Of course HD doesn't suck in and of itself, but for people with SD sets it does. Most people with SD sets were PERFECTLY HAPPY with an SD picture. It's just that now everyone's throwing HD pictures at SD sets and it turns out looking like crap, either letterboxed (somewhat acceptable) or fullscreened (oy).
Just ask my relatives that I helped set up with digital converter boxes. Crappy digital pictures and a bunch of crap channels they never wanted in the first place. Oh joy!
Another example: DirecTV out of the goodness of their hearts is giving me three full months of all the Showtime channels for free. All in glorious fullscreen! So I look up - why are the Showtime channels in fullscreen and not letterboxed? Answer - well if you had DirecTV HD they would be letterboxed. Can we sign you up?
</rant>
Naturally I am going to be buying an HD set in the near future (and sending my perfectly functional SD CRT TV to be "recycled" i.e. probably sent off to China to be stripped down by poor souls who'll be dead from lead poisoning by the time they're fifty. But I digress.) But there's definitely going to be a population buying HD simply because they want a working picture, not a better one.
Note they chose to say it uses "radar" rather than "microwaves." A little less scary sounding perhaps?
You should only call it RADAR if you're using it for RAdio Detection And Ranging - not for making bats scream "NO! Get out of my head Charles!"
100% of survey respondents also agreed that if given the choice between their current ISP service and one that offered one hundred times the bandwidth for one-tenth the price, they'd choose the latter. So be sure to lobby the government for laws that support this position as well.
Dow Jones has been running a news search and database service called Factiva ( http://www.factiva.com/ ) since 1999. It is primarily used in business (although they do take credit cards) and is a serious news database - thousands of news sources fed directly to it, taxonomies, APIs, the works. Head to head it kicks Google News' ass. If Dow Jones is developing a consumer version it could have a number of advantages over Google News that users may be willing to shell out for.
Selling your textbooks. Just another way of saying "I spent several hundred dollars and a few hundred man-hours learning something I'm never going to need to know again." Oh, sure I could peruse the textbook every once in awhile just to refresh, but, nah...
Seriously, how hard could it be? A few million for servers and bandwidth, a team of visionaries, developers and project managers that give a fig about privacy, usability, and openness, and you just start building the thing. Social networking without ads or marketing.
"In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love. They had five hundred years of democracy and peace. And what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
I can't believe he admitted it. "After all, US copyright-based industries continue to be one of America's largest and fastest-growing economic sectors."
When it gets down to it - talking trade balances here - once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here - once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel - once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity - y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
- music
- movies
- microcode
- high-speed pizza delivery
Combine that and a few basic rules of gameplay - "No, if you let your ship get captured, you can shoot the ship that captured it, then you'll have TWO ships firing" - and you have a game you can enjoy even if you do get your ass kicked the first few times. This was very important when quarters were at stake.
I actually fell out of gaming when Mortal Kombat-style games came to dominate. I couldn't be arsed to climb the learning curve. ("No you gotta jump and kick at the same time" "I am dammit!, Aw, fuck this...")
Having recently bought textbooks it seems the best trick is to give the audience little choice in the matter. Publish new editions every year with enough changes (actual new content, relocating chapters, new title, new typeface, new cover, new layout, new publisher etc.) that it makes using old and new editions in the same class all but impossible. Bundle the book with exclusive online content and make sure the professors require its use. Offer an electronic version but with the severest DRM available and charge the same price as the print version, and of course for a limited license (good for 18 months, say.)
Also, counter-intuitively, keep the price in the how fucking much?! range. Once you've spent $150 on a textbook, the idea of being the nice guy who spends his weekends scanning it in so that everyone else can get it for free becomes far less palatable - "Why should I be the only sucker who paid for it?"
Agreed. In a down economy education is an excellent investment. Sometime after you graduate the economy will turn around, another bubble-enhanced can-you-start-yesterday hiring frenzy will start, and you'll be awfully glad you have the MA when it does.
Just remember to watch your debts and put some money in the bank. Nothing lasts forever.
Goatherd: 'n this here be Thor, the 'erd's Alpha goat.
Larry (leans in): Why hello there, Thor! And aren't you just the cutest thing...
Thor: BAH! (headbutts Larry and storms off.)
This sounds like a "King of the Hill" episode, writ large.
"No, Peggy, you don't understand! They're OVERPAYING ME! I'm stealing from the government, I tell you what! And I can't get them to stop! It keeps me up at night, I tell you what!"
Forty years later: A Colonel shows up at Hank's door.
- "Mr Hill? We've responded to your letter, and it turns out you were right. We have been overpaying you all this time."
- (sighs.) "I always knew this day would come." (hold out his wrists) "I'll come along quietly."
- "No, no, Mr. Hill! You don't understand. We're implementing the fix you suggested. It'll save the government millions of dollars a year. We just wanted to thank you!"
- "Oh. Huh. Well, thank you sir. But in that case, can I at least give you back the money?"
- "I beg your pardon?"
- "Wait here." (Hank goes to his garage, wheels out a 50-gal drum on a hand truck.) "I've been putting the extra pennies in here since 1969, I tell you what. And now I'm ready to return it."
- (smiles) "No, you go ahead and keep that. We're cool." (leaves)
- "Alright! I can go to college now!"
- "Bobby, go to your room!"
- "I'm 45 years old! You can't make me go to my room!"
- "Now, mister!"
- "Aw.."
Disk-based storage is so Thomas Edison. Is there any reason to think solid-state storage won't be catching up to disks in terms of density, longevity, price, etc. anytime in the foreseeable future?
I mean c'mon people! It's the 21st century and our computing machines still have motors in them!
Slashdot Mirror
Of course HD doesn't suck in and of itself, but for people with SD sets it does. Most people with SD sets were PERFECTLY HAPPY with an SD picture. It's just that now everyone's throwing HD pictures at SD sets and it turns out looking like crap, either letterboxed (somewhat acceptable) or fullscreened (oy).
Just ask my relatives that I helped set up with digital converter boxes. Crappy digital pictures and a bunch of crap channels they never wanted in the first place. Oh joy!
Another example: DirecTV out of the goodness of their hearts is giving me three full months of all the Showtime channels for free. All in glorious fullscreen! So I look up - why are the Showtime channels in fullscreen and not letterboxed? Answer - well if you had DirecTV HD they would be letterboxed. Can we sign you up?
</rant>
Naturally I am going to be buying an HD set in the near future (and sending my perfectly functional SD CRT TV to be "recycled" i.e. probably sent off to China to be stripped down by poor souls who'll be dead from lead poisoning by the time they're fifty. But I digress.) But there's definitely going to be a population buying HD simply because they want a working picture, not a better one.
OK, you can call the waahmbulance now.
Note they chose to say it uses "radar" rather than "microwaves." A little less scary sounding perhaps?
You should only call it RADAR if you're using it for RAdio Detection And Ranging - not for making bats scream "NO! Get out of my head Charles!"
Also, it sounds like it works a lot like this system - are they sure they're not making the whole bat feel hot?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Denial_System
100% of survey respondents also agreed that if given the choice between their current ISP service and one that offered one hundred times the bandwidth for one-tenth the price, they'd choose the latter. So be sure to lobby the government for laws that support this position as well.
I'll see your IT Crowd vid (funny!) and raise you -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TXkxSl4f6vw
- The Boondocks!
Dow Jones has been running a news search and database service called Factiva ( http://www.factiva.com/ ) since 1999. It is primarily used in business (although they do take credit cards) and is a serious news database - thousands of news sources fed directly to it, taxonomies, APIs, the works. Head to head it kicks Google News' ass. If Dow Jones is developing a consumer version it could have a number of advantages over Google News that users may be willing to shell out for.
Selling your textbooks. Just another way of saying "I spent several hundred dollars and a few hundred man-hours learning something I'm never going to need to know again." Oh, sure I could peruse the textbook every once in awhile just to refresh, but, nah...
Instead of when it was first reported in January?
http://slashdot.org/submission/928767/Virtual-Bike-Lane-proposed-by-designers?art_pos=1
Sheesh.
Seriously, how hard could it be? A few million for servers and bandwidth, a team of visionaries, developers and project managers that give a fig about privacy, usability, and openness, and you just start building the thing. Social networking without ads or marketing.
(Or perhaps even better, the p2p social network.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Third_Man#The_cuckoo_clock_speech
And many of those will be USB 1.0, although (hopefully) that shouldn't pose a problem.
Those nerd NASA scientists are gonna get their pants pulled down and spanked with moon rocks.
I can't believe he admitted it. "After all, US copyright-based industries continue to be one of America's largest and fastest-growing economic sectors."
When it gets down to it - talking trade balances here - once we've brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they're making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here - once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel - once the Invisible Hand has taken away all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity - y'know what? There's only four things we do better than anyone else:
- music
- movies
- microcode
- high-speed pizza delivery
The only winning move is not to play.
How about a nice game of chess?
Left-Right-Forward-Back-point-your-gun-at-the-bad-guys-and-SHOOT!!
Combine that and a few basic rules of gameplay - "No, if you let your ship get captured, you can shoot the ship that captured it, then you'll have TWO ships firing" - and you have a game you can enjoy even if you do get your ass kicked the first few times. This was very important when quarters were at stake.
I actually fell out of gaming when Mortal Kombat-style games came to dominate. I couldn't be arsed to climb the learning curve. ("No you gotta jump and kick at the same time" "I am dammit!, Aw, fuck this...")
NGOML!
Just mix 'em together and you're set.
Unfortunately the tip-jar model doesn't always work. See my previously posted anecdote - http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1046291&cid=25943171
Having recently bought textbooks it seems the best trick is to give the audience little choice in the matter. Publish new editions every year with enough changes (actual new content, relocating chapters, new title, new typeface, new cover, new layout, new publisher etc.) that it makes using old and new editions in the same class all but impossible. Bundle the book with exclusive online content and make sure the professors require its use. Offer an electronic version but with the severest DRM available and charge the same price as the print version, and of course for a limited license (good for 18 months, say.)
Also, counter-intuitively, keep the price in the how fucking much?! range. Once you've spent $150 on a textbook, the idea of being the nice guy who spends his weekends scanning it in so that everyone else can get it for free becomes far less palatable - "Why should I be the only sucker who paid for it?"
How are they gonna fire them rockets right-side up?
Agreed. In a down economy education is an excellent investment. Sometime after you graduate the economy will turn around, another bubble-enhanced can-you-start-yesterday hiring frenzy will start, and you'll be awfully glad you have the MA when it does.
Just remember to watch your debts and put some money in the bank. Nothing lasts forever.
I highly recommend Comic Book Comics for anyone wanting the inside dope on the history of comics. Twisted tales indeed!
Introducing people to Life In Hell would be a lot easier if Groening put them online. Still waiting! (http://www.mattgroening.com/) AUUUGH!
A loon who understood how alternating current works.
Unlike some other loon inventors back then.
Lookin' at you, Thomas Alva.
(Topsy the Elephant, RIP)
Goatherd: 'n this here be Thor, the 'erd's Alpha goat.
Larry (leans in): Why hello there, Thor! And aren't you just the cutest thing...
Thor: BAH! (headbutts Larry and storms off.)
This sounds like a "King of the Hill" episode, writ large.
"No, Peggy, you don't understand! They're OVERPAYING ME! I'm stealing from the government, I tell you what! And I can't get them to stop! It keeps me up at night, I tell you what!"
Forty years later: A Colonel shows up at Hank's door.
- "Mr Hill? We've responded to your letter, and it turns out you were right. We have been overpaying you all this time."
- (sighs.) "I always knew this day would come." (hold out his wrists) "I'll come along quietly."
- "No, no, Mr. Hill! You don't understand. We're implementing the fix you suggested. It'll save the government millions of dollars a year. We just wanted to thank you!"
- "Oh. Huh. Well, thank you sir. But in that case, can I at least give you back the money?"
- "I beg your pardon?"
- "Wait here." (Hank goes to his garage, wheels out a 50-gal drum on a hand truck.) "I've been putting the extra pennies in here since 1969, I tell you what. And now I'm ready to return it."
- (smiles) "No, you go ahead and keep that. We're cool." (leaves)
- "Alright! I can go to college now!"
- "Bobby, go to your room!"
- "I'm 45 years old! You can't make me go to my room!"
- "Now, mister!"
- "Aw.."
Disk-based storage is so Thomas Edison. Is there any reason to think solid-state storage won't be catching up to disks in terms of density, longevity, price, etc. anytime in the foreseeable future?
I mean c'mon people! It's the 21st century and our computing machines still have motors in them!