I work for a large Internet company that you've heard of, and (like most people in my profession) I've been spending a lot of time over the last several months coding -- and recoding, and recoding, and recoding -- to make sure my code works with IE7, without breaking all the IE6 and IE5.5 hacks that we've had to use over the years (and that IE7 no longer requires -- although rest assured, it needs its own hacks.)
So, when I saw this Slashdot post about the release, my immediate reaction was "well, I guess I get to find out if I pulled it off."
Then I read these comments, and saw the post about Flash 9 for Linux, and I got really, really excited. I feel much better now.
Cat's game snarks aside, this is genuine progress. Typically, a computer game version of tic tac toe plays by comparing the current board configuration against a collection of possible conditions, and determines the move that way -- or by scanning the board for possible win-in-one-move conditions and blocking them. In the first game, an unbeatable (it always wins or ties) game results (provided the collection of possible conditions/moves is accurate), and in the second case it's possible to win by creating a win-in-one-move condition that simultaneously creates two win-in-one-move conditions.
This DNA computer, on the other hand, successfully blocks all win-in-one-move conditions without using any kind of lookup table; in other words, it "figures it out" by itself. Is this conscious logic? Not necessarily, but it is indeed logic being applied.
I have twins, a boy and a girl, age 1 year and 2 months (or so). We made a conscious decision to raise them without television, at least before the age of two.
To date, their TV watching has consisted of the following:
- About half an hour total of little bits of a Richard Scary videotape someone gave us, with songs that we sung along with (we're a music-focused family);
- About ten minutes of teletubbies as an experiment (that helped us discover that our child care provider had occasionally shown them teletubbies, something we suspected when our daughter became obsessed with a teletubbies book all of a sudden);
- The aforementioned teletubbies viewing, which makes up about half an hour a day total (we're looking into another child care provider now that we know about it.)
So yeah, it's possible to do it, but it isn't easy when you use daycare providers (luckily we had a nanny for the first year, so this half an hour a day of TV is a short-term thing.)
Call me when I can play Guitar Hero II on the Wii, with a guitar control that has a place to attach the controller, so that as I swing the guitar (and my body) around, my on-screen avatar dances along with me, and if I strum with a particularly excessive body movement, I get added points.
My parents have been married -- and still are -- since the 60s. My father's been working in IT since the 70s. I've been working in IT since the mid 90s, and my marriage is strong/kids are happy.
Er, I don't have a point here, except to say that working in IT is not a guarantee of marital strife.
Take one hundred people with computers, and who have an interest in Folding@Home. Offer them a CPU-driven version of the app, and 100 computers will be running the CPU-driven app, regardless of the age/performance of the machine.
Now, offer them a GPU-driven alternative. For the most part, the only people that will install and run it are those with a fancy-schmancy video card capable of running it, and for the most part, the only people that have a fancy-schmancy video card capable of running it have high-performance computers as well (or at least more recent computers that came with compatible cards.)
So let's say that's ten out of the hundred, and those ten are statistically likely to have had the highest-performing CPUs as well; so you've pulled the top ten performers out of the CPU-client pool, and thrown them in the GPU-client pool. Even if you didn't switch those ten people over to the GPU, you could probably isolate those computers' CPU-client performance numbers from the other 90 and find that they're disproportionally faster than a larger number of the slower computers.
There's still more to the story, of course, but you really are taking the highest-performing computers out of the CPU pool and into the GPU pool. The exception would be high-performance servers with lousy/no graphic cards, but those are likely working so hard to perform their normal business that Folding@Home isn't a priority.
The bank has motivation and resources to implement a solution, whereas individual customers do not. This is because banks control the technologies that phishers emulate in order to con their targets.
For example, the company I work for is concerned about phishers stealing user accounts, by emailing links to pages that look like our corporate signin page (used for many properties in many locations, so commonly encountered on various sites by our employees.) As individual users, it was extremely difficult to tell whether the page being logged into was legitimate or not; so, the company now uses a cookie to identify you as an employee, and embed your picture (from the company's internal records) into the login page. If there's no picture of you, it's not legitimate.
Is that foolproof? No, because other employees could get your photo and fake the login page. It certainly narrows it down to internal employees and contractors, however, and it's a step that individual employees could never have taken on their own.
Similarly, imagine if ATM cards didn't have PINs, and possession of the card was enough to withdraw money from remote locations. Individual users couldn't do much about this, other than hold onto their card for dear life, but the banks could easily implement PIN codes so that theft of the card did not automatically enable theft of account monies.
Again, is that foolproof? No, because some people write their PINs on their cards (duh) and some people manage to set up "fake" ATMs to collect card swipes and PINs. However, banks now use the unique identifier on the card to access the customer's name and display it before the PIN is punched -- no name means you probably shouldn't use the machine. Again, another step (still not foolproof) that individual users couldn't enact on their own.
If a bank makes a service available, they are the ones in good position to improve the security of that service, and at some point the bank actually hands over the money based on their own assurance that the person using the service is who they say they are, using whatever method the bank provides. All of this is up to the bank, not the user, and so they should carry the liability -- if not, they can always opt to avoid providing those services that they cannot successfully protect.
Does this absolve the users of all responsibility? No, but there are still lots of stupid things users can do -- and shouldn't -- that cause them to lose money that the bank doesn't -- and shouldn't -- have to reimburse.
I guess you can think of it like this: if a bank's machine gives out money to the wrong person, it's the bank's fault -- and if the bank's machine gives out money to the right person, who is then mugged within half a second of the transaction, it's the user's fault.
1. Right now in my neighborhood, there are six wireless routers that I can reach from my living room, none of which I own or operate. They have SSIDs of "linksys" or "default", and of the six, only four are running WEP. All six of those routers are running on channel 6. So why is this bad?
1a. If I were feeling nosy, I could connect to two of my neighbor's routers and watch all of their web browsing, instant messaging, email, and so on (except where https is being used, which is likely rare). Since radio signals are directional, I could easily figure out which router belongs to which house, and so now I've got a lot of information about that person, and I know where they live. The possibilities of abuse are endless.
1b. Insecurity is part of it, but ignorance is another part, and all six of those people have poor wireless performance because they're all running on a different channel. I'll admit this: I logged into the admin console of one and switched it to channel 4, just to see if it made a difference. It did; the wireless signal almost doubled from where I was sitting.
2. It's one thing to share an internet connection with your neighbors, or with anyone who wanders by; however, you should be doing to voluntarily and with an awareness of the risks, not because you're ignorance of the circumstances. I share my internet connection with my neighbor via a WPA-PSK bridge, and in such a way that nobody can see what's going on. Equally important: my neighbor can't see what I'm doing, because he's on a completely different subnet with firewalls between; I can be a Nice Guy(tm) without having to trust anyone blindly. I can do the same thing with everyone who wanders by if I keep my wireless separate from my home network (as above) and don't use encryption on the access point, so they take the risk and I'm still being a Nice Guy(tm) almost risk-free.
2a. However, it's not entirely risk-free, because a person wandering by (or, let's face it, my neighbor) might do illegal things through my internet connection, and one day my computers might be seized because of it. So yeah, it's risky all right.
Call me when they put a huge, inflatable arena in space, and start holding athletic events there. Somewhere between Ender's Game and Jocks In Space there's got to be a sweet spot of entertainment...
Quick note: in theory that might be true, but then in theory if this happened on a regular basis, everyone would concentrate EVEN MORE on getting elected, and do EVEN LESS for the people once they got in, because they'd know that re-election was unlikely if not impossible -- even if they did a good job.
The ability to be re-elected is supposed to be a check on such behavior; it is supposed to incentivize good performance by offering an extension. Unfortunately, when the majority doesn't care enough about what's being done in office to know a person's track record, that incentive isn't worth much.
Well, the answer is "you cannot make a profit by producing a good at great expense, if one individual sale of that good can result in an infinite number of copies made and distributed at no cost." That's it; without DRM, you can't make a profit, if distribution of that type of good is your *only* business.
However, the most commonly considered scenario is that of music distribution, and music distribution only exists as a profitable business because the alternative (going out to a venue to see music) was more expensive (in time, money, effort and inconvenience) than buying a copy to play at home. In theory, someone might have asked, "how can you make a profit by producing live shows and charging for tickets, when people can buy and share performance recordings for less?" and the answer would be "you can't." Yet somehow, live shows still managed to make money, and that's because performance recordings don't give you the full "live" experience. That can't be replicated at little or no cost, and so it remains a profitable business. Also, the distribution of those recordings (directly to the consumer and via radio) gives consumers confidence in the product they'll be getting at a "live" performance, so they'll pay more for it.
Movies are the same way; the VCR was supposed to close movie houses, and it certainly made then LESS profitable, but it remains a profitable business because seeing a movie theater is a different experience than watching a video tape, and for many people a more valuable experience (such that the additional cost in time, money, effort and inconvenience is worth it.)
So what happens when you remove the profitability from recorded performances, either movies or music? The sale of recorded performances becomes unprofitable, but live/theatrical performance remains profitable. The end result should be that musicians stop making recordings of their music, and focus all of their efforts on live performance, while moviemakers stop allowing their movies to be released on DVD.
That's not what has happened so far, however. Remember the music example, where the live performance business was profitable both despite and because of the distribution of recordings? Well, if you get rid of the profitable recordings AND the free recordings (by not making records at all), nobody knows about you and nobody will come to see your shows -- and the live performance business goes down the drain. That's what it was like to be a musician back before performances could be recorded; only a small number of musicians were profitable (large symphonies and whatnot), and being a musician was a generally disreputable business to be in. Performance recordings brought profit, and profit brought legitimacy.
So now you have musicians that can't make money through recorded performances, but still want to make money through live performances. So they continue to record, and accept the cost of recording as a marketing expense rather than a direct source of revenue. Without recordings at all, nobody comes to your live shows; sell your recordings, and you'll make some money from recordings and some from shows; give away your recordings (which is what you do these days if you distribute just one CD) and you'll make no money from the recordings, but you'll still make money from the live shows.
Will you make as much money at the live shows as you did with the recordings plus the live shows combined? Probably not, but remember: generally, the record companies make the recording money, and the musicians make most of their money from live performances. Take away the recording profit, and you might hurt the record companies, but the musicians can go right on being profitable.
This isn't a complete answer by any means, but it's all I have time for.:)
Far better (in my mind) than one laptop per child is simply "one computer per classroom" for third world countries, and make sure that computer has a huge monitor, backup power, and an internet connection of reasonable bandwidth.
I say this because having access to current information -- especially when presented in contextually-rich ways, such as google earth et al -- is a tremendous teaching tool that a good instructor can use to teach more effectively. On the other hand, putting individual machines in the hands of children may have benefits, but I'm having a hard time thinking of what they might be.
As for money-where-my-mouth-is, I have two infants, and I have no intention whatsoever of giving them their own computers. A firehose of information without guidance is of little use. However, there will be a computer in the common area, hooked up to a big monitor, for us to use as a family. We can monitor their surfing, provide context when they need it, and make computer use a social activity instead of a solitary one.
The racing game Forza (on XBox) has something like this now, albeit nonverbally. You can turn on a trainer that places arrows on the track to indicate the line you should be driving, which is not a big deal; however, that line is dynamically updated as you drive to give you information that's pertinent to your current performance and situation.
Let's say you drive into a turn too quickly. What were once green arrows (to say "keep going, no need to slow down") suddenly turn yellow, then red, as you pass the point at which you should have hit the brakes. Once you've slowed down enough to recover, the arrows go back to green (or yellow). This simple mechanism is surprisingly useful.
It's not a big leap to take that data and present it in faux-human form (a voice saying "You're driving into the turns too fast!" and a worried face on your robo-instructor) instead of graphically. So yeah, it's already here.
I'm looking forward to......robots that freeze, mid-stride, for no apparent reason, and need a (re)boot to the head to get moving again;...robots that get infected by viruses and wander through your house, "deleting" your pets;...the "Blue Stumble Of Death"
"Having taken advantage of their hospitality for the better part of an afternoon, I stand to take my leave, but my hosts insist on driving me back to my hotel. Once there, we say our good-byes and, belatedly, a thought occurs to me -- an afterthought, perhaps. If Craigslist does what its users ask of it, and Craigslist doesn't need or seem to want all the ad revenue it declines to collect, maybe we, as end-users, should ask them to post some banner ads and give us the money instead.
There's something wrong, I suppose, in that reasoning. But I like the idea."
Evidentally that reporter has not heard of all those other companies that tried that business model -- specifically, making an explicit "you view ads, you get compensated" relationship, usually offering a free computer or cold hard cash. Last I heard, most of those -- if not all -- crashed and burned. Anyone know of a successful one?
This seems to be a phrasing problem. It SOUNDS like they're saying "Second Life can only handle three users per server", but what I think they actually MEAN is "Second Life has, on average, 3 users per server during peak usage." In other words, their servers may actually be ABLE to handle 30 users each, or 300 (or 3), but we don't actually know -- all we know is that the server/user ratio right now is about three users per server at peak times.
All of those old machines had one flaw or another, something that came up even when brand new as a result of bad design -- having to lift and drop the LISA on occasion, for instance, or having to reseat the memory cards in Atari 800s every few days to keep 'em running.
Given the premise of your work, I'd want to know what you fixed on each machine that was due to age and neglect, versus what you did (or didn't) fix because it was a side-effect of a known design flaw (such as impact damage to the bottom of the LISA over time, or whatnot.)
I can tell you this: playing WarioWare Twisted! on the DS (which has a single-axis gyro to determine the orientation of the device) is addictive, natural-feeling and surprisingly fun. One nice thing about it is that it detects motion, not position; for instance, straight up is the position you're holding it when the game starts, not necessarily straight according to gravity. This works really, surprisingly well.
I'm speculating, of course, but I have to assume that the controller is going to use a combination of gyroscope (for movement detection) when broad movements are what matter, and laser pointer (for aiming at the screen) when precision is demanded. Whatever the solution, I'm looking forward to it -- and as for their goal of getting non-gamers involved, my wife pinged me today to say "I just read about it, and I want to buy one as soon as it comes out!"
Or maybe it was a completely inapproprate speech that made everyone there uncomfortable...
Hmm. In the past, when celebs (even d-list) make public asses of themselves, the news covers it, because it's entertaining to watch someone fall flat on their face.
So why not cover Colbert's "flop"? Could it be that the media folks recognize that it is they, not Colbert, who looks like they've fallen on their faces?
So if this forces webcasters to use the "most" restrictive DRM available, and someone comes out with an incredibly restrictive DRMd platform, will every webcaster need to migrate to it? And if someone else comes out with a more restrictive one a week after that, will they need to migrate again?
User experience. The way the remote fits and feels in your hand, the location of the buttons, the sounds the unit makes, the layout of the menus and how you interact with them -- TiVo is "better" in the same way that some phones are "better" than others, or some shoes are "better" than others; it's not necessarily about the feature set, but about the quality of your interaction with the device, and thus harder to quantify.
>Or to put it another way, the smart, thought and talented (and psychologically healthy) people don't need to do all the other >BS. They 1) have enough respect for themselves that they don't have to do it, and 2) have enough respect for themselved that >they keep themselves cleaned up.
Hmm. I have a beard, because my wife really really likes it. I have attractive clean clothes, but they're casual, because I feel (and work alongside people who feel) that being comfortable (and clean) is more important than being "dressed up".
Of course, if I were going out to client sites again (previous job), I'd either lose the beard or trim it (depending on the audience), and you're darn tootin' I'd wear a suit.
Here are some handy things to phrase more politely than I'm phrasing them here:
"I can't tell you when it will be finished until we know exactly what we're building. Help us nail down the specifications, and I'll be able to give you a finish date with the current staff and workload."
"There is a finite amount of manpower available to do this work, and the schedule I gave you is firm, unless we either add people -- and that won't be a one-to-one improvement, it will depend on how much work can be run in parallel -- or reduce scope. Help us do that, and I'll be able to get you a new completion date."
"I know you want these changes in the initial launch, and I want to give you these changes in the initial launch. However, there will be some impact to how long it will take, because a lot of work we've already completed will need to be redone. Help us nail down the new specifications, and I'll be able to give you a finish date with the current staff and workload."
Slashdot Mirror
I work for a large Internet company that you've heard of, and (like most people in my profession) I've been spending a lot of time over the last several months coding -- and recoding, and recoding, and recoding -- to make sure my code works with IE7, without breaking all the IE6 and IE5.5 hacks that we've had to use over the years (and that IE7 no longer requires -- although rest assured, it needs its own hacks.)
So, when I saw this Slashdot post about the release, my immediate reaction was "well, I guess I get to find out if I pulled it off."
Then I read these comments, and saw the post about Flash 9 for Linux, and I got really, really excited. I feel much better now.
Cat's game snarks aside, this is genuine progress. Typically, a computer game version of tic tac toe plays by comparing the current board configuration against a collection of possible conditions, and determines the move that way -- or by scanning the board for possible win-in-one-move conditions and blocking them. In the first game, an unbeatable (it always wins or ties) game results (provided the collection of possible conditions/moves is accurate), and in the second case it's possible to win by creating a win-in-one-move condition that simultaneously creates two win-in-one-move conditions.
This DNA computer, on the other hand, successfully blocks all win-in-one-move conditions without using any kind of lookup table; in other words, it "figures it out" by itself. Is this conscious logic? Not necessarily, but it is indeed logic being applied.
I have twins, a boy and a girl, age 1 year and 2 months (or so). We made a conscious decision to raise them without television, at least before the age of two.
To date, their TV watching has consisted of the following:
- About half an hour total of little bits of a Richard Scary videotape someone gave us, with songs that we sung along with (we're a music-focused family);
- About ten minutes of teletubbies as an experiment (that helped us discover that our child care provider had occasionally shown them teletubbies, something we suspected when our daughter became obsessed with a teletubbies book all of a sudden);
- The aforementioned teletubbies viewing, which makes up about half an hour a day total (we're looking into another child care provider now that we know about it.)
So yeah, it's possible to do it, but it isn't easy when you use daycare providers (luckily we had a nanny for the first year, so this half an hour a day of TV is a short-term thing.)
Call me when I can play Guitar Hero II on the Wii, with a guitar control that has a place to attach the controller, so that as I swing the guitar (and my body) around, my on-screen avatar dances along with me, and if I strum with a particularly excessive body movement, I get added points.
My parents have been married -- and still are -- since the 60s. My father's been working in IT since the 70s. I've been working in IT since the mid 90s, and my marriage is strong/kids are happy.
Er, I don't have a point here, except to say that working in IT is not a guarantee of marital strife.
Take one hundred people with computers, and who have an interest in Folding@Home. Offer them a CPU-driven version of the app, and 100 computers will be running the CPU-driven app, regardless of the age/performance of the machine.
Now, offer them a GPU-driven alternative. For the most part, the only people that will install and run it are those with a fancy-schmancy video card capable of running it, and for the most part, the only people that have a fancy-schmancy video card capable of running it have high-performance computers as well (or at least more recent computers that came with compatible cards.)
So let's say that's ten out of the hundred, and those ten are statistically likely to have had the highest-performing CPUs as well; so you've pulled the top ten performers out of the CPU-client pool, and thrown them in the GPU-client pool. Even if you didn't switch those ten people over to the GPU, you could probably isolate those computers' CPU-client performance numbers from the other 90 and find that they're disproportionally faster than a larger number of the slower computers.
There's still more to the story, of course, but you really are taking the highest-performing computers out of the CPU pool and into the GPU pool. The exception would be high-performance servers with lousy/no graphic cards, but those are likely working so hard to perform their normal business that Folding@Home isn't a priority.
The bank has motivation and resources to implement a solution, whereas individual customers do not. This is because banks control the technologies that phishers emulate in order to con their targets.
For example, the company I work for is concerned about phishers stealing user accounts, by emailing links to pages that look like our corporate signin page (used for many properties in many locations, so commonly encountered on various sites by our employees.) As individual users, it was extremely difficult to tell whether the page being logged into was legitimate or not; so, the company now uses a cookie to identify you as an employee, and embed your picture (from the company's internal records) into the login page. If there's no picture of you, it's not legitimate.
Is that foolproof? No, because other employees could get your photo and fake the login page. It certainly narrows it down to internal employees and contractors, however, and it's a step that individual employees could never have taken on their own.
Similarly, imagine if ATM cards didn't have PINs, and possession of the card was enough to withdraw money from remote locations. Individual users couldn't do much about this, other than hold onto their card for dear life, but the banks could easily implement PIN codes so that theft of the card did not automatically enable theft of account monies.
Again, is that foolproof? No, because some people write their PINs on their cards (duh) and some people manage to set up "fake" ATMs to collect card swipes and PINs. However, banks now use the unique identifier on the card to access the customer's name and display it before the PIN is punched -- no name means you probably shouldn't use the machine. Again, another step (still not foolproof) that individual users couldn't enact on their own.
If a bank makes a service available, they are the ones in good position to improve the security of that service, and at some point the bank actually hands over the money based on their own assurance that the person using the service is who they say they are, using whatever method the bank provides. All of this is up to the bank, not the user, and so they should carry the liability -- if not, they can always opt to avoid providing those services that they cannot successfully protect.
Does this absolve the users of all responsibility? No, but there are still lots of stupid things users can do -- and shouldn't -- that cause them to lose money that the bank doesn't -- and shouldn't -- have to reimburse.
I guess you can think of it like this: if a bank's machine gives out money to the wrong person, it's the bank's fault -- and if the bank's machine gives out money to the right person, who is then mugged within half a second of the transaction, it's the user's fault.
I'll say yes.
1. Right now in my neighborhood, there are six wireless routers that I can reach from my living room, none of which I own or operate. They have SSIDs of "linksys" or "default", and of the six, only four are running WEP. All six of those routers are running on channel 6. So why is this bad?
1a. If I were feeling nosy, I could connect to two of my neighbor's routers and watch all of their web browsing, instant messaging, email, and so on (except where https is being used, which is likely rare). Since radio signals are directional, I could easily figure out which router belongs to which house, and so now I've got a lot of information about that person, and I know where they live. The possibilities of abuse are endless.
1b. Insecurity is part of it, but ignorance is another part, and all six of those people have poor wireless performance because they're all running on a different channel. I'll admit this: I logged into the admin console of one and switched it to channel 4, just to see if it made a difference. It did; the wireless signal almost doubled from where I was sitting.
2. It's one thing to share an internet connection with your neighbors, or with anyone who wanders by; however, you should be doing to voluntarily and with an awareness of the risks, not because you're ignorance of the circumstances. I share my internet connection with my neighbor via a WPA-PSK bridge, and in such a way that nobody can see what's going on. Equally important: my neighbor can't see what I'm doing, because he's on a completely different subnet with firewalls between; I can be a Nice Guy(tm) without having to trust anyone blindly. I can do the same thing with everyone who wanders by if I keep my wireless separate from my home network (as above) and don't use encryption on the access point, so they take the risk and I'm still being a Nice Guy(tm) almost risk-free.
2a. However, it's not entirely risk-free, because a person wandering by (or, let's face it, my neighbor) might do illegal things through my internet connection, and one day my computers might be seized because of it. So yeah, it's risky all right.
Oddly enough, I wasn't being funny, and agree with you completely, for exactly the reasons you state. :)
Call me when they put a huge, inflatable arena in space, and start holding athletic events there. Somewhere between Ender's Game and Jocks In Space there's got to be a sweet spot of entertainment...
Quick note: in theory that might be true, but then in theory if this happened on a regular basis, everyone would concentrate EVEN MORE on getting elected, and do EVEN LESS for the people once they got in, because they'd know that re-election was unlikely if not impossible -- even if they did a good job.
The ability to be re-elected is supposed to be a check on such behavior; it is supposed to incentivize good performance by offering an extension. Unfortunately, when the majority doesn't care enough about what's being done in office to know a person's track record, that incentive isn't worth much.
Well, the answer is "you cannot make a profit by producing a good at great expense, if one individual sale of that good can result in an infinite number of copies made and distributed at no cost." That's it; without DRM, you can't make a profit, if distribution of that type of good is your *only* business.
:)
However, the most commonly considered scenario is that of music distribution, and music distribution only exists as a profitable business because the alternative (going out to a venue to see music) was more expensive (in time, money, effort and inconvenience) than buying a copy to play at home. In theory, someone might have asked, "how can you make a profit by producing live shows and charging for tickets, when people can buy and share performance recordings for less?" and the answer would be "you can't." Yet somehow, live shows still managed to make money, and that's because performance recordings don't give you the full "live" experience. That can't be replicated at little or no cost, and so it remains a profitable business. Also, the distribution of those recordings (directly to the consumer and via radio) gives consumers confidence in the product they'll be getting at a "live" performance, so they'll pay more for it.
Movies are the same way; the VCR was supposed to close movie houses, and it certainly made then LESS profitable, but it remains a profitable business because seeing a movie theater is a different experience than watching a video tape, and for many people a more valuable experience (such that the additional cost in time, money, effort and inconvenience is worth it.)
So what happens when you remove the profitability from recorded performances, either movies or music? The sale of recorded performances becomes unprofitable, but live/theatrical performance remains profitable. The end result should be that musicians stop making recordings of their music, and focus all of their efforts on live performance, while moviemakers stop allowing their movies to be released on DVD.
That's not what has happened so far, however. Remember the music example, where the live performance business was profitable both despite and because of the distribution of recordings? Well, if you get rid of the profitable recordings AND the free recordings (by not making records at all), nobody knows about you and nobody will come to see your shows -- and the live performance business goes down the drain. That's what it was like to be a musician back before performances could be recorded; only a small number of musicians were profitable (large symphonies and whatnot), and being a musician was a generally disreputable business to be in. Performance recordings brought profit, and profit brought legitimacy.
So now you have musicians that can't make money through recorded performances, but still want to make money through live performances. So they continue to record, and accept the cost of recording as a marketing expense rather than a direct source of revenue. Without recordings at all, nobody comes to your live shows; sell your recordings, and you'll make some money from recordings and some from shows; give away your recordings (which is what you do these days if you distribute just one CD) and you'll make no money from the recordings, but you'll still make money from the live shows.
Will you make as much money at the live shows as you did with the recordings plus the live shows combined? Probably not, but remember: generally, the record companies make the recording money, and the musicians make most of their money from live performances. Take away the recording profit, and you might hurt the record companies, but the musicians can go right on being profitable.
This isn't a complete answer by any means, but it's all I have time for.
Far better (in my mind) than one laptop per child is simply "one computer per classroom" for third world countries, and make sure that computer has a huge monitor, backup power, and an internet connection of reasonable bandwidth.
I say this because having access to current information -- especially when presented in contextually-rich ways, such as google earth et al -- is a tremendous teaching tool that a good instructor can use to teach more effectively. On the other hand, putting individual machines in the hands of children may have benefits, but I'm having a hard time thinking of what they might be.
As for money-where-my-mouth-is, I have two infants, and I have no intention whatsoever of giving them their own computers. A firehose of information without guidance is of little use. However, there will be a computer in the common area, hooked up to a big monitor, for us to use as a family. We can monitor their surfing, provide context when they need it, and make computer use a social activity instead of a solitary one.
The racing game Forza (on XBox) has something like this now, albeit nonverbally. You can turn on a trainer that places arrows on the track to indicate the line you should be driving, which is not a big deal; however, that line is dynamically updated as you drive to give you information that's pertinent to your current performance and situation.
Let's say you drive into a turn too quickly. What were once green arrows (to say "keep going, no need to slow down") suddenly turn yellow, then red, as you pass the point at which you should have hit the brakes. Once you've slowed down enough to recover, the arrows go back to green (or yellow). This simple mechanism is surprisingly useful.
It's not a big leap to take that data and present it in faux-human form (a voice saying "You're driving into the turns too fast!" and a worried face on your robo-instructor) instead of graphically. So yeah, it's already here.
I'm looking forward to... ...robots that freeze, mid-stride, for no apparent reason, and need a (re)boot to the head to get moving again; ...robots that get infected by viruses and wander through your house, "deleting" your pets; ...the "Blue Stumble Of Death"
From TFA:
"Having taken advantage of their hospitality for the better part of an afternoon, I stand to take my leave, but my hosts insist on driving me back to my hotel. Once there, we say our good-byes and, belatedly, a thought occurs to me -- an afterthought, perhaps. If Craigslist does what its users ask of it, and Craigslist doesn't need or seem to want all the ad revenue it declines to collect, maybe we, as end-users, should ask them to post some banner ads and give us the money instead.
There's something wrong, I suppose, in that reasoning. But I like the idea."
Evidentally that reporter has not heard of all those other companies that tried that business model -- specifically, making an explicit "you view ads, you get compensated" relationship, usually offering a free computer or cold hard cash. Last I heard, most of those -- if not all -- crashed and burned. Anyone know of a successful one?
This seems to be a phrasing problem. It SOUNDS like they're saying "Second Life can only handle three users per server", but what I think they actually MEAN is "Second Life has, on average, 3 users per server during peak usage." In other words, their servers may actually be ABLE to handle 30 users each, or 300 (or 3), but we don't actually know -- all we know is that the server/user ratio right now is about three users per server at peak times.
That's it! Let's all start sending mail to each other's outboxes! Perfect!
All of those old machines had one flaw or another, something that came up even when brand new as a result of bad design -- having to lift and drop the LISA on occasion, for instance, or having to reseat the memory cards in Atari 800s every few days to keep 'em running.
Given the premise of your work, I'd want to know what you fixed on each machine that was due to age and neglect, versus what you did (or didn't) fix because it was a side-effect of a known design flaw (such as impact damage to the bottom of the LISA over time, or whatnot.)
I can tell you this: playing WarioWare Twisted! on the DS (which has a single-axis gyro to determine the orientation of the device) is addictive, natural-feeling and surprisingly fun. One nice thing about it is that it detects motion, not position; for instance, straight up is the position you're holding it when the game starts, not necessarily straight according to gravity. This works really, surprisingly well.
I'm speculating, of course, but I have to assume that the controller is going to use a combination of gyroscope (for movement detection) when broad movements are what matter, and laser pointer (for aiming at the screen) when precision is demanded. Whatever the solution, I'm looking forward to it -- and as for their goal of getting non-gamers involved, my wife pinged me today to say "I just read about it, and I want to buy one as soon as it comes out!"
Or maybe it was a completely inapproprate speech that made everyone there uncomfortable...
Hmm. In the past, when celebs (even d-list) make public asses of themselves, the news covers it, because it's entertaining to watch someone fall flat on their face.
So why not cover Colbert's "flop"? Could it be that the media folks recognize that it is they, not Colbert, who looks like they've fallen on their faces?
So if this forces webcasters to use the "most" restrictive DRM available, and someone comes out with an incredibly restrictive DRMd platform, will every webcaster need to migrate to it? And if someone else comes out with a more restrictive one a week after that, will they need to migrate again?
User experience. The way the remote fits and feels in your hand, the location of the buttons, the sounds the unit makes, the layout of the menus and how you interact with them -- TiVo is "better" in the same way that some phones are "better" than others, or some shoes are "better" than others; it's not necessarily about the feature set, but about the quality of your interaction with the device, and thus harder to quantify.
>Or to put it another way, the smart, thought and talented (and psychologically healthy) people don't need to do all the other >BS. They 1) have enough respect for themselves that they don't have to do it, and 2) have enough respect for themselved that >they keep themselves cleaned up.
Hmm. I have a beard, because my wife really really likes it. I have attractive clean clothes, but they're casual, because I feel (and work alongside people who feel) that being comfortable (and clean) is more important than being "dressed up".
Of course, if I were going out to client sites again (previous job), I'd either lose the beard or trim it (depending on the audience), and you're darn tootin' I'd wear a suit.
Here are some handy things to phrase more politely than I'm phrasing them here:
"I can't tell you when it will be finished until we know exactly what we're building. Help us nail down the specifications, and I'll be able to give you a finish date with the current staff and workload."
"There is a finite amount of manpower available to do this work, and the schedule I gave you is firm, unless we either add people -- and that won't be a one-to-one improvement, it will depend on how much work can be run in parallel -- or reduce scope. Help us do that, and I'll be able to get you a new completion date."
"I know you want these changes in the initial launch, and I want to give you these changes in the initial launch. However, there will be some impact to how long it will take, because a lot of work we've already completed will need to be redone. Help us nail down the new specifications, and I'll be able to give you a finish date with the current staff and workload."
Repeat ad nauseum until the project is finished.