The problem wasn't buildings. The problem was new hires. Most of grants goes to pay people's salaries. More researchers means more grants means more money for everyone, so during the doubling most places used it to expand the number of researchers. So the available funds got absorbed on an increase in the number of people competing for it, then we were hit with an inflation rate cut, so the percentage of projects funded hit a sharp decline. This is especially true because grants span multiple years, so you must finish funding grants that were already accepted before you can fund new ones.
Think about it in terms of a bubble like the dot com bubble or the housing bubble. If you see the prices of something double, then suddenly stay flat, most other sectors would see people frantically running for the doors crying about a burst bubble. Of course people half way into a PhD can't exactly leave that fast, but the danger is that in the long run the same thing will result, with students running to other fields (perhaps less beneficial for the long term health of the nation) where they can actually have a chance of making a living.
A better approach would have been to double more slowly and then keep increasing funding at slower and slower rates each year until biomedical funding hit some target percentage of overall GDP.
FYI, I just saw Time machine do basically the same thing (~100 Gb of data with ~500 Mb changed) in under 2 minutes due to the FSEvents tracking that's been mentioned several times in this thread which allows it to avoid traversing the entire file system looking for changed files. This makes the hourly backup strategy practical. Even if you are on a laptop and have to connect up a physical external drive, keeping the backup time that short means that there are no excuses. I can easily tell myself that I can't afford to wait 20 minutes for a backup to complete, but I can almost always spend 2.
Also I think everyone should be congratulating Apple for making the FSEvents magic open to everyone, so if someone else wants to go and make a better mac backup program, they can get the speed benefit, too. I'm hoping that the updated version of SuperDuper will do this, leaving me with no excuse for not having both a versioned backup and a bootable backup updated at all times.
In spite of its limited market share, Apple has often been one of the biggest leaders in innovating with acceptance of new hardware standards. Not having to support an arbitrary base of hardware manufactured by other people allows them to be much more nimble. If the next big thing required a particular combination of hardware, Apple can ensure that all new computers made include it, even if it raises the cost slightly for a benefit that won't become clear until later when they enable features that take advantage of it.
If Apple were to become a mainly software company, not only would they be faced with supporting far more models, they'd loose their ability to ensure that new computers contain the hardware they want and would instead have to dictate the software to the hardware the users have chosen. Look at Vista. Faced with the choice of buying new hardware that supports Vista well or sticking with XP, many people choose XP.
To be successful as a purely software company, Apple would have to compete directly with Microsoft and shift their focus to high volume, low margin. This is absolutely contrary to everything that Jobs is interested in. He would much rather have a successful minority company with a disproportionate impact on the market as a whole than a leading manufacturer of a commodity.
I think the biggest factors are inertia and target market. Microsoft wants to satisfy as many people as possible and that means satisfying big corporations who are going to make big buys. That means that they are going to have a great deal of resistance to any changes that will require expensive re-training. It's hard to innovate under those circumstances. Furthermore, the Microsoft idea of "winning" is dominance in market share. This leads them to design for the lowest common denominator: something that the greatest number of people will be satisfied with even if no one will be thrilled by it. Apple would much rather have greater mind share and be seen as having the best products, therefor they are willing to make choices that might turn off some, even many or most, users if the changes raise the quality of the product. This makes it much easier to innovate.
This is the key. Information/computer technology had arisen so fast that we've seen the entire field transition in less than a generation from one in which the only people involved at all were advanced amateurs or professionals to one in which everyone participates. Measured as an average among computer users, knowledge has dropped. Measured as an average among the population as a whole, it has increased. And I doubt that the level of expertise of the experts of the generation has much changed.
As far as the writing ability of politicians... I think many of them actually could. Certainly there are many intellectual leaders out there who could. The difference is in what is valued in society and valued in politicians. Most politicians are like the blond cheerleader in high school who thinks she has to pretend she isn't one of the smartest people in her class because she thinks if she's smart no one will like her. Unfortunately when it comes to the very short run goal of getting a date for Saturday or getting elected to office, they might both be right since high school boys/the voting public aren't famous for making good decisions.
And "skills today's college students don't have: writing, critical thinking, hard work and just plain showing up."? Oh, come on. Get over yourself and realize that every generation since the beginning of time has made statements like that and they all look stupid in hind sight.
In other news, if your house burns down you'll loose all your stuff. Honestly if your music collection (expensive but possible to replace) is what you are most worried about in a hard drive crash, then you clearly don't have the same kind of data on your computer that I do. If your CDs are lost/stolen/damaged they're gone unless you... that's right, back up. Like you should be anyway. Nothing to see here. Move along.
I'm not sure that math scans...
Taking ER as an example from your chart, a 30 second spot is $400,000. Assume 20 minutes of ads (an overestimate, given that show run about 42-43 minutes and some of the ads are for other shows on the same channel), that works out to revenue of $16 million. The same season they got about http://loneswordsman.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!D545 4D646CBAAB6B!198.entry12.3 million viewers or about $1.30 per viewer. I believe that the wholesale rate for TV shows http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/19/steve-jobs-figh ting-for-9-99-itunes-movie-downloads/is 70%, so if the TV show costs 1.99 to download, 1.393 will go to the studio. Therefore, the studio is making about the same amount of money, possibly a bit more from each viewer who downloads a TV show from iTunes as they make per viewer from advertisers. I'm sure this is not a coincidence.
Ad rates are set by number of viewers, so, although I didn't check, I'd expect this to scale to shows with higher or lower viewership, maintaining about the same revenue per viewer. Furthermore, if more and more viewers switch from watching on the buying from iTunes, the decrease in the amount they make from ads will be balanced by more revenue fro downloads.
This isn't about maintaining the amount of money they make off of broadcast, it's about increasing it, and, more importantly, increasing their control.
This completely misses the point of employer (or government for that matter) health insurance.
Obviously those with higher risks cost more on an individual level and if allowed to follow the market, insurance companies will equalize the risk by making riskier people pay more. The whole idea behind having these big insurance plans funded by employers, the AARP, Unions, or Governments is that you approach an insurance company with a market so big that they can't pass it up but say essentially "take it or leave it at the cost of the average person multiplied by the number of people covered." Because the insurance company is guaranteed a big check, they are willing to spring for it at a lower cost than they would otherwise, and that way people can actually afford insurance. This also prevents the insurance company from dropping you if you suddenly become a greater risk. Ever tried to afford insurance as a bargaining unit of one? It's not pretty.
Also, it seems like the idea behind this is at least in part to encourage people to be healthier. But do you honestly think that someone who knows all of the health risks is going to suddenly get healthy because they are being charged extra for their healthcare? After all, with the case of smoking, they are already paying for their habit. It seems to me this is more about healthy people patting themselves on the back.
And hey, as long as we're following down that road why not charge women more than men (after all most women go to the doctor more frequently than men) and certainly they should pay more while they are pregnant. Oh, and people with children are much more likely to get sick as their kids bring home diseases from school. Over 50? Your risks are much greater than mine. Are your teeth not straight? Those are going to be some higher dentist bills. And don't get me started on those selfish risk takers the sportsmen, driving up our healthcare costs with all their knee surgeries.
Healthcare should be a basic human right, not something we bet on. The whole idea of making it an "insurance" program is simply cruel and, in the long run, makes it more expensive to treat the same number of people since emergency rooms are required to treat people, and doctors and insurance companies waste tons of money fighting with each other over repayments.
Yes, but everyone does have the right to due process and companies that find themselves in the position of being gateways to major life activities can find themselves in a sort of semi-govermental capacity where this is concerned especially because I'm sure they claim some sort of contract with their users. So MySpace might be open to complaints if they are seen as being arbitrary and unresponsive.
However the bigger concern is to learn the right lessons from this. The private sector is very good at compiling and sharing information about consumers. Someone could very well think that it would be a really good idea to implement this more broadly and create a sort of credit check for sex offender status. You might not have a fundamental right to a MySpace page but what about if it isn't just a MySpace page. What if it is renting an apartment, buying a house, buying a car, getting a credit card, getting internet service at all, etc, etc, etc. I mean who wouldn't want to sign on to a "no tolerance policy on sex offenders?"
I'm not saying this is happening, just that it is a really good reminder why it would be a very bad idea.
2. The Big Studios have been pushing to get Apple to charge a higher rate per song for years now. This outcome has Apple saying, "Hey, get rid of DRM and we'll do it." I wonder how tempting that will be to the other studios.
Actually what the labels have really wanted is variable pricing, so that they can choose which tracks are "hot" or "premium" and charge more for them. Or, more likely, so that most new music can be kept expensive while everyone is talking about it and prices can drop only when the buzz starts to fade. As far as I can tell, pricing will still be standard from song to song. They've just introduced a new kind of content with a new price which is the same for every song from EMI.
I'm surprised I haven't seen this on the thread, but will we all need iPods with bigger drives now? Mine's maxed at the lower sample rate. Is that the other win for Jobs?
DRM free means you are free to re-incode it back to 128kbps and archive the full quality original. Or for that matter transcode it into mp3 if your player (or the old mp3 cd player you've got lying around) won't support AAC. That we couldn't do those kind of things was the whole point of complaining about DRM in the first place.
There's also readability. And trust me, I know all too well that experts in the field don't always write the most understandable, remotely well written (or even grammatically correct) articles. Locking down to approved versions as the default display will discourage mildly knowledgeable people from cleaning up articles for the purpose of understandability. If you can't see your edits taking effect live, I'd bet that many people will loose the impetus to make little fixes. After all, who am I to mess with an "authoritative" article.
A better approach is the one where the "bleeding edge" version is displayed by default. But it could get a badge saying "This article contains up to the minute edits, click here for an expert verified version." Digging into the history is asking too much, but that would give the best of both worlds.
Also, for the many users who would prefer to see only the authoritative versions, there could be a box to click when searching to display authoritative versions by default or even to search only authoritative versions returning nothing if there is no expert verified version. That way people can use Wikipedia however works best for them. There's enough room here for all of us, we're not trying to squeeze this thing into physical book after all.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem wasn't buildings. The problem was new hires. Most of grants goes to pay people's salaries. More researchers means more grants means more money for everyone, so during the doubling most places used it to expand the number of researchers. So the available funds got absorbed on an increase in the number of people competing for it, then we were hit with an inflation rate cut, so the percentage of projects funded hit a sharp decline. This is especially true because grants span multiple years, so you must finish funding grants that were already accepted before you can fund new ones. Think about it in terms of a bubble like the dot com bubble or the housing bubble. If you see the prices of something double, then suddenly stay flat, most other sectors would see people frantically running for the doors crying about a burst bubble. Of course people half way into a PhD can't exactly leave that fast, but the danger is that in the long run the same thing will result, with students running to other fields (perhaps less beneficial for the long term health of the nation) where they can actually have a chance of making a living. A better approach would have been to double more slowly and then keep increasing funding at slower and slower rates each year until biomedical funding hit some target percentage of overall GDP.
FYI, I just saw Time machine do basically the same thing (~100 Gb of data with ~500 Mb changed) in under 2 minutes due to the FSEvents tracking that's been mentioned several times in this thread which allows it to avoid traversing the entire file system looking for changed files. This makes the hourly backup strategy practical. Even if you are on a laptop and have to connect up a physical external drive, keeping the backup time that short means that there are no excuses. I can easily tell myself that I can't afford to wait 20 minutes for a backup to complete, but I can almost always spend 2.
Also I think everyone should be congratulating Apple for making the FSEvents magic open to everyone, so if someone else wants to go and make a better mac backup program, they can get the speed benefit, too. I'm hoping that the updated version of SuperDuper will do this, leaving me with no excuse for not having both a versioned backup and a bootable backup updated at all times.
In spite of its limited market share, Apple has often been one of the biggest leaders in innovating with acceptance of new hardware standards. Not having to support an arbitrary base of hardware manufactured by other people allows them to be much more nimble. If the next big thing required a particular combination of hardware, Apple can ensure that all new computers made include it, even if it raises the cost slightly for a benefit that won't become clear until later when they enable features that take advantage of it.
If Apple were to become a mainly software company, not only would they be faced with supporting far more models, they'd loose their ability to ensure that new computers contain the hardware they want and would instead have to dictate the software to the hardware the users have chosen. Look at Vista. Faced with the choice of buying new hardware that supports Vista well or sticking with XP, many people choose XP.
To be successful as a purely software company, Apple would have to compete directly with Microsoft and shift their focus to high volume, low margin. This is absolutely contrary to everything that Jobs is interested in. He would much rather have a successful minority company with a disproportionate impact on the market as a whole than a leading manufacturer of a commodity.
I think the biggest factors are inertia and target market. Microsoft wants to satisfy as many people as possible and that means satisfying big corporations who are going to make big buys. That means that they are going to have a great deal of resistance to any changes that will require expensive re-training. It's hard to innovate under those circumstances. Furthermore, the Microsoft idea of "winning" is dominance in market share. This leads them to design for the lowest common denominator: something that the greatest number of people will be satisfied with even if no one will be thrilled by it. Apple would much rather have greater mind share and be seen as having the best products, therefor they are willing to make choices that might turn off some, even many or most, users if the changes raise the quality of the product. This makes it much easier to innovate.
This is the key. Information/computer technology had arisen so fast that we've seen the entire field transition in less than a generation from one in which the only people involved at all were advanced amateurs or professionals to one in which everyone participates. Measured as an average among computer users, knowledge has dropped. Measured as an average among the population as a whole, it has increased. And I doubt that the level of expertise of the experts of the generation has much changed. As far as the writing ability of politicians... I think many of them actually could. Certainly there are many intellectual leaders out there who could. The difference is in what is valued in society and valued in politicians. Most politicians are like the blond cheerleader in high school who thinks she has to pretend she isn't one of the smartest people in her class because she thinks if she's smart no one will like her. Unfortunately when it comes to the very short run goal of getting a date for Saturday or getting elected to office, they might both be right since high school boys/the voting public aren't famous for making good decisions. And "skills today's college students don't have: writing, critical thinking, hard work and just plain showing up."? Oh, come on. Get over yourself and realize that every generation since the beginning of time has made statements like that and they all look stupid in hind sight.
In other news, if your house burns down you'll loose all your stuff. Honestly if your music collection (expensive but possible to replace) is what you are most worried about in a hard drive crash, then you clearly don't have the same kind of data on your computer that I do. If your CDs are lost/stolen/damaged they're gone unless you... that's right, back up. Like you should be anyway. Nothing to see here. Move along.
I'm not sure that math scans... Taking ER as an example from your chart, a 30 second spot is $400,000. Assume 20 minutes of ads (an overestimate, given that show run about 42-43 minutes and some of the ads are for other shows on the same channel), that works out to revenue of $16 million. The same season they got about http://loneswordsman.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!D545 4D646CBAAB6B!198.entry12.3 million viewers or about $1.30 per viewer. I believe that the wholesale rate for TV shows http://www.engadget.com/2006/06/19/steve-jobs-figh ting-for-9-99-itunes-movie-downloads/is 70%, so if the TV show costs 1.99 to download, 1.393 will go to the studio. Therefore, the studio is making about the same amount of money, possibly a bit more from each viewer who downloads a TV show from iTunes as they make per viewer from advertisers. I'm sure this is not a coincidence.
Ad rates are set by number of viewers, so, although I didn't check, I'd expect this to scale to shows with higher or lower viewership, maintaining about the same revenue per viewer. Furthermore, if more and more viewers switch from watching on the buying from iTunes, the decrease in the amount they make from ads will be balanced by more revenue fro downloads.
This isn't about maintaining the amount of money they make off of broadcast, it's about increasing it, and, more importantly, increasing their control.
This completely misses the point of employer (or government for that matter) health insurance. Obviously those with higher risks cost more on an individual level and if allowed to follow the market, insurance companies will equalize the risk by making riskier people pay more. The whole idea behind having these big insurance plans funded by employers, the AARP, Unions, or Governments is that you approach an insurance company with a market so big that they can't pass it up but say essentially "take it or leave it at the cost of the average person multiplied by the number of people covered." Because the insurance company is guaranteed a big check, they are willing to spring for it at a lower cost than they would otherwise, and that way people can actually afford insurance. This also prevents the insurance company from dropping you if you suddenly become a greater risk. Ever tried to afford insurance as a bargaining unit of one? It's not pretty. Also, it seems like the idea behind this is at least in part to encourage people to be healthier. But do you honestly think that someone who knows all of the health risks is going to suddenly get healthy because they are being charged extra for their healthcare? After all, with the case of smoking, they are already paying for their habit. It seems to me this is more about healthy people patting themselves on the back. And hey, as long as we're following down that road why not charge women more than men (after all most women go to the doctor more frequently than men) and certainly they should pay more while they are pregnant. Oh, and people with children are much more likely to get sick as their kids bring home diseases from school. Over 50? Your risks are much greater than mine. Are your teeth not straight? Those are going to be some higher dentist bills. And don't get me started on those selfish risk takers the sportsmen, driving up our healthcare costs with all their knee surgeries. Healthcare should be a basic human right, not something we bet on. The whole idea of making it an "insurance" program is simply cruel and, in the long run, makes it more expensive to treat the same number of people since emergency rooms are required to treat people, and doctors and insurance companies waste tons of money fighting with each other over repayments.
Yes, but everyone does have the right to due process and companies that find themselves in the position of being gateways to major life activities can find themselves in a sort of semi-govermental capacity where this is concerned especially because I'm sure they claim some sort of contract with their users. So MySpace might be open to complaints if they are seen as being arbitrary and unresponsive. However the bigger concern is to learn the right lessons from this. The private sector is very good at compiling and sharing information about consumers. Someone could very well think that it would be a really good idea to implement this more broadly and create a sort of credit check for sex offender status. You might not have a fundamental right to a MySpace page but what about if it isn't just a MySpace page. What if it is renting an apartment, buying a house, buying a car, getting a credit card, getting internet service at all, etc, etc, etc. I mean who wouldn't want to sign on to a "no tolerance policy on sex offenders?" I'm not saying this is happening, just that it is a really good reminder why it would be a very bad idea.
Supposedly whole albums will cost the same as they do now.
There's also readability. And trust me, I know all too well that experts in the field don't always write the most understandable, remotely well written (or even grammatically correct) articles. Locking down to approved versions as the default display will discourage mildly knowledgeable people from cleaning up articles for the purpose of understandability. If you can't see your edits taking effect live, I'd bet that many people will loose the impetus to make little fixes. After all, who am I to mess with an "authoritative" article.
A better approach is the one where the "bleeding edge" version is displayed by default. But it could get a badge saying "This article contains up to the minute edits, click here for an expert verified version." Digging into the history is asking too much, but that would give the best of both worlds.
Also, for the many users who would prefer to see only the authoritative versions, there could be a box to click when searching to display authoritative versions by default or even to search only authoritative versions returning nothing if there is no expert verified version. That way people can use Wikipedia however works best for them. There's enough room here for all of us, we're not trying to squeeze this thing into physical book after all.