Refrigerators and wall-warts are not necessarily designed or manufactured by the same group or company. Why not have the wall-wart manufacturers develop more efficient power supplies? Just because a fridge would save more power, doesn't mean going after the small things is useless (especially when you are talking on the scale of hundreds of millions of wall warts). Also, once you get all the big ticket items efficient, you'll want to go after the little stuff as well, so why not do everything at once and get the little stuff out of the way?
I don't know, that is a good question. I wonder how things would turn out if it was gone. Also, I'd like to see Condorcet voting take hold, because the system right now encourages a two party system.
When I think about it, in years past I probably could have been a Republican, but their homophobia, warmongering, and runaway spending really turns me off to the party. 2004 was the first election in which I could vote, and I voted Libertarian. FYI, my state was an easy Kerry victory, so my voting for Badnarik didn't win Bush any electoral points (now... if I was in Ohio...).
You should be happy, instead of doing homework, I looked it up for you:).
Even a year ago Apple was slightly profitable with the music store. I didn't listen to the conference call, but it was widely reported and if you can find the call online, then you can listen for yourself.
Well, they could not renew the contract. If Steve has the balls he might just remove all of that labels' songs from the store and see how they like losing all the potential earnings. iTunes has a huge market share and I don't think people are going to just up and switch that quick to another store (especially when so many people have iPods). Steve has lots of bargaining power here and one of the big things about the music store when it was released was the simple pricing (although, the album pricing is more flexible than it used to be, so you can no longer predict how much an album will cost, unfortunately). I will not buy a single song for more than a dollar, so if they do raise prices, I just won't be those songs. Also, who knows, it might give a big push to the smaller labels like CD Baby when all their music is much cheaper.
Also, in reply to like the great-grandparent, I do believe iTMS is profitable these days. I think they are making a nice little profit, actually (nothing compared to the iPod sales, but nothing to sneeze at either).
The gas taxes don't nearly pay for roads, though. Especially freeways and the like. I don't mind paying for handicap ramp because they are a lot cheaper and absolutely required for some people.
I'm trying to be a considerate citizen (for example, environmentally) using the most fair means possible: capitalism. I put my money where my mouth is and support green causes like not driving, buying organic food, or green power. It is usually more expensive for me, and yet the money I give through taxes is still being used to build roads and subsidize oil companies. It is hard to be a conscience individual when my money is being taken for hugely expensive projects like roads and pork freeways in Alaska. If people had to pay the real cost of their destructive behavior, they would be more inclined to go the green route and it wouldn't be as high an incremental cost (aka, if drivers actually paid for the roads, going to public transit or bikes would save even more money then it does now... because you wouldn't have to pay that in taxes (although, I'd rather have them keep the tax level and just balance the freaking budget)).
Andrew
PS: If you can't tell, I'm trying to be an environmentalist in the most libertarian way possible.
Except I don't shop at Walmart. I tend to shop at places that care local food and I'm near a port, so good don't have to travel far. I try to eat local food as much as possible. Right now Walmart and others are getting an advantage because they can keep their inventory in trucks on roads and not have to pay much transit cost. We are subsidizing Walmart's (and others) business.
And I'm pissed at how much damage truckers do to roads that is then paid for by my tax money. Let's see how well the truckers do if the cost of roads weren't externalized. Railroads are way more efficient and, even though they have to pay for their own infrastructure, still manage to compete with truckers when it comes to shipping.
Well, I imagine in the 9+ months they owned Urchin before releasing Analytics, they were porting all the code to run on their scalable back end systems (GFS, BigTable and the like). Of course, Analytics was pretty poor the day it was released, and still doesn't have much information. I guess they didn't give it a cluster big enough or something.
Umm, are you guys sure Apple created Zeroconf? I thought it was created independently and then Apple started using and shipping it in a bunch of programs.
Your DVR transcodes the signal from your digital source to another format? Why? My family has a HD DVR and it just saves the digital stream directly. The quality is exactly the same as OTA.
Every screenshot of the stock widget shows Apple up. They also usually include PIXR, GOOG, and AMZN as gainers. When they include MSFT, it is always red:).
I tried some localized pages on Google's site (Taiwan, China, and Trinidad were the three that came to mind), but they didn't offer maps, I don't think. I guess I'm an idiot for not trying the English speaking TLDs like.ca and.co.uk. Oh well. Also, pinging google.ca gives me about 34 ms while google.com is 80. I should stick with you guys:).
I know, what the hell. All of a sudden Google stopped working. Some other IPs work, but not that one. I could change my hosts file, but I don't want to. The thing is, without changing the hosts file, I can't login to like search history, because it tries to redirect to that one address. Also, Gmail and Maps aren't work for me either. Grr.
steve has power without money
on
Pixar For Sale?
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· Score: 1
I think Steve has more power now with Pixar and Apple than he would without Pixar but with three billion dollars in cash. Steve can almost single handedly steer the computer industry (well, for consumers). Apple may only have a small 4% (or so) of sales, but they have much more influence in the industry. He also has tons of content producers using his products, when you think about Final Cut Pro. Pixar is an animation powerhouse. Their movies are almost guaranteed to be hits (because they are quality) and he has Disney by the balls. In an earlier discussion, some were guessing that Disney gave Apple their shows for the music (or would that be media?) store because Disney wanted to be on good terms with Steve in the hopes of recovering a relationship with Pixar. Also, Steve is the darling of the media and has given MS and Bill black eyes a number of times. Steve is better at predicting the needs of the market (iPod vs tablet PC or media center) than Bill, making Bill look foolish ("People want to talk to their computer").
Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that Steve has amazing amounts of power in various industries with relatively little money (compared to folks like Bill or Larry Ellison). You know the old saying, "Only Jobs could have gone to the media companies."
This is true, but wouldn't they have ways to reduce grain and other problems? I mean hell, they fixed up the Star Wars movies for DVD (and broke them in many other areas, but they didn't improve color), I'd imagine they could reduce grain and stuff on old TV shows. However, would this be price prohibitive? They want to sell these shows on the cheap, which they might not be able to do if they have go through and improve the quality of each one. However, IANA Video Engineer or whatever, so I wouldn't know.
Re:the freak icon's purpose! (quick, mod down!)
on
No Porn for You, iPod
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· Score: 1
Hehe, okay. I don't actually use the system to mod down posts from my 'foes', I just use it as a marking of someone who has said something I didn't like. I can't remember all the reasons I foe people, but some include if they support that Russian music site and don't understand copyright. If someone unfairly bashes Apple ("The iTMS sucks. I'll only use it when songs cost 10 cents without DRM. Anyone who uses it now is an idiot."), etc. If you promote UN take over of the internet or more government control of our life, I might also make you a foe.
Think of it this way, I have so many foes, that it must not take much to get on my foe list (there fore decreasing the severity of the foe list). Again, I don't mod posts from foes down (using/.'s preferences) because they'll say informative stuff sometimes, but it just serves as a warning to me.
Andrew
PS: Not like you'll ever read this since you posted AC and will probably forget about it, but oh well.
Yeah, suicide girls has an iPod-formatted video podcast right on their homepage (and it is aimed specifically at the iPod). I ran into their website today and thought that was freakin' awesome. Once I clear up some HD space, I'll have to subscribe. Also, here is another article about porn on the iPod. I forwarded that to my mom.
I agree. I've been to a number of Google tech talk/recruiting sessions and they really emphasize the small groups inside the company. Most projects seem to be 2-4 people. Only when a product nears launch do more people get involved (lawyers, UI designers, translators, etc.). I thought they said that Gmail was done by about four people for most of the time. When you have this many groups, of course there will be lots of diversity. Sometimes when I see a new product or one-box coming out of the Googleplex, I get worried that they are losing their focus and relevance (for a while they had two competing "definitive answer" one-boxes that sometimes both showed up for one query; I can't remember the names exactly, but I thought it looked pretty bad... where was the coordination?). However, most projects get fixed up and made better, and I regain faith in Google. Right now I'm most skeptical about the Web Accelerator (just because of all the problems it has had).
Also, you are correct. Google has just started rolling out phase two of a three phase update to their ranking engine (dubbed jagger update). A lot of SEO folk are complaining about losing placement, and if they are complaining, I think that means we are getting better results:)
Well, it was the first file that came to my mind. Plus, it is a small file to test, I didn't want to abuse TinyURL too much. I ripped a movie into H.264 and it is 700 megs. I thought about uploading that, but that would be a little too mean.
If you use OS X, it takes a little bit of work. I download Java 1.5 and installed it. Then you have to set your path variable in terminal to get it use the correct Java (the website didn't mention this, and the new Java Configuration Panel thing didn't make it work for the terminal). Anyway, after doing all that, I was able to make this file:
# TinyDiskFile - used to retrieve a file that has been stored in TinyUrl.com! # # By Acidus - Most Significant Bit Labs - Acidus@msblabs.org Version: 1.0 Filename: hello.jpg Size: 21324 Checksum Algorithm: CRC32 Checksum: 1707489058 Compression Algorithm: Deflate Encryption Algorithm: AES, 128bit Encryption Key: lyKYrF793XAIYYXXSYnRjg== # # Cluster Hashes # Clusters: 7 Cluster: 877ml Cluster: 7pl84 Cluster: 9zxx6 Cluster: 8lr45 Cluster: ae5t7 Cluster: 77deo Cluster: 8wp6q
Every time you run the program with the same parameters, it outputs a different set of URLs. This is unfortunate. It'd be nice if it would spit out the same set of URLs for each file, so that if two users upload the same file, it isn't duplicated in TinyURL.
Google has a shuttle between SF and their offices in Mountain View. It significantly reduces the number of car trips and it also runs on biodiesel. Its incentives are that you don't have to be bothered with driving and you can use the wireless on the trip.
I'd rather see companies offer discounted bus passes (many companies subsidize parking for their employees in downtown areas) and shuttles like this rather than encouraging employees to buy "green" cars.
Even better, encourage bicycle use and/or locate your office in a dense neighborhood where employees can live close to work. I'd rather work in a dense urban area (not necessarily downtown, but a neighborhood that is consistently 3-4 stories tall (or on a bike trail, like OmniGroup)) than in a suburban office park.
Yes, that is a 64K binary being emulated for PPC in Classic (IIRC).
Re:But capitalism isn't automatically selfish...
on
Space Tourism?
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· Score: 1
Here is an interesting story. Last night I attended a discussion at the Science Fiction Museum (well, it was actually in the Experience Music Project, but they are the same building) with people involved in creating new lift technologies to get to space. One guy was a businessman from LiftPort, who is working on a space elevator. There was also a scientist there who had the idea of using ground based lasers to heat liquid hydrogen in a vehicle, which would be used as propellent.
The big problems right now for the elevator are science based (hopefully the bottleneck will eventually become funding, as carbon nanotubes are developed). The laser guy's biggest problem was funding. His research was based on current technologies (and future advancements will only make his plan easier).
One person in the audience asked how the common folk can get involved, since we don't have large sums of money. Now to the point. I was in a Paul Allen funded building listening to a talk that would be right up his alley. He spent large sums of money on SpaceShipOne which used conventional lift technologies. I think it would be cool if he funded some of these lesser known lift technologies.
The laser system can lift 200 kg to orbit for about 100-200 USD/pound (I believe that was the example he gave). Unlike the space elevator, these launches could be nearly continuous and are much quicker than the elevator journey (although, they wouldn't carry nearly as much weight). It seems like the laser system would be ideal for sending tourists up to space (while the lift would be good for sending crafts/components/systems to space).
Okay, that was a lot of writing, but since you mentioned Paul Allen and space flight:)
Slashdot Mirror
Refrigerators and wall-warts are not necessarily designed or manufactured by the same group or company. Why not have the wall-wart manufacturers develop more efficient power supplies? Just because a fridge would save more power, doesn't mean going after the small things is useless (especially when you are talking on the scale of hundreds of millions of wall warts). Also, once you get all the big ticket items efficient, you'll want to go after the little stuff as well, so why not do everything at once and get the little stuff out of the way?
I don't know, that is a good question. I wonder how things would turn out if it was gone. Also, I'd like to see Condorcet voting take hold, because the system right now encourages a two party system.
Yeah, a dictatorship would be so much easier :).
When I think about it, in years past I probably could have been a Republican, but their homophobia, warmongering, and runaway spending really turns me off to the party. 2004 was the first election in which I could vote, and I voted Libertarian. FYI, my state was an easy Kerry victory, so my voting for Badnarik didn't win Bush any electoral points (now... if I was in Ohio...).
You should be happy, instead of doing homework, I looked it up for you :).
Even a year ago Apple was slightly profitable with the music store. I didn't listen to the conference call, but it was widely reported and if you can find the call online, then you can listen for yourself.
Andrew
Well, they could not renew the contract. If Steve has the balls he might just remove all of that labels' songs from the store and see how they like losing all the potential earnings. iTunes has a huge market share and I don't think people are going to just up and switch that quick to another store (especially when so many people have iPods). Steve has lots of bargaining power here and one of the big things about the music store when it was released was the simple pricing (although, the album pricing is more flexible than it used to be, so you can no longer predict how much an album will cost, unfortunately). I will not buy a single song for more than a dollar, so if they do raise prices, I just won't be those songs. Also, who knows, it might give a big push to the smaller labels like CD Baby when all their music is much cheaper.
Also, in reply to like the great-grandparent, I do believe iTMS is profitable these days. I think they are making a nice little profit, actually (nothing compared to the iPod sales, but nothing to sneeze at either).
Andrew
The gas taxes don't nearly pay for roads, though. Especially freeways and the like. I don't mind paying for handicap ramp because they are a lot cheaper and absolutely required for some people.
I'm trying to be a considerate citizen (for example, environmentally) using the most fair means possible: capitalism. I put my money where my mouth is and support green causes like not driving, buying organic food, or green power. It is usually more expensive for me, and yet the money I give through taxes is still being used to build roads and subsidize oil companies. It is hard to be a conscience individual when my money is being taken for hugely expensive projects like roads and pork freeways in Alaska. If people had to pay the real cost of their destructive behavior, they would be more inclined to go the green route and it wouldn't be as high an incremental cost (aka, if drivers actually paid for the roads, going to public transit or bikes would save even more money then it does now... because you wouldn't have to pay that in taxes (although, I'd rather have them keep the tax level and just balance the freaking budget)).
Andrew
PS: If you can't tell, I'm trying to be an environmentalist in the most libertarian way possible.
Except I don't shop at Walmart. I tend to shop at places that care local food and I'm near a port, so good don't have to travel far. I try to eat local food as much as possible. Right now Walmart and others are getting an advantage because they can keep their inventory in trucks on roads and not have to pay much transit cost. We are subsidizing Walmart's (and others) business.
And I'm pissed at how much damage truckers do to roads that is then paid for by my tax money. Let's see how well the truckers do if the cost of roads weren't externalized. Railroads are way more efficient and, even though they have to pay for their own infrastructure, still manage to compete with truckers when it comes to shipping.
Well, I imagine in the 9+ months they owned Urchin before releasing Analytics, they were porting all the code to run on their scalable back end systems (GFS, BigTable and the like). Of course, Analytics was pretty poor the day it was released, and still doesn't have much information. I guess they didn't give it a cluster big enough or something.
Umm, are you guys sure Apple created Zeroconf? I thought it was created independently and then Apple started using and shipping it in a bunch of programs.
Your DVR transcodes the signal from your digital source to another format? Why? My family has a HD DVR and it just saves the digital stream directly. The quality is exactly the same as OTA.
Every screenshot of the stock widget shows Apple up. They also usually include PIXR, GOOG, and AMZN as gainers. When they include MSFT, it is always red :).
I tried some localized pages on Google's site (Taiwan, China, and Trinidad were the three that came to mind), but they didn't offer maps, I don't think. I guess I'm an idiot for not trying the English speaking TLDs like .ca and .co.uk. Oh well. Also, pinging google.ca gives me about 34 ms while google.com is 80. I should stick with you guys :).
Or http://216.239.39.99/.
Bahh! I was just going to compare Yahoo's new beta mapping service with Google Maps. Yahoo's maps looked very similar.
I know, what the hell. All of a sudden Google stopped working. Some other IPs work, but not that one. I could change my hosts file, but I don't want to. The thing is, without changing the hosts file, I can't login to like search history, because it tries to redirect to that one address. Also, Gmail and Maps aren't work for me either. Grr.
I think Steve has more power now with Pixar and Apple than he would without Pixar but with three billion dollars in cash. Steve can almost single handedly steer the computer industry (well, for consumers). Apple may only have a small 4% (or so) of sales, but they have much more influence in the industry. He also has tons of content producers using his products, when you think about Final Cut Pro. Pixar is an animation powerhouse. Their movies are almost guaranteed to be hits (because they are quality) and he has Disney by the balls. In an earlier discussion, some were guessing that Disney gave Apple their shows for the music (or would that be media?) store because Disney wanted to be on good terms with Steve in the hopes of recovering a relationship with Pixar. Also, Steve is the darling of the media and has given MS and Bill black eyes a number of times. Steve is better at predicting the needs of the market (iPod vs tablet PC or media center) than Bill, making Bill look foolish ("People want to talk to their computer").
Anyway, the point I'm trying to make is that Steve has amazing amounts of power in various industries with relatively little money (compared to folks like Bill or Larry Ellison). You know the old saying, "Only Jobs could have gone to the media companies."
This is true, but wouldn't they have ways to reduce grain and other problems? I mean hell, they fixed up the Star Wars movies for DVD (and broke them in many other areas, but they didn't improve color), I'd imagine they could reduce grain and stuff on old TV shows. However, would this be price prohibitive? They want to sell these shows on the cheap, which they might not be able to do if they have go through and improve the quality of each one. However, IANA Video Engineer or whatever, so I wouldn't know.
Hehe, okay. I don't actually use the system to mod down posts from my 'foes', I just use it as a marking of someone who has said something I didn't like. I can't remember all the reasons I foe people, but some include if they support that Russian music site and don't understand copyright. If someone unfairly bashes Apple ("The iTMS sucks. I'll only use it when songs cost 10 cents without DRM. Anyone who uses it now is an idiot."), etc. If you promote UN take over of the internet or more government control of our life, I might also make you a foe.
/.'s preferences) because they'll say informative stuff sometimes, but it just serves as a warning to me.
Think of it this way, I have so many foes, that it must not take much to get on my foe list (there fore decreasing the severity of the foe list). Again, I don't mod posts from foes down (using
Andrew
PS: Not like you'll ever read this since you posted AC and will probably forget about it, but oh well.
Yeah, suicide girls has an iPod-formatted video podcast right on their homepage (and it is aimed specifically at the iPod). I ran into their website today and thought that was freakin' awesome. Once I clear up some HD space, I'll have to subscribe. Also, here is another article about porn on the iPod. I forwarded that to my mom.
I agree. I've been to a number of Google tech talk/recruiting sessions and they really emphasize the small groups inside the company. Most projects seem to be 2-4 people. Only when a product nears launch do more people get involved (lawyers, UI designers, translators, etc.). I thought they said that Gmail was done by about four people for most of the time. When you have this many groups, of course there will be lots of diversity. Sometimes when I see a new product or one-box coming out of the Googleplex, I get worried that they are losing their focus and relevance (for a while they had two competing "definitive answer" one-boxes that sometimes both showed up for one query; I can't remember the names exactly, but I thought it looked pretty bad... where was the coordination?). However, most projects get fixed up and made better, and I regain faith in Google. Right now I'm most skeptical about the Web Accelerator (just because of all the problems it has had).
:)
Also, you are correct. Google has just started rolling out phase two of a three phase update to their ranking engine (dubbed jagger update). A lot of SEO folk are complaining about losing placement, and if they are complaining, I think that means we are getting better results
Andrew
Well, it was the first file that came to my mind. Plus, it is a small file to test, I didn't want to abuse TinyURL too much. I ripped a movie into H.264 and it is 700 megs. I thought about uploading that, but that would be a little too mean.
Google has a shuttle between SF and their offices in Mountain View. It significantly reduces the number of car trips and it also runs on biodiesel. Its incentives are that you don't have to be bothered with driving and you can use the wireless on the trip.
I'd rather see companies offer discounted bus passes (many companies subsidize parking for their employees in downtown areas) and shuttles like this rather than encouraging employees to buy "green" cars.
Even better, encourage bicycle use and/or locate your office in a dense neighborhood where employees can live close to work. I'd rather work in a dense urban area (not necessarily downtown, but a neighborhood that is consistently 3-4 stories tall (or on a bike trail, like OmniGroup)) than in a suburban office park.
Netscape 3.0? Too high tech for me. My friend reads Gmail with NS 2.0.
Yes, that is a 64K binary being emulated for PPC in Classic (IIRC).
Here is an interesting story. Last night I attended a discussion at the Science Fiction Museum (well, it was actually in the Experience Music Project, but they are the same building) with people involved in creating new lift technologies to get to space. One guy was a businessman from LiftPort, who is working on a space elevator. There was also a scientist there who had the idea of using ground based lasers to heat liquid hydrogen in a vehicle, which would be used as propellent.
:)
The big problems right now for the elevator are science based (hopefully the bottleneck will eventually become funding, as carbon nanotubes are developed). The laser guy's biggest problem was funding. His research was based on current technologies (and future advancements will only make his plan easier).
One person in the audience asked how the common folk can get involved, since we don't have large sums of money. Now to the point. I was in a Paul Allen funded building listening to a talk that would be right up his alley. He spent large sums of money on SpaceShipOne which used conventional lift technologies. I think it would be cool if he funded some of these lesser known lift technologies.
The laser system can lift 200 kg to orbit for about 100-200 USD/pound (I believe that was the example he gave). Unlike the space elevator, these launches could be nearly continuous and are much quicker than the elevator journey (although, they wouldn't carry nearly as much weight). It seems like the laser system would be ideal for sending tourists up to space (while the lift would be good for sending crafts/components/systems to space).
Okay, that was a lot of writing, but since you mentioned Paul Allen and space flight
Andrew