The only regret I have is that we probably won't use em for DB servers because of Oracle's asinine policy of charging per core, sometimes I wish we had gone SQL2005 for more stuff as it is going to scale better with improving hardware.
That is the most draconian pricing policy I have ever heard. You actually have to pay Oracle for increasing your processing power?
And an honest question: was there a reason why you didn't look at MySQL or PostgreSQL? I'm not a database expert but my work with them has made me believe they are robust solutions--I certainly prefer them to MSSQL, which is about as pleasant to use as a suppository.
Okay, not withstanding your obvious (and, I will admit, somewhat justified) anger at media corporations, is AIDS an acronym for something besides Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome? Or are you saying that Sony et al. want to give me an STD? I would normally consider hyperbole to be in the vein of an angry rant but the mention of AIDS doesn't quite follow naturally from DRM. Then again, I may just not be caught up to what the kids are saying nowadays.
So your uninformed but still willing to share your opinions?
This is not flamebait. It was a true observation: people should not criticize Vista's UAC if they genuinely don't know anything about it. People who think UAC is overly obtrusive haven't used Vista enough: during the initial install phase, yes, you need to grant access fairly often. But that's no different than on any Linux machine. The problem is that most programs that have no business requiring root access (AIM?) require it for a successful install and sometimes even afterwards, and so Windows users get the impression that they can't do anything unless they're an admin. Vista does a lot of things wrong (it is far too resource-intensive, IMO) but this isn't one of them. Calling someone out who doesn't use Vista and doesn't know much about UAC when they make false statements shouldn't qualify as flamebait.
Why doesn't the FCC mandate real open standards, that are easy and cheap to implement?
Because then it would be doing its job and protecting the consumer, which would involve effort and foresight. This way, they can just do what the cable companies ask them to, and everyone who matters goes away happy and rich.
(Okay, I'm not normally this anti-establishment, but the FCC has convinced me that it doesn't give a flying fuck about the American people.)
This is the response I received from him.
When did this come up? Anyway, entirely depends on the purpose of the network and whatnot. Most wireless transport is straight data, and can only go but so far at gigabit speeds. Longest I've heard of for full duplex gigabit is 5-6 miles. As far as fiber, it all depends about the terrain, obstacles, lotsa stuff. It all depends on what you put on either end of the fiber runs, and how long they are. Most rings around and local to richmond are only going to be on OC12, 622Mbit. Even the ring that I'm plugged into. Anything higher would be custom built for certian customers. The advantage to a fiber -ring- like that, is that it's a SONET ring, it's a full loop, and if one part gets cut, none of the nodes go down. For long range runs, you setup multiple physically diverse runs to get redundancy. When it comes to wireless, you've gotta tack that much more MUX hardware onto either end to encode things like traditional voice and whatnot. OC type networks will easily transport voice or depending on what you feed into it. Wireless tends to be cheaper because you don't have to worry about paying anyone rent. For either ground or space on a telephone pole... Not sure how to go about answering that accurately, but wireless tends to be cheaper on the mid high end and the mid range level. But, all you can do is gigabit, there's nothing over that. OC48 and 192, 2.5gig and 10gig are generally reserved for Tier1 carrier backbones, and the hardware to go on either end is insanely expensive.
Any foot of fiber costs orders of magnitude more than any foot of wireless range, anywhere, underground or suspended along poles.
But that's not really the entire question, is it? We also have to deal with the question of simultaneous connections and throughput, two areas where fiber handily beats a wireless solution. I'm emailing my friend at Richmond Air to see what insight he has to offer, but I think the TCO of wireless and fiber solutions are closer than most people realize--and that, overall, there's a lot more potential for market growth than the telcoms would like us to believe.
In the same way as it's cost-prohibitive for investment funds today, presumably?
Not at all. Investment agencies have to compete with each other, so they have considerable incentive to do things as efficiently as possible. There is no one the government would have to compete with to remain "the government." I see your point--that the govt-owned firm would essentially be forced to act and compete as a private firm--but what I am saying is that the government would never be able to handle investments in that govt-owned firm as efficiently as an investment brokerage would. The people in charge of auditing that company and managing its growth, on the govt-side, would have no competition for their jobs, (and would also not have a reward system in place for doing well), and thus wouldn't be motivated to do any more than the bare minimum.
But you don't say why.
I did above--as an institution, the government isn't at risk of going out of business. Sure, there needs to be budgetary management, but just enough to ensure that it doesn't go bankrupt. (And a quick look at Medicare and Social Security will show you just how well it does at that.)
Secondly, the services that you say must be provided by government are by their very definition not revenue-generating services. That leaves governments with only one way to obtain money - to steal it from its citizens. A funny thing about being mugged - I don't particularly care whether the mugger takes all my money, half of it, or only a tenner. I care about the violation.
Yes, but they're not supposed to be revenue-generating. The government exists solely to protect my rights and liberties. It cannot do that without some infrastructure devoted to law enforcement and national defense. National security is something we, as a nation, need to pay for. It's not theft because we're being provided with a service that we can't trust any private entities to offer. There's a word for profitable national security: colonialism. We don't want that.
I will say I find your idea of having the government invest in firms pretty interesting. I think it would require a complete re-imagining of how the government works, along with a significant culture shift among state workers, to succeed. Having worked for the state, and knowing people in the Armed Forces, I can tell you now that at least in the US, they are horribly inefficient. And it's because of the bureaucratic culture.
Putting up wireless towers and WAP's is profoundly cheaper, faster, and less disruptive, than digging up the ground to lay one network of fiber after another.
Per my conversations with the wireless ISP in Richmond, this has not been the impression I've received. It's not cheaper or faster (although it may be less disruptive); it just requires a different sort of maintenance and cost. To my understanding, not all fiber has to be buried, either. It can be suspended along poles. So the only places it needs to be buried are in connection spots for residential neighborhoods--the wiring from a residential unit to a connection box, and the internal wiring of the residential unit, should be handled in the original construction anyway.
Throw the Australian telco, Telstra, in amongst the examples and the debate continues to swing towards privatization of public utilities being a terrible idea. now instead of having a government run monopoly of the telco infrastructure, you have a privately owned monopoly that owns all the infrastructure.
What's the nature of their monopoly? Your conclusion doesn't follow naturally--did the Australian government just hand them the lines and say "here, these are yours now?" Because that's what happened in the US and it's why I think the internet isn't privatized at all: it's in the hands of government-granted monopolies. I can't say that the alternative--a govt-run monopoly--would be any better or worse (my suspicion is that it would be much, much worse), but I firmly believe that completely opening the land to anyone who wanted to run cable would cause a boom in internet access.
Does suggest that it isn't a 10:1 between lossy and lossless.
You're comparing 320kbps MP3s to FLAC. I was comparing 128kbps AAC to FLAC. Are you asserting that a 128kbps AAC file and a 320kbps MP3 file are the same size?
FLAC is about 2:1 compression, and a CD holds 700MB.
I pulled the numbers off of awaken.com; also, wikipedia disagrees with you: "Audio sources encoded to FLAC are typically reduced in size 30 to 40 percent." 700MB x.7 = 490MB. (or 420, assuming 40% compression.)
Secondly, most of the time, people are using a higher quality setting anyway for lossy encoding. An 80 minute album at 192kbps is going to be around 112.5MB, or a bit less than 1/3 the space of the lossless compression.
Most slashdot people, or most people in general? I think the overwhelming majority of iTunes users never touch their encoding settings, so 128kbps is a safe assumption.
And even if it doesn't, harddrive space is CHEAP. Sure, 500GB drives don't grow on trees, but storage space has never been as cheap as it is now. A 500GB drive can store over 1000 albums, that's less than 10 cents per album.
Cheap comparatively, sure, but not absolutely. And you can't buy hard drive space in increments--if you only need 10 more GB of storage space, too bad; you're got to buy at least 80GB. And I don't think most consumers would think paying between 80 and 120 dollars for extra hard drive space qualifies as "cheap." (Again, I'm assuming we're talking about the average iTunes user, who does not use newegg or outpost.com to get decent deals on HDD space.) This was all to counter the AC's response, which was that encoding in FLAC, as opposed to AAC, carried with it no additional costs. It's simply not true. And it's more than an inconsequential cost; it would cost Apple much more in bandwidth usage, (and thus probably cost more to acquire from them), and costs more to store.
Sure, the proper DVD is even better, but by the time that is available (actually before), the pirated copies are *also* based on DVD-rips, so they remain superior.
But the point I am trying to make is that for some, "sucky and impossible-to-watch" does not beat "not available at all." It may be the best available at that time, but it may still be unacceptable for a good deal of viewers, myself included. So I hesitate to call the cam release "superior"--it's certainly more available, but superior is too strong a word, because it isn't an option for some.
You keep arguing that bandwith cost more money the more you use it...I'm not sure I understand you.
No, I'm arguing that bandwidth for distribution costs the providers money. Apple pays X dollars for X amount of bandwidth. If they start distributing files that are 10 times as large as what they have now, they will probably suffer an exponential increase in cost for their bandwidth--and that cost will, in part, be transferred to the consumer. Apple can't afford to charge $.99 a song if each song is nearly 50MB; bandwidth would become prohibitively expensive. Go and look at serving capacity contracts from any ISP; it's all based on bandwidth caps.
Plenty of privatized systems (UK railroads anyone?) become much worse, and plenty of countries have excellent services for things like health care or public transportation.
I don't think there are many systems of public health care that are "excellent" and do not require an immense tax burden from the citizenry. Public transportation is really touch-and-go--you raise a good point there, but I don't have any evidence to swing the debate either way, in America's case. Personal transportation is basically all anyone does in America unless they live in a big city, and even then, car ownership for urban residents in America far outweighs the rest of the world. It may just be a cultural thing. I wish we had better public transit, but we can't even get private transit to be successful, because everyone would just rather drive their car.
If the government would have held on to the wires themselves instead of giving it away to private enterprise, I'm sure service would be much better than it is now (you do realize that voting customers have influence, however little, on government, while consumers of a monopoly have no influence at all?)
I agree, which is why part of the government's job is to prevent monopolies from forming. I honestly don't know what would have happened if the government had not divvied up the wire back in the day. Maybe things would be better now--our government was much less bulky. But I would shudder to think of the modern government handling internet access. Just look at the clusterf*ck that is "Homeland Security," and how routinely they fail at the simplest of tests.
So why can't a state-owned company be a fair player in a competitive industry? After all, the only difference would be who had title on the shares; if the problem is that the government could introduce a regulatory skew into the market, that could be prevented by constitution (in countries which have constitutional governments, at least).
Because the very nature of public funding complicates things. Subsidies always come with strings attached, and the government just isn't very good and quickly and efficiently responding to consumer demand. Our airline industry is a perfect example: privately owned airlines are thriving, while subsidizes airlines are barely able to stave off bankruptcy. If the government started subsidizing like shareholders did, i.e. "you promise me growth of x% or I withdraw my shares," then I think it's possible. But the amount of supervision and overhead the state would require to do that on a large scale would be cost-prohibitive.
In contrast, dogmatically insisting that governments cannot run companies properly and must be prevented from owning them produces governments which can never earn their keep or pay their own way, which are always a drain on individual effort and enterprise, and which have no sense of responsibility (it's hard to maintain one when not only do you earn all your money by theft and extortion, but you are prohibited from exercising any other choice).
Ok, you lost me here. I say government is terrible at providing services. (And thus, by inference, that they are terrible at running companies.) How does this keep the government from earning its keep? There are some jobs that just can't be entrusted to the private sector: national security and lawmaking, to name a few. (Although in the US we are increasingly becoming slaves of our lobbyist system.) I think our method of election needs to change--especially presidential elections--and that our methods of taxation must change too. (Fairtax FTW.) But I'm a government minimalist--make it provide what it must, and let the people do the rest.
Exactly what companies do you think are going to start massively laying wire? The phone companies (the what, two that are left)? Already have. Maybe cable companies? Already have.
New ones. I get into this in an earlier post--I firmly believe companies will enter the market if given the chance.
The government has nothing to do with the high barrier to entry to the telecommunications market. In fact, aside from the bureaucracy of having to get the permission of basically every local government you want to lay wire for, I don't believe that there ARE any laws restricting competition.
See here and here. Specifically, note the parts that talk about ILECs and CLECs. Why would an ILEC be forced to allow a CLEC to use its wire? Because a CLEC isn't allowed to run its own.
It is simply ungodly expensive to lay wire and purchase all the devices necessary to connect those wires, and it's economically inefficient to run two or three or 15 pieces of wire to the same places when only one gets used at a time.
It really isn't that expensive. There's just not a lot of demand for the product, so prices stay high--it's just simple economics. Admittedly, copper can only get more expensive, but fiber's price can only decrease. It's a synthetic compound, and if demand for it jumped through the roof, people would find more efficient ways to make it. Look at how fast the PC market has grown in ten years. Why aren't we seeing the same sort of innovation in networking equipment? Because the demand isn't there.
That these new entrants would have no interest in serving rural customers if not forced to is certainly something to consider. So is whether or not these people all scrambling to run wire in your scenario would bother to connect with each other and under what terms. Ultimately these are issues that will require government intervention.
I'm mostly concerned with government-granted monopolies. For the purposes of inter-network communication, I don't think any rational company would refuse to do it, or even charge extra for it: look at cell phone service. Clearly the issue is complicated, but ultimately competition would not allow competitors to try and screw the customer--if one provider was being a jackass, then you could switch, and that would be that. If there was evidence of large-scale collusion, then the government steps in--that's what it's there for.
You should acquaint yourself with the term Natural Monopoly and its implications. These issues are complicated, particularly if you go back in history to the time when things were just starting out. There really isn't an answer that is both simple and good. It may be that there is no good answer at all.
I am familiar with the term; I just don't think it applies here. The only issues I see are in how to service the rural areas, which I think just requires more research. We haven't found a way to get them cost-effective broadband, yet. This is not the same as not being able to get them water or electricity.
Can you say Healthcare? Education? Electricity? Water?
Private education consistently stomps public education, so efficiency is not a question there. Health care is a mixed bag, and is more closely linked to the fubar'd insurance system in the US than the nature of private health care. Electricity and water are a different story altogether. It is possible to live without internet access; I think most Americans would find it impossible to live without water, and extremely difficult to live without electricity. I do think electricity could benefit from some deregulation, but water has to be a public utility, and as a result it's going to be less efficient. I'm not saying "the government should never provide any services, ever." I'm saying "whenever we can prevent having the government provide a service, we should do so."
Poppy cock. If you believe that, you haven't worked in private enterprise business(es). Did Enron or Worldcom deliver? I'll grant you Walmart. But to say governments are terrible at providing services and not taking into account the problems with private enterprise businesses is silly. As a current example, look to Michael Moore's "Sicko".
You're attacking two different issues here. The first issue is the idea that private enterprise can be just as inefficient as public enterprise. I agree with you, but look at the two examples you just gave. They're both companies that were profoundly corrupt. They represent the overwhelming minority of private companies. Now look at state government in the US. Ask anyone who works for the state whether or not its run efficiently. I have worked for two separate state organizations, and I realize the evidence I present is anecdotal, but both times the process was excruciatingly inefficient. Everyone I speak to who works in the state or consults for the state asserts the same thing: the efficient state organization is the exception, not the rule. It has to do with the very nature of bureaucracy: no market pressure means no incentive to perform. Likewise, state employees are never rewarded for exemplary service, and so the state rarely keeps the best and the brightest. (There are exceptions to this--the NSA, CIA, and FBI all recruit very bright individuals, but that is because they can provide other compensation that traditional salaries can't necessarily match.)
Your example of the health industry is amusing, because I work at an insurance brokerage. I can tell you now that our insurance system is the reason that health care costs are so high; it has nothing to do with private enterprise. It's an extremely complicated problem that requires a fundamental shift in American attitudes before we can really start fixing it.
I think you provided the counter argument to this in your own comment. It's the high price of laying lines into rural areas that made the government get involved. There are certain segments of the market that costs more than others to penetrate. If not for government intervention, most of rural America won't have telecommunication services. Not everyone and their mother can start laying lines because of the high infrastructure cost. In markets that have very low entry cost, government intervention is rarely needed but in markets where there are high upfront capital cost, government intervention is needed to ensure that everyone is being served. It is definitely inefficient but so are a lot of things that fall under the category of "fairness" or have to do with "social justice".
I agree with you, but this is what makes me so upset about the $200 billion that the US government forked over to telcoms to address that very issue. It is my opinion now that the telcoms are not providing adequate service to anyone. To my knowledge, no one is spending serious time and money to try and develop a cost-effective way to get internet service to rural areas. That's the kind of thing the govt. should be pouring money into.
Or do you intend upon arguing that several different companies would have laid their own fiber networks across an entire city?
In a nutshell, yes, I am arguing that. In much the same way that many different wireless providers originally threw their antennas up, I think that if the market were completely deregulated, a lot of people would try their hand at providing internet service. I know that if Richmond were to open up tomorrow, I would probably get into the business myself. I'm fairly close with a few ISP employees and deal with Verizon, Cavalier, and Level 3 on a regular basis, (as well as Richmond Air, a wireless ISP), and I really am convinced that prices for everything in that market are artificially high because there's no incentive to make things cheaper. It was really my exposure to Richmond Air, who's not subject to nearly as much regulation (and as a result, is much more competitive), that got me thinking this way.
I'm interested in your "cheaper" comment. Seems like you are grasping at anything to try to justify AAC over FLAC.
Did you even read the OP? I'll quote for you:
That makes AACs at least five times cheaper to distribute (assuming the only cost involved is bandwidth, and that costs rise proportionally to bandwidth) than FLACs.
So, off the bat, you completely misread the OP's point. He never claimed anything regarding cost to consumers, but was speaking about the cost of distribution--and even that includes a caveat! But let's move on to your next point.
I download and convert my music to FLAC all of the time. Where am I wasting money?
When did anyone ever mention anything about wasting money? Up until this point we were just discussing realities: FLAC files are much bigger than 128kbps AAC files, so it costs more to distribute FLAC files. Coincidentally, it also costs more to store them.
I can see one way and that is the DVDs that I backup my FLAC music too. Considering a 4.7GB DVD is about $0.20, I guess every 10 DVDs I use as a backup would yield me a $2 savings. I generate about 10 DVDs a year of FLAC backups so I guess your big concern with the money saving advantage of compressed AAC is roughly $2/year. Well worth the cost because IMHO, compressed music sucks on anything but a portable player with headphones. Gee, thanks for the great money saving tip.
This is where you really lose it. Are you just going to completely ignore the space on your hard drive the FLACs take up? An average 500GB drive costs between $100 and $120. The average FLAC album is 500MB. The average 128kbps AAC album is (let's be generous here) 50MB. That is an entire order of magnitude. You would need to buy 10 500GB drives to store an equivalent amount of FLACs as AACs. Now, most people don't have music collections that are that large--but my current collection (recorded in a mix of MP3 and AAC) is easily 80GB, stored on a 500GB drive. I could not fit this same collection on the drive using FLAC; I would have to either switch to a TB drive, or span the library over two separate drives, both of which would cost me money. Unless you are claiming you only play FLACs from your DVD backups, (in which case the cost should factor in time and convenience), there is no doubt that FLACs cost you considerably more to store than AAC files.
So, in conclusion, FLAC does cost more than AAC, for everyone. I'm not claiming the cost is unjustified; some people vastly prefer lossless audio. Others really don't care. But there can be no doubt that the extra quality carries with it a hefty price tag.
The ones from cams are *also* superior to the DVDs, for the simple reason that they're available at a time when the alternative DVD is -no- DVD.
If you consider superior to consider only availability, then I'd say you've got a case--but most people also factor in viewing quality. I can't watch most cam releases because it's just too difficult to follow what's going on; the audio is booming, the viewing angle is bad, and the contrast flares so much that it makes the viewing prohibitive. A DVD also normally includes other audio tracks, some extras, etc. I do think the time between theatrical and DVD release is artificially long, though.
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That is the most draconian pricing policy I have ever heard. You actually have to pay Oracle for increasing your processing power?
And an honest question: was there a reason why you didn't look at MySQL or PostgreSQL? I'm not a database expert but my work with them has made me believe they are robust solutions--I certainly prefer them to MSSQL, which is about as pleasant to use as a suppository.
Okay, not withstanding your obvious (and, I will admit, somewhat justified) anger at media corporations, is AIDS an acronym for something besides Acquired Immuno-Deficiency Syndrome? Or are you saying that Sony et al. want to give me an STD? I would normally consider hyperbole to be in the vein of an angry rant but the mention of AIDS doesn't quite follow naturally from DRM. Then again, I may just not be caught up to what the kids are saying nowadays.
QFT.
This is not flamebait. It was a true observation: people should not criticize Vista's UAC if they genuinely don't know anything about it. People who think UAC is overly obtrusive haven't used Vista enough: during the initial install phase, yes, you need to grant access fairly often. But that's no different than on any Linux machine. The problem is that most programs that have no business requiring root access (AIM?) require it for a successful install and sometimes even afterwards, and so Windows users get the impression that they can't do anything unless they're an admin. Vista does a lot of things wrong (it is far too resource-intensive, IMO) but this isn't one of them. Calling someone out who doesn't use Vista and doesn't know much about UAC when they make false statements shouldn't qualify as flamebait.
Because then it would be doing its job and protecting the consumer, which would involve effort and foresight. This way, they can just do what the cable companies ask them to, and everyone who matters goes away happy and rich.
(Okay, I'm not normally this anti-establishment, but the FCC has convinced me that it doesn't give a flying fuck about the American people.)
But that's not really the entire question, is it? We also have to deal with the question of simultaneous connections and throughput, two areas where fiber handily beats a wireless solution. I'm emailing my friend at Richmond Air to see what insight he has to offer, but I think the TCO of wireless and fiber solutions are closer than most people realize--and that, overall, there's a lot more potential for market growth than the telcoms would like us to believe.
Not at all. Investment agencies have to compete with each other, so they have considerable incentive to do things as efficiently as possible. There is no one the government would have to compete with to remain "the government." I see your point--that the govt-owned firm would essentially be forced to act and compete as a private firm--but what I am saying is that the government would never be able to handle investments in that govt-owned firm as efficiently as an investment brokerage would. The people in charge of auditing that company and managing its growth, on the govt-side, would have no competition for their jobs, (and would also not have a reward system in place for doing well), and thus wouldn't be motivated to do any more than the bare minimum.
I did above--as an institution, the government isn't at risk of going out of business. Sure, there needs to be budgetary management, but just enough to ensure that it doesn't go bankrupt. (And a quick look at Medicare and Social Security will show you just how well it does at that.)
Yes, but they're not supposed to be revenue-generating. The government exists solely to protect my rights and liberties. It cannot do that without some infrastructure devoted to law enforcement and national defense. National security is something we, as a nation, need to pay for. It's not theft because we're being provided with a service that we can't trust any private entities to offer. There's a word for profitable national security: colonialism. We don't want that.
I will say I find your idea of having the government invest in firms pretty interesting. I think it would require a complete re-imagining of how the government works, along with a significant culture shift among state workers, to succeed. Having worked for the state, and knowing people in the Armed Forces, I can tell you now that at least in the US, they are horribly inefficient. And it's because of the bureaucratic culture.
Per my conversations with the wireless ISP in Richmond, this has not been the impression I've received. It's not cheaper or faster (although it may be less disruptive); it just requires a different sort of maintenance and cost. To my understanding, not all fiber has to be buried, either. It can be suspended along poles. So the only places it needs to be buried are in connection spots for residential neighborhoods--the wiring from a residential unit to a connection box, and the internal wiring of the residential unit, should be handled in the original construction anyway.
What's the nature of their monopoly? Your conclusion doesn't follow naturally--did the Australian government just hand them the lines and say "here, these are yours now?" Because that's what happened in the US and it's why I think the internet isn't privatized at all: it's in the hands of government-granted monopolies. I can't say that the alternative--a govt-run monopoly--would be any better or worse (my suspicion is that it would be much, much worse), but I firmly believe that completely opening the land to anyone who wanted to run cable would cause a boom in internet access.
You're comparing 320kbps MP3s to FLAC. I was comparing 128kbps AAC to FLAC. Are you asserting that a 128kbps AAC file and a 320kbps MP3 file are the same size?
I pulled the numbers off of awaken.com; also, wikipedia disagrees with you: "Audio sources encoded to FLAC are typically reduced in size 30 to 40 percent." 700MB x .7 = 490MB. (or 420, assuming 40% compression.)
Most slashdot people, or most people in general? I think the overwhelming majority of iTunes users never touch their encoding settings, so 128kbps is a safe assumption.
Cheap comparatively, sure, but not absolutely. And you can't buy hard drive space in increments--if you only need 10 more GB of storage space, too bad; you're got to buy at least 80GB. And I don't think most consumers would think paying between 80 and 120 dollars for extra hard drive space qualifies as "cheap." (Again, I'm assuming we're talking about the average iTunes user, who does not use newegg or outpost.com to get decent deals on HDD space.) This was all to counter the AC's response, which was that encoding in FLAC, as opposed to AAC, carried with it no additional costs. It's simply not true. And it's more than an inconsequential cost; it would cost Apple much more in bandwidth usage, (and thus probably cost more to acquire from them), and costs more to store.
I sort of responded to this post in the one below, as you both made (more or less) the same point.
But the point I am trying to make is that for some, "sucky and impossible-to-watch" does not beat "not available at all." It may be the best available at that time, but it may still be unacceptable for a good deal of viewers, myself included. So I hesitate to call the cam release "superior"--it's certainly more available, but superior is too strong a word, because it isn't an option for some.
No, I'm arguing that bandwidth for distribution costs the providers money. Apple pays X dollars for X amount of bandwidth. If they start distributing files that are 10 times as large as what they have now, they will probably suffer an exponential increase in cost for their bandwidth--and that cost will, in part, be transferred to the consumer. Apple can't afford to charge $.99 a song if each song is nearly 50MB; bandwidth would become prohibitively expensive. Go and look at serving capacity contracts from any ISP; it's all based on bandwidth caps.
I don't think there are many systems of public health care that are "excellent" and do not require an immense tax burden from the citizenry. Public transportation is really touch-and-go--you raise a good point there, but I don't have any evidence to swing the debate either way, in America's case. Personal transportation is basically all anyone does in America unless they live in a big city, and even then, car ownership for urban residents in America far outweighs the rest of the world. It may just be a cultural thing. I wish we had better public transit, but we can't even get private transit to be successful, because everyone would just rather drive their car.
I agree, which is why part of the government's job is to prevent monopolies from forming. I honestly don't know what would have happened if the government had not divvied up the wire back in the day. Maybe things would be better now--our government was much less bulky. But I would shudder to think of the modern government handling internet access. Just look at the clusterf*ck that is "Homeland Security," and how routinely they fail at the simplest of tests.
Because the very nature of public funding complicates things. Subsidies always come with strings attached, and the government just isn't very good and quickly and efficiently responding to consumer demand. Our airline industry is a perfect example: privately owned airlines are thriving, while subsidizes airlines are barely able to stave off bankruptcy. If the government started subsidizing like shareholders did, i.e. "you promise me growth of x% or I withdraw my shares," then I think it's possible. But the amount of supervision and overhead the state would require to do that on a large scale would be cost-prohibitive.
Ok, you lost me here. I say government is terrible at providing services. (And thus, by inference, that they are terrible at running companies.) How does this keep the government from earning its keep? There are some jobs that just can't be entrusted to the private sector: national security and lawmaking, to name a few. (Although in the US we are increasingly becoming slaves of our lobbyist system.) I think our method of election needs to change--especially presidential elections--and that our methods of taxation must change too. (Fairtax FTW.) But I'm a government minimalist--make it provide what it must, and let the people do the rest.
New ones. I get into this in an earlier post--I firmly believe companies will enter the market if given the chance.
See here and here. Specifically, note the parts that talk about ILECs and CLECs. Why would an ILEC be forced to allow a CLEC to use its wire? Because a CLEC isn't allowed to run its own.
It really isn't that expensive. There's just not a lot of demand for the product, so prices stay high--it's just simple economics. Admittedly, copper can only get more expensive, but fiber's price can only decrease. It's a synthetic compound, and if demand for it jumped through the roof, people would find more efficient ways to make it. Look at how fast the PC market has grown in ten years. Why aren't we seeing the same sort of innovation in networking equipment? Because the demand isn't there.
I'm mostly concerned with government-granted monopolies. For the purposes of inter-network communication, I don't think any rational company would refuse to do it, or even charge extra for it: look at cell phone service. Clearly the issue is complicated, but ultimately competition would not allow competitors to try and screw the customer--if one provider was being a jackass, then you could switch, and that would be that. If there was evidence of large-scale collusion, then the government steps in--that's what it's there for.
I am familiar with the term; I just don't think it applies here. The only issues I see are in how to service the rural areas, which I think just requires more research. We haven't found a way to get them cost-effective broadband, yet. This is not the same as not being able to get them water or electricity.
Private education consistently stomps public education, so efficiency is not a question there. Health care is a mixed bag, and is more closely linked to the fubar'd insurance system in the US than the nature of private health care. Electricity and water are a different story altogether. It is possible to live without internet access; I think most Americans would find it impossible to live without water, and extremely difficult to live without electricity. I do think electricity could benefit from some deregulation, but water has to be a public utility, and as a result it's going to be less efficient. I'm not saying "the government should never provide any services, ever." I'm saying "whenever we can prevent having the government provide a service, we should do so."
You're attacking two different issues here. The first issue is the idea that private enterprise can be just as inefficient as public enterprise. I agree with you, but look at the two examples you just gave. They're both companies that were profoundly corrupt. They represent the overwhelming minority of private companies. Now look at state government in the US. Ask anyone who works for the state whether or not its run efficiently. I have worked for two separate state organizations, and I realize the evidence I present is anecdotal, but both times the process was excruciatingly inefficient. Everyone I speak to who works in the state or consults for the state asserts the same thing: the efficient state organization is the exception, not the rule. It has to do with the very nature of bureaucracy: no market pressure means no incentive to perform. Likewise, state employees are never rewarded for exemplary service, and so the state rarely keeps the best and the brightest. (There are exceptions to this--the NSA, CIA, and FBI all recruit very bright individuals, but that is because they can provide other compensation that traditional salaries can't necessarily match.)
Your example of the health industry is amusing, because I work at an insurance brokerage. I can tell you now that our insurance system is the reason that health care costs are so high; it has nothing to do with private enterprise. It's an extremely complicated problem that requires a fundamental shift in American attitudes before we can really start fixing it.
I agree with you, but this is what makes me so upset about the $200 billion that the US government forked over to telcoms to address that very issue. It is my opinion now that the telcoms are not providing adequate service to anyone. To my knowledge, no one is spending serious time and money to try and develop a cost-effective way to get internet service to rural areas. That's the kind of thing the govt. should be pouring money into.
In a nutshell, yes, I am arguing that. In much the same way that many different wireless providers originally threw their antennas up, I think that if the market were completely deregulated, a lot of people would try their hand at providing internet service. I know that if Richmond were to open up tomorrow, I would probably get into the business myself. I'm fairly close with a few ISP employees and deal with Verizon, Cavalier, and Level 3 on a regular basis, (as well as Richmond Air, a wireless ISP), and I really am convinced that prices for everything in that market are artificially high because there's no incentive to make things cheaper. It was really my exposure to Richmond Air, who's not subject to nearly as much regulation (and as a result, is much more competitive), that got me thinking this way.
So, off the bat, you completely misread the OP's point. He never claimed anything regarding cost to consumers, but was speaking about the cost of distribution--and even that includes a caveat! But let's move on to your next point.
When did anyone ever mention anything about wasting money? Up until this point we were just discussing realities: FLAC files are much bigger than 128kbps AAC files, so it costs more to distribute FLAC files. Coincidentally, it also costs more to store them.
This is where you really lose it. Are you just going to completely ignore the space on your hard drive the FLACs take up? An average 500GB drive costs between $100 and $120. The average FLAC album is 500MB. The average 128kbps AAC album is (let's be generous here) 50MB. That is an entire order of magnitude. You would need to buy 10 500GB drives to store an equivalent amount of FLACs as AACs. Now, most people don't have music collections that are that large--but my current collection (recorded in a mix of MP3 and AAC) is easily 80GB, stored on a 500GB drive. I could not fit this same collection on the drive using FLAC; I would have to either switch to a TB drive, or span the library over two separate drives, both of which would cost me money. Unless you are claiming you only play FLACs from your DVD backups, (in which case the cost should factor in time and convenience), there is no doubt that FLACs cost you considerably more to store than AAC files.
So, in conclusion, FLAC does cost more than AAC, for everyone. I'm not claiming the cost is unjustified; some people vastly prefer lossless audio. Others really don't care. But there can be no doubt that the extra quality carries with it a hefty price tag.
If you consider superior to consider only availability, then I'd say you've got a case--but most people also factor in viewing quality. I can't watch most cam releases because it's just too difficult to follow what's going on; the audio is booming, the viewing angle is bad, and the contrast flares so much that it makes the viewing prohibitive. A DVD also normally includes other audio tracks, some extras, etc. I do think the time between theatrical and DVD release is artificially long, though.