Furthermore, queue... dick-measuring about how an hour of downtime for 16 users is totally unacceptable in "the enterprise" and how my users need five nines uptime, (even though all they do is play minesweeper and write reports). Insinuate anyone who would tolerate more than a minute a decade of switch downtime is a homeless, shoeless, neckbearded GNU/hippie. Quote federal regulations about reliability for nuclear reactor primary safety systems, vaguely hint that the stuff my users are working on is just as important/dangerous (it isn't; it's reports and minesweeper, but this is slashdot and appearances must be maintained). Cast aspersions upon the qualifications of anyone who thinks thin clients are reliable despite the crippling switch failure issue.
Without any pressure to keep that price down, there's no reason to lower prices.
Well, thanks for the tautology...
As far as I can tell, there's no competition forcing lower prices in residential wireline internet at all.
You can pay $30/month for DSL from the local phone monopoly, or you can pay $30/month for cable modem service from the cable monopoly for a 10mbps circuit. Or if you were in one of the test markets for FIOS, you can get that, and pay $100/mo for the same bit rate people in Japan are paying ~$15 for. Same as it's been since nineteen fracking ninety nine...
We are thrilled to hear your response to our offer of \/1A g R 4. However, as we are persons thus far unknown to you, in a country thus far unknown, who have contracted with other persons unknown to you in Russia and China to hire the services of 100,000 computers in 12 separated countries for to send our valuable messages to you we must reply to your filing of the law suit against us in California court with a "giggle" as they say in English. Good luck collecting on your defaults judgement.
So if I choose to have a wired landline with no added features and no long-distance service, it'll be like a nickel a month thanks to the power of multiple competing local carriers?
Sorry, no, it's $20 or (inflation adjusted) just about what it was in 1980. Stop trying to fit facts into your ideology like that, you're just hurting them both...
Maintain infrastructure? Shit, most of them don't intend to build any in the first place!
We've got a "deregulated" market in Texas, and most of the power providers competing for my energy dime don't own a single generator or a foot of wire. They're just arbitrageurs buying cheap power in one place, paying ERCOT to pipe it across the (highly-regulated, thus functional) grid to their customers (who are under contract to buy it for a higher price) and pocketing the difference.
We've got the same scheme in Texas. Electric bills changed from being a simple "Your used X KWH last month, pay us X * 0.10 dollars" to being like cell phone contracts with opaque pricing models, multitudinous fees, taxes, and surcharges, two-year commitments (with early termination fees), etc. Unsurprisingly, we now pay more on average than people in surrounding states where electricity is provided by a monopoly public utility...
It doesn't matter how many developers HURD had in the 90s, it still wouldn't be able to join a wi-fi network without loading the card's non-free firmware.
"And much like the PS2, I think the longer developers work with the machine, the better the games are going to get. For instance we are only using approximately 1/3 of the processing power of the SPUs on the Cell processor in Uncharted."
A less fanboyish way to put that would be "Once again, Sony has delivered a CPU/GPU architecture optimized to deliver amazing spec sheet numbers rather than amazing gameplay and visuals. We'll learn to compensate... eventually."
But then, you don't stay on Sony's good studios list by not being a PlayStation fanboy...
That's because they are looking at strings not intents or emotions. Language is not merely symbols there are whole other layers of information embedded in it.
...which you can only extract after parsing the strings and symbols!
Getting to the emotion and intent behind a sentence isn't a shortcut to having the computer to correctly interpret language, it's the next step that can only be taken after you solve the problem of getting the literal meaning.
What really needs to happen is that they need to stop looking at language and create models for what is the emotional content of each context they are measuring and what it is pointing at.
And how are you going to determine what a context is and what it "points at" without understanding the literal meaning of the sentence first? It's hard to figure out who to attach the negative emotional content of "pedophelia" to when you don't know whether the sentence containing it is about a molester or about the detective who busted him...
If you say Google or Facebook are the biggest threat to freedom on Internet: everyone yawns and says "well, duh!" and goes back to playing Farmville. If you say anything bad at all about Apple, the rabid haters (see: all the comments here so far) and the frothing fanboys (wait until this gets posted on TUAW or DaringFireball) show up in droves and drive your ad impressions (or book sales) through the roof.
T,FTFReality.
There's zero economic incentive to stand up an IPv6 service, and won't be until a critical mass of clients have only IPv6 connectivity (no IPv4). There's no economic incentive for an ISP to provide IPv6 unless the customers demand it, and they don't care because there aren't any services or content exclusively on IPv6.
It's sad to us geeks, but the future is an internet of many-layered NAT where connections can only be routed from end-user to well-known servers, not from end-user to end-user.
No, and since puppy kisses make me break out in hives, that's another point in favor of the security system......or a gun, or high explosives, or steel bear traps, or a pointy-teethed attack-bunny, or really anything except a dog.
"They're too late to join the game. The problem is that Facebook already has everyone you know, so everyone joins it because everyone else already is there. Some random mumblings about walled gardens and open source won't make normal people switch over."
This.
Remember the hordes of people who switched away from the walled gardens of AIM and MSN messenger to open-source federated Jabber networks? Yeah, me neither. Even the open source geeks kept an account on the proprietary networks because the value of a messaging network (like a social networking site) is in how many people that you want to talk to are connected.
"Bloatware (or, to use the more kind euphemism, 'Pre-installed software' that the computer manufacturer gets paid to include on a new PC)."
That's crapware. Bloatware is any software that's deemed by the/. crowd to take up too much disk/RAM/CPU time for what it does (mostly by using a runtime environment the slashdotter calling it bloatware doesn't like, such as Java or Mono or The Other Desktop's core libraries) but in some extreme cases using X11 at all, or even failure to be written in hand-tuned assembly are sufficient to earn the title "bloatware".
I won't argue there, but Sony hasn't been so bad with the PS3.... It's not like consumers have been totally shafted by Sony on this device.
Wait, what? That better be sarcasm.
Sony has been ESPECIALLY bad with the PS3. Back-compatibility with your PS2 games? Hope you bought a launch system. Want a controller with force-feedback? Hope you didn't buy a launch system, if you did you'll need to pony up another $40 each for new controllers. SD/MS/CF card readers? Gone. Spare USB ports? Gone. SACD playback? Gone (not likely anyone noticed, though) OtherOS? Gone.
Time to replace the old "It only does everything" slogan with something more in line with the current feature set, like "It only plays blu-ray movies and PS3 games"...
It's not a tax, nobody is withholding parking money from your paycheck or tacking it onto the price of everything you buy. It's a fee for service (something I thought all the/. armchair libertarian economists would approve of).
By occupying a parking space, you consume a limited resource. The meter (standing in for the resource's owner) extracts a fee proportional to the amount consumed. It's like something right out of market economics 101.
Slashdot: where we pretend to know everything there is to know about cross-compiling toolchains when the article is about porting netBSD to a microwave, and then pretend not to whenever someone mentions Independence Day...
"...but, in the end, the computer still is that magical logical machine. That's my view -- is it yours?"
No. At some point any sufficiently complex piece of deterministic logic becomes indistinguishable from randomness, and PCs are past that point for me. The beauty of the underlying logical machine is totally obscured by the apparent randomness of errors that go away after rebooting (or sometimes just issuing the same command again).
Some days my map prints perfectly, some days it comes out with extraneous pink lines all over Florida, some days it crashes the plotter so badly it needs a hard reset. Logically, I know the problem isn't "luck" or satanic printer gremlins, and that it must be some subtle, deterministic interaction between the source data, the GIS software, Windows, HP's print driver, and their plotter firmware, but damned if I have the time or the skill or the source code to track it down. It's easier to just mumble obscenities about wasting ink and paper and try again (faster, and more likely to result in a correct print, too).
And apparently so is theorizing about why we haven't heard from the aliens yet.
Maybe they killed themselves off in an awful world war. Maybe they poisoned their planet with chemical weapons. Maybe they poisoned their planet with radioactive fallout, triggered nuclear winter, and all froze in the radioactive dark. Maybe they discovered Communism, and turned into an unfeeling murderous hive-mind, and then starved to death. Maybe they discovered CO2-emitting energy sources, and runaway climate change did them in. Maybe terrorist nanotech turned them into grey goo. Maybe they're too busy playing video games seek out new life, new civilizations, and new green-skinned hotties.
Somehow no matter what the theory is, it reads like a tract condemning whatever humanity is doing wrong at the time, rather than a serious attempt at squaring the Drake equation with our lack of credible signals from extraterrestrial life.
Slashdot Mirror
Anticipating Linux on the Desktop is so 2001. Ubiquitous Android tablets are the new mobile equivalent of LotD.
Furthermore, queue... dick-measuring about how an hour of downtime for 16 users is totally unacceptable in "the enterprise" and how my users need five nines uptime, (even though all they do is play minesweeper and write reports). Insinuate anyone who would tolerate more than a minute a decade of switch downtime is a homeless, shoeless, neckbearded GNU/hippie. Quote federal regulations about reliability for nuclear reactor primary safety systems, vaguely hint that the stuff my users are working on is just as important/dangerous (it isn't; it's reports and minesweeper, but this is slashdot and appearances must be maintained). Cast aspersions upon the qualifications of anyone who thinks thin clients are reliable despite the crippling switch failure issue.
Without any pressure to keep that price down, there's no reason to lower prices.
Well, thanks for the tautology...
As far as I can tell, there's no competition forcing lower prices in residential wireline internet at all.
You can pay $30/month for DSL from the local phone monopoly, or you can pay $30/month for cable modem service from the cable monopoly for a 10mbps circuit. Or if you were in one of the test markets for FIOS, you can get that, and pay $100/mo for the same bit rate people in Japan are paying ~$15 for. Same as it's been since nineteen fracking ninety nine...
Dear Dan,
We are thrilled to hear your response to our offer of \/1A g R 4. However, as we are persons thus far unknown to you, in a country thus far unknown, who have contracted with other persons unknown to you in Russia and China to hire the services of 100,000 computers in 12 separated countries for to send our valuable messages to you we must reply to your filing of the law suit against us in California court with a "giggle" as they say in English. Good luck collecting on your defaults judgement.
OXOX,
Vladimir and ???
So if I choose to have a wired landline with no added features and no long-distance service, it'll be like a nickel a month thanks to the power of multiple competing local carriers?
Sorry, no, it's $20 or (inflation adjusted) just about what it was in 1980. Stop trying to fit facts into your ideology like that, you're just hurting them both...
Maintain infrastructure? Shit, most of them don't intend to build any in the first place!
We've got a "deregulated" market in Texas, and most of the power providers competing for my energy dime don't own a single generator or a foot of wire. They're just arbitrageurs buying cheap power in one place, paying ERCOT to pipe it across the (highly-regulated, thus functional) grid to their customers (who are under contract to buy it for a higher price) and pocketing the difference.
We've got the same scheme in Texas. Electric bills changed from being a simple "Your used X KWH last month, pay us X * 0.10 dollars" to being like cell phone contracts with opaque pricing models, multitudinous fees, taxes, and surcharges, two-year commitments (with early termination fees), etc. Unsurprisingly, we now pay more on average than people in surrounding states where electricity is provided by a monopoly public utility...
It doesn't matter how many developers HURD had in the 90s, it still wouldn't be able to join a wi-fi network without loading the card's non-free firmware.
His numbers don't include holidays I think.
And correctly so, because employers are not required to pay you for holidays here.
I don't think they're even required to allow you to take unpaid time off for holidays...
"And much like the PS2, I think the longer developers work with the machine, the better the games are going to get. For instance we are only using approximately 1/3 of the processing power of the SPUs on the Cell processor in Uncharted."
A less fanboyish way to put that would be "Once again, Sony has delivered a CPU/GPU architecture optimized to deliver amazing spec sheet numbers rather than amazing gameplay and visuals. We'll learn to compensate... eventually."
But then, you don't stay on Sony's good studios list by not being a PlayStation fanboy...
That's because they are looking at strings not intents or emotions. Language is not merely symbols there are whole other layers of information embedded in it.
...which you can only extract after parsing the strings and symbols!
Getting to the emotion and intent behind a sentence isn't a shortcut to having the computer to correctly interpret language, it's the next step that can only be taken after you solve the problem of getting the literal meaning.
What really needs to happen is that they need to stop looking at language and create models for what is the emotional content of each context they are measuring and what it is pointing at.
And how are you going to determine what a context is and what it "points at" without understanding the literal meaning of the sentence first? It's hard to figure out who to attach the negative emotional content of "pedophelia" to when you don't know whether the sentence containing it is about a molester or about the detective who busted him...
"Mechwarrior 3"
Yes, please! "Reactor online, weapons online, sensors online. All systems nominal. *chirp*"
Bingo. He's playing the John C Dvorak strategy.
If you say Google or Facebook are the biggest threat to freedom on Internet: everyone yawns and says "well, duh!" and goes back to playing Farmville. If you say anything bad at all about Apple, the rabid haters (see: all the comments here so far) and the frothing fanboys (wait until this gets posted on TUAW or DaringFireball) show up in droves and drive your ad impressions (or book sales) through the roof.
...the ongoing move to IPv6 is impossible.
T,FTFReality.
There's zero economic incentive to stand up an IPv6 service, and won't be until a critical mass of clients have only IPv6 connectivity (no IPv4). There's no economic incentive for an ISP to provide IPv6 unless the customers demand it, and they don't care because there aren't any services or content exclusively on IPv6.
It's sad to us geeks, but the future is an internet of many-layered NAT where connections can only be routed from end-user to well-known servers, not from end-user to end-user.
We still rely on them because passwords are free and compatible with 99% of installed meatware.
No, and since puppy kisses make me break out in hives, that's another point in favor of the security system... ...or a gun, or high explosives, or steel bear traps, or a pointy-teethed attack-bunny, or really anything except a dog.
"They're too late to join the game. The problem is that Facebook already has everyone you know, so everyone joins it because everyone else already is there. Some random mumblings about walled gardens and open source won't make normal people switch over."
This.
Remember the hordes of people who switched away from the walled gardens of AIM and MSN messenger to open-source federated Jabber networks? Yeah, me neither. Even the open source geeks kept an account on the proprietary networks because the value of a messaging network (like a social networking site) is in how many people that you want to talk to are connected.
WebM is a container format, it's a subset of MKV (hence the name: WebM = Matroska for the web).
"Bloatware (or, to use the more kind euphemism, 'Pre-installed software' that the computer manufacturer gets paid to include on a new PC)."
/. crowd to take up too much disk/RAM/CPU time for what it does (mostly by using a runtime environment the slashdotter calling it bloatware doesn't like, such as Java or Mono or The Other Desktop's core libraries) but in some extreme cases using X11 at all, or even failure to be written in hand-tuned assembly are sufficient to earn the title "bloatware".
That's crapware. Bloatware is any software that's deemed by the
I won't argue there, but Sony hasn't been so bad with the PS3. ... It's not like consumers have been totally shafted by Sony on this device.
Wait, what? That better be sarcasm.
Sony has been ESPECIALLY bad with the PS3. Back-compatibility with your PS2 games? Hope you bought a launch system. Want a controller with force-feedback? Hope you didn't buy a launch system, if you did you'll need to pony up another $40 each for new controllers. SD/MS/CF card readers? Gone. Spare USB ports? Gone. SACD playback? Gone (not likely anyone noticed, though) OtherOS? Gone.
Time to replace the old "It only does everything" slogan with something more in line with the current feature set, like "It only plays blu-ray movies and PS3 games"...
It's not a tax, nobody is withholding parking money from your paycheck or tacking it onto the price of everything you buy. It's a fee for service (something I thought all the /. armchair libertarian economists would approve of).
By occupying a parking space, you consume a limited resource. The meter (standing in for the resource's owner) extracts a fee proportional to the amount consumed. It's like something right out of market economics 101.
Slashdot: where we pretend to know everything there is to know about cross-compiling toolchains when the article is about porting netBSD to a microwave, and then pretend not to whenever someone mentions Independence Day...
"...but, in the end, the computer still is that magical logical machine. That's my view -- is it yours?"
No. At some point any sufficiently complex piece of deterministic logic becomes indistinguishable from randomness, and PCs are past that point for me. The beauty of the underlying logical machine is totally obscured by the apparent randomness of errors that go away after rebooting (or sometimes just issuing the same command again). Some days my map prints perfectly, some days it comes out with extraneous pink lines all over Florida, some days it crashes the plotter so badly it needs a hard reset. Logically, I know the problem isn't "luck" or satanic printer gremlins, and that it must be some subtle, deterministic interaction between the source data, the GIS software, Windows, HP's print driver, and their plotter firmware, but damned if I have the time or the skill or the source code to track it down. It's easier to just mumble obscenities about wasting ink and paper and try again (faster, and more likely to result in a correct print, too).
"7. I can install what I want.*"
*Provided that what you want exists for Android (and in some cases your phone's specific flavor of Android), which it probably doesn't.
And apparently so is theorizing about why we haven't heard from the aliens yet.
Maybe they killed themselves off in an awful world war. Maybe they poisoned their planet with chemical weapons. Maybe they poisoned their planet with radioactive fallout, triggered nuclear winter, and all froze in the radioactive dark. Maybe they discovered Communism, and turned into an unfeeling murderous hive-mind, and then starved to death. Maybe they discovered CO2-emitting energy sources, and runaway climate change did them in. Maybe terrorist nanotech turned them into grey goo. Maybe they're too busy playing video games seek out new life, new civilizations, and new green-skinned hotties.
Somehow no matter what the theory is, it reads like a tract condemning whatever humanity is doing wrong at the time, rather than a serious attempt at squaring the Drake equation with our lack of credible signals from extraterrestrial life.