Sure, 720p is becoming more common (as LCDs and Plasmas grab marketshare), and 1080p is becoming the standard on the high end, but the majority of sets out there are 1080i. Is there is HUGE difference between a movie in 720p/1080i vs. 480p, absolutely, because film internally has such a high level of detail. At the video game level... well, it's NOT huge. More lines are always better, but in a fast moving game, 480p @ 60 fps is really fluid. Sure 720p @ 60 fps would be better, but I would prefer we have a fluid 60 fps than get into more lines. If you have a 1080i set, you can't benefits from 720p unless your set has an "up-converter" from 720p or a "down-converted to 480p).
One of the points of consoles is that with a fixed hardware base, you tweak to get max performance instead of losing stuff to abstraction because you don't understand the hardware. If I was playing on a non-HDTV set (a distinct possibility depending on what TV the console is hooked up to), I would prefer that my games at 480i push the system. If you need to build a came to go at 720p, then you can't have as much going on, for the same hardware, as a machine that only needs to push 480p.
For this generation, HD will be common but not everywhere, and 480p will be pretty good. Last generation, I loved getting 480p games over 480i games, but it was alright either way. Everything being 480p is good enough for now. HD OTA looks MUCH better than DVD, but DVD looks MUCH better than VHS, so we deal. I think that one more rev of console power will make it easy to make 1080p the norm (figure 4-5x the pixels of 480p, but we'll have 5-8 times the hardware) that can output at 1080p, 1080i, 720p, 480p, or 480i depending on your monitor with no difference in playability.
The same way I can enjoy DVDs, I can enjoy 480p gaming. I believe that the hardware in the Wii will push out 480p with full 60 fps MUCH more reasonably than the other systems can push out 720p or 1080i content. This time, 480p is the norm, next time, 720p or 1080p. It's more about more polygons than more lines.
Thank you for a well argued response. Please note, I don't think that Atheists are immoral people, and the militant Christians that argue that are at a minimum rude, and more likely violating the divine rules that they have taken upon themselves to follow (Noachide Covenant doesn't require them to be nice to others, be respectful, or follow the "golden rule" of the great Hillel that Christianity took upon themselves). As a religious Jew I don't believe that Christians have to uphold the rules of their gospels, but if they take vows upon themselves to do so, they should make the effort, even if they aren't binding the way a Jewish vow is binding upon a Jew.
As a educated, moral, atheistic person, you might actually enjoy picking up a good translation of the Torah or Tanakh. The Stone Edition Chumash is very popular among modern Orthodox Jews because it has an excellent translation and the commentary and notes really gives some great insights. Without adopting a believe in the divine nature of it, you might learn a lot of the building blocks of Western civilization, as pre-Romanization, the early Church were followers of the same branch of Judaism that modern Rabbinic Judaism follows (although they don't follow the Jewish Oral law codified in the Talmud, the underlying assumptions of the Christian off-shoot was similar). Similarly, I love reading about Christian theology and mysticism, because I think it helps me understand history, without believing in their messiah or dgospels.
For example, you point out that 6 of the 10 commandments are good ideas and should be followed by everyone. You might be shocked to learn that Hashem, G-d of the Israelites agrees, and they are documented in the first book in the Covenant of Noach. Hashem's covenant with Noach is considered binding upon the Gentile descendants of Noah (under Jewish law of course), while the expanded Torah obligations are only binding upon Jews.
I would agree with you that religious wars are tribal in nature. In fact, I think part of where Christianity's militant tendencies comes from taking laws governing the 12 tribes of Israel and adopting them for the non-Israelite world. In addition, Judaism had approximately 1500 years between the receiving of Torah and the writing down of the Oral Law for our sages to explain and adopt the implementation of these rules, and Christianity left without much of the Oral Law and struggled to figure out how to apply very strict laws to others. On the other hand, Christianity takes a huge hit for religious wars launched by Christian Europe which I believe is unfair. Before Christianization, Europe was dominated by the Romans with their pagan faith. Pre-Christianity, the Romans engaged in perpetual warfare, raping and pillaging to spend the wealth on the excesses of their elites that engaged in relentless sodomy with young boys and gluttony. Post-Christianity, Europeans certainly engaged in warfare, but nothing on the scope of what they did under Roman religion. Whatever theological differences I have with Christianity, I can appreciate that it was a calming influence on Europeans, and they became FAR LESS barbaric than their Roman ancestors, which is a good thing.
European tribes fight wars... lots of them... they are currently on hiatus and trying to coerce with trade instead of arms, but they are still a militant people. I don't believe that Christianity made Europeans more warlike.
OTOH, Islam had a militarizing affect on the Arabian people that took its message. Without even looking at modern times, look at how Islam was adopted by the Arab people, a bunch of Nomadic Arabian tribes and spread to massive regions militarily. Before Islam, the Arab people were tribal nomads. After adopting Islam, they created a massive Caliphate that rivaled the Romans for militaristic activity. Look at this
Nintendo's market is VERY different than Sony and Microsoft. Nintendo lost 3rd party support in the N64 era, and only slightly recovered with the Gamecube. They will probably recover more with the Wii, primarily because the system is SO different, companies will make a bunch of interesting puzzle games that take advantage of the different UI.
However, Nintendo can come in third and be very happy in their market. Sony/MS need HUGE 3rd party support, because they only make about $8/game sold by third parties. Nintendo makes most of the top sellers (keeping $42/game), and publishes most of the rest (keeping between $16 and $30/game... publishing games sometimes means that they pay development costs + profits, and then keep the $42/game, but figure that the royalties + costs brings that down a bit).
Also, Nintendo has traditionally sold consoles at a profit (at some points with the Gamecube, they sold at a loss). Supposedly that's only a few dollars a console at launch, losses during heavy cuts, and profits in later parts of the system's life. Microsoft bit a big bullet in the Xbox because they were using customized parts with contracted pricing, they learned their lesson this time. Nintendo uses mostly off-the-shelf components, and sets their contracts to decline over time, which Microsoft is aping).
Nintendo probably makes money if you buy their System + 1-2 games (a Mario game and a Zelda game, for example), and then cleans up if you buy more. Because Nintendo's stop selling games are normally Mario, Zelda, and a few other of their games, they make much more money per console than Sony and Microsoft do with their third party fees.
Remember, profits are in the games, and Nintendo's premier games normally sell in the same quantity (or higher) than Sony and Microsoft's top games do... not sure how Mario Sunshine vs. Halo worked out, but if Microsoft outsold them, it wasn't the HUGE difference that the console sales volumes would indicate.
Sony owns the market of hardcore gamers, but Microsoft looks like they are going to do well in the Xbox 360 arena. However, hardcore gamers that rent a few games a month may not put more money into Sony and Microsoft's pocket than a casual Nintendo customer that buys Mario, Zelda, Smash Bros., Mario Kart, and a few other premier games.
Hell, Animal Forest never had a huge player base, but it used simple N64 era graphics with simple programming, and no doubt turned a nice profit.
As a gamer, I'd love Mario to be the most high-tech game on the market, but I can appreciate that Nintendo can make games that are 80% as high-tech as the MS/Sony games are for less than half the cost, sell the same number of units, and make more money. Nintendo has spent two generations not being the top dog, and still made money, while Sega dropped out of hardware, Microsoft lost $4 billion, and Sony kept going. It's unclear whether Sony made more money off the Playstation as Nintendo did with the N64 (the companies don't break out numbers, and analysts gave mixed estimates), but the fact that the PS outsold the N64 4:1 and we're not sure who made money demonstrates the power of Nintendo's business plan... and the Xbox 360 and PS3 are requiring MUCH larger hardware subsidies as last round... last round, Nintendo turned profits, and Microsoft outsold them 2:1 and lost money. Competition makes things better for consumers (as the MS vs. Sony battle to destroy profit margins demonstrated), but the companies with more monopoly pricing power do better.
Expect Nintendo to keep doing their thing, making innovative new systems, selling in third place, and making gamers happy along the way.
The argument of atheists being immoral really stems from the fact that the rational conclusion of true atheism is amoral. If you accept evolution and atheism, and life as we know it is a combination of random mutation and natural selection, and there is no higher purpose, the natural extension of that is amoral. Why is it wrong to kill? Simply saying "because its wrong to deny another person life" implies that there is a higher value to human life. If human life is no more valuable than animal life, then a truly consist atheist would believe that there is no difference between eating meat and killing a person.
While most religious people have a horrible time expressing it, it isn't necesssarily fear of divine retribution that keeps things in check, but a code of morality. Maintaining our generally accepted morality doesn't require accepting Jesus as Messiah (as few religious Christians would argue that all of us Jews are immoral, even if they believe we will suffer eternal damnation), but it does require accepting a code of morality.
Morality requires that there be things that are inherently good and things that are inherently bad. True atheism rejects these concepts, as they deny that there is a higher power than the natural state of the world.
Now, nothing stops Atheists from behaving in a moral manner, there are certain concepts understood within a social contract that governs interpersonal behavior. However, if one rejects that there is a natural good and evil (things that cannot exist in a purely scientific world where mutation and natural selection governs all), it becomes harder to argue for a moral manner.
Unfortunately, most non-believers get their impression of religious individuals from the least educated and most passionate about their faiths, and conclude that faith is the opiate for the masses. The other problem is that most religious debates center on minutia... All religious Jews accept that the Covenant of Noah is binding upon Gentiles and the Torah is binding upon Jews. All Christians accept that salvation requires faith and understanding in the ministry of Jesus. So what happens is arguments about hierarchy and structure (Protestant Reformation/Revolt), status of the world to come and requirements to enter (Christians vs. Jews), etc.
All religious people accept that people are obligated to establish reasonable civil courts and property rights claims (part of the Covenant of Noah), generally acceptable behavior towards lesser beings like animals (Covenant of Noah likewise prohibits tearing the flesh from a live animal, etc). Religious people also accept that before Abraham left Ur and accepted the divine word, the world was filled with paganism and idolatry, which at the time involved human sacrifices, tearing of limbs from animals, institutionalized rape, etc. It was through the divine order to Abraham that people accepted that there was a good and evil defined by a higher power.
Now, modern Atheists in the west live in Christian societies (and if we throw in Israeli Atheists, a Jewish society). Their common framework of morality stems from certain underlying assumptions that society has made by the believers. Few Atheists would argue that rape, murder, and human sacrifice are acceptable behavior, but few can give a concrete reason that doesn't borrow a reason accept by generally understood principles of ethics that do in fact derive from the world the monotheists created.
I don't not murder because I fear the heavenly court. I don't murder because its wrong, and it would never occur to me to kill someone just because it benefits me. Atheists make the SAME assumptions and engage in moral behavior, but they don't realize that their morality comes from societal norms that were established by their religious neighbors that they condemn.
Most Atheists accept what is conventional western morality, and therefore see religious people as duped idiots, because the only difference that they see is the ritualiism and superstition, and ignore
He was giving an interview with HD Net's news division... it was hard hitting, I'm sure.
The rep from TI (makers of DLP) was talking to someone else from TI and from one of the Korean television manufacturers (probably Samsung, but I don't recall). They weren't addressing him, they were talking to each other. He was 20 feet away, and couldn't hear what they were saying.
He moved the industry, and people recognize that... especially the ones whose careers were heavily affected by his behavior.
The guy owns HD Net (and the sister channel, HD Net Movies). When nobody was doing HD Content, he got HD rights to minor college games and NHL games, and built a little network there. He also bought the right to do transfers of old shows. He's an active participant on AVS Forum, explaining what is going on in the HD world. The craziest thing, you could only get HD Net from DirecTV and a local Texas station for its first few years. He bought a local television station just to run HD Net OTA to prove that OTA HD was practical.
When I met him very briefly (like 1 second) at CES some years back, watching him speak was amazing, not for what he said, but to hear the AWE from the representatives of companies like TI that were talking about how nobody did more for their industry than him.
The man has loads of money, and is spending it to push things that he believes will make the world a better place. He also has an ego the size of Texas. He had is own show on HD Net (where he could be a big dork but have his players on), and HD Net's coverage of CES was interviewing him.
The guy made a fortune selling broadcast.com at JUST the right time, and is now pushing technology the way he wants it, where a few gambles can make a difference. HD Net's sports coverage forced ESPN to adopt HD content before they wanted to, and DirecTV used HD Net to anchor HD programming when there was almost no programming. If it wasn't for him, the local affiliates would have gotten their dream of HD being a fig leaf to get public airwaves, where 1/6 of the channel space would carry normal 480i programming, and 5/6s be sold for data services, etc. Instead, HD Net helped force everyone's hand, and HD is here and real.
The guy's hobby appears to be bending public will to his, and he does a good job of it. While these "investments" may not have been profitable in a traditional sense (I doubt that he loses money, but he probably isn't getting a better ROI than having plowed his money into the S&P 500), it seems to have made him happy. He owns a basketball team, and he has a television network that buys the rights to do HD Transfers of whatever shows he wants to watch in HD. While the rest of us are at the mercy of the marketing departments guessing what we want, he can go make it happen. That's a pretty cool hobby.
The US doesn't really have elections, we have census data and districting. The party in power in the state (originally elected) carves up districts to put as many of their opponent's neighborhoods into clumps, i.e. districts that are 65%-80% for their opponents. This is easier for the GOP to do because Democratic voters are predominately urban voters (wealthy and poor) so make is districts that look reasonable on a map. Then you spread out your voters depending on how ballsy you are. You only need 51% of the vote, but 55%-60% keeps your seats safe.
Sometimes, you have areas that you couldn't do that with, or new developments between census rounds causes a district to change, and you get close elections.
After watching Florida be humiliated in 2000 with the recount debacle, the politicians decided to get rid of recounts. In some sense, this kinda makes sense... the recount scenario is a tie that comes down to.25% (or.5%, for some states) of a differential. In that case, the reality is, voter fraud will swing an election by 1% or 2% anyway, so it isn't a will of the people. Also, if 100 people vote, 48-47-5 (REGARDLESS of which of the first two candidates win, a majority is disenfranchised in a first-past-the-post system.
A close election means that the legislature failed to carve things up correctly, and they'd rather the wrong guy win then go through a recount. And anytime you have a recount scenario, the reality is that the vote was a tie. Sure, votes aren't SUPPOSED to have a margin of area, but all of our traditional vote counting mechanisms do. The current one replaces margin of error counting with an exact count, but voter confusion is worth a few points anyway.
People complaining about paper trails, etc., are attributing to malice (desire to steal elections), what is really a matter of NOBODY wants a repeat of Florida 2000.
A) Niche computer market, 3% of sales, 40% margins on the hardware, a relatively small software R&D division that helps move hardware at 40% margins... oh yeah, and to make some extra cash (and provide an incentive to buy more hardware), we sell the new versions of the software (10+ years ago, gave them away). Thy does this make sense, each year or so, I can upgrade iLife + OS for about $200... Well, if I'm on big hardware, no biggie, if I use a Mac Mini, well, for $200 I can upgrade, or for $600 buy a new machine... provide an incentive to buy the new machine. We know the Mini has lower margins, say, 33%? In that case, Apple makes $200 if you buy a new machine, or $200 if you upgrade the software... Apple doesn't care.
Or, license OS, this means two separate markets
B) Intel PC Operating system market. Let's look at this market, two major players. One, a monopolist with 95% marketshare, who struggles to sell upgrades because of their entrenched base. Most computers NEVER get an OS upgrade. The competitors charge about $35 for OEM Windows Home, "free" for Linux, or dirt cheap, probably $20 for an OEM Linux OS that the vendor supports... Gee, what a great market. Even if Apple can collect a premium, $50 OEM pricing... that means that OS X machines sell for $100 more than their Windows counterparts, and Apple makes $50/machine. So if estimates of quadrupling market-share are real, then Apple breaks even. Even the "Apple is expensive crowd" that really wants to pirate the OS for free, sets an upperbound of quadrupling marketshare... Gee, so if they are right, then Apple breaks even... brilliant move... but I guess they might sell more copies of iWork...:)
C) Now that OS X is generic, available at retail for $129 (and BitTorrent for $0), Apple goes from their niche market with 40% margins to the EXTREMELY competitive PC market. The entrenched players hold about 50% of the market, and local grey-box manufacturers + home built machines are about 50%. In this industry, margins of 8% are huge, because once you pay people to put the equipment together, ship stuff around, etc., you cost more than the guy building in his basement. No room for differentialization, etc. Maybe Apple will do "insanely great" design work, collect a premium off the market, and make 10% margins...
Entering the OS market SUCKS. It sucked BEFORE Linux became popular, giving away a Unix-like OS for free, and it sucks now. Nobody but Microsoft has EVER made big money selling operating systems, because people DO NOT BUY THEM. OEMs buy them cheaply, but nobody buys operating systems.
Apple is where it is because it found a great niche and milks it... milks it for all its worth... makes 5x margins that the industry dreams of. Sure, Dell makes more money most of the time... BUT ONLY Dell does it. Apple has a nice growing market, an iPod where they grabbed a premium, and now the iTunes music store. They'll get into new markets, but only where there are good margins.
Entering into overly competitive markets and abandoning decent monopoly pricing power (economics term, they aren't a monopoly, but since Windows PCs aren't a perfect substitute, they get to charge price of PC + substitution "cost" - $1 and sell machines) to enter cutt-throat competitive markets...
It's not a recipe for success, it's a recipe for destroying shareholder value.
One of the things that most Internet marketers miss (myself included at times) is that as you move up the food chain, there are more buyers. If I am pushing a brand-less product, I focus on my CPC rate, conversion rate, etc., and don't care where the ad runs, only the conversion rate there and what I am paying per click.
However, the big boys (Ford Motor Company, Warner Bros. Television, etc.) focus on brand building and budgets. They don't ask if they are making money off the impressions, they have a quarterly budget, spend the budget, and ideally aim for the biggest bang-for-the-buck. However, they don't want their brand associated with marginal content, so they have to approve the site carrying their ad.
Now, they pay dearly for the privilege, but for a content site, a big-name ad agency placing a big brand may be willing to pay substantially more on a CPM basis because they need to cut a deal, take up time, etc. If I am making $5 CPM, I'm not going to spend hours with their legal department, etc., to make $5.05 CPM. Now for $6 or $7 CPM, or even $10, I'll spend time handling them as a client, not running an ad network.
The flip side to this, the ad agency doesn't want to spend hours time from highly paid professionals for a site with 1000-2000 visits/day. They need a bang for the buck, and if their time is going to add $5-$10 on a CPM basis for compliance, then the advertising becomes less viable.
So, when you hit thresholds on major rankings, whether it be Alexa, Nielson, etc., then some of the ad players notice you. So the rankings matter, because maybe hitting top-2000 means you can sign on a few premier accounts. While the traffic jump from spot 2001 to 2000 may not be huge, you may see a HUGE revenue jump if you can sell the inventory.
That's why the things matter, as you move up, companies that won't deal with smaller players because transaction costs are too high show up... More demand for your ad inventory, holding supply constant, means higher prices. Even as you move higher, the supply increases (which would force you to take lower prices to move it), more buyers come on the scene, which usually means a still higher CPM.
The rules change as you move up the food chain, which is why the people that define the food chain matter.
Everyone is Washington (and any organization) thinks that their problems are the most important, and runs around with "their head on fire" to use a Clark phrase. The question for our leaders is which one to listen to, and we need to be 100% accurate... The Islamists (or Islamo-facists to use the new term), or Terrorist, or whatever you call them, only need to succeed onces. The Arabs on the west bank of the Jordan launch 10 suicide attackers a day, and the IDF stops 99.9% of them, that still means that every three months the world press talks about suicide bombers and how hopeless it is to look for a military solution.
The White House needs to manage thousands of reports, decide what gets to the president, etc., and the enemy needs to sneak one past.
Sure the FBI counter-terrorism guys were screaming about the threat of terrorists. The FBI organized crime unit was no doubt screaming about the mob. The CIA south Asia guys were screaming about India and Pakistan. The CIA China guys will scream about disputed Islands, as well as Taiwan.
Everyone that spends 40 hours a week focusing on one particular threat to US interests thinks that there is something major there. While the US has vast resources, they aren't unlimited, and maintaining a global hegemony requires deciding where to put the resources.
And guess what, if you make decisions based on probabilities, you are going to make a lot of 80% decisions.... and guess what, 1 in 5 of those will be wrong.
Those deals are only for the BIG suppliers with SHORT turn-around deals. Wal-mart is a vicious customer, but can deliver HUGE volumes. They have also moderated themselves, as suppliers stopped working with them when they got too cutt-throat. The buyers have been reigned in, because big accounts like Rubbermaid became problematic. A friend in marketing at Rubbermaid was telling us that while the "buy on sale," where Walmart accepts the inventory at their cash register has pushed the inventory holding risk to the suppliers, it's only on products that are sold within 2-3 days of being in the store. Wal-mart doesn't waste shelf space on items that don't turn-over.
The suppliers are actually happy with the arrangement, because it's a deal point, and they can extract better pricing by working with that system. While I'm sure that Wal-mart has played hardball as you described, it's a little overstating to suggest that that is the normal way of doing business.
My friend also suggested that the buyers have been becoming less adversarial, and trying to produce more win-wins. Sure the Wal-mart culture is there... normally buyers get taken out to lunch with salesmen who entertain them... a bit of sneaky corruption, the buyers are pushed to gives a little bit of the company's money to get well treated by the salesmen. At Wal-mart, salesmen go to Wal-mart HQ, no meals are allowed. All negotiations take place in a small room at Wal-mart HQ. By keeping their buyers from trading favors with salesmen, they keep their costs down.
Walmart does MANY things... they are aggressive, but not necessary under-handed. However, they have a LOT of maneuvering room in the industry, and if they can make real money by selling Apple iTunes movies in the store, they WILL bring market pressure on the studios to play ball.
I agree with you, in theory, about zoning. On the other-hand, there is a massive externality issue involved. For example, if you prop unregulated low income housing, slum style, into a neighborhood, you will cause MAJOR negative externalizes in the surrounding communities. If I own a peace of land with a view of the ocean (theoretical house, 2 stories), and someone buys the land in front of me (currently 1 story), and puts up a 3 story building, I lose my view. This is a negative to me. Restricting the owner from doing so is a negative to them, devaluing their property rights.
Zoning is a bit of a compromise, I can buy my theoretical house, knowing that that lot is only zoned for 1 story (so the view is factored into my house). If it is zoned for three stories, then I take a risk.
I'm not anti-development, but I think that externalities need to be considered. In the case of my neighborhood, the original developer zoned it recreational with the city to get cheaper tax rates and operate a country club in the community. Country-club living (living near the club, where you play golf, tennis, and swim without the "public" being there like at a part), was very big in suburban South Florida in the 70s. It was a combination of community separation (upper middle class white people hanging out with their kind), plus how society was for young families then. Now, the trend went to private pools and public tennis courts in the 80s, and continued in the 90s. The country club society crumbled as South Florida stopped being retirees and their wealthy doctors/lawyers and into a real economy with dual incomes and stressed families.
However, the neighbors bought their house from the developer (or the previous owners, but essentially from the developer), with the understanding that the developer set up the country club as a recreation facility. Most houses in our neighborhood within 2 blocks of the old club have no pool, including massive houses that you would expect to have a pool in Florida, unless they were build 10+ years later when private pools were the rage.
Should the developer/new owner of the country club, that has received 30 years of subsidized taxes, and premium prices for pool-less homes 30 years earlier by providing a swimming pool, be allowed to say, okay, I already cashed in on that part, just build the last handful of unbuilt lots (in the 90s, and away they went to rezone it and cash in after the run-up).
In all fairness, the zoning is essentially a deed restriction. If you zone something a certain way to create more value (like they did), removing that value without compensation to the people who paid you a premium for that value (or their successors) seems just as unfair as arbitrary zoning restrictions.
A developer gets recreational land rezoned as residential to put in a slew of houses (this happened down the street from me, albeit before I moved in). Tax base goes up, politicians get donations, everyone is excited... except the neighbors whose house is no longer down the street from a country club with a pool and instead has more houses... After a 5 year fight, the compromise is a rezone on half, and the other half becomes a park... everyone is somewhat happy (still having recreational features, although less than before, but now free), and developers make money, just not what they would if they could have used ALL the land. The new road is a non-issue, because they did it private so it could be gated... Now I am a supporter of property rights, but when the original neighborhood was built, the recreational use was part of "the deal" via zoning, so letting someone rezone in this case devalues everyone else, so they should get compensation, which the new park essentially is.
Maintaining those resources is now the city's burden, but it has the tax base to support it from the new houses, no problem. Now the city needs to run sewage, water, and other lines there... who should pay for that? Should the city pay for that to make the land more valuable for the developers, or should the developers pay for it as part of the rezone? Of course the costs get passed on to the buyers (although, in reality not entirely, i.e. if the person would pay $500k before, they aren't going to pay $525k for the same house just because the builder's costs went up)... in many ways, these costs get eaten by the developer, because they charge the owners whatever the market will pay, not cost + profit. Now, it is possible that these costs would make some development projects unprofitable as a result (increases costs cuts the supply curve raises prices and lowers quantities, not just increases prices).
I agree that once a part of the city, the new home owners are the same as everyone else, otherwise, it is pulling up the ladder. But ultimately, the "first citizens" had to pay for the roll-out of facilities through their taxes, and whenever someone buys that person's house, you implicitly paid for it because the value of the house in part includes those resources.
The anti-capitalist bent on Slashdot is a bit silly, as is the NIMBYism hidden in the anti-developer garbage. However, it's not clear to me that running sewage, water, electricity, and roads to a new location should be the city's responsibility, taxing existing tax-payers for services that they don't use doesn't seem right. I agree that once they move in they are equal, I'm just not sure why citizens 1-100 that already paid for the resources that they use (explicitly or implicitly) to pay for citizens 101-105 to move in seems fair, versus citizens 101-105 pay their startup costs...
Remember, you claim that developers pass it along to first owners (I don't agree that it is a 100% pass-through), in which case the owners are implicitly paying for it, same as all the other home owners. In fact, these new owners get a discount, because they only pay the marginal costs... if you argued that they should pay 5% of the existing sewage system's costs, I'd say you stepped over the line.
Now, this is all BS, because capital improvements are paid via bond issues, and therefore NOT paid by current tax payers, but future tax payers, including the new ones. However, I still think that marginal costs to the city should be paid for by the developers, and therefore cut into potential profits but not have the city subsidize developers.
One of the problems with the old 7.x series vacuum, is that if you ever end up 1 record over the vacuum memory allocation, then it doesn't properly vacuum it. This means that you are going about your business, vacuum analyze every night, and all of a sudden, your database explodes and fills the hard drive, because old tuples are never cleared out. This is particularly a problem if you have "scrap tables" where the data is constantly deleted, updated, and reinserted... while this isn't reasonable for normalized data, sometiime we have "data cache" tables managed with triggers that store LOTS of data.
If you catch it in time, no problem, but otherwise, you get real problems. Once you get big, you need to vacuum full to avoid this. That's all well and good, but vacuum full can leave the database unavailable while run... this is a problem for a web server database. We can use it on our internal machines no problems (run it Sunday morning, nobody is working then), but it's a problem.
PostgreSQL 8 looks good, but I'm a little scared to migrate ALL the data that we have, and most importantly, screw up any messy optimizations that we've made that made sense on the PostgreSQL 7 engine but not the PostgreSQL 8 engine.
PHP through 4.1 was an AWESOME prototyping language... what it was designed for. Back then, you could POST or GET a form, and the variables were automatically filled in. This was a huge security whole, and therefore plugged, which has made it less useful in some ways, but more production friendly in others.
However, my old partner when to a PHP conference, and was STUNNED that the recommended course of action was: 1. Use PHP to prototype 2. Move all business login into C or C++ 3. Call the business logic from PHP wrapping the C/C++ calls
While that may be more "correct," that would have massively increased development time.
Our current cycle is like this: 1. Prototype in PHP and PostgreSQL in a test database, treating it like MySQL or Access (a retarded database) 2. Move all validation code into the database with pl/pgSQL, using triggers, etc 3. Performance tune by creating (using triggers) optimized tables for the live site. 4. Deploy
This gets us a lightening fast, reliable system. Unfortunately, for legacy reasons, we have so much PHP code that we've written that migrating to something else (including PHP 5) is hard to justify until we have the budget to get the extra staff just to migrate the system.
It's more work on the DB side, but it's well worth it.
One of the performance tunes we've considered: pl/php, which last time we evaluated it, wasn't quite ready for prime time. Our idea: after tuning your database, move all your database access into the database.
Essentially, for each "page type" on a dynamic site, create a php function that gathers ALL the data you need and puts it into an array. Then, call the Database PHP function getPageType("values to be passed"). The server side PHP function will do all the queries you need, serialize the array, and return it as a TEXT value. Your web page deserializes and displays.
The reason for this is that you have several delays and resource hogs: 1. unoptimized queries: before you move things to stored procedures, test your SQL with explain. Add indexes as needed. If you look up on two or three values, create an index on those values... basic stuff, but will get you massive speed-ups. 2. database connections, to keep this down, put everything on the server into one database and use schemas for access, now you can use persistent connections with a "web" user that connects in persistently and switches as needed (or make your getPage functions accessible to the web user... SECURITY definer, grant execute to the web user). 3. back-and-forth connections: the best way to kill performance, have a PHP script that calls the database, gets some data, calculates on it, and queries again... the fewer queries to the database a page, the better, less overhead. If you need to do back-and-forth activity, write a stored procedure, then there is a single database call. PostgreSQL lets you write stored procedures in SQL, so there is no excuse not to do it.
If you are doing a project of any magnitude, (i.e. 2-3 programmers on it), then one of you should learn to play DBA and optimize the database. If you do that, PostgreSQL is a fast moving beast.
Most performance competitions are MySQL users testing PostgreSQL. However, if you use PostgreSQL like MySQL, it's dog slow. MySQL is a "retarded" database with almost no overhead, so querying the database 15-20 times on a page is harmless. PostgreSQL requires database administration. Once you set up your database right, and tune the server settings (increase buffers, allocate more sort memory, etc.) it screams, but you have to treat it like a real DB.
If you are just throwing your thoughts up on the web, it's not worth it, but if you are doing a real "small" project, where the license for Oracle, DB2, or even MS SQL Server would be extravagant, PostgreSQL is a great option. (The problem with the real databases isn't just the price tag, it's that they are more powerful IF configured right, so you end up needing a 6-figure DBA, instead of a book on database design and about 12 hours to get used to writing triggers).
One morning I got my email right after the market openned, saw no movement... on a whim, bought a few hundred bucks worth, figuring, people stupider than me had to fall for it... Made about 20%-30% on the deal after commissions...
Haven't tried in a few years, been to busy, but it was actually pretty funny... Thought about doing that with some small money... I mean, the annual percentage gain is really impressive if you actually acted on all these and got some fast run ups...
The problem is, it's all short term, which means major taxes... Alternatively, you could do it in an IRA or other shielded account, but that means keeping in cash except when you make the play... no margin means you need to keep cash sitting around when you aren't playing, which cuts into returns... If you have margin, you can always move the cash in 2-3 days later conveniently.
Microsoft started offering top people $1m/year salaries to snag them. While this seems like the market working, it's not quite real when Microsoft can use its massive cash reserves to cripple a company. Basically, if Microsoft can offer 20 key people $1m/year over market salaries, then the competition is either bled for $20m/year, which can destroy smaller competition, and hasn't cost Microsoft a dollar, or they spend $20m to put a competitor out of business by stealing key people and use their cash to establish a monopoly position.
This is blatantly anti-trust in the case of a monopolist, and was a lawsuit that I believe Microsoft settled.
Borland made some boneheaded management maneuvers, but this was after Microsoft crippled the company, and Borland made a desperate effort to recover.
You're not buying my argument? You think that accountability means someone to sue and companies want to sue vendors?
I'm not arguing AGAINST open source programming, I use very few programs that aren't available under a free license... my desktop apps are, but business infrastructure is now.
BTW: the ideal scenario would be paying programmers to add features, given an existing free base, but that isn't that practical. It means hunting down a programmer, negotiating a rate, etc. These are all costly things, likely costing me 2-3 hours of time, which isn't free.
However, accountable companies have customer service, ways to put in feature requests, etc. Projects aren't "accountable" in that manner.
The only place I have EVER seen a company "want someone to sue" if something goes wrong is on Slashdot. In the real world, most businesses want to avoid lawsuits because only the lawyers win. The only times companies want legal battles is to establish barriers to entry... Where the cost of creating the barrier is less than the monopoly rents extracting, generate the lawsuit. Lawsuits are done to keep competition out, not as a reasonable way of recovering costs from a vendor.
Accountability is NOT the same as lawsuits. Microsoft is accountable for to me, because if I don't like their software, I don't buy it. OpenBSD is not accountable to me because they believe they are giving me something for free and therefore don't care about money coming in. Buying things (like RHEL, or OpenBSD CDs, etc.) creates some accountability, because they lose money if they don't keep customers happy.
Creating a financial incentive to make customers happy creates accountability. In Linux land, certain features get implemented because someone scratches an itch, or because a business needs a feature and pays someone to implement it. Those are advantages of the "open source model," but a drawback from accountability. I am a customer, I want to know that the aggregate of their customer base matters as well. The millions of $400-$500/year customers need to have their interests respected, and an environment where you have to be big enough to pay a programmer to implement the feature leaves us all out.
It's all about accountability, and a company that looks out for its customers. It's not about "someone to sue" if things go wrong.
Unfortunately, America is still suffering a bizarrely warped market by the baby boomers. They were a massive generation, promoting growth, which is a good thing... however when they were coming of age, the US went to war, instituted a draft, and granted exemption for education. As a result, people would hide in universities to avoid service.
As a result, we have a GLUT of PhDs in a similar age range that are hanging around until retirement. In addition, that same generation didn't produce a larger follow-on generation, so we have a decrease in NEED for educators (there also isn't a draft that requires people to hide in the Academy, which lowers demand further).
But that same Glut of Professors have protected themselves from the market with tenure and other policies. When the boomers retire en masse, we are going to have massive ripple effects... The Boomer generation climbed the ladder, pulled it up behind them, and are looking at the smaller generation after them wondering why they won't take care of them the way they took care of their parents...
I've bought MANY Hifn projects, because the OpenBSD.org website said that they were good, and sent me to Soekris to get them. I have bought 4 PCI cards, 7 of the mini-PCI cards, and Soekris boards to support the latter. Without Theo's support, I wouldn't have bought those products. If there are a bunch of people like me, then we are a nice group of orders that they shouldn't lose because they can't deal with one rude programmer.
That said, I bought the products because Theo said so... the OpenBSD project doesn't exist, it's a manifestation of Theo, seeing as how donations are a check to Theo...:)
As brilliant as Theo is, his behavior makes me nervous to trust his organization's software for mission-critical functions. The fact that I might pick up the new OpenBSD CDs, go to upgrade my servers, and "surprise" no drive for you, is NOT an acceptable state of affairs, and that is what I am concerned about.
I'd say that's a little off too. It's more that the southern and rural voters I believe you're referring to - who may lack sophistication, but not intelligence - don't take well to condescending intellectuals *at all*. Like, say, John Kerry, who came off that way. Contrast that with Bill Clinton, who is brilliant but not condescending, and got on very well with voters of all classes.
I think you hit the nail on the head here, and it is commonly missed. Intelligence is not the same as education, and intelligent people are pretty evenly distributed throughout the population. The difference is that the somewhat intelligent but very educated crew tend to get REALLY condescending towards the rest of people. If someone is having an argument, and switches to jargon-heavy language, that is a sign that they can't explain the subject (or they could explain it in jargon-less language), its a sign that they are heavily educated, but not intelligent enough to understand and explain the concepts that they basically memorized.
What you had personality wise and educationally in these past two US elections demonstrates that conventional wisdom is great for the unintelligent and overeducated class. The most common myth was that George Bush was somehow less intelligent and less educated that Al Gore or John Kerry. Of all the standardized test results we received (SAT scores, Air Force tests, etc.) that would show an intelligence gap, Bush scored slightly higher that his political opponents, but none were off the charts. Educationally, all three were similar (Bush and Kerry nearly identical, Gore had several failed graduate school efforts before finding a path), with Bush having slightly better grades in an apples-to-apples comparison (one of the years at Yale was Pass/Fail, if we strip that year out for both Bush and Kerry, Bush's GPA was decently better).
We had three heavily educated but intellectually mediocre (probably 1.5 deviations above average -- intelligent, but not brilliant) people running for the Presidency. Bush's simplistic tone seemed more comforting to people, and while Kerry and Gore could spout Washington-jargon until blue in the face, neither seemed terribly capable of explaining what they were talking about, which goes along with that lack of intelligence to match their education.
Bill Clinton, who you sited, was the PERFECT counter example. He is BRILLIANT AND EDUCATED, and could explain complicated issues in a jargon-free manner because he actually understood it. Bill Clinton didn't push people away the way Gore and Kerry did, and it's not about the intelligence factor.
If you aren't that bright, but your parents could provide you with an expensive education, expect to be EXTREMELY popular with 20 and 30 something singles in urban areas who are the next generation of not so intelligence but expensively educated... they will love you. Expect to be popular amongst Doctors, Lawyers, or any other professionals for whom education is all that matters, and intelligence and people skills are seen as lesser traits.
Expect to be EXTREMELY UNPOPULAR amongst those that are near your intelligence (slightly below - slightly above) whose parents couldn't afford such an education... IF you try to use that education to put yourself above them.
1985, Apple's offering is about $4000, the IBM offering is ONLY $3000... A few years later, Apple's offering remains about $3500, IBM compatibles are $2000...
Now, remember we have 20+ years of inflation... That $4000 machine from Apple is like spending $10,000 in today's dollars ($8000 from inflation, another $2000 from income increases)
For a while, the price differential was huge.
Now? The "Apple is expensive" crowd is sounding increasingly absurd. The Mac Mini is like $500-$700, the Dell is $400-$600... Sure there is a price differential, but it's now small. $100-$200 difference is NOTHING compared to the $1500 ($3000-$3500 in today's dollards) difference.
A family today often has two computers, maybe more. My Apple//c was the family computer for 5 years, because even the cheap Apple was expensive.
Five years ago, the idea of a central home computer with WinTerms seemed like a possible future. Now, why bother, the workstations are basically free. We don't have modular systems, we have digital hubs...
10 years ago I went to college with a computer containing: a motherboard, CPU, RAM, graphics card, 3D acceleration card, ethernet card, SCSI card, sound card, 2-3 hard drives, CD-ROM, CD-Recorder, etc....
Now, I use a MacBook Pro, but it wouldn't matter if I had a PC... I'd have a machine with a keywork, mouse, monitor, and box. Upgrades? Everything is on-board, USB/Firewire peripherals add my expansion. Do I need to upgrade a video card? Why bother, when you can get an entire computer for $400-$600 why do I need replacable parts? Only on laptops where a $2k-$3k replacement cost may matter do I even think about how nice it would be for a speed up.
I have a small business. We generate traffic from search engines. A hiccup in a system (ours, our ISP's, Google's, Yahoo's, etc.) can cost us serious money, and potentially put us out of business and our employees out of jobs. Those that have businesses build around WoW can potentially lose money if Blizzard chokes on their mailing of the money, or other things beyond their control.
Are these businesses significant on the scale of a wire payment from Wal-Mart -> Rubbermaid not going through, or a transfer from Nike to their textile plant in China?
Of course not.
However, for those that own those businesses and work in those businesses, it is just as significant.
Point being, as the onling games generate larger and larger supporting economies, downtime ceases to just be an inconvenience (and potential loss of customers... certainly some users on the edge between continuing to play and quit are pushed to the quit site when they can't play when they want), and begins to effect the livelihood of many.
The fact that it isn't your livelihood doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Sure, WoW related activities won't be at the level of a trading desk at Citi, but it still affects people and that matters.
Universities have an overhead level, including salary fringe, etc., that then gets estimated. If the university's overhead rate is 65%, then for every $1 in grant money, 35 cents goes to cover DIRECT costs of the work, and 65 cents go to the University Overhead Income Account.
Basically, things like lab space may be direct or indirect (overhead) costs, depending on setups.
Given that they weren't on staff so there was no fringe (taxes, benefits, etc.), and they weren't using any school resources, maybe they got a discount and a 45% or 50% overhead rate.
Essentially, in grant accounting, you have to account for your direct expenditures (and get reimbursed from the grant issuer), but the overhead you keep. So the university wants as high an overhead rate as possible, as they keep that money. The researchers that "earned the grant" want the lowest rate possible, so more of the money goes into their accounts for their expenditures (you know, things like their salaries).
Also, if grant money is spent on not-aprroved things (let's say Theo calls 25% of his house his office, but the grant doesn't cover the home office, or he hires a project manager and that isn't approved for the grant), then the school won't be able to get reimbursed for those expenditures. Each organization's politics determines what happens when the school "eats" the costs (part of why they have such a high overhead, they cover over-runs, etc.), but in this case, it was an outside organization. I wonder how comfortable the University was cutting checks to Theo's personal account without knowing that they would get reimbursed, so they probably kept a high reserve that they wouldn't release, and a large overhead rate.
Slashdot Mirror
Sure, 720p is becoming more common (as LCDs and Plasmas grab marketshare), and 1080p is becoming the standard on the high end, but the majority of sets out there are 1080i. Is there is HUGE difference between a movie in 720p/1080i vs. 480p, absolutely, because film internally has such a high level of detail. At the video game level... well, it's NOT huge. More lines are always better, but in a fast moving game, 480p @ 60 fps is really fluid. Sure 720p @ 60 fps would be better, but I would prefer we have a fluid 60 fps than get into more lines. If you have a 1080i set, you can't benefits from 720p unless your set has an "up-converter" from 720p or a "down-converted to 480p).
One of the points of consoles is that with a fixed hardware base, you tweak to get max performance instead of losing stuff to abstraction because you don't understand the hardware. If I was playing on a non-HDTV set (a distinct possibility depending on what TV the console is hooked up to), I would prefer that my games at 480i push the system. If you need to build a came to go at 720p, then you can't have as much going on, for the same hardware, as a machine that only needs to push 480p.
For this generation, HD will be common but not everywhere, and 480p will be pretty good. Last generation, I loved getting 480p games over 480i games, but it was alright either way. Everything being 480p is good enough for now. HD OTA looks MUCH better than DVD, but DVD looks MUCH better than VHS, so we deal. I think that one more rev of console power will make it easy to make 1080p the norm (figure 4-5x the pixels of 480p, but we'll have 5-8 times the hardware) that can output at 1080p, 1080i, 720p, 480p, or 480i depending on your monitor with no difference in playability.
The same way I can enjoy DVDs, I can enjoy 480p gaming. I believe that the hardware in the Wii will push out 480p with full 60 fps MUCH more reasonably than the other systems can push out 720p or 1080i content. This time, 480p is the norm, next time, 720p or 1080p. It's more about more polygons than more lines.
Alex
Robson,
Thank you for a well argued response. Please note, I don't think that Atheists are immoral people, and the militant Christians that argue that are at a minimum rude, and more likely violating the divine rules that they have taken upon themselves to follow (Noachide Covenant doesn't require them to be nice to others, be respectful, or follow the "golden rule" of the great Hillel that Christianity took upon themselves). As a religious Jew I don't believe that Christians have to uphold the rules of their gospels, but if they take vows upon themselves to do so, they should make the effort, even if they aren't binding the way a Jewish vow is binding upon a Jew.
As a educated, moral, atheistic person, you might actually enjoy picking up a good translation of the Torah or Tanakh. The Stone Edition Chumash is very popular among modern Orthodox Jews because it has an excellent translation and the commentary and notes really gives some great insights. Without adopting a believe in the divine nature of it, you might learn a lot of the building blocks of Western civilization, as pre-Romanization, the early Church were followers of the same branch of Judaism that modern Rabbinic Judaism follows (although they don't follow the Jewish Oral law codified in the Talmud, the underlying assumptions of the Christian off-shoot was similar). Similarly, I love reading about Christian theology and mysticism, because I think it helps me understand history, without believing in their messiah or dgospels.
For example, you point out that 6 of the 10 commandments are good ideas and should be followed by everyone. You might be shocked to learn that Hashem, G-d of the Israelites agrees, and they are documented in the first book in the Covenant of Noach. Hashem's covenant with Noach is considered binding upon the Gentile descendants of Noah (under Jewish law of course), while the expanded Torah obligations are only binding upon Jews.
I would agree with you that religious wars are tribal in nature. In fact, I think part of where Christianity's militant tendencies comes from taking laws governing the 12 tribes of Israel and adopting them for the non-Israelite world. In addition, Judaism had approximately 1500 years between the receiving of Torah and the writing down of the Oral Law for our sages to explain and adopt the implementation of these rules, and Christianity left without much of the Oral Law and struggled to figure out how to apply very strict laws to others. On the other hand, Christianity takes a huge hit for religious wars launched by Christian Europe which I believe is unfair. Before Christianization, Europe was dominated by the Romans with their pagan faith. Pre-Christianity, the Romans engaged in perpetual warfare, raping and pillaging to spend the wealth on the excesses of their elites that engaged in relentless sodomy with young boys and gluttony. Post-Christianity, Europeans certainly engaged in warfare, but nothing on the scope of what they did under Roman religion. Whatever theological differences I have with Christianity, I can appreciate that it was a calming influence on Europeans, and they became FAR LESS barbaric than their Roman ancestors, which is a good thing.
European tribes fight wars... lots of them... they are currently on hiatus and trying to coerce with trade instead of arms, but they are still a militant people. I don't believe that Christianity made Europeans more warlike.
OTOH, Islam had a militarizing affect on the Arabian people that took its message. Without even looking at modern times, look at how Islam was adopted by the Arab people, a bunch of Nomadic Arabian tribes and spread to massive regions militarily. Before Islam, the Arab people were tribal nomads. After adopting Islam, they created a massive Caliphate that rivaled the Romans for militaristic activity. Look at this
Nintendo's market is VERY different than Sony and Microsoft. Nintendo lost 3rd party support in the N64 era, and only slightly recovered with the Gamecube. They will probably recover more with the Wii, primarily because the system is SO different, companies will make a bunch of interesting puzzle games that take advantage of the different UI.
However, Nintendo can come in third and be very happy in their market. Sony/MS need HUGE 3rd party support, because they only make about $8/game sold by third parties. Nintendo makes most of the top sellers (keeping $42/game), and publishes most of the rest (keeping between $16 and $30/game... publishing games sometimes means that they pay development costs + profits, and then keep the $42/game, but figure that the royalties + costs brings that down a bit).
Also, Nintendo has traditionally sold consoles at a profit (at some points with the Gamecube, they sold at a loss). Supposedly that's only a few dollars a console at launch, losses during heavy cuts, and profits in later parts of the system's life. Microsoft bit a big bullet in the Xbox because they were using customized parts with contracted pricing, they learned their lesson this time. Nintendo uses mostly off-the-shelf components, and sets their contracts to decline over time, which Microsoft is aping).
Nintendo probably makes money if you buy their System + 1-2 games (a Mario game and a Zelda game, for example), and then cleans up if you buy more. Because Nintendo's stop selling games are normally Mario, Zelda, and a few other of their games, they make much more money per console than Sony and Microsoft do with their third party fees.
Remember, profits are in the games, and Nintendo's premier games normally sell in the same quantity (or higher) than Sony and Microsoft's top games do... not sure how Mario Sunshine vs. Halo worked out, but if Microsoft outsold them, it wasn't the HUGE difference that the console sales volumes would indicate.
Sony owns the market of hardcore gamers, but Microsoft looks like they are going to do well in the Xbox 360 arena. However, hardcore gamers that rent a few games a month may not put more money into Sony and Microsoft's pocket than a casual Nintendo customer that buys Mario, Zelda, Smash Bros., Mario Kart, and a few other premier games.
Hell, Animal Forest never had a huge player base, but it used simple N64 era graphics with simple programming, and no doubt turned a nice profit.
As a gamer, I'd love Mario to be the most high-tech game on the market, but I can appreciate that Nintendo can make games that are 80% as high-tech as the MS/Sony games are for less than half the cost, sell the same number of units, and make more money. Nintendo has spent two generations not being the top dog, and still made money, while Sega dropped out of hardware, Microsoft lost $4 billion, and Sony kept going. It's unclear whether Sony made more money off the Playstation as Nintendo did with the N64 (the companies don't break out numbers, and analysts gave mixed estimates), but the fact that the PS outsold the N64 4:1 and we're not sure who made money demonstrates the power of Nintendo's business plan... and the Xbox 360 and PS3 are requiring MUCH larger hardware subsidies as last round... last round, Nintendo turned profits, and Microsoft outsold them 2:1 and lost money. Competition makes things better for consumers (as the MS vs. Sony battle to destroy profit margins demonstrated), but the companies with more monopoly pricing power do better.
Expect Nintendo to keep doing their thing, making innovative new systems, selling in third place, and making gamers happy along the way.
Alex
The argument of atheists being immoral really stems from the fact that the rational conclusion of true atheism is amoral. If you accept evolution and atheism, and life as we know it is a combination of random mutation and natural selection, and there is no higher purpose, the natural extension of that is amoral. Why is it wrong to kill? Simply saying "because its wrong to deny another person life" implies that there is a higher value to human life. If human life is no more valuable than animal life, then a truly consist atheist would believe that there is no difference between eating meat and killing a person.
While most religious people have a horrible time expressing it, it isn't necesssarily fear of divine retribution that keeps things in check, but a code of morality. Maintaining our generally accepted morality doesn't require accepting Jesus as Messiah (as few religious Christians would argue that all of us Jews are immoral, even if they believe we will suffer eternal damnation), but it does require accepting a code of morality.
Morality requires that there be things that are inherently good and things that are inherently bad. True atheism rejects these concepts, as they deny that there is a higher power than the natural state of the world.
Now, nothing stops Atheists from behaving in a moral manner, there are certain concepts understood within a social contract that governs interpersonal behavior. However, if one rejects that there is a natural good and evil (things that cannot exist in a purely scientific world where mutation and natural selection governs all), it becomes harder to argue for a moral manner.
Unfortunately, most non-believers get their impression of religious individuals from the least educated and most passionate about their faiths, and conclude that faith is the opiate for the masses. The other problem is that most religious debates center on minutia... All religious Jews accept that the Covenant of Noah is binding upon Gentiles and the Torah is binding upon Jews. All Christians accept that salvation requires faith and understanding in the ministry of Jesus. So what happens is arguments about hierarchy and structure (Protestant Reformation/Revolt), status of the world to come and requirements to enter (Christians vs. Jews), etc.
All religious people accept that people are obligated to establish reasonable civil courts and property rights claims (part of the Covenant of Noah), generally acceptable behavior towards lesser beings like animals (Covenant of Noah likewise prohibits tearing the flesh from a live animal, etc). Religious people also accept that before Abraham left Ur and accepted the divine word, the world was filled with paganism and idolatry, which at the time involved human sacrifices, tearing of limbs from animals, institutionalized rape, etc. It was through the divine order to Abraham that people accepted that there was a good and evil defined by a higher power.
Now, modern Atheists in the west live in Christian societies (and if we throw in Israeli Atheists, a Jewish society). Their common framework of morality stems from certain underlying assumptions that society has made by the believers. Few Atheists would argue that rape, murder, and human sacrifice are acceptable behavior, but few can give a concrete reason that doesn't borrow a reason accept by generally understood principles of ethics that do in fact derive from the world the monotheists created.
I don't not murder because I fear the heavenly court. I don't murder because its wrong, and it would never occur to me to kill someone just because it benefits me. Atheists make the SAME assumptions and engage in moral behavior, but they don't realize that their morality comes from societal norms that were established by their religious neighbors that they condemn.
Most Atheists accept what is conventional western morality, and therefore see religious people as duped idiots, because the only difference that they see is the ritualiism and superstition, and ignore
He was giving an interview with HD Net's news division... it was hard hitting, I'm sure.
The rep from TI (makers of DLP) was talking to someone else from TI and from one of the Korean television manufacturers (probably Samsung, but I don't recall). They weren't addressing him, they were talking to each other. He was 20 feet away, and couldn't hear what they were saying.
He moved the industry, and people recognize that... especially the ones whose careers were heavily affected by his behavior.
Alex
The guy owns HD Net (and the sister channel, HD Net Movies). When nobody was doing HD Content, he got HD rights to minor college games and NHL games, and built a little network there. He also bought the right to do transfers of old shows. He's an active participant on AVS Forum, explaining what is going on in the HD world. The craziest thing, you could only get HD Net from DirecTV and a local Texas station for its first few years. He bought a local television station just to run HD Net OTA to prove that OTA HD was practical.
When I met him very briefly (like 1 second) at CES some years back, watching him speak was amazing, not for what he said, but to hear the AWE from the representatives of companies like TI that were talking about how nobody did more for their industry than him.
The man has loads of money, and is spending it to push things that he believes will make the world a better place. He also has an ego the size of Texas. He had is own show on HD Net (where he could be a big dork but have his players on), and HD Net's coverage of CES was interviewing him.
The guy made a fortune selling broadcast.com at JUST the right time, and is now pushing technology the way he wants it, where a few gambles can make a difference. HD Net's sports coverage forced ESPN to adopt HD content before they wanted to, and DirecTV used HD Net to anchor HD programming when there was almost no programming. If it wasn't for him, the local affiliates would have gotten their dream of HD being a fig leaf to get public airwaves, where 1/6 of the channel space would carry normal 480i programming, and 5/6s be sold for data services, etc. Instead, HD Net helped force everyone's hand, and HD is here and real.
The guy's hobby appears to be bending public will to his, and he does a good job of it. While these "investments" may not have been profitable in a traditional sense (I doubt that he loses money, but he probably isn't getting a better ROI than having plowed his money into the S&P 500), it seems to have made him happy. He owns a basketball team, and he has a television network that buys the rights to do HD Transfers of whatever shows he wants to watch in HD. While the rest of us are at the mercy of the marketing departments guessing what we want, he can go make it happen. That's a pretty cool hobby.
Alex
The US doesn't really have elections, we have census data and districting. The party in power in the state (originally elected) carves up districts to put as many of their opponent's neighborhoods into clumps, i.e. districts that are 65%-80% for their opponents. This is easier for the GOP to do because Democratic voters are predominately urban voters (wealthy and poor) so make is districts that look reasonable on a map. Then you spread out your voters depending on how ballsy you are. You only need 51% of the vote, but 55%-60% keeps your seats safe.
.25% (or .5%, for some states) of a differential. In that case, the reality is, voter fraud will swing an election by 1% or 2% anyway, so it isn't a will of the people. Also, if 100 people vote, 48-47-5 (REGARDLESS of which of the first two candidates win, a majority is disenfranchised in a first-past-the-post system.
Sometimes, you have areas that you couldn't do that with, or new developments between census rounds causes a district to change, and you get close elections.
After watching Florida be humiliated in 2000 with the recount debacle, the politicians decided to get rid of recounts. In some sense, this kinda makes sense... the recount scenario is a tie that comes down to
A close election means that the legislature failed to carve things up correctly, and they'd rather the wrong guy win then go through a recount. And anytime you have a recount scenario, the reality is that the vote was a tie. Sure, votes aren't SUPPOSED to have a margin of area, but all of our traditional vote counting mechanisms do. The current one replaces margin of error counting with an exact count, but voter confusion is worth a few points anyway.
People complaining about paper trails, etc., are attributing to malice (desire to steal elections), what is really a matter of NOBODY wants a repeat of Florida 2000.
Alex
Hmm, which market should we be in...
:)
A) Niche computer market, 3% of sales, 40% margins on the hardware, a relatively small software R&D division that helps move hardware at 40% margins... oh yeah, and to make some extra cash (and provide an incentive to buy more hardware), we sell the new versions of the software (10+ years ago, gave them away). Thy does this make sense, each year or so, I can upgrade iLife + OS for about $200... Well, if I'm on big hardware, no biggie, if I use a Mac Mini, well, for $200 I can upgrade, or for $600 buy a new machine... provide an incentive to buy the new machine. We know the Mini has lower margins, say, 33%? In that case, Apple makes $200 if you buy a new machine, or $200 if you upgrade the software... Apple doesn't care.
Or, license OS, this means two separate markets
B) Intel PC Operating system market. Let's look at this market, two major players. One, a monopolist with 95% marketshare, who struggles to sell upgrades because of their entrenched base. Most computers NEVER get an OS upgrade. The competitors charge about $35 for OEM Windows Home, "free" for Linux, or dirt cheap, probably $20 for an OEM Linux OS that the vendor supports... Gee, what a great market. Even if Apple can collect a premium, $50 OEM pricing... that means that OS X machines sell for $100 more than their Windows counterparts, and Apple makes $50/machine. So if estimates of quadrupling market-share are real, then Apple breaks even. Even the "Apple is expensive crowd" that really wants to pirate the OS for free, sets an upperbound of quadrupling marketshare... Gee, so if they are right, then Apple breaks even... brilliant move... but I guess they might sell more copies of iWork...
C) Now that OS X is generic, available at retail for $129 (and BitTorrent for $0), Apple goes from their niche market with 40% margins to the EXTREMELY competitive PC market. The entrenched players hold about 50% of the market, and local grey-box manufacturers + home built machines are about 50%. In this industry, margins of 8% are huge, because once you pay people to put the equipment together, ship stuff around, etc., you cost more than the guy building in his basement. No room for differentialization, etc. Maybe Apple will do "insanely great" design work, collect a premium off the market, and make 10% margins...
Entering the OS market SUCKS. It sucked BEFORE Linux became popular, giving away a Unix-like OS for free, and it sucks now. Nobody but Microsoft has EVER made big money selling operating systems, because people DO NOT BUY THEM. OEMs buy them cheaply, but nobody buys operating systems.
Apple is where it is because it found a great niche and milks it... milks it for all its worth... makes 5x margins that the industry dreams of. Sure, Dell makes more money most of the time... BUT ONLY Dell does it. Apple has a nice growing market, an iPod where they grabbed a premium, and now the iTunes music store. They'll get into new markets, but only where there are good margins.
Entering into overly competitive markets and abandoning decent monopoly pricing power (economics term, they aren't a monopoly, but since Windows PCs aren't a perfect substitute, they get to charge price of PC + substitution "cost" - $1 and sell machines) to enter cutt-throat competitive markets...
It's not a recipe for success, it's a recipe for destroying shareholder value.
Alex
One of the things that most Internet marketers miss (myself included at times) is that as you move up the food chain, there are more buyers. If I am pushing a brand-less product, I focus on my CPC rate, conversion rate, etc., and don't care where the ad runs, only the conversion rate there and what I am paying per click.
However, the big boys (Ford Motor Company, Warner Bros. Television, etc.) focus on brand building and budgets. They don't ask if they are making money off the impressions, they have a quarterly budget, spend the budget, and ideally aim for the biggest bang-for-the-buck. However, they don't want their brand associated with marginal content, so they have to approve the site carrying their ad.
Now, they pay dearly for the privilege, but for a content site, a big-name ad agency placing a big brand may be willing to pay substantially more on a CPM basis because they need to cut a deal, take up time, etc. If I am making $5 CPM, I'm not going to spend hours with their legal department, etc., to make $5.05 CPM. Now for $6 or $7 CPM, or even $10, I'll spend time handling them as a client, not running an ad network.
The flip side to this, the ad agency doesn't want to spend hours time from highly paid professionals for a site with 1000-2000 visits/day. They need a bang for the buck, and if their time is going to add $5-$10 on a CPM basis for compliance, then the advertising becomes less viable.
So, when you hit thresholds on major rankings, whether it be Alexa, Nielson, etc., then some of the ad players notice you. So the rankings matter, because maybe hitting top-2000 means you can sign on a few premier accounts. While the traffic jump from spot 2001 to 2000 may not be huge, you may see a HUGE revenue jump if you can sell the inventory.
That's why the things matter, as you move up, companies that won't deal with smaller players because transaction costs are too high show up... More demand for your ad inventory, holding supply constant, means higher prices. Even as you move higher, the supply increases (which would force you to take lower prices to move it), more buyers come on the scene, which usually means a still higher CPM.
The rules change as you move up the food chain, which is why the people that define the food chain matter.
Alex
Everyone is Washington (and any organization) thinks that their problems are the most important, and runs around with "their head on fire" to use a Clark phrase. The question for our leaders is which one to listen to, and we need to be 100% accurate... The Islamists (or Islamo-facists to use the new term), or Terrorist, or whatever you call them, only need to succeed onces. The Arabs on the west bank of the Jordan launch 10 suicide attackers a day, and the IDF stops 99.9% of them, that still means that every three months the world press talks about suicide bombers and how hopeless it is to look for a military solution.
The White House needs to manage thousands of reports, decide what gets to the president, etc., and the enemy needs to sneak one past.
Sure the FBI counter-terrorism guys were screaming about the threat of terrorists.
The FBI organized crime unit was no doubt screaming about the mob.
The CIA south Asia guys were screaming about India and Pakistan.
The CIA China guys will scream about disputed Islands, as well as Taiwan.
Everyone that spends 40 hours a week focusing on one particular threat to US interests thinks that there is something major there. While the US has vast resources, they aren't unlimited, and maintaining a global hegemony requires deciding where to put the resources.
And guess what, if you make decisions based on probabilities, you are going to make a lot of 80% decisions.... and guess what, 1 in 5 of those will be wrong.
Alex
Those deals are only for the BIG suppliers with SHORT turn-around deals. Wal-mart is a vicious customer, but can deliver HUGE volumes. They have also moderated themselves, as suppliers stopped working with them when they got too cutt-throat. The buyers have been reigned in, because big accounts like Rubbermaid became problematic. A friend in marketing at Rubbermaid was telling us that while the "buy on sale," where Walmart accepts the inventory at their cash register has pushed the inventory holding risk to the suppliers, it's only on products that are sold within 2-3 days of being in the store. Wal-mart doesn't waste shelf space on items that don't turn-over.
The suppliers are actually happy with the arrangement, because it's a deal point, and they can extract better pricing by working with that system. While I'm sure that Wal-mart has played hardball as you described, it's a little overstating to suggest that that is the normal way of doing business.
My friend also suggested that the buyers have been becoming less adversarial, and trying to produce more win-wins. Sure the Wal-mart culture is there... normally buyers get taken out to lunch with salesmen who entertain them... a bit of sneaky corruption, the buyers are pushed to gives a little bit of the company's money to get well treated by the salesmen. At Wal-mart, salesmen go to Wal-mart HQ, no meals are allowed. All negotiations take place in a small room at Wal-mart HQ. By keeping their buyers from trading favors with salesmen, they keep their costs down.
Walmart does MANY things... they are aggressive, but not necessary under-handed. However, they have a LOT of maneuvering room in the industry, and if they can make real money by selling Apple iTunes movies in the store, they WILL bring market pressure on the studios to play ball.
Alex
I agree with you, in theory, about zoning. On the other-hand, there is a massive externality issue involved. For example, if you prop unregulated low income housing, slum style, into a neighborhood, you will cause MAJOR negative externalizes in the surrounding communities. If I own a peace of land with a view of the ocean (theoretical house, 2 stories), and someone buys the land in front of me (currently 1 story), and puts up a 3 story building, I lose my view. This is a negative to me. Restricting the owner from doing so is a negative to them, devaluing their property rights.
Zoning is a bit of a compromise, I can buy my theoretical house, knowing that that lot is only zoned for 1 story (so the view is factored into my house). If it is zoned for three stories, then I take a risk.
I'm not anti-development, but I think that externalities need to be considered. In the case of my neighborhood, the original developer zoned it recreational with the city to get cheaper tax rates and operate a country club in the community. Country-club living (living near the club, where you play golf, tennis, and swim without the "public" being there like at a part), was very big in suburban South Florida in the 70s. It was a combination of community separation (upper middle class white people hanging out with their kind), plus how society was for young families then. Now, the trend went to private pools and public tennis courts in the 80s, and continued in the 90s. The country club society crumbled as South Florida stopped being retirees and their wealthy doctors/lawyers and into a real economy with dual incomes and stressed families.
However, the neighbors bought their house from the developer (or the previous owners, but essentially from the developer), with the understanding that the developer set up the country club as a recreation facility. Most houses in our neighborhood within 2 blocks of the old club have no pool, including massive houses that you would expect to have a pool in Florida, unless they were build 10+ years later when private pools were the rage.
Should the developer/new owner of the country club, that has received 30 years of subsidized taxes, and premium prices for pool-less homes 30 years earlier by providing a swimming pool, be allowed to say, okay, I already cashed in on that part, just build the last handful of unbuilt lots (in the 90s, and away they went to rezone it and cash in after the run-up).
In all fairness, the zoning is essentially a deed restriction. If you zone something a certain way to create more value (like they did), removing that value without compensation to the people who paid you a premium for that value (or their successors) seems just as unfair as arbitrary zoning restrictions.
A developer gets recreational land rezoned as residential to put in a slew of houses (this happened down the street from me, albeit before I moved in). Tax base goes up, politicians get donations, everyone is excited... except the neighbors whose house is no longer down the street from a country club with a pool and instead has more houses... After a 5 year fight, the compromise is a rezone on half, and the other half becomes a park... everyone is somewhat happy (still having recreational features, although less than before, but now free), and developers make money, just not what they would if they could have used ALL the land. The new road is a non-issue, because they did it private so it could be gated... Now I am a supporter of property rights, but when the original neighborhood was built, the recreational use was part of "the deal" via zoning, so letting someone rezone in this case devalues everyone else, so they should get compensation, which the new park essentially is.
Maintaining those resources is now the city's burden, but it has the tax base to support it from the new houses, no problem. Now the city needs to run sewage, water, and other lines there... who should pay for that? Should the city pay for that to make the land more valuable for the developers, or should the developers pay for it as part of the rezone? Of course the costs get passed on to the buyers (although, in reality not entirely, i.e. if the person would pay $500k before, they aren't going to pay $525k for the same house just because the builder's costs went up)... in many ways, these costs get eaten by the developer, because they charge the owners whatever the market will pay, not cost + profit. Now, it is possible that these costs would make some development projects unprofitable as a result (increases costs cuts the supply curve raises prices and lowers quantities, not just increases prices).
I agree that once a part of the city, the new home owners are the same as everyone else, otherwise, it is pulling up the ladder. But ultimately, the "first citizens" had to pay for the roll-out of facilities through their taxes, and whenever someone buys that person's house, you implicitly paid for it because the value of the house in part includes those resources.
The anti-capitalist bent on Slashdot is a bit silly, as is the NIMBYism hidden in the anti-developer garbage. However, it's not clear to me that running sewage, water, electricity, and roads to a new location should be the city's responsibility, taxing existing tax-payers for services that they don't use doesn't seem right. I agree that once they move in they are equal, I'm just not sure why citizens 1-100 that already paid for the resources that they use (explicitly or implicitly) to pay for citizens 101-105 to move in seems fair, versus citizens 101-105 pay their startup costs...
Remember, you claim that developers pass it along to first owners (I don't agree that it is a 100% pass-through), in which case the owners are implicitly paying for it, same as all the other home owners. In fact, these new owners get a discount, because they only pay the marginal costs... if you argued that they should pay 5% of the existing sewage system's costs, I'd say you stepped over the line.
Now, this is all BS, because capital improvements are paid via bond issues, and therefore NOT paid by current tax payers, but future tax payers, including the new ones. However, I still think that marginal costs to the city should be paid for by the developers, and therefore cut into potential profits but not have the city subsidize developers.
Alex
One of the problems with the old 7.x series vacuum, is that if you ever end up 1 record over the vacuum memory allocation, then it doesn't properly vacuum it. This means that you are going about your business, vacuum analyze every night, and all of a sudden, your database explodes and fills the hard drive, because old tuples are never cleared out. This is particularly a problem if you have "scrap tables" where the data is constantly deleted, updated, and reinserted... while this isn't reasonable for normalized data, sometiime we have "data cache" tables managed with triggers that store LOTS of data.
If you catch it in time, no problem, but otherwise, you get real problems. Once you get big, you need to vacuum full to avoid this. That's all well and good, but vacuum full can leave the database unavailable while run... this is a problem for a web server database. We can use it on our internal machines no problems (run it Sunday morning, nobody is working then), but it's a problem.
PostgreSQL 8 looks good, but I'm a little scared to migrate ALL the data that we have, and most importantly, screw up any messy optimizations that we've made that made sense on the PostgreSQL 7 engine but not the PostgreSQL 8 engine.
Alex
PHP through 4.1 was an AWESOME prototyping language... what it was designed for. Back then, you could POST or GET a form, and the variables were automatically filled in. This was a huge security whole, and therefore plugged, which has made it less useful in some ways, but more production friendly in others.
However, my old partner when to a PHP conference, and was STUNNED that the recommended course of action was:
1. Use PHP to prototype
2. Move all business login into C or C++
3. Call the business logic from PHP wrapping the C/C++ calls
While that may be more "correct," that would have massively increased development time.
Our current cycle is like this:
1. Prototype in PHP and PostgreSQL in a test database, treating it like MySQL or Access (a retarded database)
2. Move all validation code into the database with pl/pgSQL, using triggers, etc
3. Performance tune by creating (using triggers) optimized tables for the live site.
4. Deploy
This gets us a lightening fast, reliable system. Unfortunately, for legacy reasons, we have so much PHP code that we've written that migrating to something else (including PHP 5) is hard to justify until we have the budget to get the extra staff just to migrate the system.
It's more work on the DB side, but it's well worth it.
One of the performance tunes we've considered: pl/php, which last time we evaluated it, wasn't quite ready for prime time. Our idea: after tuning your database, move all your database access into the database.
Essentially, for each "page type" on a dynamic site, create a php function that gathers ALL the data you need and puts it into an array. Then, call the Database PHP function getPageType("values to be passed"). The server side PHP function will do all the queries you need, serialize the array, and return it as a TEXT value. Your web page deserializes and displays.
The reason for this is that you have several delays and resource hogs:
1. unoptimized queries: before you move things to stored procedures, test your SQL with explain. Add indexes as needed. If you look up on two or three values, create an index on those values... basic stuff, but will get you massive speed-ups.
2. database connections, to keep this down, put everything on the server into one database and use schemas for access, now you can use persistent connections with a "web" user that connects in persistently and switches as needed (or make your getPage functions accessible to the web user... SECURITY definer, grant execute to the web user).
3. back-and-forth connections: the best way to kill performance, have a PHP script that calls the database, gets some data, calculates on it, and queries again... the fewer queries to the database a page, the better, less overhead. If you need to do back-and-forth activity, write a stored procedure, then there is a single database call. PostgreSQL lets you write stored procedures in SQL, so there is no excuse not to do it.
If you are doing a project of any magnitude, (i.e. 2-3 programmers on it), then one of you should learn to play DBA and optimize the database. If you do that, PostgreSQL is a fast moving beast.
Most performance competitions are MySQL users testing PostgreSQL. However, if you use PostgreSQL like MySQL, it's dog slow. MySQL is a "retarded" database with almost no overhead, so querying the database 15-20 times on a page is harmless. PostgreSQL requires database administration. Once you set up your database right, and tune the server settings (increase buffers, allocate more sort memory, etc.) it screams, but you have to treat it like a real DB.
If you are just throwing your thoughts up on the web, it's not worth it, but if you are doing a real "small" project, where the license for Oracle, DB2, or even MS SQL Server would be extravagant, PostgreSQL is a great option. (The problem with the real databases isn't just the price tag, it's that they are more powerful IF configured right, so you end up needing a 6-figure DBA, instead of a book on database design and about 12 hours to get used to writing triggers).
Alex
One morning I got my email right after the market openned, saw no movement... on a whim, bought a few hundred bucks worth, figuring, people stupider than me had to fall for it... Made about 20%-30% on the deal after commissions...
Haven't tried in a few years, been to busy, but it was actually pretty funny... Thought about doing that with some small money... I mean, the annual percentage gain is really impressive if you actually acted on all these and got some fast run ups...
The problem is, it's all short term, which means major taxes... Alternatively, you could do it in an IRA or other shielded account, but that means keeping in cash except when you make the play... no margin means you need to keep cash sitting around when you aren't playing, which cuts into returns... If you have margin, you can always move the cash in 2-3 days later conveniently.
Alex
Microsoft started offering top people $1m/year salaries to snag them. While this seems like the market working, it's not quite real when Microsoft can use its massive cash reserves to cripple a company. Basically, if Microsoft can offer 20 key people $1m/year over market salaries, then the competition is either bled for $20m/year, which can destroy smaller competition, and hasn't cost Microsoft a dollar, or they spend $20m to put a competitor out of business by stealing key people and use their cash to establish a monopoly position.
This is blatantly anti-trust in the case of a monopolist, and was a lawsuit that I believe Microsoft settled.
Borland made some boneheaded management maneuvers, but this was after Microsoft crippled the company, and Borland made a desperate effort to recover.
Alex
You're not buying my argument? You think that accountability means someone to sue and companies want to sue vendors?
I'm not arguing AGAINST open source programming, I use very few programs that aren't available under a free license... my desktop apps are, but business infrastructure is now.
BTW: the ideal scenario would be paying programmers to add features, given an existing free base, but that isn't that practical. It means hunting down a programmer, negotiating a rate, etc. These are all costly things, likely costing me 2-3 hours of time, which isn't free.
However, accountable companies have customer service, ways to put in feature requests, etc. Projects aren't "accountable" in that manner.
Alex
The only place I have EVER seen a company "want someone to sue" if something goes wrong is on Slashdot. In the real world, most businesses want to avoid lawsuits because only the lawyers win. The only times companies want legal battles is to establish barriers to entry... Where the cost of creating the barrier is less than the monopoly rents extracting, generate the lawsuit. Lawsuits are done to keep competition out, not as a reasonable way of recovering costs from a vendor.
Accountability is NOT the same as lawsuits. Microsoft is accountable for to me, because if I don't like their software, I don't buy it. OpenBSD is not accountable to me because they believe they are giving me something for free and therefore don't care about money coming in. Buying things (like RHEL, or OpenBSD CDs, etc.) creates some accountability, because they lose money if they don't keep customers happy.
Creating a financial incentive to make customers happy creates accountability. In Linux land, certain features get implemented because someone scratches an itch, or because a business needs a feature and pays someone to implement it. Those are advantages of the "open source model," but a drawback from accountability. I am a customer, I want to know that the aggregate of their customer base matters as well. The millions of $400-$500/year customers need to have their interests respected, and an environment where you have to be big enough to pay a programmer to implement the feature leaves us all out.
It's all about accountability, and a company that looks out for its customers. It's not about "someone to sue" if things go wrong.
Alex
Unfortunately, America is still suffering a bizarrely warped market by the baby boomers. They were a massive generation, promoting growth, which is a good thing... however when they were coming of age, the US went to war, instituted a draft, and granted exemption for education. As a result, people would hide in universities to avoid service.
As a result, we have a GLUT of PhDs in a similar age range that are hanging around until retirement. In addition, that same generation didn't produce a larger follow-on generation, so we have a decrease in NEED for educators (there also isn't a draft that requires people to hide in the Academy, which lowers demand further).
But that same Glut of Professors have protected themselves from the market with tenure and other policies. When the boomers retire en masse, we are going to have massive ripple effects... The Boomer generation climbed the ladder, pulled it up behind them, and are looking at the smaller generation after them wondering why they won't take care of them the way they took care of their parents...
I've bought MANY Hifn projects, because the OpenBSD.org website said that they were good, and sent me to Soekris to get them. I have bought 4 PCI cards, 7 of the mini-PCI cards, and Soekris boards to support the latter. Without Theo's support, I wouldn't have bought those products. If there are a bunch of people like me, then we are a nice group of orders that they shouldn't lose because they can't deal with one rude programmer.
:)
That said, I bought the products because Theo said so... the OpenBSD project doesn't exist, it's a manifestation of Theo, seeing as how donations are a check to Theo...
As brilliant as Theo is, his behavior makes me nervous to trust his organization's software for mission-critical functions. The fact that I might pick up the new OpenBSD CDs, go to upgrade my servers, and "surprise" no drive for you, is NOT an acceptable state of affairs, and that is what I am concerned about.
Alex
I think you hit the nail on the head here, and it is commonly missed. Intelligence is not the same as education, and intelligent people are pretty evenly distributed throughout the population. The difference is that the somewhat intelligent but very educated crew tend to get REALLY condescending towards the rest of people. If someone is having an argument, and switches to jargon-heavy language, that is a sign that they can't explain the subject (or they could explain it in jargon-less language), its a sign that they are heavily educated, but not intelligent enough to understand and explain the concepts that they basically memorized.
What you had personality wise and educationally in these past two US elections demonstrates that conventional wisdom is great for the unintelligent and overeducated class. The most common myth was that George Bush was somehow less intelligent and less educated that Al Gore or John Kerry. Of all the standardized test results we received (SAT scores, Air Force tests, etc.) that would show an intelligence gap, Bush scored slightly higher that his political opponents, but none were off the charts. Educationally, all three were similar (Bush and Kerry nearly identical, Gore had several failed graduate school efforts before finding a path), with Bush having slightly better grades in an apples-to-apples comparison (one of the years at Yale was Pass/Fail, if we strip that year out for both Bush and Kerry, Bush's GPA was decently better).
We had three heavily educated but intellectually mediocre (probably 1.5 deviations above average -- intelligent, but not brilliant) people running for the Presidency. Bush's simplistic tone seemed more comforting to people, and while Kerry and Gore could spout Washington-jargon until blue in the face, neither seemed terribly capable of explaining what they were talking about, which goes along with that lack of intelligence to match their education.
Bill Clinton, who you sited, was the PERFECT counter example. He is BRILLIANT AND EDUCATED, and could explain complicated issues in a jargon-free manner because he actually understood it. Bill Clinton didn't push people away the way Gore and Kerry did, and it's not about the intelligence factor.
If you aren't that bright, but your parents could provide you with an expensive education, expect to be EXTREMELY popular with 20 and 30 something singles in urban areas who are the next generation of not so intelligence but expensively educated... they will love you. Expect to be popular amongst Doctors, Lawyers, or any other professionals for whom education is all that matters, and intelligence and people skills are seen as lesser traits.
Expect to be EXTREMELY UNPOPULAR amongst those that are near your intelligence (slightly below - slightly above) whose parents couldn't afford such an education... IF you try to use that education to put yourself above them.
Alex
Here is the thing to remember...
//c was the family computer for 5 years, because even the cheap Apple was expensive.
1985, Apple's offering is about $4000, the IBM offering is ONLY $3000... A few years later, Apple's offering remains about $3500, IBM compatibles are $2000...
Now, remember we have 20+ years of inflation... That $4000 machine from Apple is like spending $10,000 in today's dollars ($8000 from inflation, another $2000 from income increases)
For a while, the price differential was huge.
Now? The "Apple is expensive" crowd is sounding increasingly absurd. The Mac Mini is like $500-$700, the Dell is $400-$600... Sure there is a price differential, but it's now small. $100-$200 difference is NOTHING compared to the $1500 ($3000-$3500 in today's dollards) difference.
A family today often has two computers, maybe more. My Apple
Five years ago, the idea of a central home computer with WinTerms seemed like a possible future. Now, why bother, the workstations are basically free. We don't have modular systems, we have digital hubs...
10 years ago I went to college with a computer containing: a motherboard, CPU, RAM, graphics card, 3D acceleration card, ethernet card, SCSI card, sound card, 2-3 hard drives, CD-ROM, CD-Recorder, etc....
Now, I use a MacBook Pro, but it wouldn't matter if I had a PC... I'd have a machine with a keywork, mouse, monitor, and box. Upgrades? Everything is on-board, USB/Firewire peripherals add my expansion. Do I need to upgrade a video card? Why bother, when you can get an entire computer for $400-$600 why do I need replacable parts? Only on laptops where a $2k-$3k replacement cost may matter do I even think about how nice it would be for a speed up.
Computers are cheap and disposable.
Alex
I have a small business. We generate traffic from search engines. A hiccup in a system (ours, our ISP's, Google's, Yahoo's, etc.) can cost us serious money, and potentially put us out of business and our employees out of jobs. Those that have businesses build around WoW can potentially lose money if Blizzard chokes on their mailing of the money, or other things beyond their control.
Are these businesses significant on the scale of a wire payment from Wal-Mart -> Rubbermaid not going through, or a transfer from Nike to their textile plant in China?
Of course not.
However, for those that own those businesses and work in those businesses, it is just as significant.
Point being, as the onling games generate larger and larger supporting economies, downtime ceases to just be an inconvenience (and potential loss of customers... certainly some users on the edge between continuing to play and quit are pushed to the quit site when they can't play when they want), and begins to effect the livelihood of many.
The fact that it isn't your livelihood doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Sure, WoW related activities won't be at the level of a trading desk at Citi, but it still affects people and that matters.
Universities have an overhead level, including salary fringe, etc., that then gets estimated. If the university's overhead rate is 65%, then for every $1 in grant money, 35 cents goes to cover DIRECT costs of the work, and 65 cents go to the University Overhead Income Account.
Basically, things like lab space may be direct or indirect (overhead) costs, depending on setups.
Given that they weren't on staff so there was no fringe (taxes, benefits, etc.), and they weren't using any school resources, maybe they got a discount and a 45% or 50% overhead rate.
Essentially, in grant accounting, you have to account for your direct expenditures (and get reimbursed from the grant issuer), but the overhead you keep. So the university wants as high an overhead rate as possible, as they keep that money. The researchers that "earned the grant" want the lowest rate possible, so more of the money goes into their accounts for their expenditures (you know, things like their salaries).
Also, if grant money is spent on not-aprroved things (let's say Theo calls 25% of his house his office, but the grant doesn't cover the home office, or he hires a project manager and that isn't approved for the grant), then the school won't be able to get reimbursed for those expenditures. Each organization's politics determines what happens when the school "eats" the costs (part of why they have such a high overhead, they cover over-runs, etc.), but in this case, it was an outside organization. I wonder how comfortable the University was cutting checks to Theo's personal account without knowing that they would get reimbursed, so they probably kept a high reserve that they wouldn't release, and a large overhead rate.
Ah, grant accounting...
Alex