Afaict becoming part of the EU means handing over control of your trade and borders policy (among many other things) to the EU and is therefore mutally exclusive to making similar arragemens with anyone else.
I mean, just look at the devastation non-native species are causing in various nations. They certify they can contain these creatures forever and ever?
Notice that it's small animals being invasive while the megafauna are often endangered even on their home ground?
Megafauna move slowly, breed very slowly and are easy to spot. So it's pretty easy to hunt and kill them at a rate much faster than they can breed.
ahh memories of the old slashdot where you lost your place on a page when trying to post a comment or read a post that was displayed as just a subject line.
What is the upside of existence of Ukraine as separate state? And any other national state for that matter..
The larger an empire gets the less representation each citizen of that empire has and the harder it gets to topple corrupt rulers. It can also mean that entities just outside the empire come under a lot of pressure to become part of it (in turn making the empire ever larger and more powefull).
Which I get the impression is the big problem for ukraine. It's presumablly very difficult to find compromises in politics when one side wants to be part of the russian block, the other side wants to be part of the EU and being part of the two is mutually exclusive.
Putin’s long game? Meet the Eurasian Union [bostonglobe.com]
It's always struck me that being just outside the european union must kinda suck. Customers in the EU will be reluctant to buy from your buisness because they know they risk being stuck with stupid fees for collecting trivial ammount of VAT*. Travel into neighbouring countries is subject to restrictions decided by the block as a whole** rather than by your neighboughing country.
Putin aside I can see why the russians would not much like the idea of going from being the dominant force in a block to being the ones stuck just outside it
* buy a £20 item, pay £4 VAT plus £10 fee for collecting the VAT is the sort of experiance i've had when buying from outside the EU. ** Strictly speaking it's the schengen area rather than the EU per-se but there are only a handful of countries that are in one but not the other.
At 100/year its still a steal if you order a lot (I've ordered furniture from amazon using Prime... 2 day free shipping on a desk? Sectional couch? TV?
I wonder how much more the two day shipping really costs them than the standard free shipping. To an extent if a lot of people buying the struff have prime subscriptions I would expect them to just build the cost of said two day shipping into their prices.
And therin lies the problem, if a megacorp whose headquarters are in the US is given the choice between handing the data over to the US government (and hence breaking EU law but probablly not being punished for it since the EU government won't know it happened) or refusing to hand the data over and getting punished by the US governemnent for doing so which do you think they will choose?
Over long distances your main costs are the fiber and optical amplifiers, so fancy tricks at the transmitter and receiver to get more out of said infrastructure make a lot of sense.
Over short distances the fiber is a smaller part of the overall cost and so it's often cheaper to just lay more fiber than to bother with the fancy tricks.
Per watt of maximum production of the panels under unrelistic condions used in the vendors datasheet? Per watt of maximum production of the panels on a real site? Per watt of average production of the panels on a real site? Per watt of expected production at the time the grid needs the power most*?
* This is especially a problem in cooler climates where the peak load is heating rather than aircon.
Oil prices are vastly different than oil costs for most oil producers. We need to worry, then, only of beating oil prices
Prices in a competitive market are driven by costs BUT it's not the average costs that matter, it's the marginal costs. If demand exceeds supply then the price will rise, the rising price will have two affects, firstly it will decrease demand, secondly it will cause sources that were previously non-viable to be brought online, this will bring the market back into balance.
Similarly if supply exceeds demand then prices will fall causing sources that were previously viable to become non-viable and also increasing demand and brining the market back into balance.
Of course in both cases there are time delays and hence inherent instability. on both the supply and demand side so short term fluctuations are inevitable.
So if you want to drive out the majority of use of resource x you have to beat the cost of the majority of production of that resource to drive down the price of the resource to where the majority of production is non-viable.
Makes me wonder why people in say, EVE, aren't held liable or arrested for sweeping in and taking over an entire faction and claiming everything as their own.
Eve online is a game, participents in the game knew or should have known that anything in the game is subject to the rules of the game and the whims of the games owners. They also knew or should have known that they were forbidden from exchanging those in-game "assets" for anything outside the game.
MT gox traders on the other hand have put their money and bitcoins in trust with the exchange so they can trade them with each other more easilly. The exchange has broken that trust either by stealing the bitcoins themselves or by incompetently allowing large scale heists.
which pushes the cost onto innocent third party service providers
The records higher up the chain (e.g. on the root and tld servers) can still have long ttls and be cached appropriately even if the records at the bottom of the chain have short ttls. so the only person it's really "pushing costs on" is the end users dns provider (usually thier ISP).
The fact that google give away dns service for free without trying to inject any advertising makes me think that the "costs being pushed" onto the users ISP are pretty trivial.
primarily, that it redirects based on where the user's DNS resolver lies, which may be on the opposite side of the country from the user
That is certainly a disadvantage, more so for some sites than others (if you only have a handful of locations per continent then it's probablly not going to make much difference for you).
There are proposals to fix this issue but it will take time for them to be adopted.
For web-based traffic, properly implemented redirects are typically the best option.
Redirects are a good choice for downloads and possiblly videos (for videos custom page generation also seems to be a common soloution) but if you try and use them for pages you will end up with users storing permanent references to individual servers in their bookmarks and you also have the problem that you have to serve the redirects from somewhere (which brings us back to the problem of poor retry handling). IMO these issues make redirects an unacceptable soloution for geographic detection and fallback with web pages.
For other services with a dedicated client, there are much better options that can be implemented, and can also provide a much better user experience.
Agreed if you have a dedicated client you have a lot more options.
I have a friend in England who has a full 100MB symmetric line for what I'm paying Verizon 50 down and 25 up and he even gets an, OMG wait for it, a static IP without bandwidth caps and port blocking.
Where I am (in a suburban area in england) the best broadband services are openreach FTTC (up to 80mbps down, up to 20mbps up, subject to the condition of your phone line) and virgin media cable up to 152mbps down, difficult to find the upload speeds (last I checked the top upload speed they were offering to new customers was 5mbps but upload speeds are not something they like to talk about), also a shitty provider in other ways. Where my parents are (also in suburbia but slightly further out) the openreach FTTC is available but the cable isn't. People in the countryside generally fare even worse.
Note that both of the above systems are misleadingly advertised as "fiber optic"
Yes there are isolated areas in the UK where a new upstart is delivering great service and their are isolated areas where openreach are experimenting with FTTH but just like in america these areas with great service are the exception not the rule.
For failover, round robin DNS and an intelligent client/resolver that will try more than one IP address provide the answer. Unfortunately, some resolvers and browsers will stop on the first error instead, so this isn't a perfect solution either.
And even those that do fall back sometimes do so excruciatingly slowy because they wait for the OS to time out the TCP connection before they try another IP.
For web traffic, the initial load of the page should check the source IP and issue an appropriate redirect to a geo-specific server pool.
Using http redirects for web pages means you will end up with the name of the server pool in the browsers address bar (and potentially in bookmarks the user creates) which may be undesirable. It can also mean extra round trips which can be undesitable for users on high latency connections.
IMO this is ultimately a case of "pick your poison" and dns based techiques have ben widely settled on as the "least bad" option.
but on HDMI it's likely just not going to work if the error rate is anything you'd notice
Not true, when a HDMI connection gets poor you get "sparkles" on the screen.
Remember, the issue is that you MUST meet the same specifications no matter how long the cable is.
Afaict (granted I got this information from a cable vendor so take it with a pinch of salt but what they say seems to make a lot of sense)
1: Apparently the HDMI guys are lax on enforcing the rules with many noncompliant cables on the market. 2: Many real setups are likely to have multiple cables between source and sink (wallports, passive switch boxes, whatever), even if all the individual cables are compliant the combination may not be. 3: There are multiple grades of HDMI cable, a HDMI cable certified for the lower grade is not gauranteed to work at 1080p60 (used by most PCs but relatively uncommon with other AV gear)
Bottom line, if it's a short cable directly between source and sink you probablly don't have to care. If it's a long cable or if it's part of a chain of cables you probablly want to be more choosy.
Given the level of competance the people running the authoritiative server seem to be displaying it's also possible that they made a configuration screwup and that screwup got stuck in comcast's cache (is there a maximum on how long a dns record ttl can be?)
The short TTLs aren't really needed for doing geolocation stuff (it's not like a downstream dns server is going to physically move which keeping it's cache), the main reason for using short ttls is so you can quickly move traffic to another datacenter in the event of a failure or overloading.
The alternative is to move the traffic around using routing protocols, but that has costs of it's own.
IIRC sattelite providers often pull some pretty crazy shit to reduce effective latency*, I suspect the DNS stuff you saw is part of that.
* They can't reduce the latency of the sattelite link itself but by doing dirty tricks that involve cooperation between the CPE and the equipment at the provider they can reduce the number of round trips across the satellite link.
As I understand it steam mostly ignores the distros package management, there are a handful of libraries expected to be supplied by the OS, some more supplied by the "steam runtime" and for anything else game devs are expected to bring their own.
Some cables are legitimately expensive because they are expensive to make. Some cables are expensive because they are a niche product and there is only one vendor and then some cables are stupidly expensive simply to prey on idiots.
These cables undoutablly will not be cheap but they may well be cheaper than terminating and patching all those fibers seperately for those few niches that really need that much bandwidth between the same pair of devices.
I think the question is why make a game in Direct3D and translate it to OpenGL rather than simply making it in OpenGL from the start
Because game developers don't start from scratch with each game, they either buy an engine in or they create and engine and use it for multiple games (and possiblly sell it to third party game developers too). Of course they tweak that engine with each new game but only rarely do they perform a major rewrite.
The initial release game for the source engine was half life 2 and the initial release platforms for that game was windows, closely followed by xbox (original). It's pretty obvious why they would have built their engine on directx.
Various variants of that idea have been tried over the years. There are a few issues
1: While I don't have figures for the various components of a hard drive I would expect the head mechanism is a significat portion of the cost, if they put the heads mechanism in the disk unit (as rev did) then they lose some of the cost benefits over using one peice hard drives, if they put the head mechanism in the drive unit (as jaz did) then the seal is broken every time a disk is inserted bringing reliability issues. 2: They can't upgrade to new technology too often as each time they do so they disenfranchise existing users. That means they will always be technologically behind the one peice soloutions. 3: The drives never achieved more than a niche presence and were always vendor specific so you were very limited in who you could share disks with.
LOL. You mean some people still like to own their own DRM laden media rather than just streaming or renting DRM laden downloads.
The trouble with the term "DRM" is it is used to cover a wide range of technologies with different implications for the users.
The DRM on DVDs, blurays and (for the most part) console games is set up primerally to prevent copying, but you can still play the original media in as many different players as you want and you can still resell the original media when you no longer want it.
The DRM on online sales (and many PC games even when sold on physical media:( ) is typically setup to limit the set of devices on which the media can be used through some form of online activation system. The exact restrictions enforced vary but being blocked from reselling your purchases and being highly reliant on the continued operation of the online service are common trends.
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Afaict becoming part of the EU means handing over control of your trade and borders policy (among many other things) to the EU and is therefore mutally exclusive to making similar arragemens with anyone else.
I mean, just look at the devastation non-native species are causing in various nations. They certify they can contain these creatures forever and ever?
Notice that it's small animals being invasive while the megafauna are often endangered even on their home ground?
Megafauna move slowly, breed very slowly and are easy to spot. So it's pretty easy to hunt and kill them at a rate much faster than they can breed.
ahh memories of the old slashdot where you lost your place on a page when trying to post a comment or read a post that was displayed as just a subject line.
What is the upside of existence of Ukraine as separate state? And any other national state for that matter..
The larger an empire gets the less representation each citizen of that empire has and the harder it gets to topple corrupt rulers. It can also mean that entities just outside the empire come under a lot of pressure to become part of it (in turn making the empire ever larger and more powefull).
Which I get the impression is the big problem for ukraine. It's presumablly very difficult to find compromises in politics when one side wants to be part of the russian block, the other side wants to be part of the EU and being part of the two is mutually exclusive.
Putin’s long game? Meet the Eurasian Union [bostonglobe.com]
It's always struck me that being just outside the european union must kinda suck. Customers in the EU will be reluctant to buy from your buisness because they know they risk being stuck with stupid fees for collecting trivial ammount of VAT*. Travel into neighbouring countries is subject to restrictions decided by the block as a whole** rather than by your neighboughing country.
Putin aside I can see why the russians would not much like the idea of going from being the dominant force in a block to being the ones stuck just outside it
* buy a £20 item, pay £4 VAT plus £10 fee for collecting the VAT is the sort of experiance i've had when buying from outside the EU.
** Strictly speaking it's the schengen area rather than the EU per-se but there are only a handful of countries that are in one but not the other.
At 100/year its still a steal if you order a lot (I've ordered furniture from amazon using Prime... 2 day free shipping on a desk? Sectional couch? TV?
I wonder how much more the two day shipping really costs them than the standard free shipping. To an extent if a lot of people buying the struff have prime subscriptions I would expect them to just build the cost of said two day shipping into their prices.
at least on paper...
And therin lies the problem, if a megacorp whose headquarters are in the US is given the choice between handing the data over to the US government (and hence breaking EU law but probablly not being punished for it since the EU government won't know it happened) or refusing to hand the data over and getting punished by the US governemnent for doing so which do you think they will choose?
Over long distances your main costs are the fiber and optical amplifiers, so fancy tricks at the transmitter and receiver to get more out of said infrastructure make a lot of sense.
Over short distances the fiber is a smaller part of the overall cost and so it's often cheaper to just lay more fiber than to bother with the fancy tricks.
Per watt of what?
Per watt of maximum production of the panels under unrelistic condions used in the vendors datasheet?
Per watt of maximum production of the panels on a real site?
Per watt of average production of the panels on a real site?
Per watt of expected production at the time the grid needs the power most*?
* This is especially a problem in cooler climates where the peak load is heating rather than aircon.
Oil prices are vastly different than oil costs for most oil producers. We need to worry, then, only of beating oil prices
Prices in a competitive market are driven by costs BUT it's not the average costs that matter, it's the marginal costs. If demand exceeds supply then the price will rise, the rising price will have two affects, firstly it will decrease demand, secondly it will cause sources that were previously non-viable to be brought online, this will bring the market back into balance.
Similarly if supply exceeds demand then prices will fall causing sources that were previously viable to become non-viable and also increasing demand and brining the market back into balance.
Of course in both cases there are time delays and hence inherent instability. on both the supply and demand side so short term fluctuations are inevitable.
So if you want to drive out the majority of use of resource x you have to beat the cost of the majority of production of that resource to drive down the price of the resource to where the majority of production is non-viable.
Makes me wonder why people in say, EVE, aren't held liable or arrested for sweeping in and taking over an entire faction and claiming everything as their own.
Eve online is a game, participents in the game knew or should have known that anything in the game is subject to the rules of the game and the whims of the games owners. They also knew or should have known that they were forbidden from exchanging those in-game "assets" for anything outside the game.
MT gox traders on the other hand have put their money and bitcoins in trust with the exchange so they can trade them with each other more easilly. The exchange has broken that trust either by stealing the bitcoins themselves or by incompetently allowing large scale heists.
which pushes the cost onto innocent third party service providers
The records higher up the chain (e.g. on the root and tld servers) can still have long ttls and be cached appropriately even if the records at the bottom of the chain have short ttls. so the only person it's really "pushing costs on" is the end users dns provider (usually thier ISP).
The fact that google give away dns service for free without trying to inject any advertising makes me think that the "costs being pushed" onto the users ISP are pretty trivial.
primarily, that it redirects based on where the user's DNS resolver lies, which may be on the opposite side of the country from the user
That is certainly a disadvantage, more so for some sites than others (if you only have a handful of locations per continent then it's probablly not going to make much difference for you).
There are proposals to fix this issue but it will take time for them to be adopted.
For web-based traffic, properly implemented redirects are typically the best option.
Redirects are a good choice for downloads and possiblly videos (for videos custom page generation also seems to be a common soloution) but if you try and use them for pages you will end up with users storing permanent references to individual servers in their bookmarks and you also have the problem that you have to serve the redirects from somewhere (which brings us back to the problem of poor retry handling). IMO these issues make redirects an unacceptable soloution for geographic detection and fallback with web pages.
For other services with a dedicated client, there are much better options that can be implemented, and can also provide a much better user experience.
Agreed if you have a dedicated client you have a lot more options.
I have a friend in England who has a full 100MB symmetric line for what I'm paying Verizon 50 down and 25 up and he even gets an, OMG wait for it, a static IP without bandwidth caps and port blocking.
Where I am (in a suburban area in england) the best broadband services are openreach FTTC (up to 80mbps down, up to 20mbps up, subject to the condition of your phone line) and virgin media cable up to 152mbps down, difficult to find the upload speeds (last I checked the top upload speed they were offering to new customers was 5mbps but upload speeds are not something they like to talk about), also a shitty provider in other ways. Where my parents are (also in suburbia but slightly further out) the openreach FTTC is available but the cable isn't. People in the countryside generally fare even worse.
Note that both of the above systems are misleadingly advertised as "fiber optic"
Yes there are isolated areas in the UK where a new upstart is delivering great service and their are isolated areas where openreach are experimenting with FTTH but just like in america these areas with great service are the exception not the rule.
Most of the time, when a plane goes down we know where it went.
And since we don't know why or how this plane went down surely we don't really know whether some fancy new system would have helped or not.
For failover, round robin DNS and an intelligent client/resolver that will try more than one IP address provide the answer. Unfortunately, some resolvers and browsers will stop on the first error instead, so this isn't a perfect solution either.
And even those that do fall back sometimes do so excruciatingly slowy because they wait for the OS to time out the TCP connection before they try another IP.
For web traffic, the initial load of the page should check the source IP and issue an appropriate redirect to a geo-specific server pool.
Using http redirects for web pages means you will end up with the name of the server pool in the browsers address bar (and potentially in bookmarks the user creates) which may be undesirable. It can also mean extra round trips which can be undesitable for users on high latency connections.
IMO this is ultimately a case of "pick your poison" and dns based techiques have ben widely settled on as the "least bad" option.
but on HDMI it's likely just not going to work if the error rate is anything you'd notice
Not true, when a HDMI connection gets poor you get "sparkles" on the screen.
Remember, the issue is that you MUST meet the same specifications no matter how long the cable is.
Afaict (granted I got this information from a cable vendor so take it with a pinch of salt but what they say seems to make a lot of sense)
1: Apparently the HDMI guys are lax on enforcing the rules with many noncompliant cables on the market.
2: Many real setups are likely to have multiple cables between source and sink (wallports, passive switch boxes, whatever), even if all the individual cables are compliant the combination may not be.
3: There are multiple grades of HDMI cable, a HDMI cable certified for the lower grade is not gauranteed to work at 1080p60 (used by most PCs but relatively uncommon with other AV gear)
Bottom line, if it's a short cable directly between source and sink you probablly don't have to care. If it's a long cable or if it's part of a chain of cables you probablly want to be more choosy.
Given the level of competance the people running the authoritiative server seem to be displaying it's also possible that they made a configuration screwup and that screwup got stuck in comcast's cache (is there a maximum on how long a dns record ttl can be?)
The short TTLs aren't really needed for doing geolocation stuff (it's not like a downstream dns server is going to physically move which keeping it's cache), the main reason for using short ttls is so you can quickly move traffic to another datacenter in the event of a failure or overloading.
The alternative is to move the traffic around using routing protocols, but that has costs of it's own.
IIRC sattelite providers often pull some pretty crazy shit to reduce effective latency*, I suspect the DNS stuff you saw is part of that.
* They can't reduce the latency of the sattelite link itself but by doing dirty tricks that involve cooperation between the CPE and the equipment at the provider they can reduce the number of round trips across the satellite link.
As I understand it steam mostly ignores the distros package management, there are a handful of libraries expected to be supplied by the OS, some more supplied by the "steam runtime" and for anything else game devs are expected to bring their own.
Some cables are legitimately expensive because they are expensive to make. Some cables are expensive because they are a niche product and there is only one vendor and then some cables are stupidly expensive simply to prey on idiots.
These cables undoutablly will not be cheap but they may well be cheaper than terminating and patching all those fibers seperately for those few niches that really need that much bandwidth between the same pair of devices.
I think the question is why make a game in Direct3D and translate it to OpenGL rather than simply making it in OpenGL from the start
Because game developers don't start from scratch with each game, they either buy an engine in or they create and engine and use it for multiple games (and possiblly sell it to third party game developers too). Of course they tweak that engine with each new game but only rarely do they perform a major rewrite.
The initial release game for the source engine was half life 2 and the initial release platforms for that game was windows, closely followed by xbox (original). It's pretty obvious why they would have built their engine on directx.
I presume that when they started encountering sectors they had read before they would move the head outwards.
Various variants of that idea have been tried over the years. There are a few issues
1: While I don't have figures for the various components of a hard drive I would expect the head mechanism is a significat portion of the cost, if they put the heads mechanism in the disk unit (as rev did) then they lose some of the cost benefits over using one peice hard drives, if they put the head mechanism in the drive unit (as jaz did) then the seal is broken every time a disk is inserted bringing reliability issues.
2: They can't upgrade to new technology too often as each time they do so they disenfranchise existing users. That means they will always be technologically behind the one peice soloutions.
3: The drives never achieved more than a niche presence and were always vendor specific so you were very limited in who you could share disks with.
LOL. You mean some people still like to own their own DRM laden media rather than just streaming or renting DRM laden downloads.
The trouble with the term "DRM" is it is used to cover a wide range of technologies with different implications for the users.
The DRM on DVDs, blurays and (for the most part) console games is set up primerally to prevent copying, but you can still play the original media in as many different players as you want and you can still resell the original media when you no longer want it.
The DRM on online sales (and many PC games even when sold on physical media :( ) is typically setup to limit the set of devices on which the media can be used through some form of online activation system. The exact restrictions enforced vary but being blocked from reselling your purchases and being highly reliant on the continued operation of the online service are common trends.