If you can find the guy running BitTorrent, ask him to lower his upload speed to something reasonable, like 26k. When I first started using BitTorrent, it would kill my network because it was flooding my UPSTREAM. (When your upstream is flooded, you can't initiate a connection to a web server.) By turning my upload speed to something managable, all of my problems went away. (Heck, I can even talk on my Vonage while downloading a busy torrent at full tilt.)
It's my understanding that Google encourages its engineers to devote a certain percentage of their time on projects of their own choosing. Microsoft does not, but they're safer. If you're someone who can handle risk and likes to take time to play around with inventions, choose Google. If you're someone who wants to identify with a secure job in an established company, choose Microsoft.
That being stated, it's worth spending a few days in both the Bay area and the Seattle area to see which one is more livable. Seatle, (as far as I know,) has a better girl/guy ratio... But this week I saw a kick-ass Roger Waters concert a stone's throw away from Google's campus.
As for the quad-core thing, it's the same story all over again. Intel rush out a solder-together-two-chips job to beat the competition to market, and then the actual innovators come out with something coherent that works more efficiently etc.
The answer, deduced by simple economics, is that music is too expensive. Let's say a teenager makes, after taxes, $5 per hour. A legal album costs two hours of work. For two hours of time spent on the illegal P2P networks, the teen can get much more.
As a result, the music industry might want to consider selling downloads for about $3 / album. Specifically, the music industry is getting commoditized. There's no reason to spend $10 / downloaded album when the overhead is much less then a CD.
My employer has a rather liberal telecommuting policy, which is further enhanced by the fact that most people I work with on a day-to-day basis are in offices that are at least 3 hours away. With the exception of the rare times that I get to have real face time with my co-workers, it really doesn't matter where my physical body is when I work.
The third-place working style really does come in handy. It's great when you can drive to the mechanic on a slow afternoon and hop on to their wireless. I've also used it to extend family visits by telecommuting from my parents' back porch. Sometimes I wonder why my employer paid to relocate me when everyone I work with is at least 140 miles away.
I'm really getting tempted to start taking "work-cations", where I telecommute and travel at the same time.
About 5 years ago, Verizon had a silly system for handling acount plan changes in the middle of a billing cycle. If you changed your plan in the middle of a billing cycle, the computer would do this:
Figure out the average number of minutes you were allowed to have per day in each plan.
Multiply the average for each plan by the number of days you were in each plan
Give you the calculated number of minutes for seperate period in the beggining and end of the plan.
For example, I once upgraded from a 300 minute plan to a 1000 minute plan about 2 days into the beginning of a billing cycle. The computer decided that I was only allowed to have 12 minutes at the beginning of the month, and about 900 minutes for the rest of the billing cycle, and chaged me about $70 for a 50-minute call. Needless to say, I was rather pissed off when I only used a total of 400 minutes during a billing cycle, yet had a charge of $70 for going over my minutes.
What if all of the species have a common ancestor? Ever consider the evolutionary implications of the human race populating distant solar systems over the next millenia? We'll become different species, and eventually some will forget that we evolved from a common ancestor on earth... This could be accellerated if colonies use genetic engineering to adapt to other planets.
The answer to your question comes down to a simple rule called "Economies of Scale". Microsoft sells many more copies of their products then their open source competators, yet their price to develop software stays the same. Thus, because they can divide up their development costs among many more customers, they can charge less then the open source versions.
I think the real problem is that you don't understand what you're building. Why did you choose to go with open source in the first place? Was it for some fuzzy "feel-good" reason, or do you need closer control over the bits and bytes of your environment? If your answer was the latter, you could end up paying much, much, much more in choosing the closed source route because sometimes Windows just doesn't do what you want it to do unless you can coax some kind of shared source liscensing agreement with Microsoft.
Are you selling devices that will end up being special-purpose computers? In the long run, building on Windows will be more expensive because you'll need more powerful hardware in each unit that you sell. On the other hand, Windows might give you the advantage of moving to market faster.
Perhaps if Microsoft charged less for thier software it would be pirated less often? I paid less then $100 for Windows 98, why should I pay >$300 for Vista Uber Edition?
If you aren't doing anything evil why do you need secrecy (or privacy)?
I'm hoping your questions is rhetorical. Let me give you a few examples:
Richard Nixon bugged John Lennon because he was a political opponent.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was on the CIA's watch list.
Illegal != evil. There are illegal activities in the USA that aren't evil. In order to avoid debate, I'll point to the past example of alcohol prohibition. Back in the 1920s, it was illegal to call up your buddy to sample his latest brew, although not evil.
I don't want my bank account information in any database that isn't mine.
Some people would prefer to keep their phone sex conversations private.
I completely agree; the SAT is the kind of test where the best approach is to practice. When I took my first practice SAT, (before the written part,) I scored in the 1200s. After a summer of taking roughly 1-2 practice tests per week, I ended up scoring in the 1300s.
As an aside, I do think there are some real benefits gained by practicing the SAT; I'm much better at avoiding scenarios where marketers try and trick me into giving them my money and time. I also learned how much weight rich Americans put into artificial and unreliable numbers; the SAT is only one of many ways used to judge incoming students; good schools know that it has its limitations. Did I need the extra 100 points on my SAT? Probably not, but I did learn some valuable skills from my tutor.
Another thing to consider: If I remember correctly, many American schools are more forgiving on SAT scores for non-Americans. If, after taking a practice SAT, your score is well in your target school's range, there's no point in trying to push it higher just to impress them with artificial numbers.
I was a teenager for most of the 90s, when the internet was new. I think the real concern with putting children on the public internet is that parents, (which I will be someday) fear that their children don't have the ability to make rational judgement about uncontrolled information.
While I can still remember my teenage years; I think the best approach is to not underestimate young people in their abilities to process information. Trust is key. I spent a significant amount of time visiting web sites that my parents would NOT approve of; yet as a result I've learned how to better discern fact from fiction. In some cases, I'm better then my parents in knowing when I'm reading manipulative information.
My mother was excellent when handling me as a teenager. She talked to me.
Will I allow my children complete, uncensored and unlogged access to the internet? Maybe not when they're very young & fragile... But, if memory serves me correctly, my peers who had restrictive parents (when it came to technology,) ended up worse then I did.
A few weeks ago the Comcast rep told me that Vonage was preventing my router from loading a configuration file from the modem. He also told me that Comcast put a secret configuration file on my computer that I could not see. He eventually convinced me that my router (with Vonage built-in) is flakey, but I didn't appreciate listening to twenty minutes worth of stories about hidden magic configuration files obscured by pixie dust.
Frankly, Comcast should (in theory) be able to provide better phone service then Vonage because they can garuntee better QOS. Is it worth it? Not for me, because I can just pull my cell phone out of my pocket if there's a problem.
CDs lack an infinitely variable volume level. At 16 bits of resolution, there are 65,536 possible volume levels (including silence), in distinct steps. Normally one would never notice, but the limitations of digital DO have a profound effect while processing.
Your statement is misguided, although I will admit to having the same viewpoint when I was a novice audiophile. Lets consider how biology, analouge recordings, and physics work! There is no such thing as an "infinitely variable volume level". Let me explain:
When you hear, your ears transmit information to your brain by sending electrical impulses over neurons. An electron is like a bit, a neuron can't send half of an electron!
There is a limited number of molocules that hit your ear.
On an analouge tape, there are a limited number of molocules that can either have a positive or negative ionic charge. A molocule can't have a +0.2345 charge.
On a record, there are a limited number of molocules to guide the needle.
I could go on and on, but my point is, that at some point, physics, biology, and even analouge techniques limit you to a discrete amount of levels of loudness.
Thus, in the digital world, you can eventually reach a resolution that exceeds what you are capable of hearing.
In the real world, you're always hearing something. The quietest sound that you can hear is just slightly louder then background noise from wind, crickets, or your own ears ringing. In the analouge world, the quiestest sound you can hear is just slightly louder then the hiss that comes from the record or tape. This is called signal to noise ratio.
When someone says that an analouge recording has an "infinate" amount of loudness, they ignore that all analouge recordings are limited by the signal to noise ratio. Digital audio has a signal to noise ratio of roughly half of the smallest level of loudness.
I will explain how digital and analouge handle signal to noise ratio with a thought experiment. Let's say you have a sound with the following loudness levels:
10.6
-0.2
-11.8
0.7
A CD will record:
11
0
-12
1
Vinyl will record:
11.2
-0.6
-12.1
1.1
The difference between the original signal and the recorded signal is noise. On the CD, your ears will still hear the original sound, plus some hiss.
A problem with some of the early digital-to-analoge converters is that they were too agressive in removing noise. On an analouge recording, as a sound gets quieter, it gently fades into the hiss. Early A-D converters would abruptly set quiet sounds to 0. Advanced A-D converters add a small amount of noise that's too quiet to register, yet it allows quiet sounds to fade gently away. A very good A-D converter can allow you to record sounds that are quieter then 1 by adding the right amount of hiss.
Again, in conclusion, there is no such thing as infinate resolution. Good A-D converters simulate hiss to allow you to hear quiet sounds. By creating a digital medium with a very high resolution, it will be able to record everything that you can percieve.
I'm certainly not a Marketing Genius, but it seems to me that if the iTunes store really did sell $1,000,000 worth of movies in the first week, then maybe other studios will realize that pissing off Wal-Mart isn't such a big deal after all.
... But, the DVD-buying public isn't going to switch over to downloads overnight. It took DVD about 10 years to get to this level, and it'll take downloads longer because of the complexity in bringing an internet connection into the living room.
Let's be honest here, the half of the country that makes 30k / year and isn't technically savy isn't going to rush out and buy a HTPC or Apple's new iTV. They will continue to use their $30 DVD players until home networking becomes so cheap and easy that a $100 TV/iMac can get on the internet by simply plugging it into a wall socket.
Simply put, until Wall*Mart can sell a cheap internet-enabled TV that automagically uses broadband over the wall socket, the movie industry is going to have to rely on them for a significant portion of their sales.
About Creative Labs: I find their stuff is usually a good deal when you don't need to run their software. At work, I use a USB Sound Blaster Live for listening to music. It was a bargain at $50. The virtual 5.1 is useless if your source material is stereo, but it does sound excellent when listening to 5.1 music from DVD, (which I do).
I used to use a Watchman (portable personal TV) from time to time. It clearly wasn't a replacement for real TV, and it wasn't comfortable for extended viewings.
What did make it worth the hassle was that it could recieve normal TV. Can cell phones recieve normal TV?
The reason why I don't like internet dating is that you need to spend 10-20 minutes on an email so that you don't sound like an incompetant neanderthal.
In real life(TM), it's much easier to walk up to a girl, say hi, and figure out where the conversation goes... Then again, the problem with real life(TM) is finding places where there are girls who will be interested in you.
Which is well within the average 447 available; and gives scope for losses. So; it turns out it's not crazy to suggest you can get 500 miles on $9 worth of electricity.
...Until the government realizes that everyone is bypassing gasoline taxes. Gas taxes fund roads.
Slashdot Mirror
If you can find the guy running BitTorrent, ask him to lower his upload speed to something reasonable, like 26k. When I first started using BitTorrent, it would kill my network because it was flooding my UPSTREAM. (When your upstream is flooded, you can't initiate a connection to a web server.) By turning my upload speed to something managable, all of my problems went away. (Heck, I can even talk on my Vonage while downloading a busy torrent at full tilt.)
My $0.02:
It's my understanding that Google encourages its engineers to devote a certain percentage of their time on projects of their own choosing. Microsoft does not, but they're safer. If you're someone who can handle risk and likes to take time to play around with inventions, choose Google. If you're someone who wants to identify with a secure job in an established company, choose Microsoft.
That being stated, it's worth spending a few days in both the Bay area and the Seattle area to see which one is more livable. Seatle, (as far as I know,) has a better girl/guy ratio... But this week I saw a kick-ass Roger Waters concert a stone's throw away from Google's campus.
Funny, very people seem to realize that this would essentially prevent Sony's rootkit fiasco.
I wouldn't describe it like that. Take a look at this: Intel Pledges 80 Cores in Five Years.
Movie studios should just get out of the DVD business. Instead, they should sell .isos to retailers, and let the retailers print the DVDs.
No, gamers are perfectly happy playing their Atari 2600s on their black and white Zeniths.
The answer, deduced by simple economics, is that music is too expensive. Let's say a teenager makes, after taxes, $5 per hour. A legal album costs two hours of work. For two hours of time spent on the illegal P2P networks, the teen can get much more.
As a result, the music industry might want to consider selling downloads for about $3 / album. Specifically, the music industry is getting commoditized. There's no reason to spend $10 / downloaded album when the overhead is much less then a CD.
My employer has a rather liberal telecommuting policy, which is further enhanced by the fact that most people I work with on a day-to-day basis are in offices that are at least 3 hours away. With the exception of the rare times that I get to have real face time with my co-workers, it really doesn't matter where my physical body is when I work.
The third-place working style really does come in handy. It's great when you can drive to the mechanic on a slow afternoon and hop on to their wireless. I've also used it to extend family visits by telecommuting from my parents' back porch. Sometimes I wonder why my employer paid to relocate me when everyone I work with is at least 140 miles away.
I'm really getting tempted to start taking "work-cations", where I telecommute and travel at the same time.
About 5 years ago, Verizon had a silly system for handling acount plan changes in the middle of a billing cycle. If you changed your plan in the middle of a billing cycle, the computer would do this:
For example, I once upgraded from a 300 minute plan to a 1000 minute plan about 2 days into the beginning of a billing cycle. The computer decided that I was only allowed to have 12 minutes at the beginning of the month, and about 900 minutes for the rest of the billing cycle, and chaged me about $70 for a 50-minute call. Needless to say, I was rather pissed off when I only used a total of 400 minutes during a billing cycle, yet had a charge of $70 for going over my minutes.
I now go with T-Mobile pre-paid and Vonage.
What if all of the species have a common ancestor? Ever consider the evolutionary implications of the human race populating distant solar systems over the next millenia? We'll become different species, and eventually some will forget that we evolved from a common ancestor on earth... This could be accellerated if colonies use genetic engineering to adapt to other planets.
The answer to your question comes down to a simple rule called "Economies of Scale". Microsoft sells many more copies of their products then their open source competators, yet their price to develop software stays the same. Thus, because they can divide up their development costs among many more customers, they can charge less then the open source versions.
I think the real problem is that you don't understand what you're building. Why did you choose to go with open source in the first place? Was it for some fuzzy "feel-good" reason, or do you need closer control over the bits and bytes of your environment? If your answer was the latter, you could end up paying much, much, much more in choosing the closed source route because sometimes Windows just doesn't do what you want it to do unless you can coax some kind of shared source liscensing agreement with Microsoft.
Are you selling devices that will end up being special-purpose computers? In the long run, building on Windows will be more expensive because you'll need more powerful hardware in each unit that you sell. On the other hand, Windows might give you the advantage of moving to market faster.
Perhaps if Microsoft charged less for thier software it would be pirated less often? I paid less then $100 for Windows 98, why should I pay >$300 for Vista Uber Edition?
Where I live I can buy Green Power from the grid. It's much easier then a windmill, and I don't have to put up with a big fan on my property.
I'm hoping your questions is rhetorical. Let me give you a few examples:
I completely agree; the SAT is the kind of test where the best approach is to practice. When I took my first practice SAT, (before the written part,) I scored in the 1200s. After a summer of taking roughly 1-2 practice tests per week, I ended up scoring in the 1300s.
As an aside, I do think there are some real benefits gained by practicing the SAT; I'm much better at avoiding scenarios where marketers try and trick me into giving them my money and time. I also learned how much weight rich Americans put into artificial and unreliable numbers; the SAT is only one of many ways used to judge incoming students; good schools know that it has its limitations. Did I need the extra 100 points on my SAT? Probably not, but I did learn some valuable skills from my tutor.
Another thing to consider: If I remember correctly, many American schools are more forgiving on SAT scores for non-Americans. If, after taking a practice SAT, your score is well in your target school's range, there's no point in trying to push it higher just to impress them with artificial numbers.
On closer inspection, the spot is full of multiplying monoliths
How about this: Copyrights expire after 17 years, and DRMed media must keep a non-DRMed version in escrow?
I was a teenager for most of the 90s, when the internet was new. I think the real concern with putting children on the public internet is that parents, (which I will be someday) fear that their children don't have the ability to make rational judgement about uncontrolled information.
While I can still remember my teenage years; I think the best approach is to not underestimate young people in their abilities to process information. Trust is key. I spent a significant amount of time visiting web sites that my parents would NOT approve of; yet as a result I've learned how to better discern fact from fiction. In some cases, I'm better then my parents in knowing when I'm reading manipulative information.
My mother was excellent when handling me as a teenager. She talked to me.
Will I allow my children complete, uncensored and unlogged access to the internet? Maybe not when they're very young & fragile... But, if memory serves me correctly, my peers who had restrictive parents (when it came to technology,) ended up worse then I did.
A few weeks ago the Comcast rep told me that Vonage was preventing my router from loading a configuration file from the modem. He also told me that Comcast put a secret configuration file on my computer that I could not see. He eventually convinced me that my router (with Vonage built-in) is flakey, but I didn't appreciate listening to twenty minutes worth of stories about hidden magic configuration files obscured by pixie dust.
Frankly, Comcast should (in theory) be able to provide better phone service then Vonage because they can garuntee better QOS. Is it worth it? Not for me, because I can just pull my cell phone out of my pocket if there's a problem.
Your statement is misguided, although I will admit to having the same viewpoint when I was a novice audiophile. Lets consider how biology, analouge recordings, and physics work! There is no such thing as an "infinitely variable volume level". Let me explain:
I could go on and on, but my point is, that at some point, physics, biology, and even analouge techniques limit you to a discrete amount of levels of loudness.
Thus, in the digital world, you can eventually reach a resolution that exceeds what you are capable of hearing.
In the real world, you're always hearing something. The quietest sound that you can hear is just slightly louder then background noise from wind, crickets, or your own ears ringing. In the analouge world, the quiestest sound you can hear is just slightly louder then the hiss that comes from the record or tape. This is called signal to noise ratio.
When someone says that an analouge recording has an "infinate" amount of loudness, they ignore that all analouge recordings are limited by the signal to noise ratio. Digital audio has a signal to noise ratio of roughly half of the smallest level of loudness.
I will explain how digital and analouge handle signal to noise ratio with a thought experiment. Let's say you have a sound with the following loudness levels:
A CD will record:
Vinyl will record:
The difference between the original signal and the recorded signal is noise. On the CD, your ears will still hear the original sound, plus some hiss.
A problem with some of the early digital-to-analoge converters is that they were too agressive in removing noise. On an analouge recording, as a sound gets quieter, it gently fades into the hiss. Early A-D converters would abruptly set quiet sounds to 0. Advanced A-D converters add a small amount of noise that's too quiet to register, yet it allows quiet sounds to fade gently away. A very good A-D converter can allow you to record sounds that are quieter then 1 by adding the right amount of hiss.
Again, in conclusion, there is no such thing as infinate resolution. Good A-D converters simulate hiss to allow you to hear quiet sounds. By creating a digital medium with a very high resolution, it will be able to record everything that you can percieve.
... But, the DVD-buying public isn't going to switch over to downloads overnight. It took DVD about 10 years to get to this level, and it'll take downloads longer because of the complexity in bringing an internet connection into the living room.
Let's be honest here, the half of the country that makes 30k / year and isn't technically savy isn't going to rush out and buy a HTPC or Apple's new iTV. They will continue to use their $30 DVD players until home networking becomes so cheap and easy that a $100 TV/iMac can get on the internet by simply plugging it into a wall socket.
Simply put, until Wall*Mart can sell a cheap internet-enabled TV that automagically uses broadband over the wall socket, the movie industry is going to have to rely on them for a significant portion of their sales.
About Creative Labs: I find their stuff is usually a good deal when you don't need to run their software. At work, I use a USB Sound Blaster Live for listening to music. It was a bargain at $50. The virtual 5.1 is useless if your source material is stereo, but it does sound excellent when listening to 5.1 music from DVD, (which I do).
I used to use a Watchman (portable personal TV) from time to time. It clearly wasn't a replacement for real TV, and it wasn't comfortable for extended viewings.
What did make it worth the hassle was that it could recieve normal TV. Can cell phones recieve normal TV?
The reason why I don't like internet dating is that you need to spend 10-20 minutes on an email so that you don't sound like an incompetant neanderthal.
In real life(TM), it's much easier to walk up to a girl, say hi, and figure out where the conversation goes... Then again, the problem with real life(TM) is finding places where there are girls who will be interested in you.
...Until the government realizes that everyone is bypassing gasoline taxes. Gas taxes fund roads.