Because when you use hardware instead of software to do the heavy lifting, you don't see the performance hit and you benefit from encryption on all partitions. Or at least that is the idea, I can't find the read/write rates to make sure there isn't (much of) a performance hit.
They basically have a large dataset consisting of User, Movie, Rating. Of this set, they split it into two data sets. In the smaller subset they removed the ratings and didn't release these to the public. They didn't modify the larger subset at all. They had cinematch make predictions on the smaller subset (without having been told the real predictions) and use this as the baseline. Next, people that compete in the competition make predictions on the missing data and improvements can be calculated. They calculate the percent improvement as 100 * [Submission's Error] / [Cinematch's Error]
There are a number of ways to calculate the error but for the Netflix competition they use MASE (Mean Average Squared Error). Basically you take the sum of the squared difference between what was predicted and what the real rating was then divide it by the number of ratings.
Detailed information can be found on the Netflix Prize rules page and there are a number of good posts on the forums as well.
This is a shame. However, I know my university doesn't accept credit for either portion anyways.
I actually took the AB test the last year the course was C++ and when I got to college it was a pain to get credit -- they had made a policy to no longer accept credit once the course was switched to Java and even though I took it while it was C++, the policy was now in place.
You points are mostly correct. However, copy protection is not "meant to prevent you from backing up your only copy of the disk to another device." It is meant to prevent you from either making copies of movies you do now own (IE rental or borrowed movie) for personal use, or to prevent you from making copying movies you own and giving/selling them to someone that does not own the movie -- basically anything other than fair use (backing up, down sampling for personal use, accessing content for a creative art, etc.) In other words, (IMO), the movie studios don't have any problem with fair use -- they have a problem with theft and the only viable solution on their end is copy protection which unfortunately has the side effect of limiting fair use.
I'm pretty confident that if we were in a perfect society where the only reason someone would copy a movie was for true backup purposes only, then copy protection would not exist. But we aren't in this perfect society, so our two options are 1) Have no copy protection and also some way to legally enforce theft. Or 2) We put up with copy protection which does work against a majority of the public and results in much less law enforcement needed.
The problem with 1 is that it is very difficult for law enforcement to find people that copy movies illegally because it can be done in the privacy. I am certainly not suggesting we should sacrifice privacy in the interest of getting rid of copy protection.
The problem with 2 is that copy restriction restricts fair use (backup, down sampling for personal use and creative art.)
I suppose there is a third option as well which is to make movie theft perfectly legal. This seems like a horrible idea because it will remove incentive for movie studios to produce quality films because of reduced profits, lower margins and higher risk. Movie studios have always had the option to do this but nobody has found a business model that can strive on free movies like we have with free/open source software.
You are right, programmers aren't currently "stuck" with a serial programming model; however, looking into the future it is pretty clear that the hardware is developing faster than the programming models. Systems with dozens and dozens of cores aren't far off but we really don't have a good way to take advantage of all the cores.
In the very near future, we could potentially have systems with hundreds of cores that sit idle all the time because none of the software takes advantage of much more than 5-10 cores. Of course, this would never actually happen, because once the hardware manufacturers notice this to be a problem, they will stop increasing the number of cores and try to make some other changes that would result in increased performance to the end user. There will always be a bottleneck -- either the software paradigms or the hardware and right now it looks like in the near future it will be the software.
Yes, there are some algorithms that no matter what you do have to be executed sequentially. However, there is a huge truckload of algorithms that can be rewritten, with little added complexity, to take advantage of parallel computing. Furthermore, there is a slew of algorithms that could be rewritten with a slight loss in efficiency to be parallelized but with a net gain in performance. This third type of algorithm is what I think the most interesting is for researchers -- Even though parallelizing the algorithm may introduce redundant calculations or added work, the increased number of workers outweighs this.
In other words, what is more efficient: 1 core that performs 20,000 instructions in 1 second or 5 cores that each perform 7,000 instructions, in parallel, in 0.35 seconds. Perhaps surprisingly to you, the single core is more efficient (20,000 instructions instead of 7,000*5 = 35,000 instructions) -- BUT, if we have the extra 4 cores sitting around doing nothing anyways, we may as well introduce inefficiency and finish the algorithm about 2.9 times faster.
I'm all for free market competition and in the end I hope that Sun goes through with this and we get to see it all play out; however, a part of me feels like Apple developed the hardware, API, and SDK and should get their $99 + 30% if thats what they require. If consumers don't like this in the long run, they can go buy other phones.
Either Apple is starting to see enough revenue that the business division is getting more swing within the company, OR, the engineers have some reason that they didn't want to bother trying to implement Java (performance, security, etc.)
Personally, I'm holding my tongue for Silverlight with a custom set of iPhone controls (afterall, Microsoft said in MIX08 something along the lines of "We intend to port Silverlight to every mobile device that has an SDK")
Engineering has always been about compromise. Any idiot can design a structure that is X feet tall but it would prove more useful it if wasn't a giant block of concrete -- if it had room for offices and the materials used to build it had minimal cost without sacrificing structural integrity.
The same applies to computer engineering. We would easily build a cell phone network that had so many redundancies that it would virtually never go down and would support for thousands of times the expected average load, but we would pay for it in terms of cost. Customers demand reliability. Customers demand affordable cost. What the customer is "willing to accept" is a balance between the two.
It sounds like they don't need faster super computers but instead to narrow the number of areas they are crunching away at. Why not pick the top 2 or 3 issues and crunch away at those instead of running 20 jobs, all of which will hardly get anywhere in the four years this supercomputer has to live?
I don't think the availability of high quality downloads should effect whether or not the market is ready for HD media. Instead, the limiting factor is the ubiquity of high def TVs in the household; there is no sense in getting a blue ray player if you have a 480 TV.
Conversely, I think the lack of high quality downloads would actually spur increased demand for the delivery of high quality content though other means (in this case, HD discs.) If people have high def TVs, they are going to want high def content. If they can't get high def content from the internet, they will try to get it from high def media.
I don't know anything about Zimbra but if it is really open source, then there is nothing Microsoft would be able to do. The license allows other groups to take the code and continue development. Assuming Yahoo is paying employees to develop Zimbra (I have no idea, are they?) the worst Microsoft could do is lay off those employees or make them start working on a different project. However, the open source is still out there with its license in tact and if it really is a good project, someone will start up a sourceforge project in no time.
There is a great article on Reuters (http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSN0631875320080209) about Chris Liddell, Microsoft's new Chief Financial Advisor. It discusses why Microsoft has increased spending/acquisitions so much lately.
My personal stance is that it was stupid that they had so much cash sitting around in the first place. This change in spending shouldn't be thought of as a last ditch desperation but rather a long needed change in spending philosophy. What good could ever come of having 64 billion dollars in cash doing nothing? (This happened in 2004 just before the world's largest dividend was paid out.)
Having said that, I'm still not sure I agree that Yahoo was a good acquisition target. It would only be valuable if Microsoft could actually merge all the common services and do it without disrupting current users' service. Just look at youtube, Google hasn't really done anything noticible to change youtube and they've had it for quite some time now. I would have at least expected Google Video to be fully merged or redirect to youtube by now.
I'm not sure I understand your point about Microsoft copying the iPhone. Microsoft has been in the phone business for years now (Windows CE/Mobile), long before Apple decided to do the iPhone. Secondly, Ballmer has already stated that Microsoft is not interested in making a Zune-Phone or anything of that type; Microsoft is happy selling the operating system for phones to other companies to do with what they want on the hardware side of things.
Personally, I would think less of Microsoft if they didn't even try to get into new markets. I'm glad to see that they acknowledge that new markets exist and that there is room for more competition. Everyone should be thankful that Microsoft is competing because competition is the best for consumers -- just look at what it did with Intel and AMD (lower prices and faster technology development).
So the encryption technique which is built on top of the fact that prime numbers products are difficult to factor is supposedly going to be beaten. This encryption technique relies on the fact that as we scale the prime number product up in size linearly, the difficulty to factor it goes up exponentially (ie, factoring 6773461 (1489*4549) is (much) more than twice as difficult as factoring 3391079 (2003*1693) even through 6773461/3391079 ~= 2.) Next up, there exists a quantum algorithm (and has for some time now) that can perform this factoring in O((log n)^3) time. Quantum computers are now capable of running this algorithm.
At this point most people would panic and begin buying up all the gold bricks; however, what we have failed to mention is that producing a quantum computer capable of dealing with larger and larger numbers is an exponentially difficult problem in itself. Currently we have quantum computers that can run this algorithm on the number 15 (5*3) but it will be over twice as difficult to build a quantum computer that can run this algorithm on 35 (5*7). We need not worry until quantum computer manufacturing/engineering gets to a point where they can be scaled up linearly as well. I don't doubt that this day will come, but I do doubt that it will come before we have figured out a good quantum replacement that doesn't scale well even on quantum computers.
I was thinking more along the lines of the second to last machine man need ever make. The final machine, of course, being the ultra-intelligent machine that has human compassion hard-wired.
Microsoft has said that one of the goals of the 360 was to help Microsoft get into the consumer's family room. And, it makes sense when you are a company with 60,000 programmers in Redmond alone. Games will always be the primary concern for both Sony and Microsoft but you can only put so many developers on one aspect for so long before it becomes over saturated. So we start to see all these other technologies arise.
For Microsoft, each technology synergies with other Microsoft technologies (the ability to stream from your Windows PVR makes Media Center more desirable, XNA makes programmers that develop for the 360 also have a very easy time delivering the same code to PC and visa versa.) However, for Sony it seems like each of these new technologies is just another effort to increase console sales.
It will certainly be a good thing. I don't see how it could ever possibly be a bad thing to offer more scholarship programs. The question really should be 'how good?' or 'Does the good outweigh the investment?'.
To the latter, I would answer probably not. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against giving scholarships out to help more people get the education they deserve. However, I do think there are ways this money could be spent that would be even more beneficial. The reason we are falling behind other countries isn't because too few engineers are graduating; it is because the quality of those graduates is falling behind.
It would be a sale of the rights to use the allocated spectrum until some further unknown date -- basically whenever the government decides to sell it again.
After all, its not like we just invented a new spectrum and are selling it now. It has been around and in use for a long time and we are just now reallocating it for better use. If I recall, this spectrum was used for over the air TV previously?
Yeah, maybe $1,000 if you hired the contractor to do one backyard. What do you think he/she would charge if you were looking to have an entire city of backyards wired?
But thats not important anyways. We aren't worried about giving every house a new connection. The connection between my house and my local Comcast station is plenty fast -- the problem for me is between that station and the backbone and possibly even the backbone itself. My calculations say that I only need 5.69 MB/s to stream 30GB in 90 minutes. This could very easily be a high def (1080) movie. My coaxial can deliver this much bandwidth but there is certainly a bottleneck somewhere else.
Spam is annoying, dont get me wrong; however, I don't believe it is a very large bandwidth problem. Yes, it is responsible for a lot of bandwidth but nothing compared to other ways that we use/waste bandwidth. I'm pretty sure watching a single youtube video uses more bandwidth than all of the spam that I receive all month or even year.
As for your idea about putting the attachments on a server, thats exactly how attachments work. The sender sends the email and attachments to an email server. The recipient requests the files and they are downloaded. It wouldn't save any bandwidth to use a rapidshare and include a link in the email instead (except for the cases when the user doesn't want to see the picture -- but this is more easily solved by using an email client that delays the downloading of pictures until the user requests.)
Slashdot users in general are far more tech-savvy than the majority of computer users out there. Also, it is very easy for us Slashdotters to participate in conversations about operating systems and new technologies only with eachother. Because of this, we continually get a one-sided view of things and we have gotten to the point that there are rarely any good arguments between us anymore -- its always just a comment board full of Microsoft/RIAA/MPAA/yada/yada bashing instead of decent discussions about not only the flaws but also the positive aspects of the situation.
Home Users: Many of the posts above claim that switching from Windows to Linux or MacOS has been a great decision on your part. I'm glad you have found the best solution for your personal needs. However, please do consider that an overwhelming majority of computer users don't even know (or care to know) how to change their screen resolution yet alone ever fiddle around with tweaking settings, etc. Keep in mind that your needs are much different from that of the average PC user. While switching away from Windows was a great alternative for many Slashdotters, it is simply not so for the average Windows user.
When I installed Vista for the first time I was very excited to see that I didn't have to download a single driver for my Dell XPS. I had installed Windows XP on it countless times (due to Spyware and viruses) and nearly every time I forgot to burn a cd that had Dell's networking drivers on it -- with Vista this would not be an issue anymore. However, this was probably the only thing I was happy with about Vista.
I found it to be very sluggish and the copy/move file issue is almost enough for me to delete this entire post and go on with my day. UAC will be nice someday but currently it is just another default setting that I have to switch after an install. The reworked network will come in handy when IPV6 comes around but I can see how the average user wouldn't give a hoot. The user interface is nice and a lot of the work that went on behind the scenes to make it possible also means easier development of future features, but it should be more than simply a 3d window switcher and translucent title bars. I certainly don't feel like the new additions to Vista warrant the price tag. In fact, I wouldn't spend more than $100 on a copy of Vista Ultimate -- I'd rather have a slightly thicker wallet and be running Windows XP.
Gamers: I saw a number of posts about people having difficulty playing games in Vista. Although I'm not aware of the specific issues discussed in those posts, I'm willing to bet that they were caused by graphics driver issues which is out of Microsoft's control. If that isn't the case, the issues at hand were probably caused by the developers of the game writing code that relied on the fact that took advantage of unsupported effects of certain api. They never should have written the game this way in the first place and what it does is prevent Microsoft from rewriting parts of the operating system without breaking anything. (Much like how many popular websites use unsupported CSS hacks because they work but then complain when Microsoft or Mozilla makes a change to an unrelated piece of code that breaks the hack -- which never should have worked in the first place.) But back to my point, there is no current viable alternative to Windows for gamers that want to play any game off the shelf.
Developers: I don't understand how anyone can program without a graphical debugger such as the one included in Visual Studio -- props to all of you who do and are happy about that. For me, the ability to easily step through lines of code as they execute, manipulate memory in real time, and change the order that code is executed has easily saved me from hours of otherwise tedious debugging (asserts and cerr can only do so much.)
Severs: To be honest, I'm not very familiar with server technologies. Linux seems to definitely have a head-up on Windows in this market -- at least for people that just want to dev
After a long discussion, study of large samples of human beings with wide ranges of ability, talent, and work ethic, we will conclude exactly what we expected; The elite not only show the best ability but they also have the best possible predisposition and have furthermore used hard work to train whatever it is this hypothetical elite person strives at. Furthermore, the people who exhibit the absolute lowest ability within an area of study are not only apathetic to this area but also lack the predisposition. People somewhere in between have varying values of talent and work ethic.
Ability, talent and work ethic are all real values, that is, there not only exist infinatly many values to describe a person's ability, but there are also an infinite number of levels of ability between any two people.
Slashdot Mirror
Because when you use hardware instead of software to do the heavy lifting, you don't see the performance hit and you benefit from encryption on all partitions. Or at least that is the idea, I can't find the read/write rates to make sure there isn't (much of) a performance hit.
Which improvements? The Netflix competition?
They basically have a large dataset consisting of User, Movie, Rating. Of this set, they split it into two data sets. In the smaller subset they removed the ratings and didn't release these to the public. They didn't modify the larger subset at all. They had cinematch make predictions on the smaller subset (without having been told the real predictions) and use this as the baseline. Next, people that compete in the competition make predictions on the missing data and improvements can be calculated. They calculate the percent improvement as 100 * [Submission's Error] / [Cinematch's Error]
There are a number of ways to calculate the error but for the Netflix competition they use MASE (Mean Average Squared Error). Basically you take the sum of the squared difference between what was predicted and what the real rating was then divide it by the number of ratings.
Detailed information can be found on the Netflix Prize rules page and there are a number of good posts on the forums as well.
This is a shame. However, I know my university doesn't accept credit for either portion anyways.
I actually took the AB test the last year the course was C++ and when I got to college it was a pain to get credit -- they had made a policy to no longer accept credit once the course was switched to Java and even though I took it while it was C++, the policy was now in place.
Need to up the voltage to speed that pacemaker up? No problem, just get the flu.
You points are mostly correct. However, copy protection is not "meant to prevent you from backing up your only copy of the disk to another device." It is meant to prevent you from either making copies of movies you do now own (IE rental or borrowed movie) for personal use, or to prevent you from making copying movies you own and giving/selling them to someone that does not own the movie -- basically anything other than fair use (backing up, down sampling for personal use, accessing content for a creative art, etc.) In other words, (IMO), the movie studios don't have any problem with fair use -- they have a problem with theft and the only viable solution on their end is copy protection which unfortunately has the side effect of limiting fair use.
I'm pretty confident that if we were in a perfect society where the only reason someone would copy a movie was for true backup purposes only, then copy protection would not exist. But we aren't in this perfect society, so our two options are 1) Have no copy protection and also some way to legally enforce theft. Or 2) We put up with copy protection which does work against a majority of the public and results in much less law enforcement needed.
The problem with 1 is that it is very difficult for law enforcement to find people that copy movies illegally because it can be done in the privacy. I am certainly not suggesting we should sacrifice privacy in the interest of getting rid of copy protection.
The problem with 2 is that copy restriction restricts fair use (backup, down sampling for personal use and creative art.)
I suppose there is a third option as well which is to make movie theft perfectly legal. This seems like a horrible idea because it will remove incentive for movie studios to produce quality films because of reduced profits, lower margins and higher risk. Movie studios have always had the option to do this but nobody has found a business model that can strive on free movies like we have with free/open source software.
You are right, programmers aren't currently "stuck" with a serial programming model; however, looking into the future it is pretty clear that the hardware is developing faster than the programming models. Systems with dozens and dozens of cores aren't far off but we really don't have a good way to take advantage of all the cores.
In the very near future, we could potentially have systems with hundreds of cores that sit idle all the time because none of the software takes advantage of much more than 5-10 cores. Of course, this would never actually happen, because once the hardware manufacturers notice this to be a problem, they will stop increasing the number of cores and try to make some other changes that would result in increased performance to the end user. There will always be a bottleneck -- either the software paradigms or the hardware and right now it looks like in the near future it will be the software.
Yes, there are some algorithms that no matter what you do have to be executed sequentially. However, there is a huge truckload of algorithms that can be rewritten, with little added complexity, to take advantage of parallel computing. Furthermore, there is a slew of algorithms that could be rewritten with a slight loss in efficiency to be parallelized but with a net gain in performance. This third type of algorithm is what I think the most interesting is for researchers -- Even though parallelizing the algorithm may introduce redundant calculations or added work, the increased number of workers outweighs this.
In other words, what is more efficient: 1 core that performs 20,000 instructions in 1 second or 5 cores that each perform 7,000 instructions, in parallel, in 0.35 seconds. Perhaps surprisingly to you, the single core is more efficient (20,000 instructions instead of 7,000*5 = 35,000 instructions) -- BUT, if we have the extra 4 cores sitting around doing nothing anyways, we may as well introduce inefficiency and finish the algorithm about 2.9 times faster.
I'm all for free market competition and in the end I hope that Sun goes through with this and we get to see it all play out; however, a part of me feels like Apple developed the hardware, API, and SDK and should get their $99 + 30% if thats what they require. If consumers don't like this in the long run, they can go buy other phones.
Either Apple is starting to see enough revenue that the business division is getting more swing within the company, OR, the engineers have some reason that they didn't want to bother trying to implement Java (performance, security, etc.)
Personally, I'm holding my tongue for Silverlight with a custom set of iPhone controls (afterall, Microsoft said in MIX08 something along the lines of "We intend to port Silverlight to every mobile device that has an SDK")
Engineering has always been about compromise. Any idiot can design a structure that is X feet tall but it would prove more useful it if wasn't a giant block of concrete -- if it had room for offices and the materials used to build it had minimal cost without sacrificing structural integrity.
The same applies to computer engineering. We would easily build a cell phone network that had so many redundancies that it would virtually never go down and would support for thousands of times the expected average load, but we would pay for it in terms of cost. Customers demand reliability. Customers demand affordable cost. What the customer is "willing to accept" is a balance between the two.
It sounds like they don't need faster super computers but instead to narrow the number of areas they are crunching away at. Why not pick the top 2 or 3 issues and crunch away at those instead of running 20 jobs, all of which will hardly get anywhere in the four years this supercomputer has to live?
I don't think the availability of high quality downloads should effect whether or not the market is ready for HD media. Instead, the limiting factor is the ubiquity of high def TVs in the household; there is no sense in getting a blue ray player if you have a 480 TV.
Conversely, I think the lack of high quality downloads would actually spur increased demand for the delivery of high quality content though other means (in this case, HD discs.) If people have high def TVs, they are going to want high def content. If they can't get high def content from the internet, they will try to get it from high def media.
I don't know anything about Zimbra but if it is really open source, then there is nothing Microsoft would be able to do. The license allows other groups to take the code and continue development. Assuming Yahoo is paying employees to develop Zimbra (I have no idea, are they?) the worst Microsoft could do is lay off those employees or make them start working on a different project. However, the open source is still out there with its license in tact and if it really is a good project, someone will start up a sourceforge project in no time.
There is a great article on Reuters (http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSN0631875320080209) about Chris Liddell, Microsoft's new Chief Financial Advisor. It discusses why Microsoft has increased spending/acquisitions so much lately.
My personal stance is that it was stupid that they had so much cash sitting around in the first place. This change in spending shouldn't be thought of as a last ditch desperation but rather a long needed change in spending philosophy. What good could ever come of having 64 billion dollars in cash doing nothing? (This happened in 2004 just before the world's largest dividend was paid out.)
Having said that, I'm still not sure I agree that Yahoo was a good acquisition target. It would only be valuable if Microsoft could actually merge all the common services and do it without disrupting current users' service. Just look at youtube, Google hasn't really done anything noticible to change youtube and they've had it for quite some time now. I would have at least expected Google Video to be fully merged or redirect to youtube by now.
I'm not sure I understand your point about Microsoft copying the iPhone. Microsoft has been in the phone business for years now (Windows CE/Mobile), long before Apple decided to do the iPhone. Secondly, Ballmer has already stated that Microsoft is not interested in making a Zune-Phone or anything of that type; Microsoft is happy selling the operating system for phones to other companies to do with what they want on the hardware side of things.
Personally, I would think less of Microsoft if they didn't even try to get into new markets. I'm glad to see that they acknowledge that new markets exist and that there is room for more competition. Everyone should be thankful that Microsoft is competing because competition is the best for consumers -- just look at what it did with Intel and AMD (lower prices and faster technology development).
So the encryption technique which is built on top of the fact that prime numbers products are difficult to factor is supposedly going to be beaten. This encryption technique relies on the fact that as we scale the prime number product up in size linearly, the difficulty to factor it goes up exponentially (ie, factoring 6773461 (1489*4549) is (much) more than twice as difficult as factoring 3391079 (2003*1693) even through 6773461/3391079 ~= 2.) Next up, there exists a quantum algorithm (and has for some time now) that can perform this factoring in O((log n)^3) time. Quantum computers are now capable of running this algorithm.
At this point most people would panic and begin buying up all the gold bricks; however, what we have failed to mention is that producing a quantum computer capable of dealing with larger and larger numbers is an exponentially difficult problem in itself. Currently we have quantum computers that can run this algorithm on the number 15 (5*3) but it will be over twice as difficult to build a quantum computer that can run this algorithm on 35 (5*7). We need not worry until quantum computer manufacturing/engineering gets to a point where they can be scaled up linearly as well. I don't doubt that this day will come, but I do doubt that it will come before we have figured out a good quantum replacement that doesn't scale well even on quantum computers.
I was thinking more along the lines of the second to last machine man need ever make. The final machine, of course, being the ultra-intelligent machine that has human compassion hard-wired.
Microsoft has said that one of the goals of the 360 was to help Microsoft get into the consumer's family room. And, it makes sense when you are a company with 60,000 programmers in Redmond alone. Games will always be the primary concern for both Sony and Microsoft but you can only put so many developers on one aspect for so long before it becomes over saturated. So we start to see all these other technologies arise.
For Microsoft, each technology synergies with other Microsoft technologies (the ability to stream from your Windows PVR makes Media Center more desirable, XNA makes programmers that develop for the 360 also have a very easy time delivering the same code to PC and visa versa.) However, for Sony it seems like each of these new technologies is just another effort to increase console sales.
It will certainly be a good thing. I don't see how it could ever possibly be a bad thing to offer more scholarship programs. The question really should be 'how good?' or 'Does the good outweigh the investment?'.
To the latter, I would answer probably not. Don't get me wrong, I'm not against giving scholarships out to help more people get the education they deserve. However, I do think there are ways this money could be spent that would be even more beneficial. The reason we are falling behind other countries isn't because too few engineers are graduating; it is because the quality of those graduates is falling behind.
It would be a sale of the rights to use the allocated spectrum until some further unknown date -- basically whenever the government decides to sell it again.
After all, its not like we just invented a new spectrum and are selling it now. It has been around and in use for a long time and we are just now reallocating it for better use. If I recall, this spectrum was used for over the air TV previously?
Yeah, maybe $1,000 if you hired the contractor to do one backyard. What do you think he/she would charge if you were looking to have an entire city of backyards wired?
But thats not important anyways. We aren't worried about giving every house a new connection. The connection between my house and my local Comcast station is plenty fast -- the problem for me is between that station and the backbone and possibly even the backbone itself. My calculations say that I only need 5.69 MB/s to stream 30GB in 90 minutes. This could very easily be a high def (1080) movie. My coaxial can deliver this much bandwidth but there is certainly a bottleneck somewhere else.
Spam is annoying, dont get me wrong; however, I don't believe it is a very large bandwidth problem. Yes, it is responsible for a lot of bandwidth but nothing compared to other ways that we use/waste bandwidth. I'm pretty sure watching a single youtube video uses more bandwidth than all of the spam that I receive all month or even year.
As for your idea about putting the attachments on a server, thats exactly how attachments work. The sender sends the email and attachments to an email server. The recipient requests the files and they are downloaded. It wouldn't save any bandwidth to use a rapidshare and include a link in the email instead (except for the cases when the user doesn't want to see the picture -- but this is more easily solved by using an email client that delays the downloading of pictures until the user requests.)
Slashdot users in general are far more tech-savvy than the majority of computer users out there. Also, it is very easy for us Slashdotters to participate in conversations about operating systems and new technologies only with eachother. Because of this, we continually get a one-sided view of things and we have gotten to the point that there are rarely any good arguments between us anymore -- its always just a comment board full of Microsoft/RIAA/MPAA/yada/yada bashing instead of decent discussions about not only the flaws but also the positive aspects of the situation.
Home Users:
Many of the posts above claim that switching from Windows to Linux or MacOS has been a great decision on your part. I'm glad you have found the best solution for your personal needs. However, please do consider that an overwhelming majority of computer users don't even know (or care to know) how to change their screen resolution yet alone ever fiddle around with tweaking settings, etc. Keep in mind that your needs are much different from that of the average PC user. While switching away from Windows was a great alternative for many Slashdotters, it is simply not so for the average Windows user.
When I installed Vista for the first time I was very excited to see that I didn't have to download a single driver for my Dell XPS. I had installed Windows XP on it countless times (due to Spyware and viruses) and nearly every time I forgot to burn a cd that had Dell's networking drivers on it -- with Vista this would not be an issue anymore. However, this was probably the only thing I was happy with about Vista.
I found it to be very sluggish and the copy/move file issue is almost enough for me to delete this entire post and go on with my day. UAC will be nice someday but currently it is just another default setting that I have to switch after an install. The reworked network will come in handy when IPV6 comes around but I can see how the average user wouldn't give a hoot. The user interface is nice and a lot of the work that went on behind the scenes to make it possible also means easier development of future features, but it should be more than simply a 3d window switcher and translucent title bars. I certainly don't feel like the new additions to Vista warrant the price tag. In fact, I wouldn't spend more than $100 on a copy of Vista Ultimate -- I'd rather have a slightly thicker wallet and be running Windows XP.
Gamers:
I saw a number of posts about people having difficulty playing games in Vista. Although I'm not aware of the specific issues discussed in those posts, I'm willing to bet that they were caused by graphics driver issues which is out of Microsoft's control. If that isn't the case, the issues at hand were probably caused by the developers of the game writing code that relied on the fact that took advantage of unsupported effects of certain api. They never should have written the game this way in the first place and what it does is prevent Microsoft from rewriting parts of the operating system without breaking anything. (Much like how many popular websites use unsupported CSS hacks because they work but then complain when Microsoft or Mozilla makes a change to an unrelated piece of code that breaks the hack -- which never should have worked in the first place.) But back to my point, there is no current viable alternative to Windows for gamers that want to play any game off the shelf.
Developers:
I don't understand how anyone can program without a graphical debugger such as the one included in Visual Studio -- props to all of you who do and are happy about that. For me, the ability to easily step through lines of code as they execute, manipulate memory in real time, and change the order that code is executed has easily saved me from hours of otherwise tedious debugging (asserts and cerr can only do so much.)
Severs:
To be honest, I'm not very familiar with server technologies. Linux seems to definitely have a head-up on Windows in this market -- at least for people that just want to dev
After a long discussion, study of large samples of human beings with wide ranges of ability, talent, and work ethic, we will conclude exactly what we expected; The elite not only show the best ability but they also have the best possible predisposition and have furthermore used hard work to train whatever it is this hypothetical elite person strives at. Furthermore, the people who exhibit the absolute lowest ability within an area of study are not only apathetic to this area but also lack the predisposition. People somewhere in between have varying values of talent and work ethic.
Ability, talent and work ethic are all real values, that is, there not only exist infinatly many values to describe a person's ability, but there are also an infinite number of levels of ability between any two people.
Just before I had enough floppy discs to do anything fun with, they switched to CDs.
1. double post 2. ??? 3. Win lottery 4. Profit!!