My point is that the deeper the integration goes the less chance there is for real competition. If each CPU maker does their own chipsets, audio and video then eventually there'll be no room for substantive distinction between motherboards and those manufacturers will either disappear or just produce a bunch of exact implementations of a reference design from the CPU makers.
After that the rate of innovation will flatten out and we'll settle into a yearly cycle of rehashing the same ideas year after year driven just by marketing glitz (which is where my auto industry reference came from).
Whether VIA will be a dominant cpu maker doesn't make a big difference in that outcome (though it is important in a different discussion). It's the depth of integration in the market that i'm concerned about here.
Definitely. I also fear a world with two dominant processor manufacturers who make the whole motherboard. Maybe that's too much fear...
If cpu makers make the who shebang then expect development to slow to the same rate as development in the auto industry.
Those are great benefits for the east coast and west coast users with 1280x1024 resolution who visit your most popular pages. Too bad for the ones that are at 800x600 in the middle of the country browsing your less popular pages.
I totally get that you are improving the experience for most of your visitors and that makes sense. It isn't the same as saying that it's in every visitors best interest to be counted.
The visitors who aren't in the group you want to keep aren't getting a benefit from stats collection. (And fwiw I do run sites that use google analytics.)
I'm sorry but how is that different from my laptop which only needs a power cord? I have wifi and bluetooth built in. How is the Air closer to "truly wireless?"
Well they work fine on XP on my box too. But they also work fine on the Vista machine I've used the most. Just saying that your sample size is pretty small.
We don't have numbers that were collected using any similar mechanism for XP. The percentage we see here for Vista is surely affected by which users decided to report info or had their company decide to report info. Since this stat assigns blame for the crash then any kind of comparison to XP would have to assign blame in the same way. It's not trivial to figure out a machine with a pile of processes running across multiple cores just why a crash happened or who called a function they shouldn't have.
So any kind of number that we wanted to compare would have to have the same rules on data collection and how blame gets assigned. That's all I'm saying.
Amazon's angle is that it scales up and down with the application demands. That's the 'elastic' part. It's more cost-effective than owning your own hardware for many applications. Suppose you had a web application that did some image processing. If you only get a handful of visitors then any decent hosting will do the job. When you get a traffic spike then your app can bring down the server or at least get your site cut off due to CPU quotas. Otoh if you design it to take advantage of EC2 then you can scale up as you get more visitors very quickly (dunno if it's seconds, minutes or hours) and only pay for the extra computing power while you're using it.
Doug Kaye from IT Conversations has been doing some pretty heavy stuff on EC2. He did a podcast with an Amazon guy on Technometria where they got in to a lot of detail have a listen.
There's a big difference between a few implementations existing to meet different needs (or even the same needs) and the thousands of times that the same software is built for in-house solutions (because "our situation is unique"). There's plenty of good bug-tracking software out there but I know that there are also tons of Excel spreadsheets being extended to track bugs. Many of those spreadsheets have coders looking at them and telling their bosses "we should build our own issue tracking software to replace this spreadsheet."
That sort of thing happens and will keep happening. That doesn't mean that we need to have artificial barriers stopping companies from sharing code to keep those coders employed (as the GP suggested). If code is shared then there's a chance to reuse pieces or at least look at it and decide if it's suitable for another need. When it's not shared then it stays in it's buggy little corner and the same in-house coders keep tweaking it every time it breaks.
Until all code is truly reusable and free of everything non-problem-related, programmers will reinvent the wheel over and over again.
Don't hold your breath.
People need to stop thinking of jobs as the focal point of their lives. vs
a job and money doesn't mean anything.
I'm in the same boat as you, most of us need a steady income. I'm saying that there's more to life than having a job and we should think of people as more than just what their job is. Make-work jobs may be a very simple way for politicians to keep people busy, fed and satisfied but they certainly doesn't do anything to improve the condition of humanity.
One girl actually started yelling at me, saying that I wasn't a bell customer anymore and shouldn't be calling that number (yes, the number on the note that they left me), before she 'accidentally' hung up on me.
I believe it. There's absolutely no accountability for the person on the other end of that line and yet they have complete access to whatever the company knows about you. They don't even give you their real name.
Try running skype on the same network with the jerk running bitorrent.
I run VoIP and Bittorrent on the same network.
That means they have a contractual obligation to stomp your traffic into the dirt.
I'm not an expert but I don't think that's an accurate interpretation of QoS. As I understand it it refers more to delivering time-critical packets within a maximum expected time. Clearly only a small portion of the traffic for an ISP can be time-critical. Assuming 'traffic for my customers' must always be handled faster than 'traffic for other customers' doesn't make sense from a networking standpoint and is unlikely to gain a competitive advantage for the service provider anyhow.
If companies start sharing code, there will be less code that needs to be written in-house, which means some people are going to be losing their jobs.
Or we'll find new problems to solve instead of reinventing the wheel independently in a thousand silos. Following your logic the fact that MS offers companies the ability to just buy productivity software instead of having to write their own kills off software jobs. And in a way that's true but do you really want to be writing a word processor for Citibank, get fired then go write a word processor for Macy's and so on? If you want to write software for a job then you want to do it for a company where software is the main product anyway.
People need to stop thinking of jobs as the focal point of their lives. You can save a million jobs if you decide to stop the clock and work for the sake of work but what's the point?
Emily understands "I want to cancel my account." That's what got me through to a rep finally. Whatever idiot decided that all customers should be _required_ to talk to a machine should be fired.
Didn't know they went all the way out to BC. Seriously, when I got started with them I bought a modem, screwed it up and I remember very clearly that I talked to Steve when I called them up. He's the guy that answered the phone after a couple rings and he told me what settings I'd need in Hyperterminal to connect to this modem in debug mode so I could recover it. This isn't a modem they sold me - they recommended it but I bought it used from a computer shop.
That was a few years ago. The last time I called I did have to wait on hold for all of 5 seconds before I talked to someone who, also, immediately solved my problem. It's great to see a business grow by doing a good job and selling a service they actually back.
Total time spent with Bell: no phone, no mail, just the final bill for the amount of 0$.
I like the sound of that. The rates at Babytel look higher than what I get from Les.net but Babytel looks like a full-service outfit instead of just the basic access that I want. I wonder if Les.net does the same number porting thing. I'm going to look into that - especially if it means I don't have to call Bell myself.
Of course you have to know that since your DSL is supplied over Bell's lines you're really still at their mercy in the end.
One day maybe we can hope that someone will see the sense in separating the company that owns the lines (and gets special legal treatment to do it) from the company that sells the service.
Yeah, I kind of figured I'd get the shaft on the phone number. I really don't have the strength to argue with Bell any more. Between the horrid machine they _require_ you to talk to when you call them and the useless answers of the people you finally get through to I don't know if I'll even try to keep my number.
The voip service I use right now is from Les.net (another very helpful small Canadian company) and I think I would end up moving to just using that full-time. I already have one local number from Les and just started playing with a toll-free number on my Asterisk box.
My routers are just run-of-the-mill older D-Links. I wonder if I could improve my VoIP quality with a better router - I have occasional voice quality issues that I'd have to track down if I did go to it full time.
Don't worry. All the P2P traffic will do that for them.
I get that you're probably joking but QoS can make a huge difference from what I understand. And there are cases where providers have decided not to honour the QoS flags on voip protocols. Coincidentally these providers also have a voip offering of their own where they don't have a problem meeting QoS needs.
I'm a Teksavvy client and very happy with them. You call up and still talk to a person who's actually a part of the company you're calling (in Chatham, Ontario). And quickly. I like the fact that when you talk to them they treat you like you're an intelligent person instead of just an account to be dealt with.
I was actually considering dropping my Bell telephone number to move completely to voip at Teksavvy after I found Bell adding things to my phone bill that I never asked for. Now to go to voip would require me to get dry DSL service from Teksavvy and probably end up paying more per month than I could for a basic phone bill but I'm seriously considering it just to avoid having to talk to Bell any more.
I know that the back end is still run by Bell and that the money I pay for dry DSL would probably mostly get passed on to that company anyway but at least I could trust that nobody could decide to add a long distance plan to my account without consulting me first.
My big concern with moving to voip-only is that Bell will abuse their position to degrade VoIP calls.
Slashdot Mirror
Makes more sense now.
People aren't buying a motherboard and a processor anymore, they're buying a platform.
and as far as I can tell Newegg is still selling plenty of mobos and cpus separately.
How about "in addition"?
My point is that the deeper the integration goes the less chance there is for real competition. If each CPU maker does their own chipsets, audio and video then eventually there'll be no room for substantive distinction between motherboards and those manufacturers will either disappear or just produce a bunch of exact implementations of a reference design from the CPU makers.
After that the rate of innovation will flatten out and we'll settle into a yearly cycle of rehashing the same ideas year after year driven just by marketing glitz (which is where my auto industry reference came from).
Whether VIA will be a dominant cpu maker doesn't make a big difference in that outcome (though it is important in a different discussion). It's the depth of integration in the market that i'm concerned about here.
Get a phone that has a jack for a headset.
and plug the headset in. You can't really think there's an actual need for any other equipment for a work-from-home phone-jockey job?
I still buy a motherboard and a processor... Your conclusion might be right but I'm not convinced of how you got there.
Definitely. I also fear a world with two dominant processor manufacturers who make the whole motherboard. Maybe that's too much fear...
If cpu makers make the who shebang then expect development to slow to the same rate as development in the auto industry.
If I can do a diff before I patch...
Those are great benefits for the east coast and west coast users with 1280x1024 resolution who visit your most popular pages. Too bad for the ones that are at 800x600 in the middle of the country browsing your less popular pages.
I totally get that you are improving the experience for most of your visitors and that makes sense. It isn't the same as saying that it's in every visitors best interest to be counted.
The visitors who aren't in the group you want to keep aren't getting a benefit from stats collection. (And fwiw I do run sites that use google analytics.)
I'm sorry but how is that different from my laptop which only needs a power cord? I have wifi and bluetooth built in. How is the Air closer to "truly wireless?"
Well they work fine on XP on my box too. But they also work fine on the Vista machine I've used the most. Just saying that your sample size is pretty small.
We don't have numbers that were collected using any similar mechanism for XP. The percentage we see here for Vista is surely affected by which users decided to report info or had their company decide to report info. Since this stat assigns blame for the crash then any kind of comparison to XP would have to assign blame in the same way. It's not trivial to figure out a machine with a pile of processes running across multiple cores just why a crash happened or who called a function they shouldn't have.
So any kind of number that we wanted to compare would have to have the same rules on data collection and how blame gets assigned. That's all I'm saying.
Amazon's angle is that it scales up and down with the application demands. That's the 'elastic' part. It's more cost-effective than owning your own hardware for many applications. Suppose you had a web application that did some image processing. If you only get a handful of visitors then any decent hosting will do the job. When you get a traffic spike then your app can bring down the server or at least get your site cut off due to CPU quotas. Otoh if you design it to take advantage of EC2 then you can scale up as you get more visitors very quickly (dunno if it's seconds, minutes or hours) and only pay for the extra computing power while you're using it.
Doug Kaye from IT Conversations has been doing some pretty heavy stuff on EC2. He did a podcast with an Amazon guy on Technometria where they got in to a lot of detail have a listen.
That sort of thing happens and will keep happening. That doesn't mean that we need to have artificial barriers stopping companies from sharing code to keep those coders employed (as the GP suggested). If code is shared then there's a chance to reuse pieces or at least look at it and decide if it's suitable for another need. When it's not shared then it stays in it's buggy little corner and the same in-house coders keep tweaking it every time it breaks.
Until all code is truly reusable and free of everything non-problem-related, programmers will reinvent the wheel over and over again.
Don't hold your breath.
vs
a job and money doesn't mean anything.
I'm in the same boat as you, most of us need a steady income. I'm saying that there's more to life than having a job and we should think of people as more than just what their job is. Make-work jobs may be a very simple way for politicians to keep people busy, fed and satisfied but they certainly doesn't do anything to improve the condition of humanity.
I believe it. There's absolutely no accountability for the person on the other end of that line and yet they have complete access to whatever the company knows about you. They don't even give you their real name.
I emailed Les & he said $30 to port my number. I'm still going to talk to Teksavvy before I go ahead but I'm 90% convinced now.
I run VoIP and Bittorrent on the same network. That means they have a contractual obligation to stomp your traffic into the dirt.
I'm not an expert but I don't think that's an accurate interpretation of QoS. As I understand it it refers more to delivering time-critical packets within a maximum expected time. Clearly only a small portion of the traffic for an ISP can be time-critical. Assuming 'traffic for my customers' must always be handled faster than 'traffic for other customers' doesn't make sense from a networking standpoint and is unlikely to gain a competitive advantage for the service provider anyhow.
Or we'll find new problems to solve instead of reinventing the wheel independently in a thousand silos. Following your logic the fact that MS offers companies the ability to just buy productivity software instead of having to write their own kills off software jobs. And in a way that's true but do you really want to be writing a word processor for Citibank, get fired then go write a word processor for Macy's and so on? If you want to write software for a job then you want to do it for a company where software is the main product anyway.
People need to stop thinking of jobs as the focal point of their lives. You can save a million jobs if you decide to stop the clock and work for the sake of work but what's the point?
Emily understands "I want to cancel my account." That's what got me through to a rep finally. Whatever idiot decided that all customers should be _required_ to talk to a machine should be fired.
Didn't know they went all the way out to BC. Seriously, when I got started with them I bought a modem, screwed it up and I remember very clearly that I talked to Steve when I called them up. He's the guy that answered the phone after a couple rings and he told me what settings I'd need in Hyperterminal to connect to this modem in debug mode so I could recover it. This isn't a modem they sold me - they recommended it but I bought it used from a computer shop.
That was a few years ago. The last time I called I did have to wait on hold for all of 5 seconds before I talked to someone who, also, immediately solved my problem. It's great to see a business grow by doing a good job and selling a service they actually back.
I like the sound of that. The rates at Babytel look higher than what I get from Les.net but Babytel looks like a full-service outfit instead of just the basic access that I want. I wonder if Les.net does the same number porting thing. I'm going to look into that - especially if it means I don't have to call Bell myself.
Of course you have to know that since your DSL is supplied over Bell's lines you're really still at their mercy in the end.
One day maybe we can hope that someone will see the sense in separating the company that owns the lines (and gets special legal treatment to do it) from the company that sells the service.
Yeah, I kind of figured I'd get the shaft on the phone number. I really don't have the strength to argue with Bell any more. Between the horrid machine they _require_ you to talk to when you call them and the useless answers of the people you finally get through to I don't know if I'll even try to keep my number.
The voip service I use right now is from Les.net (another very helpful small Canadian company) and I think I would end up moving to just using that full-time. I already have one local number from Les and just started playing with a toll-free number on my Asterisk box.
My routers are just run-of-the-mill older D-Links. I wonder if I could improve my VoIP quality with a better router - I have occasional voice quality issues that I'd have to track down if I did go to it full time.
I get that you're probably joking but QoS can make a huge difference from what I understand. And there are cases where providers have decided not to honour the QoS flags on voip protocols. Coincidentally these providers also have a voip offering of their own where they don't have a problem meeting QoS needs.
I'm a Teksavvy client and very happy with them. You call up and still talk to a person who's actually a part of the company you're calling (in Chatham, Ontario). And quickly. I like the fact that when you talk to them they treat you like you're an intelligent person instead of just an account to be dealt with.
I was actually considering dropping my Bell telephone number to move completely to voip at Teksavvy after I found Bell adding things to my phone bill that I never asked for. Now to go to voip would require me to get dry DSL service from Teksavvy and probably end up paying more per month than I could for a basic phone bill but I'm seriously considering it just to avoid having to talk to Bell any more.
I know that the back end is still run by Bell and that the money I pay for dry DSL would probably mostly get passed on to that company anyway but at least I could trust that nobody could decide to add a long distance plan to my account without consulting me first.
My big concern with moving to voip-only is that Bell will abuse their position to degrade VoIP calls.