Everytime text messaging's 'true cost' is shown in an article they all make the same assumptions and selectively look at information to show just how much people are being ripped off.
Yes it uses a control channel that existed already. That doesn't mean this said channel hasn't had to be beefed up, the signal quality improved everywhere as what was acceptable for the odd, low priority message isn't good for large amounts of bandwidth being thrown around. Just like phone lines weren't designed for data but when they started being used for it, phone companies had to go around improving exchanges, replacing old wiring etc.
160bytes isn't much but that's still data that has undergo handshaking, be routed around a limited bandwidth network, processed to find the destination then sent to the destination phone. It's incredibly inefficient to do this for a small amount of data. It's also incredibly costly to manage lots of minuscule transactions. To price it on pure bandwidth costs is stupid. It costs phone companies a hell of a lot more to send 1000 texts than it does for a 3G user to download a 160kb image.
It's true for pretty much every business everywhere that if you do things in incredibly tiny properties, you're going to be charged through the roof. If I did a home delivery service from a supermarket and bought just 1 banana, that banana would cost me £5.10. If I ordered 100, each banana would cost me £0.15. It doesn't matter than my house is on the delivery truck's route and they'd use no additional petrol and only minimal time to deliver the single banana, I would still have an incredibly expensive banana.
Clearly no one has ever faked ID, given someone else's address for something, used their bank details or even just put on a wig and pretended to be someone else!
This entirely new type of crime can only come about because of speed cameras! If we didn't try to punish people breaking the law this kind of thing would never happen!
The problem with LEDs at the moment is that they give off an incredibly harsh, piercing light. Not sure if they're using phosphor coating or 3-colour LEDs to achieve the white light but the slightly blueish white they produce is pretty hard on the eyes.
Another problem is how well they handle fog and rain. Current streetlamps are chosen because the wavelengths they produce penetrate fog very well. If you've a light that doesn't penetrate fog, just gets reflected, it's a complete utter nightmare as you're illuminating the fog and making it even harder to see.
The only people who are able to sift through hundreds of thousands of lines of code and spot areas to improve on are people incredibly familiar with the code and probably the main development team. It is not easy to understand other people's code, it's even less easy to spot areas that can be optimised out of the blue.
Most improvements come after people have actually run the software, used the drivers, run benchmarks and noticed that the program is buggy or sluggish in certain areas.
Probably about as much chance of me complaining to Microsoft about bad performance and getting it fixed as going on a programs dev forums and making the same complaint.
I would get a whole lot less flaming and abuse from microsoft too.
Sorry, that's just a stupid argument. Because an application is closed source they're never going to boost performance? Because you can't see the source code, you don't know if it's drivers causing bad performance?
You can see through benchmarking and general usage where an application is falling down in performance terms, is doesn't matter if you've access to course code or not. You say Vista will never have it's performance boosted? Have you seen the comparisons between a clean install and the latest updated version?
One of the most obvious examples of clear bad drivers in OS' are graphics drivers, regardless of if it's Vista or Linux, closed drivers or open drivers, it's usually plainly obvious if drivers are resulting in bad performances.
Besides which, benchmarks are for the here and now. OpenGL drivers may improve for Linux, Vista may improve its file handling, JavaVMs may see better optimisation, heck, even the damn benchmarks will probably get updated. None of this has anything to do with open or closed source.
I love the way in every test test Vista loses it's "Ubuntu is faster" but in the test where Vista wins, they explain and excuse it going "bad opengl drivers".
Either give possible reasons for slow performance of one OS each time or don't do it at all. To excuse bad performances in a benchmark in such a selective manner reeks of bias. Who's to say the Vista performance gap wasn't caused by bad drivers? Indeed the a lot of the tests where it was slower are ones involving disk access and Vista is known for being slow at this sort of thing.
It's not usually the bandwidth that kills networks for BT (although it does if you're not careful), It's the hundreds of temporary connections and half open connections it does. Lots of routers weren't designed for this and give up the ghost. You can configure them to lessen this (port forwarding, limiting it in the client) but some routers just can take it. There are also lots of routers which degrade over time with heavy BT usage and need occasional reboots.
Bittorrent is incredibly wasteful for the initial seeding and is pretty intense on network equiptment. You have to be careful configuring all of the network settings, last thing you want is all of the stores either crashing their routers or maxing out the connections.
why not spread out the backups? Limit the bandwidth of the backups to allow enough regular traffic and have different stores send their backups on different days
And just imagine the reaction to Johnny Hughes if he'd sent an aggressive condesending email back.
A well reasoned, polite letter may not win someone other but an arrogant, militant letter will certainly succeed in angering them.
You have to 'waste time with fools' because most of the general public aren't as knowledgable and this same general public are the ones you need to convince.
I've lost all hope for RMS' own unique definition of freedom when with GPL v3 he introduced elements which restrict what you are allowed to actually code and how users are allowed to use code.
Just like freedom of speach involves the freedom to say things people don't like, freedom of code should involve being able to code what people don't like otherwise it isn't true freedom.
and with the letter she received, she'll likely feel justified in her viewpoint.
You don't (usually) see complaints departments in stores do you? Even if the person handling the complaint is correct, if you respond to a customer in the way he talked to you, he'll never come back. What's worse, he'll tell all his friends and they'll think twice about shopping there.
A polite, friendly, smartly written letter correcting her will educate this teacher more than 100 ranting letters ever will. If you change her viewpoint, she'll start talking to other teachers about "this linux thing" and you'll spread positivity.
Great, so he posted an incredibly arrogant, opinionated response to that letter and has done nothing to change the teachers viewpoint other than maybe think Linux users are all pricks.
The teacher was deeply wrong with her viewpoint but the best way to respond is to politely correct her and guide her to somewhere where she can read up more on it. That's likely to result in a much more lasting result.
Instead he goes on about Evil Microsoft conspiricy theories a stupid "Linux is better than windows in every single way" type rant. It's fine thinking one OS is better than the other but you're deluding yourself if you don't think there are things one OS does better than than the other (cue 'lol windows crashes better' replies).
You won't change people by belittling them and going on what frankly, would seem like crazed ravings to someone unfamiliar with OSS zealots.
Coca Cola contained 1/400th of a single grain of cocaine per ounce(check snopes). Cocaine in the drink was simply a bi-product of the extraction process and it only kept it in at all because if was the only way they had to keep their trademark.
Alcohol would be illegal if it wasn't so easily made. When something forms just from fruit going off, controlling it is an impossibility.
Likewise have you noticed how many countries are really clamping down on cigarettes? The only reason it's still legal at all is because millions are addicted to it. As time goes on, it's becoming more and more difficult to be a smoker and it tending towards outlawing tobacco.
Fat and sugars are required by the body. You will die if you don't consume them. Last time I checked, there isn't an RDA for THC, LSD, etc.
It's this kind of stupid reasoning that makes me despair at the legalisation movement.
The hemp one is another good'un. Hemp is ok for ropes (but it has major problems with rot) and canvas. It isn't however, good for clothes. It creases incredibly easily and heavy creasing actively damages it. Also doesn't take very well to a lot of washing powders and ironing. It's not a wonder material that will render cotton obsolete. It isn't a good replacement for paper either as paper has been able to be produced in a cheap, relatively envoironmentally friendly way with reknewable wood sources for about 70 years.
However a lot of these half truths and wishful thinking cloud the argument for legalisation. You try searching any of the major issues and you get flooded with pro-legalisation sites which give incredibly one sided viewpoints.
The trouble is, they don't say things 'as they are' they say things that fit in with their view. At least with with newspapers, the fact they'll get sued means they have to reign in their viewpoints. With bloggers they don't have to (or at least don't feel the need to).
They'll twist any story to meet their means any if they need to add cridibility to their viewpoint, 10 minutes on google will find you a view by someone who is incredibly qualified that will match the point you're trying to make. No matter how stupid.
The US election and the primaries brought out the very worst in the blogosphere. Take the whole Ron Paul fad. A commodity backed economy cannot and does not work in a global economy (evidenced by the fact that not a single country does it and the last attempts to create one failed). However suddenly everyone on the blogosphere who went crazy after Ron Paul went into overdrive. They found books that backed him, they found economists they'd never heard of before and built them up to be incredibly famous, powerful people who are never wrong.
Bloggers are after their scoop. They'll scan speeches for out of context quotes, twist around statistics, post slight glimmers of rumours as major exclusives. All so they can get Dugg or Reddit or whatever.
It also results in insane amounts of slander and libel. Rumours get posted as fact, fact checking is non-existant (is your average joe blogger really likely to have contacts who would be able to officially deny or confirm something?).
Reading blogs is often like reading a trashy tabloid, only they're even more comfortable posting outright lies.
Blogs can make a good starting point for finding info on something but overall they generally only post stuff that doesn't appear in papers or news channels because they lack the quality control or journalistic integrity of news organisations.
A lot of bloggers are being jailed I imagine for basically thinking the laws that journalists have to follow don't apply to them yet, when they get arrested they demand the protection journalists get.
Most common thing is libel. In some places this can be criminal but in most it's a civil offence. If you're posting "xyz did indecent things to a barnyard animal" and it's a post that is meant to be taken seriously, it's no different to doing the same thing in a newspaper. You're posting lies about someone in a public manner.
Other common areas on contention are court orders. Orders banning people from posting names and addresses (most commonly done to protect children involved in crimes or to stop lynch mobs being formed for people accused of a bad crime) apply to everyone, not just the big papers.
You don't have the automatic right to post classified or confidential information either. A good quote (from the UK Press complaints commision) is "something that is of interest to the public is not always in the public's interests". People may be fascinated that you've hacked in to Britney Spears' email account. Does that mean you should be able to publish her emails and not be punished? This is something a lot of bloggers need to realise.
Vista doesn't benchmark especially slow since the service pack. At most there's a single digit difference between it and XP. When properly patched the OS performs well.
File transfers are slow in general in Vista, it has little to do with DRM.
Device manufacturers have had what, 5 years to develop 64bit drivers? 32bit has run the course, it's not Microsoft's fault that hardware manufacturers are lazy when it comes to this.
That RAM is no good if Vista can't properly address it, likewise with VRAM which Vista has to take into account, that eats up ram, IIRC XP uses even less of 4gb. If you're hitting the limit, there's a perfect fine 64bit vista with a strong 32bit VM/emulator.
How do you build a case that Windows 7 will fail because of Vista? All the signs point to them having tried to fix all the issues that affected Vista.
Microsoft never promised that it would benchmark better than Vista (a patched, up to date Vista actually benchmarks favourably to XP). What is faster and smoother is the user experience rather than pure number crunching.
You also get a fully GUI before display drivers are installed and it's smooth too. Not even Windows 9x could do a smooth GUI without drivers.
Also, according to Wikipedia, the betas have been released to "close partners" and employees of Microsoft; neither of these seem like impartial reviewers to me.
And people who have discovered the wonders of Bittorrent.:P
There's even a patch floating around now that re-enables some of the disabled functions that weren't fully finished for the beta.
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Yes it uses a control channel that existed already. That doesn't mean this said channel hasn't had to be beefed up, the signal quality improved everywhere as what was acceptable for the odd, low priority message isn't good for large amounts of bandwidth being thrown around. Just like phone lines weren't designed for data but when they started being used for it, phone companies had to go around improving exchanges, replacing old wiring etc.
160bytes isn't much but that's still data that has undergo handshaking, be routed around a limited bandwidth network, processed to find the destination then sent to the destination phone. It's incredibly inefficient to do this for a small amount of data. It's also incredibly costly to manage lots of minuscule transactions. To price it on pure bandwidth costs is stupid. It costs phone companies a hell of a lot more to send 1000 texts than it does for a 3G user to download a 160kb image.
It's true for pretty much every business everywhere that if you do things in incredibly tiny properties, you're going to be charged through the roof. If I did a home delivery service from a supermarket and bought just 1 banana, that banana would cost me £5.10. If I ordered 100, each banana would cost me £0.15. It doesn't matter than my house is on the delivery truck's route and they'd use no additional petrol and only minimal time to deliver the single banana, I would still have an incredibly expensive banana.
How is being convicted on the basis of a speed camera any worse than convicting someone from CCTV footage?
This entirely new type of crime can only come about because of speed cameras! If we didn't try to punish people breaking the law this kind of thing would never happen!
Perjury is only when under oath. Unless done to commit a crime (libel, fraud, etc) you're allowed to lie as much as you want.
Another problem is how well they handle fog and rain. Current streetlamps are chosen because the wavelengths they produce penetrate fog very well. If you've a light that doesn't penetrate fog, just gets reflected, it's a complete utter nightmare as you're illuminating the fog and making it even harder to see.
Most improvements come after people have actually run the software, used the drivers, run benchmarks and noticed that the program is buggy or sluggish in certain areas.
I would get a whole lot less flaming and abuse from microsoft too.
Sorry, that's just a stupid argument. Because an application is closed source they're never going to boost performance? Because you can't see the source code, you don't know if it's drivers causing bad performance?
You can see through benchmarking and general usage where an application is falling down in performance terms, is doesn't matter if you've access to course code or not. You say Vista will never have it's performance boosted? Have you seen the comparisons between a clean install and the latest updated version?
One of the most obvious examples of clear bad drivers in OS' are graphics drivers, regardless of if it's Vista or Linux, closed drivers or open drivers, it's usually plainly obvious if drivers are resulting in bad performances.
Besides which, benchmarks are for the here and now. OpenGL drivers may improve for Linux, Vista may improve its file handling, JavaVMs may see better optimisation, heck, even the damn benchmarks will probably get updated. None of this has anything to do with open or closed source.
Either give possible reasons for slow performance of one OS each time or don't do it at all. To excuse bad performances in a benchmark in such a selective manner reeks of bias. Who's to say the Vista performance gap wasn't caused by bad drivers? Indeed the a lot of the tests where it was slower are ones involving disk access and Vista is known for being slow at this sort of thing.
It's not usually the bandwidth that kills networks for BT (although it does if you're not careful), It's the hundreds of temporary connections and half open connections it does. Lots of routers weren't designed for this and give up the ghost. You can configure them to lessen this (port forwarding, limiting it in the client) but some routers just can take it. There are also lots of routers which degrade over time with heavy BT usage and need occasional reboots.
why not spread out the backups? Limit the bandwidth of the backups to allow enough regular traffic and have different stores send their backups on different days
A well reasoned, polite letter may not win someone other but an arrogant, militant letter will certainly succeed in angering them.
You have to 'waste time with fools' because most of the general public aren't as knowledgable and this same general public are the ones you need to convince.
Just like freedom of speach involves the freedom to say things people don't like, freedom of code should involve being able to code what people don't like otherwise it isn't true freedom.
People have a habbit of wanting to entrench themselves the more they feel oppressed or belittled and they'll look for allies to join them.
You don't (usually) see complaints departments in stores do you? Even if the person handling the complaint is correct, if you respond to a customer in the way he talked to you, he'll never come back. What's worse, he'll tell all his friends and they'll think twice about shopping there.
A polite, friendly, smartly written letter correcting her will educate this teacher more than 100 ranting letters ever will. If you change her viewpoint, she'll start talking to other teachers about "this linux thing" and you'll spread positivity.
The teacher was deeply wrong with her viewpoint but the best way to respond is to politely correct her and guide her to somewhere where she can read up more on it. That's likely to result in a much more lasting result.
Instead he goes on about Evil Microsoft conspiricy theories a stupid "Linux is better than windows in every single way" type rant. It's fine thinking one OS is better than the other but you're deluding yourself if you don't think there are things one OS does better than than the other (cue 'lol windows crashes better' replies).
You won't change people by belittling them and going on what frankly, would seem like crazed ravings to someone unfamiliar with OSS zealots.
Coca Cola contained 1/400th of a single grain of cocaine per ounce(check snopes). Cocaine in the drink was simply a bi-product of the extraction process and it only kept it in at all because if was the only way they had to keep their trademark.
Likewise have you noticed how many countries are really clamping down on cigarettes? The only reason it's still legal at all is because millions are addicted to it. As time goes on, it's becoming more and more difficult to be a smoker and it tending towards outlawing tobacco.
It's this kind of stupid reasoning that makes me despair at the legalisation movement.
The hemp one is another good'un. Hemp is ok for ropes (but it has major problems with rot) and canvas. It isn't however, good for clothes. It creases incredibly easily and heavy creasing actively damages it. Also doesn't take very well to a lot of washing powders and ironing. It's not a wonder material that will render cotton obsolete. It isn't a good replacement for paper either as paper has been able to be produced in a cheap, relatively envoironmentally friendly way with reknewable wood sources for about 70 years.
However a lot of these half truths and wishful thinking cloud the argument for legalisation. You try searching any of the major issues and you get flooded with pro-legalisation sites which give incredibly one sided viewpoints.
They'll twist any story to meet their means any if they need to add cridibility to their viewpoint, 10 minutes on google will find you a view by someone who is incredibly qualified that will match the point you're trying to make. No matter how stupid.
The US election and the primaries brought out the very worst in the blogosphere. Take the whole Ron Paul fad. A commodity backed economy cannot and does not work in a global economy (evidenced by the fact that not a single country does it and the last attempts to create one failed). However suddenly everyone on the blogosphere who went crazy after Ron Paul went into overdrive. They found books that backed him, they found economists they'd never heard of before and built them up to be incredibly famous, powerful people who are never wrong.
Bloggers are after their scoop. They'll scan speeches for out of context quotes, twist around statistics, post slight glimmers of rumours as major exclusives. All so they can get Dugg or Reddit or whatever.
Reading blogs is often like reading a trashy tabloid, only they're even more comfortable posting outright lies.
Blogs can make a good starting point for finding info on something but overall they generally only post stuff that doesn't appear in papers or news channels because they lack the quality control or journalistic integrity of news organisations.
Most common thing is libel. In some places this can be criminal but in most it's a civil offence. If you're posting "xyz did indecent things to a barnyard animal" and it's a post that is meant to be taken seriously, it's no different to doing the same thing in a newspaper. You're posting lies about someone in a public manner.
Other common areas on contention are court orders. Orders banning people from posting names and addresses (most commonly done to protect children involved in crimes or to stop lynch mobs being formed for people accused of a bad crime) apply to everyone, not just the big papers.
You don't have the automatic right to post classified or confidential information either. A good quote (from the UK Press complaints commision) is "something that is of interest to the public is not always in the public's interests". People may be fascinated that you've hacked in to Britney Spears' email account. Does that mean you should be able to publish her emails and not be punished? This is something a lot of bloggers need to realise.
File transfers are slow in general in Vista, it has little to do with DRM.
Device manufacturers have had what, 5 years to develop 64bit drivers? 32bit has run the course, it's not Microsoft's fault that hardware manufacturers are lazy when it comes to this.
That RAM is no good if Vista can't properly address it, likewise with VRAM which Vista has to take into account, that eats up ram, IIRC XP uses even less of 4gb. If you're hitting the limit, there's a perfect fine 64bit vista with a strong 32bit VM/emulator.
How do you build a case that Windows 7 will fail because of Vista? All the signs point to them having tried to fix all the issues that affected Vista.
You also get a fully GUI before display drivers are installed and it's smooth too. Not even Windows 9x could do a smooth GUI without drivers.
Also, according to Wikipedia, the betas have been released to "close partners" and employees of Microsoft; neither of these seem like impartial reviewers to me.
And people who have discovered the wonders of Bittorrent. :P
There's even a patch floating around now that re-enables some of the disabled functions that weren't fully finished for the beta.