>By going to a trade school you are closing options off.
Umm...why? By going to a trade school you're saving money, time, and getting concrete knowledge that will get you a job now.
In the worst case, "college" is a $100,000 barf-fest.
Of course, being in college puts you in touch with other people who are similarly skilled. I think that is the point, to socialize with your own kind. But in many cases, "your own kind" aren't destined to be rich just because they went to college...
There's some irony. You make it sound like athletics dooms a person to depressive mediocrity. And being a math nerd, walled off in a building full of other math nerds, somehow is neither depressive nor mediocre.
Ask yourself if you would want to write a program to grade papers. First, imagine yourself reading papers all day, every day, for weeks.
Then, imagine smoking a gigantic bowl and organizing all the statistical permutations of student-written papers in your head, cross-indexed in every possible way.
Now imagine writing a computer program to do exactly what you imagined when you were high. Also, imagine spending 2 weeks bug-testing it, and then 2 months convincing the idiots at The College Board that it works.
Finally, imagine spending the next 2 years defending it from detractors who say that the program is half-baked or can't replace human graders.
So by your logic, all media content is sold per smallest unit. Therefore, nobody can afford to fill a hard drive. Therefore, anybody owning a hard drive is breaking the law.
Thanks, digital Orwell! I hated my own thought-crimes, until you showed me the way!
That's exactly how it works. You pay a slight premium for selection. Selection=knowledge. You are always selling knowledge.
The long tail is unpleasant and difficult to maintain, but in business, the effort put into maintaining an appearance is the main source of competition. The business that is working more diligently should win.
Of course, whether customers are savvy enough to recognize the winner is always a gamble. Sometimes pure drivel wins. Sometimes, businesses deliberately dumb themselves down, to make their jobs easier (!) even though they make less money.
I've seen it done. Everyone is searching for his personal work/profit ratio. A long tail maximizes profit. By having every single movie, Netflix will get every single eyeball. Fact: There will be no eyeballs left for anyone else. Netflix wins. But the long tail does increase labor costs, and at some point, Netflix may say, We're big enough already.
>The "long tail" phenomenon as used in this context describes the belief that the revenue gained from the long tail exceeds that gained from the top selling items.
That's idiotic. The purpose of the long tail is to ensure the survivability of the business versus competition. The reason why the tail is "long" (and thin) is because it doesn't generate a lot of interest or revenue.
What the tail does, is to provide depth to an otherwise-shallow business. 7-11 convenience stores are an example of a business with absolutely no tail. They do make money. But it's all cups of coffee and bags of chips - the stores themselves are unpleasant, the labor mind-numbing, and nobody goes in there and drops $100 for any reason.
The best line in the article is: "Nobody in the business world is confused about this, thankfully," Anderson adds.
And the stupidest is: For any company marketing a physical product, such as Netflix's DVDs or Amazon's books, managers must weigh the costs of stocking an item against the likelihood that it will generate revenue. "If you stock a lot of products that nobody consumes, then you have a problem," says Netessine.
Hahaha. Really? Products must be chosen wisely to generate sales? These Wharton guys are little baby children. I hope UPenn pays them $4 yearly salary to write this crap and they can go spend it at the tail-less convenience store where four bucks is considered a big sale.
Having a surefire way to get at that back catalog would be highly important. The real key is getting business to focus on marketing in "long tail" manner. Something like Netflix is interesting because they are a business that really pays no penalty for keeping extra DVDs in the warehouse.... but how do they get people interested in WATCHING them.
You *don't.*
Star Wars and Indiana Jones are rightly bargain-bin items. That's because everyone has seen them in every imaginable permutation (in theaters, on re-release, on TV, on cable, on VHS, etc.)
The "long tail" has nothing to do with age. It has to do with obscurity. Titles like Bigger Stronger Faster (a recent documentary about steroids) or God's Sandbox (an Israeli film about tribal female circumcision) are better examples of the long tail. Or quality Anime imports. Or Adult Swim's output. Or foreign-language films.
Netflix has great ways of promoting obscure titles. Which is why I've seen the two that I mentioned.
So Mr. Left-Hander, you're saying that Asian written languages may be superior because they are written vertically. With proper margins, they become neutrally-handed.
Since much of this discussion revolves around speed, I see you've also been thinking that the picture-based Chinese alphabet offers superior encoding ratios to phonetic alphabets such as Roman and (also I believe) Japanese. What does this mean? A word that may be six to ten characters in Roman may be three characters in Japanese and just one character in China.
You're right, that seems very efficient.
Also, you have astutely pointed out the systematic eyestrain that is caused by reading Roman characters. The human eye, which is made to stare blankly at natural landscapes, jerks constantly as it jumps from word to word and then from one line to the next. It's true that those of us who read more, and read more intensely, wear more and thicker glasses. Coincidence?
I guess you're right again, our language design may not be optimized for our eyes, either. After all, written languages have been around for thousands of years, but it's only in the past hundred that we've had "literate" societies. The result? Suddenly, we all wear glasses.
My hand cramps, my glasses are quite thick, I have a writer's callous, and my handwriting still sucks unless I really concentrate on it. I used to think that writing was some natural, refined art, but you're starting to open my eyes to what a crappy piece of technology it is.
>If you add an insignificant product to the end of the tail,
>it obviously increases the proportion of market share of the first X% of products.
Yeah, but add a product because it is important by itself. Consider adding Dewar's to a store that has no blended scotch whiskey.
Will Dewar's increase niche sales? No. Will it increase single-malt sales? No. However, with a gaping hole in the scotch section, can you let Dewars die on its own?
Of course not. You must have it.
Now that you have Dewar's represented, should you also add Dickface Brand for half the price?
That's really the trick of it.
>So if you didn't have to work....would you be like Sall and continue to program?
One aspect of programming that has gone unacknowledged (except in Extreme Programming) is that programming is inherently a social activity. Coding is both a form of authorship (which requires an audience) as well as a hobby (which requires collaborators).
Thus, to ask if I'll be coding in old age, is like asking if I'm going to be restoring old Chevy big-blocks. If I'm the only one doing it, then no. There are an infinite number of creative activities that can be performed alone, and all of them are equally tepid under that restriction.
Of course, the OP did not specify 'alone,' but I would say the rest of society has a lot of catching up to do before computer programmers can be considered anything other than the rarest breed. How many Hemingways were there? And did his books feature occlusion and specular highlight?
There we go. Somebody is talking about the article.
I'm not a storage expert, but something about this article seems half-baked. For example, looking at the rebuild table, from 2002 to 2005, rebuild time stayed roughly the same, while drive size went from 146gb to 300gb and bandwidth went from 89 to 119 MB/sec. Is there a problem with that?
Then, from 2005 to 2009, rebuild time dropped, even though disk size went from 300gb to 450gb, because the number of drives on the channel doubled from three to six. Again, is there a problem?
Now looking at his second table, I guess the author's point is that since rebuild times have increased from 5.28 hours in 1994, to 6.6 hours in 2009, and drives have gotten 100x more reliable
(10e14 vs 10e16), the ponderously slow, 2-order of magnitude growth in drive reliability won't keep up with the dramatic 25% increase in rebuild times.
>For example specs left, code center, docs right sounds like near ideal development setup for me.
It is.
>I've tried using virtual desktop but unless
There are (customizable) keybindings that will flick you around instantly. On Linux, ctrl+arrow was so fast. I was doing 3x2 with dual monitors and even 3x3 (18 monitors' worth of space) and filling up most of it.
I've dabbled with virtual desktops for Windows and I don't remember liking it either. If you have to use the mouse to get around, it's too slow. You can just use the mouse to minimize/maximize and its the same shit anyway.
There seem to be quality control issues as well. Large screens with dense arrays will be prone to failure, thus much higher cost. That's why the displays tend to be middling in pixel density; they want them to work as well as be reasonably priced.
I hope OP knows that newer displays are still upwards of $1000 . It's not like you can go out and buy a 50" LCD for $500.
I seem to recall this worked quite well on Linux with virtual desktops (as well as multiple monitors). Once I got my Emacs, my Netscape, and my shell sessions set up on each desktop, they would be in the same places for DAYS.
>The tube monitor I had in the late 90s ran at 1600x1200. Now over 10 years later my 24" LCD is a paltry 1920x1200. It pisses me off that vertical resolution hasn't increased.
It's a software problem. Back when you were running 1600 as an elite user, the Win-masses were running Windows ME at 640x480. Increasing the resolution meant making fonts unreadably small. To patch high-res screens meant M$.programmers had to work towards not their market. Then, application programmers like Adobe had to fix their products too.
Then the internets came along, cementing 800x600 as our visual Esperanto. Sure, Windows has a "font size" setting. Past a certain point, it stops working because the *windows* don't scale to the fonts.
Lesson is, don't fix what isn't broken. Today, you can still boot up Windows 2xxx in VGA/SVGA/XVGA or whatever, and all the application fonts are legible. The windows maximize properly, the borders are the right size, and the text boxes are the correct height for the fonts.
Why reprogram the whole system just for the two of us?
LCD's aren't going backwards. They're flat, for chrissakes. And cheap.
>I find it disappointing that 30" displays get the same resolution as 24" displays but at significantly higher cost.
Yep. Now go to 40", and you'll see that it gets cheaper. Going from 24 to 30 you are adding a bigger crystal, which adds purely material cost. But going from 30 to 40 you are blowing up from tiny shutters to big, fat pixels. Remember, this is nothing more than a fancy fluorescent light-bulb. Bigger pixels should be easier to deal with.
That's my theory anyway. Shopping <37" is a waste of time.
How about 4096x1536 in late 2000? That would be the Matrox G400 with two Hitachi 19" monitors. Six megapixel. That's max, ordinary usage would be more like 1600x1200 twin.
Of course, my gaming performance sucked for years. And years. And we burnt out more than one of those Matrox cards from the heat.
You've got to be kidding. Newegg has a 24" monitor posted at $300. The 40" monitor is $600, which is a nearly 4x increase in real-estate plus it comes with ATSC and QAM tuners. Both screens are at least 1080. Plus the smaller screens (<30") have production issues, like dead pixels and off-color.
Have you heard of "price point" shopping? It means getting the most for your money.
The arcade shooter Darius had 3 screens horizontally. The way they got the bezels to disappear was by putting the two side monitors below, and using mirrors to reflect the images up together with the center monitor.
Slashdot Mirror
>By going to a trade school you are closing options off.
Umm...why? By going to a trade school you're saving money, time, and getting concrete knowledge that will get you a job now.
In the worst case, "college" is a $100,000 barf-fest.
Of course, being in college puts you in touch with other people who are similarly skilled. I think that is the point, to socialize with your own kind. But in many cases, "your own kind" aren't destined to be rich just because they went to college...
Ever heard of liberal arts?
I believe Frank Grimes called it a palace. As a consummate engineer, Frank's ideas of what constitutes a palace are surely welcome here on Slashdot.
There's some irony. You make it sound like athletics dooms a person to depressive mediocrity. And being a math nerd, walled off in a building full of other math nerds, somehow is neither depressive nor mediocre.
Ask yourself if you would want to write a program to grade papers. First, imagine yourself reading papers all day, every day, for weeks.
Then, imagine smoking a gigantic bowl and organizing all the statistical permutations of student-written papers in your head, cross-indexed in every possible way.
Now imagine writing a computer program to do exactly what you imagined when you were high. Also, imagine spending 2 weeks bug-testing it, and then 2 months convincing the idiots at The College Board that it works.
Finally, imagine spending the next 2 years defending it from detractors who say that the program is half-baked or can't replace human graders.
Do you want this project? I sure as hell do not.
Yeah wow. A dollar a pop? Are you serious????
So by your logic, all media content is sold per smallest unit. Therefore, nobody can afford to fill a hard drive. Therefore, anybody owning a hard drive is breaking the law.
Thanks, digital Orwell! I hated my own thought-crimes, until you showed me the way!
>What that says about human nature, I don't know, it just seemed appropriate to the thread.
It's an extremely appropriate observation that 90% of "generally law abiding people will continue to break" the law.
To a Martian that would be some kind of logical paradox.
That's exactly how it works. You pay a slight premium for selection. Selection=knowledge. You are always selling knowledge.
The long tail is unpleasant and difficult to maintain, but in business, the effort put into maintaining an appearance is the main source of competition. The business that is working more diligently should win.
Of course, whether customers are savvy enough to recognize the winner is always a gamble. Sometimes pure drivel wins. Sometimes, businesses deliberately dumb themselves down, to make their jobs easier (!) even though they make less money.
I've seen it done. Everyone is searching for his personal work/profit ratio. A long tail maximizes profit. By having every single movie, Netflix will get every single eyeball. Fact: There will be no eyeballs left for anyone else. Netflix wins. But the long tail does increase labor costs, and at some point, Netflix may say, We're big enough already.
>The "long tail" phenomenon as used in this context describes the belief that the revenue gained from the long tail exceeds that gained from the top selling items.
That's idiotic. The purpose of the long tail is to ensure the survivability of the business versus competition. The reason why the tail is "long" (and thin) is because it doesn't generate a lot of interest or revenue.
What the tail does, is to provide depth to an otherwise-shallow business. 7-11 convenience stores are an example of a business with absolutely no tail. They do make money. But it's all cups of coffee and bags of chips - the stores themselves are unpleasant, the labor mind-numbing, and nobody goes in there and drops $100 for any reason.
The best line in the article is: "Nobody in the business world is confused about this, thankfully," Anderson adds.
And the stupidest is: For any company marketing a physical product, such as Netflix's DVDs or Amazon's books, managers must weigh the costs of stocking an item against the likelihood that it will generate revenue. "If you stock a lot of products that nobody consumes, then you have a problem," says Netessine.
Hahaha. Really? Products must be chosen wisely to generate sales? These Wharton guys are little baby children. I hope UPenn pays them $4 yearly salary to write this crap and they can go spend it at the tail-less convenience store where four bucks is considered a big sale.
Having a surefire way to get at that back catalog would be highly important. The real key is getting business to focus on marketing in "long tail" manner. Something like Netflix is interesting because they are a business that really pays no penalty for keeping extra DVDs in the warehouse.... but how do they get people interested in WATCHING them.
You *don't.*
Star Wars and Indiana Jones are rightly bargain-bin items. That's because everyone has seen them in every imaginable permutation (in theaters, on re-release, on TV, on cable, on VHS, etc.)
The "long tail" has nothing to do with age. It has to do with obscurity. Titles like Bigger Stronger Faster (a recent documentary about steroids) or God's Sandbox (an Israeli film about tribal female circumcision) are better examples of the long tail. Or quality Anime imports. Or Adult Swim's output. Or foreign-language films.
Netflix has great ways of promoting obscure titles. Which is why I've seen the two that I mentioned.
So Mr. Left-Hander, you're saying that Asian written languages may be superior because they are written vertically. With proper margins, they become neutrally-handed.
Since much of this discussion revolves around speed, I see you've also been thinking that the picture-based Chinese alphabet offers superior encoding ratios to phonetic alphabets such as Roman and (also I believe) Japanese. What does this mean? A word that may be six to ten characters in Roman may be three characters in Japanese and just one character in China.
You're right, that seems very efficient.
Also, you have astutely pointed out the systematic eyestrain that is caused by reading Roman characters. The human eye, which is made to stare blankly at natural landscapes, jerks constantly as it jumps from word to word and then from one line to the next. It's true that those of us who read more, and read more intensely, wear more and thicker glasses. Coincidence?
I guess you're right again, our language design may not be optimized for our eyes, either. After all, written languages have been around for thousands of years, but it's only in the past hundred that we've had "literate" societies. The result? Suddenly, we all wear glasses.
My hand cramps, my glasses are quite thick, I have a writer's callous, and my handwriting still sucks unless I really concentrate on it. I used to think that writing was some natural, refined art, but you're starting to open my eyes to what a crappy piece of technology it is.
>If you add an insignificant product to the end of the tail,
>it obviously increases the proportion of market share of the first X% of products.
Yeah, but add a product because it is important by itself. Consider adding Dewar's to a store that has no blended scotch whiskey.
Will Dewar's increase niche sales? No. Will it increase single-malt sales? No. However, with a gaping hole in the scotch section, can you let Dewars die on its own?
Of course not. You must have it. Now that you have Dewar's represented, should you also add Dickface Brand for half the price? That's really the trick of it.
>So if you didn't have to work....would you be like Sall and continue to program?
One aspect of programming that has gone unacknowledged (except in Extreme Programming) is that programming is inherently a social activity. Coding is both a form of authorship (which requires an audience) as well as a hobby (which requires collaborators).
Thus, to ask if I'll be coding in old age, is like asking if I'm going to be restoring old Chevy big-blocks. If I'm the only one doing it, then no. There are an infinite number of creative activities that can be performed alone, and all of them are equally tepid under that restriction.
Of course, the OP did not specify 'alone,' but I would say the rest of society has a lot of catching up to do before computer programmers can be considered anything other than the rarest breed. How many Hemingways were there? And did his books feature occlusion and specular highlight?
There we go. Somebody is talking about the article.
I'm not a storage expert, but something about this article seems half-baked. For example, looking at the rebuild table, from 2002 to 2005, rebuild time stayed roughly the same, while drive size went from 146gb to 300gb and bandwidth went from 89 to 119 MB/sec. Is there a problem with that?
Then, from 2005 to 2009, rebuild time dropped, even though disk size went from 300gb to 450gb, because the number of drives on the channel doubled from three to six. Again, is there a problem?
Now looking at his second table, I guess the author's point is that since rebuild times have increased from 5.28 hours in 1994, to 6.6 hours in 2009, and drives have gotten 100x more reliable (10e14 vs 10e16), the ponderously slow, 2-order of magnitude growth in drive reliability won't keep up with the dramatic 25% increase in rebuild times.
Is this the point he's trying to make?
>expect to not get shot as a car thief when he gets caught?
Because: They will try very hard not to get caught.
Just like a real thief.
>For example specs left, code center, docs right sounds like near ideal development setup for me.
It is.
>I've tried using virtual desktop but unless
There are (customizable) keybindings that will flick you around instantly. On Linux, ctrl+arrow was so fast. I was doing 3x2 with dual monitors and even 3x3 (18 monitors' worth of space) and filling up most of it.
I've dabbled with virtual desktops for Windows and I don't remember liking it either. If you have to use the mouse to get around, it's too slow. You can just use the mouse to minimize/maximize and its the same shit anyway.
There seem to be quality control issues as well. Large screens with dense arrays will be prone to failure, thus much higher cost. That's why the displays tend to be middling in pixel density; they want them to work as well as be reasonably priced.
I hope OP knows that newer displays are still upwards of $1000 . It's not like you can go out and buy a 50" LCD for $500.
I seem to recall this worked quite well on Linux with virtual desktops (as well as multiple monitors). Once I got my Emacs, my Netscape, and my shell sessions set up on each desktop, they would be in the same places for DAYS.
>Believe me, trying to read a PDF on such a large and split up screen is not much fun.
But what if the PDF had two columns of text? Same goes for web pages, which are more dynamic and reconfigurable than pdfs.
Something I thought of 8 years ago...
Yes. Yes it is. Now who is the guy who was complaining that LCD's don't match old CRT's for resolution?
>The tube monitor I had in the late 90s ran at 1600x1200. Now over 10 years later my 24" LCD is a paltry 1920x1200. It pisses me off that vertical resolution hasn't increased.
It's a software problem. Back when you were running 1600 as an elite user, the Win-masses were running Windows ME at 640x480. Increasing the resolution meant making fonts unreadably small. To patch high-res screens meant M$.programmers had to work towards not their market. Then, application programmers like Adobe had to fix their products too.
Then the internets came along, cementing 800x600 as our visual Esperanto. Sure, Windows has a "font size" setting. Past a certain point, it stops working because the *windows* don't scale to the fonts.
Lesson is, don't fix what isn't broken. Today, you can still boot up Windows 2xxx in VGA/SVGA/XVGA or whatever, and all the application fonts are legible. The windows maximize properly, the borders are the right size, and the text boxes are the correct height for the fonts.
Why reprogram the whole system just for the two of us?
LCD's aren't going backwards. They're flat, for chrissakes. And cheap.
>I find it disappointing that 30" displays get the same resolution as 24" displays but at significantly higher cost.
Yep. Now go to 40", and you'll see that it gets cheaper. Going from 24 to 30 you are adding a bigger crystal, which adds purely material cost. But going from 30 to 40 you are blowing up from tiny shutters to big, fat pixels. Remember, this is nothing more than a fancy fluorescent light-bulb. Bigger pixels should be easier to deal with.
That's my theory anyway. Shopping <37" is a waste of time.
If the designers of X-windows built cars, you'd be able to drive from America to Europe. The water would merely slow you down.
How about 4096x1536 in late 2000? That would be the Matrox G400 with two Hitachi 19" monitors. Six megapixel. That's max, ordinary usage would be more like 1600x1200 twin.
Of course, my gaming performance sucked for years. And years. And we burnt out more than one of those Matrox cards from the heat.
>Anything over 24" just seems to be over the top.
You've got to be kidding. Newegg has a 24" monitor posted at $300. The 40" monitor is $600, which is a nearly 4x increase in real-estate plus it comes with ATSC and QAM tuners. Both screens are at least 1080. Plus the smaller screens (<30") have production issues, like dead pixels and off-color.
Have you heard of "price point" shopping? It means getting the most for your money.
The arcade shooter Darius had 3 screens horizontally. The way they got the bezels to disappear was by putting the two side monitors below, and using mirrors to reflect the images up together with the center monitor.
According to Wiki, Darius came out in 1986. This is what it looked like, and this is the rig in action, although it looks like the 3rd monitor has gone out (you can still see how it works though).
Given the physical width of the cabinet, it also had terrific stereo sound.