It gets mentioned so often it's almost cliche, but I have to invoke the broken window fallacy.
South Korea is going to blow a crap load of taxpayer money to subsidize a project that will have marginal real benefit. Not to mention the capital invested by the telecoms. Sure, it will create 120,000 jobs. You could also pay 120,000 people to dig holes and fill them back up again. That would not be a "win" for the Korean economy.
What is the opportunity cost, in terms of job creation, of removing that spending money from consumer's hands? How many jobs would the telecoms have created if they'd invested their portion of this project's cost into other areas instead?
Previously I'd tested current and nightly versions of Safari/Webkit, FireFox, Opera and IE. I tested IE8 RC1 on the same machine under the same conditions. Results here. Short story is that RC1 significantly outperforms Beta2, but still falls short of the competition. It also seems to have added some regexp code that lets it perform freakishly well on Dromaeo's "regular expressions" suite.
The problem with Palin's Yahoo use is that it was secret, for one, and second that the emails involved govt. business but weren't recorded anywhere. So, as long as the mails sent and received using Gmail are subsequently archived somewhere, there's no problem. Whether they will be? Who knows.
To your point, though...if something of this nature were ever implemented, I'm almost positive it would involve a relatively large amount of "free" bandwidth before overage charges started to apply. So unless you were uploading 16GB worth of photos every day for an entire month, your usage would probably stay under the limit.
As I've said before, spam is an economic problem. It won't go away until you remove the economic incentive to send it. Spam is sent out because people can make money by sending it, plain and simple. If something meaningful was done to remove the incentive to send spam, then it would go away.
Given that a lot of spam is blasted out by infected PCs, if ISPs implemented a pay-per-bandwidth scheme it might have the side effect of motivating end users to be more conscientious about security. Suddenly getting stuck with a $200 monthly bill might wake some people up.
This doesn't do anything to dismantle the economic incentive to send spam; it just might increase the difficulty of assembling large bot nets.
When I still checked my mail on a BSD machine using pine, I had a complex scheme set up using custom IP filters + SpamAssassin. After all that work, I still had 5 or 6 slip through each day out of approximately 140. Since switching to gmail, maybe one slips through per week.
Ironically, thanks to google, Gates prediction is largely true. For me, at least. Spam is a complete afterthought.
Does it bother anyone that Ubuntu, the community's duly annointed challenger to Microsoft hegemony, had an outstanding bug for fourteen months whose effect was to damage hardware? That's pretty terrible.
When I had Time Warner cable, the speeds topped out at 10 Mbit/s. The author of the article echoes this when he states "I think it's 10 mega bits per second to 12 mbps".
Assuming that's right, the problem isn't that Windows is slow, it's that bandwidth.com's benchmarking application is either broken on that particular version of Ubuntu or on the particular browser he's using. "Broken" in the sense that it's reporting speeds twice as high as what he's actually achieving.
Ummm...okay? I don't recall suggesting that nobody works that much. But I'd say the same thing to them that I said to the original poster: hope it's worth it.
If you or your family is going to be suffer should you not work 80 hours per week then I would consider that level of workload to be "worth it". That said, most people, and almost certainly the guy I responded to, probably aren't in that situation.
Most likely he works those hours because 1) he has one of the "cool" IT jobs, for which the demand is so high that employers can require those sort of hours, or 2) he wants to have a posh house, posh clothes, posh car, etc. Hence my comment, "hope it's worth it". For me, those things aren't "worth" the "cost" of working regular 80 hour weeks.
My post wasn't meant to suggest that the 9/80 plan was "miserable". With 9/80 you're still working 80 hours every two weeks, for an average of 40/wk. The guy I responded to claimed that he worked 80 hours per week on average, with a low of 60/wk and high of 100/wk.
If the internet is "just like the real world" then it should be noted that most parents don't let their kids run around out in the "real world" unsupervised. In other words, if the analogy holds, then I shouldn't let my kid on the net without looking over his/her shoulder the whole time. I doubt that's how most parents operate.
There are two types of "danger". The kind that comes looking for you, e.g. sexual predators, and the kind you go looking for, e.g. age-inappropriate content. With regard to the latter, the net really is "less safe" than the "real world", since in the "real world" there are age restrictions placed on the purchase of inappropriate content. On the net its widely available free of charge.
It's XMPP with custom extensions to support voice, and possibly other features as well. From the horse's mouth:
Google Talk uses extensions to XMPP for voice signaling and peer-to-peer communication. Source code and documentation for these extensions is now available.
In addition, these extensions are in the process of being reviewed by the XMPP standards body as official enhancements (known as XEPs) to the standard. Note that the source code for Google Talk's current implementation of these extensions varies slightly from the proposed specs. Upon ratification of the specs, Google Talk (and the source code) will be updated to be in full compliance.
So basically he doesn't know whether their datacentres are plugged into coal power plants or nuclear plants, he's just making wild assumptions?
If they're located in the United States then they're almost certainly getting some percentage of their power from coal. If they happen to be getting a large percentage from hydro-electric, then they're driving up the cost and possibly preventing other consumers in the general area from getting 100% of their energy from hydro-electric. Same goes for nuclear.
Plus it's making it sound like Google gets the job done redundantly and you get the result from whichever does the job the fastest, which is obviously balls.
While it's true that Google doesn't use competing servers in that sense, it is true that a single will burn cycles on multiple machines. This description of Google's architecture talks about how a given query's terms are queried in different "barrels", which presumably may reside on different machines. In order to achieve the sort of latency they do, the process is a great deal more complicated than, say, a single query on a local database.
That's funny because mine generates 0g per hour. It's called nuclear power.
Where do you live that has 100% nuclear power? How was the nuclear plant constructed? How was the uranium mined and processed? How do the plant employees get to work? Nothing is free. If you really do live somewhere with 100% nuclear power then, yes, your footprint is much smaller than someone consuming coal-based power. But it's not non-existent.
Let's overlook the fact that most of electricity in New Zealand is produced by hydropower stations.
Were all the recipients of these tweets located in New Zealand? No. You also exaggerate the extent to which New Zealand is powered by hydro power. The latest statistics I found indicate about 54% of Kiwi power is hydro-electric. Another 11% is geothermal and wind. 24% is natural gas and 10% is coal.
Honestly, if you want voice, pick up a phone. Or use Skype if your motivation is to avoid charges. I'll cede that Google Talk (the client) isn't 100% available on non-Windows platforms. But I'll add that the portion 99% of its users actually use, i.e. IM, is 100% available on non-Windows platforms by way of Pidgin, Adium, etc.
There's benefit to having broad OS availability. Safari is available on OS X and Windows but not Linux. Safari is also pretty closed as far as plug-ins are concerned. So is Chrome, at the moment, but they're working to rectify that. If Safari ran on Linux and had an open platform for add-ons, I'd be more inclined to agree with you that there's no need for Chrome.
Presumably Google's other motivation is to provide a run-time environment for future web-based applications they might release. If they own the browser on which these applications will run, they can more easily remedy any bugs or performance concerns that crop up instead of having to wait for a third-party to take care of them.
This seems like an instance where "most bang for your buck" comes into play. IMO Google doesn't need to offer the full flexibility of FireFox as long as they provide replacements for the most popular plug-ins. In other words: Ad-Block Plus, Foxmarks, GreaseMonkey and FireBug.
Ad blocking, and "content blocking" in a more general sense, has always struck me as a task that should be "built in" to a browser instead of handled by a plug-in. Possibly also bookmark synchronization. GreaseMonkey and FireBug are more niche, so they seem well-suited to the plug-in model.
I'm using a 5 year old P4 2.4ghz Northwood w/ 1GB RAM. Works fine for web browsing, youtube, etc. Heck, I can even fire up Eclipse and do some development work and it's pretty bearable.
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It gets mentioned so often it's almost cliche, but I have to invoke the broken window fallacy.
South Korea is going to blow a crap load of taxpayer money to subsidize a project that will have marginal real benefit. Not to mention the capital invested by the telecoms. Sure, it will create 120,000 jobs. You could also pay 120,000 people to dig holes and fill them back up again. That would not be a "win" for the Korean economy.
What is the opportunity cost, in terms of job creation, of removing that spending money from consumer's hands? How many jobs would the telecoms have created if they'd invested their portion of this project's cost into other areas instead?
Previously I'd tested current and nightly versions of Safari/Webkit, FireFox, Opera and IE. I tested IE8 RC1 on the same machine under the same conditions. Results here. Short story is that RC1 significantly outperforms Beta2, but still falls short of the competition. It also seems to have added some regexp code that lets it perform freakishly well on Dromaeo's "regular expressions" suite.
Yep. Well, it would thwart botnets for the purpose of sending spam. I guess they could still potentially be used to orchestrate DDoS attacks.
The problem with Palin's Yahoo use is that it was secret, for one, and second that the emails involved govt. business but weren't recorded anywhere. So, as long as the mails sent and received using Gmail are subsequently archived somewhere, there's no problem. Whether they will be? Who knows.
Yes. Same amount of data, right?
To your point, though...if something of this nature were ever implemented, I'm almost positive it would involve a relatively large amount of "free" bandwidth before overage charges started to apply. So unless you were uploading 16GB worth of photos every day for an entire month, your usage would probably stay under the limit.
Given that a lot of spam is blasted out by infected PCs, if ISPs implemented a pay-per-bandwidth scheme it might have the side effect of motivating end users to be more conscientious about security. Suddenly getting stuck with a $200 monthly bill might wake some people up.
This doesn't do anything to dismantle the economic incentive to send spam; it just might increase the difficulty of assembling large bot nets.
When I still checked my mail on a BSD machine using pine, I had a complex scheme set up using custom IP filters + SpamAssassin. After all that work, I still had 5 or 6 slip through each day out of approximately 140. Since switching to gmail, maybe one slips through per week.
Ironically, thanks to google, Gates prediction is largely true. For me, at least. Spam is a complete afterthought.
Does it bother anyone that Ubuntu, the community's duly annointed challenger to Microsoft hegemony, had an outstanding bug for fourteen months whose effect was to damage hardware? That's pretty terrible.
When I had Time Warner cable, the speeds topped out at 10 Mbit/s. The author of the article echoes this when he states "I think it's 10 mega bits per second to 12 mbps".
Assuming that's right, the problem isn't that Windows is slow, it's that bandwidth.com's benchmarking application is either broken on that particular version of Ubuntu or on the particular browser he's using. "Broken" in the sense that it's reporting speeds twice as high as what he's actually achieving.
I'll see your "do the damned math" and raise you one "read the damned post".
The guy I was responding to says he works 80 hours in a normal week.
Ummm...okay? I don't recall suggesting that nobody works that much. But I'd say the same thing to them that I said to the original poster: hope it's worth it.
If you or your family is going to be suffer should you not work 80 hours per week then I would consider that level of workload to be "worth it". That said, most people, and almost certainly the guy I responded to, probably aren't in that situation.
Most likely he works those hours because 1) he has one of the "cool" IT jobs, for which the demand is so high that employers can require those sort of hours, or 2) he wants to have a posh house, posh clothes, posh car, etc. Hence my comment, "hope it's worth it". For me, those things aren't "worth" the "cost" of working regular 80 hour weeks.
My post wasn't meant to suggest that the 9/80 plan was "miserable". With 9/80 you're still working 80 hours every two weeks, for an average of 40/wk. The guy I responded to claimed that he worked 80 hours per week on average, with a low of 60/wk and high of 100/wk.
If the internet is "just like the real world" then it should be noted that most parents don't let their kids run around out in the "real world" unsupervised. In other words, if the analogy holds, then I shouldn't let my kid on the net without looking over his/her shoulder the whole time. I doubt that's how most parents operate.
There are two types of "danger". The kind that comes looking for you, e.g. sexual predators, and the kind you go looking for, e.g. age-inappropriate content. With regard to the latter, the net really is "less safe" than the "real world", since in the "real world" there are age restrictions placed on the purchase of inappropriate content. On the net its widely available free of charge.
Hope it's worth it. That sounds miserable.
It's XMPP with custom extensions to support voice, and possibly other features as well. From the horse's mouth:
If they're located in the United States then they're almost certainly getting some percentage of their power from coal. If they happen to be getting a large percentage from hydro-electric, then they're driving up the cost and possibly preventing other consumers in the general area from getting 100% of their energy from hydro-electric. Same goes for nuclear.
While it's true that Google doesn't use competing servers in that sense, it is true that a single will burn cycles on multiple machines. This description of Google's architecture talks about how a given query's terms are queried in different "barrels", which presumably may reside on different machines. In order to achieve the sort of latency they do, the process is a great deal more complicated than, say, a single query on a local database.
Where do you live that has 100% nuclear power? How was the nuclear plant constructed? How was the uranium mined and processed? How do the plant employees get to work? Nothing is free. If you really do live somewhere with 100% nuclear power then, yes, your footprint is much smaller than someone consuming coal-based power. But it's not non-existent.
Were all the recipients of these tweets located in New Zealand? No. You also exaggerate the extent to which New Zealand is powered by hydro power. The latest statistics I found indicate about 54% of Kiwi power is hydro-electric. Another 11% is geothermal and wind. 24% is natural gas and 10% is coal.
Honestly, if you want voice, pick up a phone. Or use Skype if your motivation is to avoid charges. I'll cede that Google Talk (the client) isn't 100% available on non-Windows platforms. But I'll add that the portion 99% of its users actually use, i.e. IM, is 100% available on non-Windows platforms by way of Pidgin, Adium, etc.
People who want better Javascript performance than FireFox.
Who needs the Google Talk IM client when its an open API and you can use Pidgin or Adium?
There's benefit to having broad OS availability. Safari is available on OS X and Windows but not Linux. Safari is also pretty closed as far as plug-ins are concerned. So is Chrome, at the moment, but they're working to rectify that. If Safari ran on Linux and had an open platform for add-ons, I'd be more inclined to agree with you that there's no need for Chrome.
Presumably Google's other motivation is to provide a run-time environment for future web-based applications they might release. If they own the browser on which these applications will run, they can more easily remedy any bugs or performance concerns that crop up instead of having to wait for a third-party to take care of them.
This seems like an instance where "most bang for your buck" comes into play. IMO Google doesn't need to offer the full flexibility of FireFox as long as they provide replacements for the most popular plug-ins. In other words: Ad-Block Plus, Foxmarks, GreaseMonkey and FireBug.
Ad blocking, and "content blocking" in a more general sense, has always struck me as a task that should be "built in" to a browser instead of handled by a plug-in. Possibly also bookmark synchronization. GreaseMonkey and FireBug are more niche, so they seem well-suited to the plug-in model.
Correction: On 3/15/2009 it will be 6 years old.
I'm using a 5 year old P4 2.4ghz Northwood w/ 1GB RAM. Works fine for web browsing, youtube, etc. Heck, I can even fire up Eclipse and do some development work and it's pretty bearable.