Of course she has talent. That's the point. The music industry finally found ONE person with talent.
The question is, can she carry the entire industry by herself? All the good songs on her albums (read: dance songs) are released to radio. The rest (ballads, rock etc.) are oh-too-typical album filler.
And her dance songs, while good, are too slow-tempo to be considered state-of-the-art in the genre.
The thing that frightens me most about Gaga is that if she's so good, then where are the imitators?
>Actually, YouTube's 720p and 1080p videos are excellent quality.
Are they?!?!
When I click on "HD", the window stays the same size. So how is that HD? It seems to me all the 720p button does is upgrade the compression.
Also, YouTube is terrible at caching, constantly re-streams even if you've downloaded the whole clip, isn't very good at fast forwarding, rewinding, or seeking, and in general has terrible sound quality. And I haven't seen anything longer than 10 minutes, either.
>But that would make sense and be immensely profitable, but not as profitable as the packages people pay for these days but never use so we'll never see it happen.
Oh it'll happen. Right now probably 95% of customers are still happy paying for TV the old fashioned way. By "happy" I mean that they do it.
Internet customers are a niche market and still poorly understood. Compare to DVR customers five years ago - we existed, but not on anyone's radar. Right now all you get on the internet front are trial balloons like on-demand or YouTube, just curiosities really.
But once internet becomes dominant, they will have to post more. Example, I still have not seen any customers hook up their computer to their TV. Even though their 55" LED Samsung is, in fact, a computer monitor. Once it clicks in people's heads that they are watching a computer, they will start looking there for content.
>But when I'm paying $900 a year to heat my house, $0 to cool it, does it really make sense to put $15k of improvements in to drop my heating bill to $500?
Interesting. But keep in mind that people pay a 30-year mortgage to either keep the house or sell it. Either way, the improvements will stay.
Also, heating costs are likely to rise in the short term (remember $4/gal gasoline?) And with an efficient house, you can afford to waste more (i.e. greater comfort).
I'm saying that if you calculate a nearly break-even proposition on a long-term improvement, then you've already calculated that you won't be losing huge sums in the process.
Burning wood smells terrible. You should try coal (seriously). Lot less maintenance too. A coal furnace will burn for hours unattended. Keeping a fireplace going is like a full-time job.
Maybe you shouldn't buy Sorny. I saw a 120hz Sorny the other day, looked like shit, way too hyperreal (and I've been warned that 120-240hz has this problem, too.)
This graph shows that American energy use has stayed roughly the same since 1972, and definitely the same since 1988.
In fact, click on the other countries and you'll see a lot of flat lines. Even the world usage is pretty flat. You have to click all over to find countries that are diagonal lines (steady increase) and even fewer have sharp spikes.
I'm guessing population increase is the major culprit in "the fact that it keeps building energy generators".
> I'd like to find a citation that shows that the people who upgrade their plasma screens also improve their insulation.
Refrigerator efficiency has increased threefold since 1972. http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/25opec/sld026.htm For a car analogy, we should be getting 45mpg fleet average by that measure. (And we could, since they do make cars like that.)
I'm just wondering where you put them all. I can't imagine a room big enough (in a house) to fit 12 monitors. I wouldn't get small ones, either. Although you might be forced to.
See my comment 1280x1024 two displays nine virtuals total area 7680x3072 = 23.6 megapixel ten years ago on a single 32mb video card.
That was for coding.
Right now I have (basically) one monitor and no virtuals. I have 7 tabs open on Chrome. To look at a different web page, I have to move my mouse all the way to the top of the screen.
With more displays (physical or virtual) I could look at any of them with no movement, immediately. I just don't think you realize it can be faster.
>browsing the internet on a 16:9 monitor in portrait mode is a dream
Great point. I'll have to try it. Right now (in landscape mode), the only comments I can read are yours and half of my textarea. In a discussion with 200+ comments....my $500 monitor shows me ONE LOL.
>I write articles and code - and find that having the reference stuff up at the same time on another screen, with graphics on another, makes writing a LOT faster!!!
Good. Here's another tip: use Xwindows virtual desktops. I used to use two 18" x a grid of nine = EIGHTEEN displays.
That was ten years ago. Flipping between the virtual desktops? Instantaneous with a keyboard shortcut. (The reason I got up to 3x3 is because there was no performance loss. I probably could have done 4x4 or 5x5. This was the 8mb card era too. Linux is just fast as fuck.)
Caveat, you need the right display manager. Crucial features:
* The ability to make a 2D grid of your choice. 2x2, 2x3, 3x3, etc. NOT just a "stack." Your shit will get lost in a stack of anything. * Small picture-in-picture window showing what apps are open on your virtuals. * Programmable keyboard shortcuts. If you have to switch displays with a mouse, you might as well forget it and stick to minimizing.
Now you've made me curious if Windows has caught up....Something tells me it's still clunky...
Go outside and look at the horizon. There's 360 degrees horizontal, all of which are potentially interesting. And only 90 degrees up. Of those, probably only 10-20 degrees have any content, the rest is sky. Even if you're smack-dab in front of a house, probably still only 45 degrees.
That's why monitors got wider, theoretically.
In a practical sense, it's easier to make film wider than taller, since making it taller increases the length of the roll. But again, that's a happy convergence with the horizon thing. If a filmmaker did in fact need a taller image, they could simply flip the camera on its side, but interestingly, nobody has ever decided to do a whole film in portrait mode.
If you don't have time to go outside, watch Lawrence of Arabia and you'll see what I mean.
Content producers are doing it because they all need to get paid. And there's no incentive for the cable company to shut off certain channels because it's not saving them any appreciable bandwidth to offer a smaller package. Once it's on the wire, it might as well stay there.
Content producers can break the model however by offering their content directly over the web. Which is already starting to happen.
Google Maps isn't much different from Mapquest. I think it was the satellite view and 3D application that got people's attention.
>before GIS, searching for images was vastly more painful.
Yes it was. But Google Images is still sad. It just checks the image tag name and if you're lucky, the developer tagged it properly. But even then, you're only getting one or two search terms out of it.
If you take a look at a proper image database, they use dozens of keywords. And you pay through the nose for it.
With everything else that Google has scanned and cataloged (all books? All houses and storefronts?!) they should probably throw a few typists at the task of tagging images.
Good to know. But whether they've written products from scratch or assimilated them (which is how Microsoft got big), they've done this:
Search with pagerank Translate Images search Maps with driving directions Satellite View StreetView News Froogle Google Video + bought YouTube Gmail Books Google FastFlip ("Reader"?) Android Chrome browser (I'm using now, it's the fastest at loading Slashdot comments) ChromeOS
They are doing everything a software company should do, which is to write or collect all the software they could ever want. If I ran the company myself, I wouldn't do much different.
Most of those are magazines, which is interesting because magazines are cheap, full-color glossy and have in-depth articles. I don't think magazines are doing great financially, but nobody is proclaiming their demise and I think precious few have closed shop.
Maybe people just need to admit that in-depth printed journalism is alive and well. It's just not coming from newspapers because they've savaged themselves of any real content.
> it's getting to be pretty obvious that electronic distribution is far superior to print.
It's pretty obvious that it's faster. Since news organizations have always relied on the "scoop" to sell papers, speed is important to them, and now they're horribly slow. When I read the morning paper, half the shit is from HuffPo, and it feels like it happened 3 days ago (when it was really just 6 hours earlier).
But I read the morning paper because it only takes ten minutes (or twenty if it's good). So I do like the paper itself. If you go online for news, it should be just as fast, but you end up browsing around for hours and finding nothing.
At least the newspaper has the decency to admit when it's over. It comes with a sports section.
I agree with everything else he said though. He nailed most of the major issues, including the epic fail of low-res images and no supporting linkage. When you read a news item, and you immediately turn to Google to continue the story, you've been hurt. Just check out what's posted here, if they're discussing a product, it's 50/50 chance they even link to the product page.
Blogs, mostly still text. You have no idea how often I click on HuffingtonPost's "Top 10 images of [whatever]." It's just so much more entertaining to see a slideshow.
I will add this, though: Newspapers are in a reactionary mode regarding the web. All they do is throw readers at the web hoping we'll stick. No. The point is, you read it first and tell me if it's interesting. If the newspaper is asking me to do extra reading ("hey, go to our homepage for more!") then they fail.
>I don't happen to support Communism but I do get sick of these simplistic statements like "X doesn't work because that one time it was tried and 'failed'".
Fraternity houses are communist. You can eat like a king for $5/day, but you have to walk through someone's puke to get to class.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course she has talent. That's the point. The music industry finally found ONE person with talent.
The question is, can she carry the entire industry by herself? All the good songs on her albums (read: dance songs) are released to radio. The rest (ballads, rock etc.) are oh-too-typical album filler.
And her dance songs, while good, are too slow-tempo to be considered state-of-the-art in the genre.
The thing that frightens me most about Gaga is that if she's so good, then where are the imitators?
>Actually, YouTube's 720p and 1080p videos are excellent quality.
Are they?!?!
When I click on "HD", the window stays the same size. So how is that HD? It seems to me all the 720p button does is upgrade the compression.
Also, YouTube is terrible at caching, constantly re-streams even if you've downloaded the whole clip, isn't very good at fast forwarding, rewinding, or seeking, and in general has terrible sound quality. And I haven't seen anything longer than 10 minutes, either.
>But that would make sense and be immensely profitable, but not as profitable as the packages people pay for these days but never use so we'll never see it happen.
Oh it'll happen. Right now probably 95% of customers are still happy paying for TV the old fashioned way. By "happy" I mean that they do it.
Internet customers are a niche market and still poorly understood. Compare to DVR customers five years ago - we existed, but not on anyone's radar. Right now all you get on the internet front are trial balloons like on-demand or YouTube, just curiosities really.
But once internet becomes dominant, they will have to post more. Example, I still have not seen any customers hook up their computer to their TV. Even though their 55" LED Samsung is, in fact, a computer monitor. Once it clicks in people's heads that they are watching a computer, they will start looking there for content.
>But when I'm paying $900 a year to heat my house, $0 to cool it, does it really make sense to put $15k of improvements in to drop my heating bill to $500?
Interesting. But keep in mind that people pay a 30-year mortgage to either keep the house or sell it. Either way, the improvements will stay.
Also, heating costs are likely to rise in the short term (remember $4/gal gasoline?) And with an efficient house, you can afford to waste more (i.e. greater comfort).
I'm saying that if you calculate a nearly break-even proposition on a long-term improvement, then you've already calculated that you won't be losing huge sums in the process.
>Lucky I have a wood fireplace.
Burning wood smells terrible. You should try coal (seriously). Lot less maintenance too. A coal furnace will burn for hours unattended. Keeping a fireplace going is like a full-time job.
>CRTs max out at around 200 Watts
So do LED's. Here's a 55inch Samsung, 80-190 watts, depending on program source.
http://www.bangkokpost.com/tech/technews/147387/samsung-led-tv-b7000
Maybe you shouldn't buy Sorny. I saw a 120hz Sorny the other day, looked like shit, way too hyperreal (and I've been warned that 120-240hz has this problem, too.)
Sigh. Why don't you guys use Google? How about the first result?
http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=wb-wdi&met=eg_use_pcap_kg_oe&idim=country:USA&dl=en&hl=en&q=energy+use+per+capita
This graph shows that American energy use has stayed roughly the same since 1972, and definitely the same since 1988.
In fact, click on the other countries and you'll see a lot of flat lines. Even the world usage is pretty flat. You have to click all over to find countries that are diagonal lines (steady increase) and even fewer have sharp spikes.
I'm guessing population increase is the major culprit in "the fact that it keeps building energy generators".
> I'd like to find a citation that shows that the people who upgrade their plasma screens also improve their insulation.
Refrigerator efficiency has increased threefold since 1972. http://www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/25opec/sld026.htm For a car analogy, we should be getting 45mpg fleet average by that measure. (And we could, since they do make cars like that.)
At least someone knows what a troll mod is. I doubt you were modded for the right reason.
>A computer security consultant was convicted in the UK for typing "/../../" after a URL and hitting enter
Wow I just realized what that does.
That's about the lowest definition of "hacking" you can possibly have. It's more like basic literacy.
I'm just wondering where you put them all. I can't imagine a room big enough (in a house) to fit 12 monitors. I wouldn't get small ones, either. Although you might be forced to.
>every application feels like popping up dialogs across the middle.
I suspect the problem is that somewhere in here, you are using Windows. I'm betting Citrix runs Windows remotely on a Windows terminal? Blah.
The only "work" I would do on Windows is maybe Word/Excel/Photoshop. And if I'm using Excel, then obviously I'm not working very hard.
>That said, I can't even think of what I would do with 12 monitors
I've done it (virtually). You fill them with crap. Open a browser window with your favorite news site (slashdot?) Leave it open...forever.
I have papers on my desk I haven't read in weeks. Is this any different?
See my comment 1280x1024 two displays nine virtuals total area 7680x3072 = 23.6 megapixel ten years ago on a single 32mb video card.
That was for coding.
Right now I have (basically) one monitor and no virtuals. I have 7 tabs open on Chrome. To look at a different web page, I have to move my mouse all the way to the top of the screen.
With more displays (physical or virtual) I could look at any of them with no movement, immediately. I just don't think you realize it can be faster.
>browsing the internet on a 16:9 monitor in portrait mode is a dream
Great point. I'll have to try it. Right now (in landscape mode), the only comments I can read are yours and half of my textarea. In a discussion with 200+ comments....my $500 monitor shows me ONE LOL.
>I write articles and code - and find that having the reference stuff up at the same time on another screen, with graphics on another, makes writing a LOT faster!!!
Good. Here's another tip: use Xwindows virtual desktops. I used to use two 18" x a grid of nine = EIGHTEEN displays.
That was ten years ago. Flipping between the virtual desktops? Instantaneous with a keyboard shortcut. (The reason I got up to 3x3 is because there was no performance loss. I probably could have done 4x4 or 5x5. This was the 8mb card era too. Linux is just fast as fuck.)
Caveat, you need the right display manager. Crucial features:
* The ability to make a 2D grid of your choice. 2x2, 2x3, 3x3, etc. NOT just a "stack." Your shit will get lost in a stack of anything.
* Small picture-in-picture window showing what apps are open on your virtuals.
* Programmable keyboard shortcuts. If you have to switch displays with a mouse, you might as well forget it and stick to minimizing.
Now you've made me curious if Windows has caught up....Something tells me it's still clunky...
Go outside and look at the horizon. There's 360 degrees horizontal, all of which are potentially interesting. And only 90 degrees up. Of those, probably only 10-20 degrees have any content, the rest is sky. Even if you're smack-dab in front of a house, probably still only 45 degrees.
That's why monitors got wider, theoretically.
In a practical sense, it's easier to make film wider than taller, since making it taller increases the length of the roll. But again, that's a happy convergence with the horizon thing. If a filmmaker did in fact need a taller image, they could simply flip the camera on its side, but interestingly, nobody has ever decided to do a whole film in portrait mode.
If you don't have time to go outside, watch Lawrence of Arabia and you'll see what I mean.
Content producers are doing it because they all need to get paid. And there's no incentive for the cable company to shut off certain channels because it's not saving them any appreciable bandwidth to offer a smaller package. Once it's on the wire, it might as well stay there.
Content producers can break the model however by offering their content directly over the web. Which is already starting to happen.
Google Maps isn't much different from Mapquest. I think it was the satellite view and 3D application that got people's attention.
>before GIS, searching for images was vastly more painful.
Yes it was. But Google Images is still sad. It just checks the image tag name and if you're lucky, the developer tagged it properly. But even then, you're only getting one or two search terms out of it.
If you take a look at a proper image database, they use dozens of keywords. And you pay through the nose for it.
With everything else that Google has scanned and cataloged (all books? All houses and storefronts?!) they should probably throw a few typists at the task of tagging images.
Good to know. But whether they've written products from scratch or assimilated them (which is how Microsoft got big), they've done this:
Search with pagerank
Translate
Images search
Maps with driving directions
Satellite View
StreetView
News
Froogle
Google Video + bought YouTube
Gmail
Books
Google FastFlip ("Reader"?)
Android
Chrome browser (I'm using now, it's the fastest at loading Slashdot comments)
ChromeOS
They are doing everything a software company should do, which is to write or collect all the software they could ever want. If I ran the company myself, I wouldn't do much different.
Most of those are magazines, which is interesting because magazines are cheap, full-color glossy and have in-depth articles. I don't think magazines are doing great financially, but nobody is proclaiming their demise and I think precious few have closed shop.
Maybe people just need to admit that in-depth printed journalism is alive and well. It's just not coming from newspapers because they've savaged themselves of any real content.
> it's getting to be pretty obvious that electronic distribution is far superior to print.
It's pretty obvious that it's faster. Since news organizations have always relied on the "scoop" to sell papers, speed is important to them, and now they're horribly slow. When I read the morning paper, half the shit is from HuffPo, and it feels like it happened 3 days ago (when it was really just 6 hours earlier).
But I read the morning paper because it only takes ten minutes (or twenty if it's good). So I do like the paper itself. If you go online for news, it should be just as fast, but you end up browsing around for hours and finding nothing.
At least the newspaper has the decency to admit when it's over. It comes with a sports section.
I agree with everything else he said though. He nailed most of the major issues, including the epic fail of low-res images and no supporting linkage. When you read a news item, and you immediately turn to Google to continue the story, you've been hurt. Just check out what's posted here, if they're discussing a product, it's 50/50 chance they even link to the product page.
Blogs, mostly still text. You have no idea how often I click on HuffingtonPost's "Top 10 images of [whatever]." It's just so much more entertaining to see a slideshow.
I will add this, though: Newspapers are in a reactionary mode regarding the web. All they do is throw readers at the web hoping we'll stick. No. The point is, you read it first and tell me if it's interesting. If the newspaper is asking me to do extra reading ("hey, go to our homepage for more!") then they fail.
Oh really? You should try telling them. Typing British Petroleum into Google comes up with BP.com as a paid link.
>Further they are often granted a monopoly by the local government
I'd like to know why this is the case.
If you go up on a telephone pole, there are 3 wires: Power, phone, and cable. How do you get to be the fourth?
After all, "phone" is really TV/phone/internet and "cable" is really TV/phone/internet. So how did those two guys get so lucky?
>I don't happen to support Communism but I do get sick of these simplistic statements like "X doesn't work because that one time it was tried and 'failed'".
Fraternity houses are communist. You can eat like a king for $5/day, but you have to walk through someone's puke to get to class.