Really? I find that most of the time I experience noticeable delays in my browser it's due to javascript. Or Flash. Now, I'd argue that website designers shouldn't be using javascript in such a way that it manages to bog down modern hardware, but that's a separate argument.
I've taken the time to benchmark Chrome 2.0's javascript performance against bleeding edge versions of FireFox, Webkit and Opera. Also compared Chrome 1.0 against FireFox 3.0.5, Safari 3.2.1 and Opera 9.6.3. Enjoy.
That's certainly the way Eustace made it sound. Of course, I have no idea how long they'd have to maintain 100% availability is before moving out of Beta. He wouldn't say. Presumably it's "pretty long".
I attended a talk by Alan Eustace, Google's Senior VP of Engineering and Research. Someone asked that exact question: what are your criteria for moving Gmail out of beta?
His answer was that google has certain "availability targets" that, until they're met, will result in Gmail staying in beta. I'm guessing it's on the order of a year's time in which no single user loses any data or is unable to get to his email. Every time someone loses data or they have down time, that resets the timer.
I'm cautiously optimistic about Windows 7. I've held off moving from XP to Vista, but Windows 7 might convince me to leave XP. That said, here are my pet peeves that still aren't (and may never be) addressed.
Check out Section 5, item (D), bullet (d) of the Radio Act of 1927, which created the Federal Radio Commission. The FRC morphed into the FCC in 1934. Specifically, the Secretary of Commerce is given the right to terminate the license of operators who transmit "profane or obscene words of language". You can view the text of the act here
This has been part of the FCC's mandate from the very beginning. It has been upheld by the courts, for instance in "FCC vs. Pacifica Foundation".
Only if the user is interested in using the new version of the Microsoft app that lacks XP support. Many can do without. At least, until websites start rendering incorrectly or they're unable to open documents in Word. But I expect it will be a good while before web standards have evolved to the point where IE8 is considered unusable.
I think many CIOs would disagree with you about whether product end-of-life constitutes a justification for upgrading. You may consider them just as "wrong" as I am, but I would bet money that my view is the prevailing opinion.
It's hard to work around OS flaws allowing remote exploits via third-party software, and firewalls only stop attacks originating from outside your network.
According to this article (which may or may not be accurate- I don't know enough to say):
http://www.batteryuniversity.com/partone-8.htm
The gravimetric energy density of super-capacitors is approximately 1/5 to 1/10 that of traditional batteries. That is to say, on the order of 1 to 10 Wh/kg. The original article says the array in Minnesota is designed to store 7 MWh. So, to store that much energy in a super-capacitor, assuming the energy density figures from that link are correct, the device would need to weigh from 700k to 7 million kg.
I'm not sure exactly how much space that would consume, but we can perhaps estimate. We'll assume the density of a fairly light metal. Say, aluminum, which has a density is 2.7 g/cm^3. So a 700,000 kg super-capacitor would need 260 million cm^3 of space. We'll assume a normal building height of 4 m (400 cm). This means that the "optimistic" super-capacitor (10 Wh/kg) could be housed in an enclosure that is 8m x 8m x 4m. The "pessimistic" super-capacitor would need a 25m x 25m x 4m enclosure.
If the technology scales linearly, space doesn't seem to be an issue. Cost, however, probably is.
Batteries need to be replaced, and are composed of a number of undesirable chemicals. Seems like ultra-capacitors might be of use here. Several orders of magnitude more recharge cycles and generally safer. Portability isn't an issue, so they could be as big and heavy as needed.
Slashdot readers aren't representative of the market at large. I've moved the same laptop between two versions of Windows, two Linux distributions and two major releases of Solaris. This does not read across into the population at large.
Which is why, in my post, I said:
As for the axioms, while they may be generally true, they're not universal:
I think what the author meant is that there's no competition until the companies are actually competing. If any one of them lowered their texting prices, the others would have to lower theirs to match or else they'd lose business. This would eventually all of them lowering their prices, keeping the same customers, and making less profit than before.
Assuming there's not explicit collusion and price-fixing going on, the four carriers are competing. Your analysis of what would happen if a particular carrier offered unlimited texting, if true, just suggests there's no advantage to a carrier offering that price structure. If that's the case, then I don't fault them for not offering it.
With Vista as my only option, my plan was to stick with XP as long as humanly possible. I have my own volume-licensed copy of XP Pro, so it's a somewhat realistic plan. If Windows 7 proves to be as high-quality as the pundits claim, that might just be enough to make me leave XP.
As for the axioms, while they may be generally true, they're not universal:
I've updated my desktop from Win2k to XP, my dad's desktop from Win98 to XP, and a friend's laptop from Win2k to XP. So it happens.
Agreed. However, "XP going end-of-life" constitutes justification. Other possible justifications: "IE8 not supported on XP" or "Office 200x not supported on XP".
Agreed. And Windows 7 provides better support for a high number of cores. So, if anything, the move towards parallelism is one reason to care about Windows 7.
Agreed. On the other hand, I/O bandwidth is not "as much as you want", so the manner in which the OS manages that bottleneck is important. Also, since the new OS will undoubtedly be installed on some systems that are still constrained to 3GB "effective" RAM, memory footprint is still important. Furthermore, as the industry continues to move in the direction of SSD sinstead of HDDs, it may become desirable to use an OS that is optimized for solid state disks. XP and Vista are not. Windows 7 might be.
Yes, they are. And one of the supposed benefits of Windows 7 over Vista is improved power efficiency, which would be a useful feature for Netbook users.
So? If anything, this is a reason not to be excited about any PC operating system, not Windows 7 in particular.
Same as #6.
To answer your final question, because:
Vista is ass. Windows 7 is apparently "not ass". Presumably some people would have migrated off XP if there was a newer version that was "not ass". Now there will be one.
When Windows 7 is finally released XP will be "even older" than it was when Vista was released, and hence even closer to end-of-life. That provides extra motivation for people to move off the old technology.
In keeping with the previous bullet, Microsoft may start dropping support for XP in their other products. That will motivate a lot of people to upgrade.
Really, though, I don't care what everybody else does. I'm "mildly" looking forward to Windows 7 for the simple fact that it gives me a viable upgrade path from XP.
This makes me dream of the day when there is real competition in the wireless industry, not this gang-of-four oligopoly.
How many participants in an industry do you need to have before you'll say that the goal of competition has been met? Four seems like it would be enough. If there was some advantage to be had by using a price structure that accurately reflects the true cost of text messages then I suspect one of the carriers would have already tried it.
I've only used OO a couple of times, but imho it compared pretty negatively to Word & Excel 2003. Mostly from the "quality" and "performance" perspectives. Assuming for the sake of argument that it is actually inferior, the question is whether that's caused by the lack of developers, or whether it is in fact ~causing~ the lack of developers. Few people relish working on an inferior product unless they think the goal of making it "superior" (in one way or another) is realistically attainable. "People" (in general) may have lost that faith in the OO.o project.
Surely you can find other courses that will transfer and fulfill degree requirements? Composition or literature. History. Economics. Math?
As for suggestions on where to go, that really depends on where you want to travel. Australia would interest me. Or Spain. Possibly the U.S. or Canada if you're not already from one of those places.
The AIR paper uses results from two surveys: TIMSS and PISA. TIMSS was created by an institute attached to an American university. However, participating countries paid their own administration costs and the World Bank also chipped in. If the non-U.S. countries thought the questions were favorably biased towards Americans, I would have expected them not to participate.
PISA was created by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development) which is comprised of 43 member nations and is located in France. Not American.
You're wrong on both accounts. That is, with regard to math education at least. Click here and scroll down to page 8. Then check out page 22 paragraph 2.
At grades 4 and 8 U.S. students out-perform their peers in Italy, New Zealand and Norway. The situation isn't as good at age 15, but U.S. students still out-perform their peers in Italy and Russia. So you'll have to back up your claim that the U.S. has the "worst public school system among developed countries". How is it worse than Italy's?
The report also claims that, along with the United States, Australia and Belgium do not have a national math curriculum. That suggests to me that curriculum is set either by province, by smaller school districts, or by individual schools.
Less advertising revenue just means they'll have to charge more to subscribers. The higher price will reduce demand, further shrinking subscription revenue and reducing the amount their remaining advertisers are willing to pay. However, at some point an equilibrium will be reached, assuming the demand doesn't shrink to the point where it's impossible to turn a profit.
If it were impossible to play games without paying for them, or music, or movies, I suspect that many of those who currently opt out of paying would, in fact, pay for some content. Maybe not to the extent that the media companies suggest, but I suspect the amount would not be insignificant.
An acquaintance of mine is a high school student. His laptop is chock full of music and movies that he's downloaded from one place or another. Now, would he buy all that content legally if it weren't available for free? No way. He couldn't afford it even if he wanted to. But, on the other hand, would he completely forgo buying any movies or music (like he does now, since he gets everything for free)? Doubtful.
2. Even the desktop version of Ubuntu is still a server-class OS, since it's running Linux under the covers. Unless they tweak a bunch of kernal tunables in such a way as to mess with its ability to act as a server. So, the comparable version of Windows to use would be 2008 Server.
3. IMO they shouldn't have used graphical benchmarks at all, since those are going to be drastically affected by driver quality. They're not so much comparing "Java on Ubuntu" to "Java on Windows" as they are "Intel drivers on Ubuntu" to "Intel drivers on Windows".
5. Off hand, I don't know the default JVM settings for Windows and Ubuntu. If they got Java from an Ubuntu repository, it's possible that whoever created the package tweaked the default values. Still, though, those values are configurable. So, if the goal is to test "platform vs. platform", then they should strive to equalize all the other variables, such as JVM settings.
On Windows they use 1.6_07, while on Linux they use 1.6_10. With different JVMs. So we have different JVMs with potentially different levels of optimization, and potentially different supporting JARs.
They use Windows Vista SP1, which is a desktop OS version. Ubuntu is not. They should have tested on Windows Server 2008 SP1 or SP2-Beta.
They use a graphics-intensive benchmark like OpenGL. Duh. No wonder Vista out-performs: you're testing the video driver, not the Java code or the OS internals.
They use a benchmark that heavily reads and writes to disk. However, they don't say whether the Windows and Ubuntu installations are located on separate (and identical) hard drives, or dual-booted on the same drive. If the latter, then one of them is potentially going to have a higher max. transfer rate.
We're given no indication as to the JVM settings used for either test. Even if they used default settings, the defaults may be set differently on the Windows and Ubuntu installations. JVM settings can drastically change the way Java code performs.
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Really? I find that most of the time I experience noticeable delays in my browser it's due to javascript. Or Flash. Now, I'd argue that website designers shouldn't be using javascript in such a way that it manages to bog down modern hardware, but that's a separate argument.
I've taken the time to benchmark Chrome 2.0's javascript performance against bleeding edge versions of FireFox, Webkit and Opera. Also compared Chrome 1.0 against FireFox 3.0.5, Safari 3.2.1 and Opera 9.6.3. Enjoy.
That's certainly the way Eustace made it sound. Of course, I have no idea how long they'd have to maintain 100% availability is before moving out of Beta. He wouldn't say. Presumably it's "pretty long".
I attended a talk by Alan Eustace, Google's Senior VP of Engineering and Research. Someone asked that exact question: what are your criteria for moving Gmail out of beta?
His answer was that google has certain "availability targets" that, until they're met, will result in Gmail staying in beta. I'm guessing it's on the order of a year's time in which no single user loses any data or is unable to get to his email. Every time someone loses data or they have down time, that resets the timer.
Faster = good. Regressions from FF2 = bad. Awesome bar = not so awesome.
I'm cautiously optimistic about Windows 7. I've held off moving from XP to Vista, but Windows 7 might convince me to leave XP. That said, here are my pet peeves that still aren't (and may never be) addressed.
Check out Section 5, item (D), bullet (d) of the Radio Act of 1927, which created the Federal Radio Commission. The FRC morphed into the FCC in 1934. Specifically, the Secretary of Commerce is given the right to terminate the license of operators who transmit "profane or obscene words of language". You can view the text of the act here
This has been part of the FCC's mandate from the very beginning. It has been upheld by the courts, for instance in "FCC vs. Pacifica Foundation".
I'd argue state-sponsored free wireless broadband is also "well-meaning but ill-conceived".
Only if the user is interested in using the new version of the Microsoft app that lacks XP support. Many can do without. At least, until websites start rendering incorrectly or they're unable to open documents in Word. But I expect it will be a good while before web standards have evolved to the point where IE8 is considered unusable.
I think many CIOs would disagree with you about whether product end-of-life constitutes a justification for upgrading. You may consider them just as "wrong" as I am, but I would bet money that my view is the prevailing opinion.
It's hard to work around OS flaws allowing remote exploits via third-party software, and firewalls only stop attacks originating from outside your network.
According to this article (which may or may not be accurate- I don't know enough to say):
http://www.batteryuniversity.com/partone-8.htm
The gravimetric energy density of super-capacitors is approximately 1/5 to 1/10 that of traditional batteries. That is to say, on the order of 1 to 10 Wh/kg. The original article says the array in Minnesota is designed to store 7 MWh. So, to store that much energy in a super-capacitor, assuming the energy density figures from that link are correct, the device would need to weigh from 700k to 7 million kg.
I'm not sure exactly how much space that would consume, but we can perhaps estimate. We'll assume the density of a fairly light metal. Say, aluminum, which has a density is 2.7 g/cm^3. So a 700,000 kg super-capacitor would need 260 million cm^3 of space. We'll assume a normal building height of 4 m (400 cm). This means that the "optimistic" super-capacitor (10 Wh/kg) could be housed in an enclosure that is 8m x 8m x 4m. The "pessimistic" super-capacitor would need a 25m x 25m x 4m enclosure.
If the technology scales linearly, space doesn't seem to be an issue. Cost, however, probably is.
Batteries need to be replaced, and are composed of a number of undesirable chemicals. Seems like ultra-capacitors might be of use here. Several orders of magnitude more recharge cycles and generally safer. Portability isn't an issue, so they could be as big and heavy as needed.
Which is why, in my post, I said:
Assuming there's not explicit collusion and price-fixing going on, the four carriers are competing. Your analysis of what would happen if a particular carrier offered unlimited texting, if true, just suggests there's no advantage to a carrier offering that price structure. If that's the case, then I don't fault them for not offering it.
With Vista as my only option, my plan was to stick with XP as long as humanly possible. I have my own volume-licensed copy of XP Pro, so it's a somewhat realistic plan. If Windows 7 proves to be as high-quality as the pundits claim, that might just be enough to make me leave XP.
As for the axioms, while they may be generally true, they're not universal:
To answer your final question, because:
Really, though, I don't care what everybody else does. I'm "mildly" looking forward to Windows 7 for the simple fact that it gives me a viable upgrade path from XP.
How many participants in an industry do you need to have before you'll say that the goal of competition has been met? Four seems like it would be enough. If there was some advantage to be had by using a price structure that accurately reflects the true cost of text messages then I suspect one of the carriers would have already tried it.
I've only used OO a couple of times, but imho it compared pretty negatively to Word & Excel 2003. Mostly from the "quality" and "performance" perspectives. Assuming for the sake of argument that it is actually inferior, the question is whether that's caused by the lack of developers, or whether it is in fact ~causing~ the lack of developers. Few people relish working on an inferior product unless they think the goal of making it "superior" (in one way or another) is realistically attainable. "People" (in general) may have lost that faith in the OO.o project.
Surely you can find other courses that will transfer and fulfill degree requirements? Composition or literature. History. Economics. Math?
As for suggestions on where to go, that really depends on where you want to travel. Australia would interest me. Or Spain. Possibly the U.S. or Canada if you're not already from one of those places.
The AIR paper uses results from two surveys: TIMSS and PISA. TIMSS was created by an institute attached to an American university. However, participating countries paid their own administration costs and the World Bank also chipped in. If the non-U.S. countries thought the questions were favorably biased towards Americans, I would have expected them not to participate.
PISA was created by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development) which is comprised of 43 member nations and is located in France. Not American.
You're wrong on both accounts. That is, with regard to math education at least. Click here and scroll down to page 8. Then check out page 22 paragraph 2.
At grades 4 and 8 U.S. students out-perform their peers in Italy, New Zealand and Norway. The situation isn't as good at age 15, but U.S. students still out-perform their peers in Italy and Russia. So you'll have to back up your claim that the U.S. has the "worst public school system among developed countries". How is it worse than Italy's?
The report also claims that, along with the United States, Australia and Belgium do not have a national math curriculum. That suggests to me that curriculum is set either by province, by smaller school districts, or by individual schools.
Best quality: concise.
Less advertising revenue just means they'll have to charge more to subscribers. The higher price will reduce demand, further shrinking subscription revenue and reducing the amount their remaining advertisers are willing to pay. However, at some point an equilibrium will be reached, assuming the demand doesn't shrink to the point where it's impossible to turn a profit.
If it were impossible to play games without paying for them, or music, or movies, I suspect that many of those who currently opt out of paying would, in fact, pay for some content. Maybe not to the extent that the media companies suggest, but I suspect the amount would not be insignificant.
An acquaintance of mine is a high school student. His laptop is chock full of music and movies that he's downloaded from one place or another. Now, would he buy all that content legally if it weren't available for free? No way. He couldn't afford it even if he wanted to. But, on the other hand, would he completely forgo buying any movies or music (like he does now, since he gets everything for free)? Doubtful.
2. Even the desktop version of Ubuntu is still a server-class OS, since it's running Linux under the covers. Unless they tweak a bunch of kernal tunables in such a way as to mess with its ability to act as a server. So, the comparable version of Windows to use would be 2008 Server.
3. IMO they shouldn't have used graphical benchmarks at all, since those are going to be drastically affected by driver quality. They're not so much comparing "Java on Ubuntu" to "Java on Windows" as they are "Intel drivers on Ubuntu" to "Intel drivers on Windows".
5. Off hand, I don't know the default JVM settings for Windows and Ubuntu. If they got Java from an Ubuntu repository, it's possible that whoever created the package tweaked the default values. Still, though, those values are configurable. So, if the goal is to test "platform vs. platform", then they should strive to equalize all the other variables, such as JVM settings.