, holding their music collection and loading their iPods, and storing their digital pictures. They don't do much else.
Now how fast of a processor do you need to do that? I'll give you a hint-- a lot of them are doing it on computers that are >5 years old, and they aren't complaining about speed unless they're loaded down with malware.
I wonder where the computing industry is going next, because I feel like it's been a while since anyone came up with a new use for PCs that the masses were clamoring for. MP3s were the last one, and IIRC that's been commonplace for almost a decade now.
It seems like where computers are going is not to be bigger/better/faster, but rather smaller/cheaper/more energy efficient. Something might break that trend, but until it does, I wonder how important it will actually be to be the "performance king".
you don't have to sell the hamburger to realize its value....no one would ever buy anything because they would lose an amount of wealth equal to the price of the good.
You're assuming that people are at all times driven by no desires other than to accrue wealth? People buy hamburgers so they can eat them, not to hoard them as "wealth". Upon consumption, their value goes to approximately zero. If they're not eaten, they spoil and their value goes to approximately zero. Buying hamburgers is consumption, not investment.
Good god, no wonder our economy is in such bad shape. We have maniacs like you running around pretending to understand how things work.
Palm announced what promises to be the product that finally matches and even betters the Apple iPhone
What does that even mean? Match and better the iPhone in what sense? Will it be smaller/lighter, have a brighter screen, better apps, better integration with the largest music retailer in the US? Will it be easier to use and more responsive? Give me something.
I see in the article that it will be "more than a bundle of apps bolted on top of a phone", and have support for Exchange and Facebook. Nothing really new there. It seems to me like this "news story" amounts to an ad for an unreleased product.
On the other hand, it's nice to hear Palm is finally maybe going to actually release a new OS. WebOS is a stupid name, but the videos make it look ok.
It may be just a rumor but I've read Snow Leopard will have out-of-the-box support for Microsoft Exchange Server.
Not just a rumor, that's what I was referring to. Apple already has mail, calendaring, and directory services built into Leopard server, but supposedly they're going to be upgraded to be more competitive with Exchange in Snow Leopard. Also, Snow Leopard on the desktop will support those services as well as Exchange.
Well as I said earlier a big reason I'd setup a Linux server instead of getting a Mac for one is because I have a Linux PC.
Well I'm not talking about my personal use or anything-- I'm talking about businesses who have a budget to buy new servers. If you don't have an Exchange server and don't have a budget to buy an Exchange server, then you're simply in a different market.
The Beatles aren't on iTunes because Apple is pissed at Apple.
I thought that was all settled. At least, it's settled enough that Apple (the computer company) can now be officially just known as "Apple, Inc" instead of "Apple Computer, Inc". I think the deal was the computer company bought the rights to the name, and is now licensing it back to the record label-- something like that.
Anyway, that wouldn't explain why the Beatles don't have their catalog on Amazon's MP3 store. I assume they're not just stupidly dragging their feet, either, but that their marketing people think they'll make less money if they do online distribution.
So it doesn't matter at all if somehow the return on your "investment" is in the form of dollars, gold, bread, enjoyment, or pig farts. Wealth is independent of its form (that's not to say all forms have the same transaction costs, though).
Maybe you're playing dumb, but it's obviously not that simple. If you spend $10 on a hamburger expecting to sell it back in a year for >$10, then you're obviously stupid. If you spend $10 on gold and expect to be able to sell it for >$10 in a year, I might be on to something.
When I spend $10 on a hamburger, it's generally not for the sake of investment. I'm going to eat it. When I buy a TV, I'm buying it so I can use it, not so I can sell it in several years for more than I payed. Wealth isn't independent of form.
Like I said before, maybe you're some great misunderstood genius. If so, you can mock me when you win the Nobel prize in economics for your incredible ideas which everyone else on the planet thinks is nonsense. In the mean time, I'll settle for listening to people who make a modicum of sense according to any conventional thought.
Let me try to break this down: all I'm saying is that someone needs to show that the benefits outweigh the costs. My strong guess is that they DO NOT because if they did, the plans to do them would probably already be on the books.
Well by that logic, no one should have ever made any laws or built any infrastructure ever because, if it made sense to do it, it would have already been done. Great! Lets all live in caves!
Of course for any given project, you have to justify the cost. Do you think you're the only person who's ever thought about that? I mean, seriously, you've been arguing all this time that fixing our bridges is equivalent to buying everyone booze, and you're saying now that you were just saying that you should be doing a cost/benefit analysis before fixing a given bridge, and you expect to be taken seriously?
Yeah, I came in here to point out how silly this is. There's no announcement about any hardware in the pipeline. They're planning on using a filesystem built on FAT but with a 2TB theoretical limit? Who cares? There are better filesystems than FAT with theoretical limits much higher than 2TB.
In fact, the bigger question in my mind is, why is Microsoft coming out with a new version of FAT to support bigger filesystems? Wouldn't the effort be better spent on figuring out how to kill FAT once and for all and replace it with something that doesn't completely suck?