There is a correlation between obesity and poverty. The average IQ of those in poverty is lower than that of those not in poverty. Simply based on those two facts, one would expect the average IQ of obsese individuals to be lower than that of non-obese individuals.
How would such a thing be decided? What if there were two competing entities that wanted control of the kernel? Could there be a fork, where you have Alan producing his kernel and some other person (or company) accepting contributions and releasing their own?
I find myself in the same situation after having just bought a digital camera. Suddenly I have lots of data I really, really don't want to lose. I've decided to buy a second hard drive and set up a relatively frequent task that will zip the contents of "My Documents" and store it on the second drive. Zip has an "update" feature that only moves files into the archive when they're newer than what's already in there. So if nothing has been updated, the operation should be relatively quick. Then, every year or so, I'll back up my data onto archival quality (Mitsui Gold) DVDs and move them to a second physical location (most likely a safe deposit box). That way if something happens that would affect both hard drives (like my house burning down) I'll lose at most one year's worth of pictures.
Total cost: $50 every ~3 years for a new hard drive, plus $3 per archival-quality DVD.
Total time: couple-second delay each time the backup process runs, or less if there's nothing to update. Maybe 30 minutes worth of DVD burning once per year.
Risk: Only most recent year's data can be lost, and that only in the event of a total catastrophe.
I realize there are legitimate reasons to exchange information anonymously. What I question is whether those reasons are as significant a motivating factor as Mr. Falkvinge suggests. I suspect [i]most[/i] people who will use this service will do so in order to break the law.
says Rickard Falkvinge, chairman of the Pirate Party. 'If the government can check everything each citizen does, nobody can keep the government in check.'
"If the government could check everything my friends and I do, we wouldn't be able to exchange copyrighted music, movies and software."
Looking forward maybe one year down the road, Intel looks to have the best performance/watt server solution, not AMD. IBM, however, will be stuck with Opterons.
There's plenty of local bandwidth available so it makes to use most of it. Current p2p systems, which make up the most traffic in internet, tend to favor the fastest peer, which will statistically be someone near you.
Unless he's on a cable modem, in which case he and his geographic neighbors share a fixed pool of bandwidth. In other words, his level of usage makes all his neighbors' internet experience that much less satisfying.
Also, while it's true that p2p systems favor the nearest host, it's also true that that host will most often not be on the same subnet as the downloading client. Meaning it's costing someone, somewhere, bandwidth. Maybe not at the backbone level, but it's costing someone. And this is just if there's one server being pulled from. With something like BitTorrent, you're talking about several at once. What are the odds that all of them are located on the same subnet as the downloading client?
Also, billing for used bits can cause economic surprises for people and make true internet based computing harder because there has to be some kind of limits for bw usage.
If you're worried about surprises then only charge for bandwidth over a certain limit and have the cost-per-unit decrease as you approach the theoretical maximum. Rig the numbers so that a customer with 100% utilization for an entire month would pay approximately 10x what a "normal" customer would expect to pay. Set the limit at which per-bandwidth charges begin so that 90% of customers fall below it and never pay a usage fee. The only real limit on usage would then be economic, i.e. the customer uses only what he's willing to pay for.
Congrats. You're the reason we need net neutrality. It is my sincere hope that BT starts charging on a per-bandwidth basis so guys like you can't hog it all.
I must disagree with the "insightful commentary". "Off" should mean "off". If there are useful tasks a console can perform while in standby mode, incorporate a "standby mode" state into the machine's design, separate from "off". Currently "off" really means "stand by", with a true "off" state completely absent. This is unfortunate. Of course there's a workaround, i.e. unplugging the machine from the wall, but that's unnecessarily burdensome for the consumer.
And what's to stop Intel from releasing its own dual-cpu version of Conroe, along with a dual-cpu chipset? Very little. Imho, things look pretty bad for AMD in the short term.
The Ars article warns that per-core bandwidth problems could end up giving a performance advantage to AMD's 4x4 approach.
I see two problems with this. First, most cpu-intensive tasks are single-threaded, and Conroe beats AMD on those. Second, even if it turns out that two Athlon64 X2s scale better than a single quad-core Conroe, the Conroe is a single-chip solution in a single-socket motherboard. AMD will have to price its X2s at less than half the cost of a quad-core Conroe. "Less than half" since they'll also need to absorb the extra cost of the dual-socket motherboard 4x4 requires. I suspect they won't be able to achieve that price point. So, given an AMD 4x4 system and a comparably-performing Intel quad-core Conroe system, the AMD system will cost more and be less attractive to consumers.
It is nice to see more companies serious about helping to getting rid of our oil dependency.
And how often will those 6,800 batties need to be replaced? And how much electricity will it take to recharge them every 200 miles? I very much suspect this car's environmental impact is far worse than a standard petroleum-based sports car.
I somehow doubt you're in a position to state on Microsoft's behalf that they will freeze or slow the growth rate of product prices once they get a grip on piracy.
Of course not. Piracy is only one "cost" that gets rolled into what Microsoft eventually charges for their product. As Operating systems continue to become more complex, and as the Windows team becomes larger and larger (and harder to manage) all that cost will also make its way into the eventual "off the shelf" price.
I'm of the opinion that they will continue to get as much money out of the marketplace as they possibly can...
I agree. And I have no problem with that. That doesn't necessarily imply, however, that a decrease in piracy wouldn't bring about a corresponding decrease in cost to the end user. It's all about supply and demand. If the base cost decreases, then Microsoft maximizes its profit by moving "down" the curve: lowering the price and selling more product.
It isn't as if they haven't been caught buying studies before. So the distrust is well justified.
The difference being: Linux zealots post cooked results for free, because they just hate Microsoft that much.
Plain and simple fact is if Microsoft could compete with the usefulness of a solid Linux distro their product would speak for itself. In some cases this is true but in essentially all technical senses Microsoft is just a plain loser.
Unfortunately, posting it slashdot doesn't make it true. I've seen multiple shootouts where MS products outperform competing OSS products. In a very technical sense.
What does WGA give me in terms of a useful feature?
If it decreases Windows piracy then it decreases the cost of Windows for everyone who purchases it legally. So not a feature per se, but a price discount.
What does the bloat that is WMP give me over a simpler mplayer?
It (arguably) integrates better with IE than mplayer does with Firefox. At least, judging by the last time I ran mplayer/Firefox on Linux. It also comes installed out-of-the-box on Windows systems. That's a feature you may not value, but lots of novice Windows users do.
Why must they invent their own file formats [e.g. Office files, WMV, WMA] that are proprietary instead of using or establishing more open standards?
Because the standard lacks something they want included. Or, because they don't want to lock themselves in to supporting future aspects of the standard that their customers don't value.
Everything MSFT does is to benefit the stock holders through locking the "customers" into their system.
Newsflash: Everything every publically held company does should be to benefit the stock holders.
Why can't Office work in Linux anyways?
It could, if there was any advantage to Microsoft in porting it. There isn't.
They do. But they're the sort of application that was hamstrung by XP/2003's not-very-scalable network stack. That liability should (largely) disappear with Vista, meaning those may be among the apps that perform better. Incidentally, from the benchmarks I've seen, server apps tend to suck ass on OSX. So much so that even Windows is preferable.
Sure. If you load an OS onto hardware it's totally unsuited for, the UI could end up becoming the bottleneck. It isn't be in the majority of cases, however. Also- hasn't Microsoft engineered Vista such that it can "fall back" to an XP-like interface? If that's the case, all "Vista sucks because it's graphics requirements are too high" are rendered moot. Of course, it does open the door for "Vista sucks becasue its interface isn't any better than XP" criticisms.
Yes, it requires a (somewhat) beefy 3d graphics card to make full use of Aero Glass. But that's just the UI. Rarely is the UI a system's bottleneck. I imagine that with the revamped TCP/IP stack and memory manager, Vista should yield performance improvements over XP/2003 for a wide range of apps.
And hope that it (router) isn't vulnerable itself.
The router's just the first line of defense. It takes care of automated remote attacks where someone just scans an IP range and hits every Windows system found. It's like the old adage about bears. You don't have to outrun the bear to avoid being eaten, you just have to run faster than the other guy. If they do get past the router then I have a software firewall, so there's still that hurdle.
And hope you don't run into Zero Day eploits.
I don't visit many "shady" sites. I don't click on links contained in spam that I receive. How likely is it for a zero-day exploit to be embedded in slashdot.org or cnn.com?
And hope it hasn't been hacked (or a proxy inbetween).
Again, not terribly likely. By "trusted source" I meant "bought it at Best Buy" or possibly "downloaded from Download.com". What do I run on a system: Adobe Reader, Eclipse, Gaim, Quicktime, Winzip, Office, a few games. Imho, worrying about downloading malicious code from a hacked eclipse.org or apple.com isn't worthwhile.
Ditto. And that's running IE and without anti-virus software. All you really need to do is:
Sit behind a cheap $50 router.
Regularly update Windows/IE with critical patches.
Not use Outlook.
Only run software obtained from a "trusted" source.
That said, my parents, brother, and most of my friends have all had their systems miserably infected at one time or another. Apparently it's difficult for people to follow these simple rules.
Obviously it's not something I'd turn down or ignore, if it were already set up and integrated into my build scripts. It's just a question of whether it's worth the effort required to set it all up and get it running daily. Maybe the effort level to achieve that is relatively low, in which case it would be worth doing.
Not having used any static analysis tools, but having worked on several java projects, I question how useful these tools are. In my experience, most bugs that could be detected by static analysis are usually caught relatively quickly anyway. The trickiest (and potentially most damaging) ones are usually non-general enough to slip past a general-purpose tool. Am I mistaken?
Neither's exactly right. The mini isn't designed to be portable, so there's no docking interface. It's also bigger and heavier than some ultra-ligth laptops, and it has fans. Because it's not designed to be portable, the ergonomics aren't 360 degrees. Turn the thing upside down and that's obvious. I was imagining something like this, but without the display, keyboard, touchpad and battery. It weighs 2.2lb with all that stuff, so fiture maybe 1.5lb without.
A USB drive would work, except that the USB interface somewhat nukes the drive's performance and requires additional cpu usage to manage the communication. A portable Raptor-X with FireWire 800 would be nice. The issue there is that if I'm going to have a single OS installation running on multiple hardware profiles, the OS had better have support for it. Another poster indicatd Windows does. If that's true, then the "really fast portable hard drive" solution migt just work. All that's missing is a smallish desktop case with a nice "slot" interface for the drive, so I wouldn't have to fool with cables. I'm imagining something similar to the old "slot" interface used for 8-track tapes.
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There is a correlation between obesity and poverty. The average IQ of those in poverty is lower than that of those not in poverty. Simply based on those two facts, one would expect the average IQ of obsese individuals to be lower than that of non-obese individuals.
How would such a thing be decided? What if there were two competing entities that wanted control of the kernel? Could there be a fork, where you have Alan producing his kernel and some other person (or company) accepting contributions and releasing their own?
What happens if Linus and Andrew Morton die in a plane crash? Who becomes the new kernel "gatekeeper"?
I find myself in the same situation after having just bought a digital camera. Suddenly I have lots of data I really, really don't want to lose. I've decided to buy a second hard drive and set up a relatively frequent task that will zip the contents of "My Documents" and store it on the second drive. Zip has an "update" feature that only moves files into the archive when they're newer than what's already in there. So if nothing has been updated, the operation should be relatively quick. Then, every year or so, I'll back up my data onto archival quality (Mitsui Gold) DVDs and move them to a second physical location (most likely a safe deposit box). That way if something happens that would affect both hard drives (like my house burning down) I'll lose at most one year's worth of pictures.
Total cost: $50 every ~3 years for a new hard drive, plus $3 per archival-quality DVD.
Total time: couple-second delay each time the backup process runs, or less if there's nothing to update. Maybe 30 minutes worth of DVD burning once per year.
Risk: Only most recent year's data can be lost, and that only in the event of a total catastrophe.
I realize there are legitimate reasons to exchange information anonymously. What I question is whether those reasons are as significant a motivating factor as Mr. Falkvinge suggests. I suspect [i]most[/i] people who will use this service will do so in order to break the law.
"If the government could check everything my friends and I do, we wouldn't be able to exchange copyrighted music, movies and software."
Looking forward maybe one year down the road, Intel looks to have the best performance/watt server solution, not AMD. IBM, however, will be stuck with Opterons.
Unless he's on a cable modem, in which case he and his geographic neighbors share a fixed pool of bandwidth. In other words, his level of usage makes all his neighbors' internet experience that much less satisfying.
Also, while it's true that p2p systems favor the nearest host, it's also true that that host will most often not be on the same subnet as the downloading client. Meaning it's costing someone, somewhere, bandwidth. Maybe not at the backbone level, but it's costing someone. And this is just if there's one server being pulled from. With something like BitTorrent, you're talking about several at once. What are the odds that all of them are located on the same subnet as the downloading client?
If you're worried about surprises then only charge for bandwidth over a certain limit and have the cost-per-unit decrease as you approach the theoretical maximum. Rig the numbers so that a customer with 100% utilization for an entire month would pay approximately 10x what a "normal" customer would expect to pay. Set the limit at which per-bandwidth charges begin so that 90% of customers fall below it and never pay a usage fee. The only real limit on usage would then be economic, i.e. the customer uses only what he's willing to pay for.
Congrats. You're the reason we need net neutrality. It is my sincere hope that BT starts charging on a per-bandwidth basis so guys like you can't hog it all.
I must disagree with the "insightful commentary". "Off" should mean "off". If there are useful tasks a console can perform while in standby mode, incorporate a "standby mode" state into the machine's design, separate from "off". Currently "off" really means "stand by", with a true "off" state completely absent. This is unfortunate. Of course there's a workaround, i.e. unplugging the machine from the wall, but that's unnecessarily burdensome for the consumer.
And what's to stop Intel from releasing its own dual-cpu version of Conroe, along with a dual-cpu chipset? Very little. Imho, things look pretty bad for AMD in the short term.
I see two problems with this. First, most cpu-intensive tasks are single-threaded, and Conroe beats AMD on those. Second, even if it turns out that two Athlon64 X2s scale better than a single quad-core Conroe, the Conroe is a single-chip solution in a single-socket motherboard. AMD will have to price its X2s at less than half the cost of a quad-core Conroe. "Less than half" since they'll also need to absorb the extra cost of the dual-socket motherboard 4x4 requires. I suspect they won't be able to achieve that price point. So, given an AMD 4x4 system and a comparably-performing Intel quad-core Conroe system, the AMD system will cost more and be less attractive to consumers.
Of course not. Piracy is only one "cost" that gets rolled into what Microsoft eventually charges for their product. As Operating systems continue to become more complex, and as the Windows team becomes larger and larger (and harder to manage) all that cost will also make its way into the eventual "off the shelf" price.
I agree. And I have no problem with that. That doesn't necessarily imply, however, that a decrease in piracy wouldn't bring about a corresponding decrease in cost to the end user. It's all about supply and demand. If the base cost decreases, then Microsoft maximizes its profit by moving "down" the curve: lowering the price and selling more product.
Customer only. I've never owned Microsoft stock.
The difference being: Linux zealots post cooked results for free, because they just hate Microsoft that much.
Unfortunately, posting it slashdot doesn't make it true. I've seen multiple shootouts where MS products outperform competing OSS products. In a very technical sense.
If it decreases Windows piracy then it decreases the cost of Windows for everyone who purchases it legally. So not a feature per se, but a price discount.
It (arguably) integrates better with IE than mplayer does with Firefox. At least, judging by the last time I ran mplayer/Firefox on Linux. It also comes installed out-of-the-box on Windows systems. That's a feature you may not value, but lots of novice Windows users do.
Because the standard lacks something they want included. Or, because they don't want to lock themselves in to supporting future aspects of the standard that their customers don't value.
Newsflash: Everything every publically held company does should be to benefit the stock holders.
It could, if there was any advantage to Microsoft in porting it. There isn't.
They do. But they're the sort of application that was hamstrung by XP/2003's not-very-scalable network stack. That liability should (largely) disappear with Vista, meaning those may be among the apps that perform better. Incidentally, from the benchmarks I've seen, server apps tend to suck ass on OSX. So much so that even Windows is preferable.
Like web servers and databases.
Sure. If you load an OS onto hardware it's totally unsuited for, the UI could end up becoming the bottleneck. It isn't be in the majority of cases, however. Also- hasn't Microsoft engineered Vista such that it can "fall back" to an XP-like interface? If that's the case, all "Vista sucks because it's graphics requirements are too high" are rendered moot. Of course, it does open the door for "Vista sucks becasue its interface isn't any better than XP" criticisms.
Yes, it requires a (somewhat) beefy 3d graphics card to make full use of Aero Glass. But that's just the UI. Rarely is the UI a system's bottleneck. I imagine that with the revamped TCP/IP stack and memory manager, Vista should yield performance improvements over XP/2003 for a wide range of apps.
And hope that it (router) isn't vulnerable itself.
The router's just the first line of defense. It takes care of automated remote attacks where someone just scans an IP range and hits every Windows system found. It's like the old adage about bears. You don't have to outrun the bear to avoid being eaten, you just have to run faster than the other guy. If they do get past the router then I have a software firewall, so there's still that hurdle.
And hope you don't run into Zero Day eploits.
I don't visit many "shady" sites. I don't click on links contained in spam that I receive. How likely is it for a zero-day exploit to be embedded in slashdot.org or cnn.com?
And hope it hasn't been hacked (or a proxy inbetween).
Again, not terribly likely. By "trusted source" I meant "bought it at Best Buy" or possibly "downloaded from Download.com". What do I run on a system: Adobe Reader, Eclipse, Gaim, Quicktime, Winzip, Office, a few games. Imho, worrying about downloading malicious code from a hacked eclipse.org or apple.com isn't worthwhile.
- Sit behind a cheap $50 router.
- Regularly update Windows/IE with critical patches.
- Not use Outlook.
- Only run software obtained from a "trusted" source.
That said, my parents, brother, and most of my friends have all had their systems miserably infected at one time or another. Apparently it's difficult for people to follow these simple rules.Obviously it's not something I'd turn down or ignore, if it were already set up and integrated into my build scripts. It's just a question of whether it's worth the effort required to set it all up and get it running daily. Maybe the effort level to achieve that is relatively low, in which case it would be worth doing.
Not having used any static analysis tools, but having worked on several java projects, I question how useful these tools are. In my experience, most bugs that could be detected by static analysis are usually caught relatively quickly anyway. The trickiest (and potentially most damaging) ones are usually non-general enough to slip past a general-purpose tool. Am I mistaken?
Neither's exactly right. The mini isn't designed to be portable, so there's no docking interface. It's also bigger and heavier than some ultra-ligth laptops, and it has fans. Because it's not designed to be portable, the ergonomics aren't 360 degrees. Turn the thing upside down and that's obvious. I was imagining something like this, but without the display, keyboard, touchpad and battery. It weighs 2.2lb with all that stuff, so fiture maybe 1.5lb without.
A USB drive would work, except that the USB interface somewhat nukes the drive's performance and requires additional cpu usage to manage the communication. A portable Raptor-X with FireWire 800 would be nice. The issue there is that if I'm going to have a single OS installation running on multiple hardware profiles, the OS had better have support for it. Another poster indicatd Windows does. If that's true, then the "really fast portable hard drive" solution migt just work. All that's missing is a smallish desktop case with a nice "slot" interface for the drive, so I wouldn't have to fool with cables. I'm imagining something similar to the old "slot" interface used for 8-track tapes.