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Comment: Re:A lot of words (Score 1) 256

by BradleyUffner (#40129881) Attached to: Apple Fires Back At DoJ Over eBook Price Fixing

Why do hardbacks cost more than paperback? The extra cost of the "cover" is probably less than a dollar, yet you've had no problem paying it before and never complained. Why? Maybe because the hardcover book will last LONGER than the paperback and is easier to take care of. Just like the ebook. You are paying more for a better product. Production costs are largely irrelevant.

Hard covers are also generally larger in size, which means more paper for the pages. This also increases the physical volume which increases the transportation and storage costs. They are also heavier, which increases the transportation costs even more.

Comment: Re:This can't be a browser due the Apple Store (Score 1) 193

by BradleyUffner (#40097731) Attached to: Axis, Yahoo's New Browser

The fact it uses the WebKit rendering engine doesn't mean it's not a browser, or that it's just a shell around Safari. And aren't all browsers just shells around a rendering engine? Loads of different browsers use WebKit. The main reason Google won't release Chrome for iOS is that they can't use V8, their JavaScript engine. Most of their WebKit customisations are available in Apple's implementation too. so, yes, it is a separate standalone browser. Install the app and see for yourself.

Other than Bookmark and History Tracking, and maybe multiple tabs, what else is there to a browser besides the rendering engine? I guess you could count the scripting engine, but that seems pretty tightly integrated with the rendering engine in all the libraries I've used; so much so that they are usually in the same library.

Comment: Re:Bandwidth of a station wagon (Score 3, Informative) 134

by BradleyUffner (#40069605) Attached to: Mega-Uploads: The Cloud's Unspoken Hurdle

I have never liked the station wagon analogy, because it misunderstands the thing we are trying to measure. In the example, we measure the bandwidth of the station wagon. But that's like measuring the bandwidth of a packet -- a nonsense concept. We measure the bandwidth of the channel, not the chunks of data which fly through it. To really get the right analogy, we should talk about the bandwidth of a freeway, not the station wagon which drives upon the freeway.

Bandwidth in the colloquial sense means "the amount of data which passes a given point, per second." So, imagine that you can load 25 TB in the form of tapes into a station wagon. For safety, these station wagons must drive a distance of 75 meters apart and a speed of 100 kilometers per hour. That means that one station wagon passes a given point every 2.7 seconds. That's 9.2 TB per second. Adding a second lane to the highway would double the bandwidth.

The stupid calculation which is often performed, on the other hand goes like this. You have 25 TB in the wagon, and you drive it to a location 10 hours away... Already you've gone off the tracks, because you are mentioning the TIME it takes to get to the destination, i.e. the LATENCY. And as anybody knows, the latency (or equivalently the distance between the points) has NOTHING to do with bandwidth.

How can you say Time has nothing to do with bandwidth when, in your own example, you measured it in TB per SECOND?

Following your example again of 9.2TB/sec, that can be changed to 9.2TB * 60 /min, or 9.2TB * 60 * 60 /hour, or 9.2TB * 60 * 60 * 10 / 10 hours, which is the exact measurement that you seem to have a problem with earlier in your post (data in a 10 hour period).

Hoping to goodness is not theologically sound. - Peanuts

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