People say that picture is before the event, but the roads seem like they have been driven on an awful lot at this point, and not just the roads, but the various side paths too. I know they water down the roads before people arrive but there is limited desire to actually drive them. They don't go anywhere yet. So why is this reported as a before picture?
Strangely, Windows is outdoing linux on a fairly important point, though it does a lot of work to attain this. As one of the commenters noted, few people run Debian stable. To really use debian you need unstable now, and that's true to a lesser degree for a number of other distros.
Because free software is free as in beer, packagers assume there is no big burden in making their packages depend on the latest versions of dependencies they have around at the time they build. They don't do the hard task of testing and building packages with older dependencies even though they would run fine on them.
On the other hand, developers for the W operating system tend to try to make their package run on as many versions of it as they can, and they test it on as many versions as you can. What that means is that a very large amount of the time, you can install the latest version of some software package on Win98, often even Win95, and almost always the 5 year old Windows 2000.
Try to have a 5 year old version (with security updates of course) of just about any linux distro and try to install the latest version of some hot new package you want. It will rarely work. It may not even be available in your package manager, and if it is, it will want to upgrade vast numbers of packages in your system that you don't actually truly need to upgrade.
And like it or not, even though upgrading is good, upgrades are scary. They are scary for ordinary non-guru users and they are scary even for guru users who are trying to run production systems they depend on. Upgrading should happen regularly, but it should happen on the user's schedule, not at random because I want to run some new software.
Ideally upgrading should not be so scary, but it is. Things break. More than once I have had a major upgrading result in a day of downtime, and I think I know what I'm doing.
It is not satisfactory to tell your senior citizen mother to run unstable and upgrade regularly. It's not going to happen.
It's a bad deal in that I would rather find a way not to give away an hour of my time for $1.20, and so would many people when it's expressed that way. And indeed, many people buy HBO or watch their TV on DVD, and millions are now watching their TV on DVRs and not watching the commercials, which scares the advertising industry.
If they can stop you from commercial skipping, they will, but they may not be able to. They may move to other forms, including the ones I suggested, and intersitials and product placements. I would much rather just be given the option to pay double what they make off me now, ie. about 50 cents for an "hour" long show.
And forms of this will come, probably by download. Those who like the "free" TV deal can continue with it for a while. TV via netflix and TV-DVDs is becoming popular too, though only some shows are available that way and the rest are delayed, sometimes for years.
We will also see more targetted ads (The path google took to riches) which we will tolerate far more.
My main point is the old model -- generic advertising, the network reselling an nour of my time for $1.20 -- will die because it's not very attractive once alternatives appear.
Indeed TV is non-rivalrous, like many other electronic media. They charge their advertisers what the market will bear, and as long as that's enough to make a nice profit, they will make the shows.
But it remains true that if they have a show with 10 million viewers, they get about 25 cents each for the first airing at a $10 CPM and 12.5 minutes of advertising (plus more of course for reruns and DVDs) This is what they are selling the show for, and in a competitive market without obscene profits, the price per viewer is what it's "worth", not the cost of production. In an alternate, pay-tv market, which free tv competes with, the viewers would pay directly, a bit more because it's not so efficient to collect, but not too far off the mark.
My point remains true. You get a product you might pay $1.20 for (wholesale) in return for watching an hour of advertising. (Strictly, for being exposed to it, you probably miss a good chunk of these going to the bathroom etc.) It's a lousy deal.
One of the reasons for the failure path of advertising is that free, advertising-supported TV is a terrible deal for the viewer.
Common CPM for TV ads is $10, meaning one cent per viewer. The network gets a penny to show you a 30 second ad. If you watch 5 hours of TV, you will see an hour of those ads, and they get $1.20.
In other words, you get $1.20 worth of programming for watching an hour of advertising. $1.20 per hour is an illegal wage by a long margin in most places these days, and a terrible deal. It's no wonder we want to reject it.
The other big mistake the TV industry has made was in thinking the grail was full video on demand. Tivo and Netflix have shown that delayed-gratification video is more than satisfactory, and a lot cheaper to produce.
There is a reason vigilante systems got a bad name
on
Should You Trust MAPS?
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· Score: 2, Insightful
It's hard to figure out the right way to do justice. But the reason that "vigilante" is a bad word is not because ad-hoc or public systems of justice can't do things right. It's because we've learned, the very hard way, that all systems of justice need accountability and checks and balances built into them. Built into them _hard_, from the very start, and impossible to remove. And even then, people find ways to remove them.
The vigilance committees start with the best of intentions. And often they do good, and help the problem. But history knows it doesn't always go that way, and when there are no checks and balances, you pay the price.
Of course, it's not impossible to set up a private justice system that has the right safeguards. But the safeguards are expensive. They deliberately... deliberately are designed to let many guilty people go unpunished. This frustrates people (especially in the spam wars, amazingly.) So people rarely stick to the safeguards.
This is why many people were worried about blacklists like these from the very start, even when they had nothing but the best laid plans.
Millions per commercial break? The superbowl perhaps, but almost nothing else. TV ads tend to cost about 1 cent per viewer. If you have a well high rated show, with 10 million viewers, you would get about $100,000 for your commercial break. With 3M viewers like Enterprise, just $30,000. Which is why it's cancelled.
You get more than the first-run money of course, you get reruns and DVD sales etc.
At California's obscene rates (I thought it was only.13, I guess I haven't looked in a while) that's $600. But perhaps you have never had a mortgage (you're putting this on a rental house?) because you can't pay off $8000 in 13 years with $600 per year. Even at today's historically low 6% interest rates, it costs $400/year just to carry an $8000 investment, and at $600 per year, you pay off $8000 in about 28 years, not 13.
I point this out so bluntly because I have seen this sort of bad math from companies in the solar industry and I think it is tantamount to fraud when they sell it this way. You fell for their line.
And note that if energy prices go down, say to the national average of 8.3 cents/kwh, you can NEVER pay off the panels. Likewise if interest rates go up. And that's with a fat rebate.
I mean any long-range plane can fly "around the world" at 89 degrees latitude, if it can get there. And these guys are not flying a great circle. So clearly there is some magic latitude that counts as going around the world, and some other that doesn't.
So how do you possibly decide what it is? Is 45 degrees enough? Above a certain latitude, weather and national politics might create an issue of course. They are getting down to 15 degrees in Hawai`i so it looks "real" but how do you quantify it?
How can you pay that off in 10 years? Typical average is 4 watt-hours per day per watt, call it 1.5 kwh per year.
$500 for a panel, if you pay nothing for install, inverters, batteries or intertie, and the panel generates 250 kwh/year. At 10 cents/kwh, thats just $25 in electricity saved -- your rates may vary.
The problem is, you could have put the $500 into any sort of reasonable investment and made more than $25. So these panels will never, ever pay for themselves, the return is negative each year. And again, that's without paying for install, inverters, batteries or intertie.
The old generation at the price you paid never pays for itself, it's only useful for going off-grid or feeling good about yourself. Perhaps in Arizona or some areas of California you can get it to pay for itself by combining really high insolation (the 4 watt-hour figure is the California average though for non-motorized panels) and the California rebate, but it's debatable.
You are misreading that document, which is also just one of several proposals.
While we don't know exactly what method would be used to measure what songs were the most popular, there are several that have been proposed, including traditional sampling. The statement you misread was probably the one about measuring what people are sharing on filesharing networks. On must such networks, you publicly advertise what you are sharing. (That's how the RIAA is finding the people to sue today without breaking any privacy laws.)
I think if you think we would advocate secret surveillance of private data, you don't know the EFF very well.
But I do know a lot of people who feel the same way and are interested in perhaps making a company to build this stuff, even some funders. I don't have time to do a lot myself. But someday, somebody will build this and it will take over.
Then Monster can sell gold plated twisted pair for your walls to run ethernet over them.
The 3-D item just seems like even more of a pain than the existing captchas, which are way overused as it is, and a burden on the vision impaired.
But the anti-spam system isn't very novel. A number of systems have tried custom subtags to generate unique addresses for other folks to use, they tend to cause more problems than they solve. This is really just a challenge/response system which is harder to use, and worst of all, forces the sender to cut and paste their mail to send it again. No thanks, you probably just don't get my mail.
There are many combinations, which is why the linux distro would scan the machine before it was accepted into the project and say "No, we can't take your comptuer" or perhaps "We can't take this computer but could if it had one of the following ethernet cards" and such. If it was missing 2 needed cards it might be rejected as not practical.
But in fact there are drivers for so many cards today that a good chunk of the computers would work. Linux hardware detection is getting pretty good. At least on the plug and play generation of ATX motherboard machines.
I'm not talking 333mhz old pentiums here, but the 600mhz to 1.6hgz class, the past 2 generations, effectively.
Plus there is tons of the old ram for those computers around as we all switched to mobos that need ddram.
Such machines could make excellent web browsing and email stations. That's a big thing, because it is giving a large chunk of the library of the world to the children in these villages. Those kids will probably learn how to use linux and maintain anything odd abuot the computers anyway, they could probably take the non-compatible computers and make them work over time.
I see a project like this as a way to connect the children.
But would it not be even better to work a way to use our vast supply of old computers, many of which are being thrown out and face a recycling problem?
Take all the best linux hardware detection and auto-configuration software from the various distros -- kudzu and the like -- and make an installer that takes an old PC, and first tells you if the hardware in it can run linux decently, and if so, automatically installs it, otherwise redirects the PC to be recycled or sold for low power windows.
People would happily donate these PCs, possibly even running the linuxizing CD themselves, since perhaps they don't qualify for the donation tax deduction of the PC doesn't pass the test on the CD.
Yes, these machines might not be as fast as the bottom end AMD chip (Sempron 2000?) that will go into them, but not only are they semi-free, they solve a recycling problem at the same time.
Currently, on a typical 1 hour TV show, they show perhaps 30 1/2 minute commercials. They charge the advertiser about a penny (this varies) for each viewer ($10 CPM). Which means they gather about 30 cents for each viewer. I don't know the exact figures but I bet only about half of this makes it to the studio that actually produces the show.
Of course this is wholesale, so it's not far off from charging a dollar because that dollar comes with all the cost of selling shows 1 viewer at a time instead of giving free to millions of viewers at a time and selling a score of advertisers.
There's little need for the 50 cent one with ads. 15 minutes of my time for 50 cents? That's well below minimum wage -- no thanks.
If they could generate the economies of scale they currently have it could be perhaps 20 cents/viewer/show with no ads. However, they would raise it as there is no way to account if a whole family is watching or just one person. (With ad sales, they do account for this through stats.)
For 3 years, I've held a superbowl commercials party, where we gather, go for a hike, and 2 hours into game-time watch the show on a hard disk video recorder. We play the football super-fast (you can still follow it, it's pretty exciting) and slow down to watch the commercials, the inverse of the rest of the year.
This year it will be in HDTV thanks to MythTV. More popular than anybody's football watching superbowl party I know.
I certainly was planning to be open about how I got products if I talked about them. I suspect most of the other folks are too. I jotted a brief note in my blog about it like some of the others.
It's really not some sort of elitist club, not even a club, nor much that new.
I do agree that by giving stuff to folks who write or are influentical, they do increase the chances that they will get written about. I presume that's their goal. There are certainly no requirements that we speak fondly of the products, but the historical tradition is people are far more likely to evangelize a new product they've seen than they are to curse something new nobody knows about, so on the balance it's been a win for vendors to do giveaways like this.
I know in the old days of magazines it was worse. Most software reviews were good for the same reason. If an obscure product came along and was bad, they just didn't write about it. If it was good, they might write. If it was famous or the company pulled enough strings (ie. bought lots of advertising) that got them a review, even at places with decent editorial firewalls, though it didn't assure a good one. If you saw a scathing review, it usually meant the company was so famous they had to review the product, or the company had pushed super hard to get one, good or no.
Truth is though, I, nor most of the people on the list aren't bought so easily. If you hear about something from somebody, you should judge how much you trust them in general, not whether they got the thing free.
If you think about it, what logic in there is giving a false good review for a bribe, if the bribe is a free version of the product you don't like very much?
I'm glad so many people are pointing out this giant flaw which makes sysadmin so hard.
I've been working on a solution, and for now will point to my original essay on whofig even though I have been in the progress of building a much more expanded set of essays.
Roughly, the realization I've come to is we should try to organize our OS not simpy around "what" the files are for but moreso around "who" is reponsible for them.
In your role as sysadmin, you would have one file tree that belongs to you, which encapsulates all your customizations of the system. The only time you ever touch other file trees is to install them (such as the file tree of a software package, which is itself changed only by the owner/developers of that package.)
Package owners, OS distribution packagers, sysadmins (at many levels -- system, network, company, imported) and users all make their changes in their own area, the rest is all read-only. (And can, other than for install, be physically read only.)
Thus to backup your customizations is trivial, and to move them to other roughly compatible systems is trivial, and upgrade is, well, perhaps not trivial but a lot easier. In theory it's just replace the trees of the OS distribution and the various packages.
Such a system needs a OS wide database which merges all customizations from all sources into one source that programs can use to read their own configuration and data, and a few other things, but in spite of the effort needed it's a way to go.
gobolinux is a good start, but it still has a program install in its file tree and then I go and modify its configuration, instead of building additional/modifying information in my own area. Down with/etc/foo.conf
I tried the SMTP server, since it would be very handy to have a free SMTP relay out there that uses userid/password for SMTP AUTH. Saves the trouble of the complex setup required in many mail agents to get this going at home.
It works, but it rewrites your From: line to be user@gmail.com, which is OK if you are using gmail as your home base, but not OK if it is just one of your mailboxes. However, it's their server so they are free to put this limitation on it, I guess.
Wireless PC speakers sounds fun (they still need power) but what we really want is a generalized IP based speaker architecture for the whole house, so all speakers can be sent a digital stream from any audio source. The current wired PC speakers woudl actually be the easiest ones to first bring into this system.
I'm sure Ray knows this, and in fact I'm sure he knows about several of the other causes of aging you didn't mention, which scientists who study the field rank as between 6 and 10 major classes. If it were only the 3 classes you cite, I would be very optimistic, but in fact the indicates that it is perhaps around 8 classes still makes many people optimistic, it seens a very tractable problem.
Just look at your 3 problems. #1 is one you might try to solve, but in fact you don't have to do so if you can solve the others, because you replace dead cells with new ones, as the body does for quite a bit of its life.
#2 You have telomerase backwards. Telomerase resets the telomere to its full length again (about 50 duplications) and is used in certain immune cells and to make gametes. Progeria results from short telomeres. Alerady there is much promising research on lengthening telomeres.
#3 Seems ripe for modern genomic technology to do what biology could not do. Reading DNA and correcting errors in ways only modern tech can figure out. For example, just take a small numbers of cells with copies of your DNA, and even though they all might be highly damaged, unless they are all damaged in the same place, you can get your complete original genome, if you want it.
There are more, but your 3 would make me feel good if that's all there were.
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People say that picture is before the event, but the roads seem like they have been driven on an awful lot at this point, and not just the roads, but the various side paths too. I know they water down the roads before people arrive but there is limited desire to actually drive them. They don't go anywhere yet. So why is this reported as a before picture?
Strangely, Windows is outdoing linux on a fairly important point, though it does a lot of work to attain this. As one of the commenters noted, few people run Debian stable. To really use debian you need unstable now, and that's true to a lesser degree for a number of other distros.
Because free software is free as in beer, packagers assume there is no big burden in making their packages depend on the latest versions of dependencies they have around at the time they build. They don't do the hard task of testing and building packages with older dependencies even though they would run fine on them.
On the other hand, developers for the W operating system tend to try to make their package run on as many versions of it as they can, and they test it on as many versions as you can. What that means is that a very large amount of the time, you can install the latest version of some software package on Win98, often even Win95, and almost always the 5 year old Windows 2000.
Try to have a 5 year old version (with security updates of course) of just about any linux distro and try to install the latest version of some hot new package you want. It will rarely work. It may not even be available in your package manager, and if it is, it will want to upgrade vast numbers of packages in your system that you don't actually truly need to upgrade.
And like it or not, even though upgrading is good, upgrades are scary. They are scary for ordinary non-guru users and they are scary even for guru users who are trying to run production systems they depend on. Upgrading should happen regularly, but it should happen on the user's schedule, not at random because I want to run some new software.
Ideally upgrading should not be so scary, but it is. Things break. More than once I have had a major upgrading result in a day of downtime, and I think I know what I'm doing.
It is not satisfactory to tell your senior citizen mother to run unstable and upgrade regularly. It's not going to happen.
It's a bad deal in that I would rather find a way not to give away an hour of my time for $1.20, and so would many people when it's expressed that way. And indeed, many people buy HBO or watch their TV on DVD, and millions are now watching their TV on DVRs and not watching the commercials, which scares the advertising industry.
If they can stop you from commercial skipping, they will, but they may not be able to. They may move to other forms, including the ones I suggested, and intersitials and product placements. I would much rather just be given the option to pay double what they make off me now, ie. about 50 cents for an "hour" long show.
And forms of this will come, probably by download. Those who like the "free" TV deal can continue with it for a while. TV via netflix and TV-DVDs is becoming popular too, though only some shows are available that way and the rest are delayed, sometimes for years.
We will also see more targetted ads (The path google took to riches) which we will tolerate far more.
My main point is the old model -- generic advertising, the network reselling an nour of my time for $1.20 -- will die because it's not very attractive once alternatives appear.
Indeed TV is non-rivalrous, like many other electronic media. They charge their advertisers what the market will bear, and as long as that's enough to make a nice profit, they will make the shows.
But it remains true that if they have a show with 10 million viewers, they get about 25 cents each for the first airing at a $10 CPM and 12.5 minutes of advertising (plus more of course for reruns and DVDs) This is what they are selling the show for, and in a competitive market without obscene profits, the price per viewer is what it's "worth", not the cost of production. In an alternate, pay-tv market, which free tv competes with, the viewers would pay directly, a bit more because it's not so efficient to collect, but not too far off the mark.
My point remains true. You get a product you might pay $1.20 for (wholesale) in return for watching an hour of advertising. (Strictly, for being exposed to it, you probably miss a good chunk of these going to the bathroom etc.) It's a lousy deal.
One of the reasons for the failure path of advertising is that free, advertising-supported TV is a terrible deal for the viewer.
Common CPM for TV ads is $10, meaning one cent per viewer. The network gets a penny to show you a 30 second ad. If you watch 5 hours of TV, you will see an hour of those ads, and they get $1.20.
In other words, you get $1.20 worth of programming for watching an hour of advertising. $1.20 per hour is an illegal wage by a long margin in most places these days, and a terrible deal. It's no wonder we want to reject it.
The other big mistake the TV industry has made was in thinking the grail was full video on demand. Tivo and Netflix have shown that delayed-gratification video is more than satisfactory, and a lot cheaper to produce.
Some of these ideas are explored in my essay on the future of TV advertising and Poor Man's Video on Demand, which you may want to read.
It's hard to figure out the right way to do justice. But the reason that "vigilante" is a bad word is not because ad-hoc or public systems of justice can't do things right. It's because we've learned, the very hard way, that all systems of justice need accountability and checks and balances built into them. Built into them _hard_, from the very start, and impossible to remove. And even then, people find ways to remove them.
The vigilance committees start with the best of intentions. And often they do good, and help the problem. But history knows it doesn't always go that way, and when there are no checks and balances, you pay the price.
Of course, it's not impossible to set up a private justice system that has the right safeguards. But the safeguards are expensive. They deliberately... deliberately are designed to let many guilty people go unpunished. This frustrates people (especially in the spam wars, amazingly.) So people rarely stick to the safeguards.
This is why many people were worried about blacklists like these from the very start, even when they had nothing but the best laid plans.
Millions per commercial break? The superbowl perhaps, but almost nothing else. TV ads tend to cost about 1 cent per viewer. If you have a well high rated show, with 10 million viewers, you would get about $100,000 for your commercial break. With 3M viewers like Enterprise, just $30,000. Which is why it's cancelled.
You get more than the first-run money of course, you get reruns and DVD sales etc.
Whoops, error there, I meant $480 to carry $8000 at 6% of course (APR).
At California's obscene rates (I thought it was only .13, I guess I haven't looked in a while) that's $600. But perhaps you have never had a mortgage (you're putting this on a rental house?) because you can't pay off $8000 in 13 years with $600 per year. Even at today's historically low 6% interest rates, it costs $400/year just to carry an $8000 investment, and at $600 per year, you pay off $8000 in about 28 years, not 13.
I point this out so bluntly because I have seen this sort of bad math from companies in the solar industry and I think it is tantamount to fraud when they sell it this way. You fell for their line.
And note that if energy prices go down, say to the national average of 8.3 cents/kwh, you can NEVER pay off the panels. Likewise if interest rates go up. And that's with a fat rebate.
I mean any long-range plane can fly "around the world" at 89 degrees latitude, if it can get there. And these guys are not flying a great circle. So clearly there is some magic latitude that counts as going around the world, and some other that doesn't.
So how do you possibly decide what it is? Is 45 degrees enough? Above a certain latitude, weather and national politics might create an issue of course. They are getting down to 15 degrees in Hawai`i so it looks "real" but how do you quantify it?
How can you pay that off in 10 years? Typical average is 4 watt-hours per day per watt, call it 1.5 kwh per year.
$500 for a panel, if you pay nothing for install, inverters, batteries or intertie, and the panel generates 250 kwh/year.
At 10 cents/kwh, thats just $25 in electricity saved -- your rates may vary.
The problem is, you could have put the $500 into any sort of reasonable investment and made more than $25. So these panels will never, ever pay for themselves, the return is negative each year. And again, that's without paying for install, inverters, batteries or intertie.
The old generation at the price you paid never pays for itself, it's only useful for going off-grid or feeling good about yourself. Perhaps in Arizona or some areas of California you can get it to pay for itself by combining really high insolation (the 4 watt-hour figure is the California average though for non-motorized panels) and the California rebate, but it's debatable.
You are misreading that document, which is also just one of several proposals.
While we don't know exactly what method would be used to measure what songs were the most popular, there are several that have been proposed, including traditional sampling. The statement you misread was probably the one about measuring what people are sharing on filesharing networks. On must such networks, you publicly advertise what you are sharing. (That's how the RIAA is finding the people to sue today without breaking any privacy laws.)
I think if you think we would advocate secret surveillance of private data, you don't know the EFF very well.
Some time ago I worked up some ideas for how I would build an all IP based digital A/V system.
They are at The ideal A/V system but of course the products don't exist yet.
But I do know a lot of people who feel the same way and are interested in perhaps making a company to build this stuff, even some funders. I don't have time to do a lot myself. But someday, somebody will build this and it will take over.
Then Monster can sell gold plated twisted pair for your walls to run ethernet over them.
The 3-D item just seems like even more of a pain than the existing captchas, which are way overused as it is, and a burden on the vision impaired.
But the anti-spam system isn't very novel. A number of systems have tried custom subtags to generate unique addresses for other folks to use, they tend to cause more problems than they solve. This is really just a challenge/response system which is harder to use, and worst of all, forces the sender to cut and paste their mail to send it again. No thanks, you probably just don't get my mail.
There are many combinations, which is why the linux distro would scan the machine before it was accepted into the project and say "No, we can't take your comptuer" or perhaps "We can't take this computer but could if it had one of the following ethernet cards" and such. If it was missing 2 needed cards it might be rejected as not practical.
But in fact there are drivers for so many cards today that a good chunk of the computers would work. Linux hardware detection is getting pretty good. At least on the plug and play generation of ATX motherboard machines.
I'm not talking 333mhz old pentiums here, but the 600mhz to 1.6hgz class, the past 2 generations, effectively.
Plus there is tons of the old ram for those computers around as we all switched to mobos that need ddram.
Such machines could make excellent web browsing and email stations. That's a big thing, because it is giving a large chunk of the library of the world to the children in these villages. Those kids will probably learn how to use linux and maintain anything odd abuot the computers anyway, they could probably take the non-compatible computers and make them work over time.
I see a project like this as a way to connect the children.
But would it not be even better to work a way to use our vast supply of old computers, many of which are being thrown out and face a recycling problem?
Take all the best linux hardware detection and auto-configuration software from the various distros -- kudzu and the like -- and make an installer that takes an old PC, and first tells you if the hardware in it can run linux decently, and if so, automatically installs it, otherwise redirects the PC to be recycled or sold for low power windows.
People would happily donate these PCs, possibly even running the linuxizing CD themselves, since perhaps they don't qualify for the donation tax deduction of the PC doesn't pass the test on the CD.
Yes, these machines might not be as fast as the bottom end AMD chip (Sempron 2000?) that will go into them, but not only are they semi-free, they solve a recycling problem at the same time.
Currently, on a typical 1 hour TV show, they show perhaps 30 1/2 minute commercials. They charge the advertiser about a penny (this varies) for each viewer ($10 CPM). Which means they gather about 30 cents for each viewer. I don't know the exact figures but I bet only about half of this makes it to the studio that actually produces the show.
Of course this is wholesale, so it's not far off from charging a dollar because that dollar comes with all the cost of selling shows 1 viewer at a time instead of giving free to millions of viewers at a time and selling a score of advertisers.
There's little need for the 50 cent one with ads. 15 minutes of my time for 50 cents? That's well below minimum wage -- no thanks.
If they could generate the economies of scale they currently have it could be perhaps 20 cents/viewer/show with no ads. However, they would raise it as there is no way to account if a whole family is watching or just one person. (With ad sales, they do account for this through stats.)
So there is one legacy.
For 3 years, I've held a superbowl commercials party, where we gather, go for a hike, and 2 hours into game-time watch the show on a hard disk video recorder. We play the football super-fast (you can still follow it, it's pretty exciting) and slow down to watch the commercials, the inverse of the rest of the year.
This year it will be in HDTV thanks to MythTV. More popular than anybody's football watching superbowl party I know.
I certainly was planning to be open about how I got products if I talked about them. I suspect most of the other folks are too. I jotted a brief note in my blog about it like some of the others.
It's really not some sort of elitist club, not even a club, nor much that new.
I do agree that by giving stuff to folks who write or are influentical, they do increase the chances that they will get written about. I presume that's their goal. There are certainly no requirements that we speak fondly of the products, but the historical tradition is people are far more likely to evangelize a new product they've seen than they are to curse something new nobody knows about, so on the balance it's been a win for vendors to do giveaways like this.
I know in the old days of magazines it was worse. Most software reviews were good for the same reason. If an obscure product came along and was bad, they just didn't write about it. If it was good, they might write. If it was famous or the company pulled enough strings (ie. bought lots of advertising) that got them a review, even at places with decent editorial firewalls, though it didn't assure a good one. If you saw a scathing review, it usually meant the company was so famous they had to review the product, or the company had pushed super hard to get one, good or no.
Truth is though, I, nor most of the people on the list aren't bought so easily. If you hear about something from somebody, you should judge how much you trust them in general, not whether they got the thing free.
If you think about it, what logic in there is giving a false good review for a bribe, if the bribe is a free version of the product you don't like very much?
Where did you get the 46h84 for anything close to $1000, delivered or otherwise?
I was even going to do a version of their theme-song telling them it was time to lay it down for a while.
I'm glad so many people are pointing out this giant flaw which makes sysadmin so hard.
/etc/foo.conf
I've been working on a solution, and for now will point to my original essay on whofig even though I have been in the progress of building a much more expanded set of essays.
Roughly, the realization I've come to is we should try to organize our OS not simpy around "what" the files are for but moreso around "who" is reponsible for them.
In your role as sysadmin, you would have one file tree that belongs to you, which encapsulates all your customizations of the system. The only time you ever touch other file trees is to install them (such as the file tree of a software package, which is itself changed only by the owner/developers of that package.)
Package owners, OS distribution packagers, sysadmins (at many levels -- system, network, company, imported) and users all make their changes in their own area, the rest is all read-only. (And can, other than for install, be physically read only.)
Thus to backup your customizations is trivial, and to move them to other roughly compatible systems is trivial, and upgrade is, well, perhaps not trivial but a lot easier. In theory it's just replace the trees of the OS distribution and the various packages.
Such a system needs a OS wide database which merges all customizations from all sources into one source that programs can use to read their own configuration and data, and a few other things, but in spite of the effort needed it's a way to go.
gobolinux is a good start, but it still has a program install in its file tree and then I go and modify its configuration, instead of building additional/modifying information in my own area. Down with
I tried the SMTP server, since it would be very handy to have a free SMTP relay out there that uses userid/password for SMTP AUTH. Saves the trouble of the complex setup required in many mail agents to get this going at home.
It works, but it rewrites your From: line to be user@gmail.com, which is OK if you are using gmail as your home base, but not OK if it is just one of your mailboxes. However, it's their server so they are free to put this limitation on it, I guess.
Wireless PC speakers sounds fun (they still need power) but what we really want is a generalized IP based speaker architecture for the whole house, so all speakers can be sent a digital stream from any audio source. The current wired PC speakers woudl actually be the easiest ones to first bring into this system.
I wrote up a description of ethernet speakers and the ideal home A/V setup some time ago mostly to talk about the broadcast flag's effect on the design, but it's still the right way to go.
I'm sure Ray knows this, and in fact I'm sure he knows about several of the other causes of aging you didn't mention, which scientists who study the field rank as between 6 and 10 major classes. If it were only the 3 classes you cite, I would be very optimistic, but in fact the indicates that it is perhaps around 8 classes still makes many people optimistic, it seens a very tractable problem.
Just look at your 3 problems. #1 is one you might try to solve, but in fact you don't have to do so if you can solve the others, because you replace dead cells with new ones, as the body does for quite a bit of its life.
#2 You have telomerase backwards. Telomerase resets the telomere to its full length again (about 50 duplications) and is used in certain immune cells and to make gametes. Progeria results from short telomeres. Alerady there is much promising research on lengthening telomeres.
#3 Seems ripe for modern genomic technology to do what biology could not do. Reading DNA and correcting errors in ways only modern tech can figure out. For example, just take a small numbers of cells with copies of your DNA, and even though they all might be highly damaged, unless they are all damaged in the same place, you can get your complete original genome, if you want it.
There are more, but your 3 would make me feel good if that's all there were.