No, they didn't want their competitors muscling in on the agreement or otherwise getting wind of their plans.
Not to mention the other reasons to make confidentiality agreements. If you are buying up big plots of land you don't want to announce it otherwise you will get hold outs who can block the deal unless they are given big payoffs.
Hence the reason I offered the analogy of taking tax breaks that you don't support. Do you refuse to take tax breaks that you think are bad policy?
Slavery, Racism and sexism have very specific and compelling reasons why they are wrong. If someone engages in a perfectly legal and commonly accepted practice you have the burden of explaining what is morally wrong about it.
This is just standard buisness practice. States compete to attract large companies with jobs and those large companies do their best to cut good deals for them.
There is nothing even slightly unethical about this. One might argue that such a system is undesierable as it gives large companies an advantage over small companies, and their is some truth to that, but on the other hand large companies may have requirements that aren't easily dealt with in non-negotiated ways.
So I certainly see an argument for the federal government outlawing states from making deals with companies to attract them (some sorts of tax breaks are already forbidden) google certainaly didn't do anything immoral by using the same system that everyone else does. I mean that's like arguing your a bad person for taking advantage of Bush's tax breaks just because you voted against them.
I have to say that I'm extremely exasperated by the complaints against google for censoring their content. Yes, censorship is bad but it really pisses me off when people blame a company just for being tangled up in some unpalatable area even if their actions are a net benefit. The, quite compelling, justification that google gave for engaging in censorship was that if they didn't do it the Chinese would have access to even less information and that more censor friendly companies would take over.
This law still presents the danger of similar bad consequences. To the extent that foreign companies can still censor material we may see companies like Google who reluctantly censor material at government request replaced with foreign companies eager to please censoring government to curry favor. The net effect of this might be to create a second economy in censor friendly IT information. The last thing we want is to have a Chinese company position itself as a more censor-friendly alternative to google to all the oppressive regimes around the world.
So I'm unsure about the goodness of this bill. It may be on net positive or it may not.
What I would surely support would be an international treaty, signed by as many free societies as possible, that agrees to impose penalties on ANY company that colludes with government censorship. If the Chinese alternative to google can't avail itself of EU/US financial markets, get ad money from companies operating in these environments or otherwise access the free world it would prevent a censor friendly company from rising to offer an alternative to the free speech friendly services. Even better it would provide the best kind of pressure, internal demands by corporations who want to make money, on places like China to relax their censoring laws so their companies can compete in the world market.
Not to mention the fact that an international treaty like this would be more resistant to things like the US-Saudi friendship.
Well the cable company is effectively serving as a sorta ISP. You are paying them for the pipes that brings things to your house.
Still, ultimately I agree with you. I think we should just eliminate the notion of phone and cable companies and just let them all (and anyone else who wants) compete for our buisness as ISPs. We can then buy some nice little internet appliance connect it to our TV and get our shows on demand.
However, my point is that you shouldn't expect the number of commercials to decrease that much. If it does we will likely have to start really paying for the shows. In fact I think one of the primary things holding us back from this model is that the people making the shows need to make sure it isn't too easy to skip commercials. I'm not totally sure what to do about this because I really like having TV around but there are lots of channels I don't like enough to actually pay for.
Ohh you're saying there are MORE than 6 minutes of commercial time per 30 minutes? That means the cost to purchase the show commercial free should be even greater.
'These asshats' have a product and they are offering to sell/give it to you. If you don't like it you don't have to buy it but the idea that you are OWED ad free TV or they are committing some sin for not giving you the entertainment you want is just absurd.
And how is this content that you have paid for? Because you ordered basic cable? That money goes to the cable operator to pay for the network (the coaxial stuff all over town). The cable company is just passing on the content they get from the networks or other stations already containing most (all?) of the commercials and annoying distractions you noted.
In fact the wikipedia article on US cable TV seems to suggest that cable companies are legally required to carry local channels meaning that as far as network TV goes you aren't paying for a dime of content only the convenience of not having to use an antenna. In fact I believe that all the non-premium channels aren't paid at all by the local cable company and are entirely funded by commercials.
So no you have not paid for the content and that is why they have commercials. Sure you might think that cable networks aren't as pricey as you have to pay (probably thanks to your government and all the monopolies they grant the cable company plus hurdles like universal roll-out) but that is a totally different matter about deregulation not about commercials.
It's like you paid your $10 to get into CES/E3/linuxworld type event and now you're bitching about those 'asshats' who put their annoying logo all over the swag you paid for. I mean Jesus Christ this is as bad as the people who get all bent out of shape over wikipedia. If you think you aren't getting a sufficient amount of enjoyment for dollar of cable then DON'T BUY IT.
Maybe you do in the abstract but I suspect when you go to the theater you don't bother to think about which theater has fewer ads. Different theaters do have more or less ads but even the people who bitch the most about the ads pick their theaters based on location, size, or theater quality never number of ads. I mean hell at the movie theaters if you care enough you can just show up a few minutes late but most people seem to prefer taking their seat early and not rushing to avoiding the commercials.
In fact I tend to think that while people like complaining about previews they actually appreciate them. They don't like the previews themselves but they like the buffer zone of time that lets them buy candy or stop in the restroom (hence why these previews are also worth a whole lot more money than most ads to the theater).
Also the bit about 'more than their job' isn't quite right. We have psychological needs for different sorts of things through the day and watching TV (even commercials) is down time that is necessery to do one's job. I mean if they really didn't like commercials they could just get up and go somewhere else for the 5 minutes.
You illustrate my point perfectly. You find commercials annoying and complain about them but it doesn't sound like you stop watching TV when you don't have a DVR. Heck I suspect you don't even care enough to change which shows you watch based on differences in the length of commercials.
We clearly do have a choice. Different theaters get to choose how many ads they show before the film (though the film has some control over this too). Certainly the studio and the theater together have this control and if people were stopping going to that theater or those films because of the number of ads they would reduce them.
This is even more obvious on TV. Different channels (in consultation with affiliates) can choose to allocate commercials as they see fit. If ABC could make more money by stealing viewers from NBC by offering fewer commercials they would do so.
Just look at the radio stations where people DO care enough about commercials to change which channels they listen to or skip away. Their FM stations vigorously compete on how man and how frequent their commercials are.
It just seems to me like all this grousing about commercials is like complaining that the free T-shirt you got at E3 has some companies name all over it. Commercials are how we pay for our TV and people's actions reveal that they would rather pay the price in commercials than in cash or in worse programs.
Of course a big part of the reason that cable is so cheap per show is that they show advertising. To answer all those people who are bitching about having to pay for cable when it has commercials I want to point out that you pay a relatively small amount for quality (and many not so quality) cable shows because of these commercials. Sure you can argue that the locally inserted commercials by the cable company are a needless waste (but remember cable has far fewer customers than phone so they must split up the cost of their network over fewer people) but if you want big budget shows with high production values you either need to charge the way HBO does (10-15 bucks per channel per month) or fund them with commercials.
I suspect others will point out that the amount the advertiser is paying per viewer is much smaller than the cost of say an iTunes download hence it should be economical to have relatively cheap commercial free download, e.g., each downloader just needs to cover the total amount an advertiser would have paid to get commercials to you. From my quick google research it seems likely that the cost per impression in the male 18-34 age group (also the download group) it is about.2c. Given a 30minute program has 6 minutes of commercials that means about $1.20 of commercials (I suspect this might be a hit high but still roughly on target). Throw in the costs of the lost commercials from reruns (how frequently have you seen the same program a second time?) and the $1.99 price begins to seem relatively reasonable. Remember the viewers that are being lost to download aren't the people who are leaving their TV on while they do something else, they are the valuable viewers who are watching closely.
If you are willing to watch commercials in your download then it's a different story but if you aren't you have to ay to replace the money the commercials would have brought in.
Also these sort of pay per show model is only ever going to be an alternative to the normal model never a replacement. Sure we will pay for commercial free versions of our favorite shows we follow but most TV watching is done casually (I wonder if there is anything on) and no matter how much you bitch about commercials I doubt you would pay to watch a show just because you had 30minutes to kill but you will watch a show with commercials for that reason. We vote with our actions and those say we want a flat rate model that lets us watch shows for no extra cost when we feel like it.
It's just the same way that people bitch about ads at the start of movies but no matter how much people bitch they never go spend an extra $2 to go to the theater with less ads.
Yes, this was why I said it was written very confusingly.
Only one photon passed through at a time but the image was then reconstructed from MANY such photons. The advance that was made was a way to slow down/store all these photons sent individually in a way that made it easier to extract the image from them.
The Image is NOT encoded into one photon, at least not in a way that can be extracted again. Each individual photon is in a superposition of having gone all the possible paths and the set of those possible paths is the information to be extracted but when measured each photon will only reveal a small amount of information so it is only in the aggregate (by measuring lots of photons) that the initial image can be reproduced. At least this is what the article sounds like it is saying it wasn't very clear.
In fact it is probably best to think of this without quantum mechanics at all. What they did is pretty much like figuring out the shape of an object by shooting BBs at it and looking at which ones make it past the object.
The part that is supposedly new and interesting is the way they collected the photons at the other end. It didn't seem very clear on this but apparently by catching many of the photons in their device at one time it made it much easier to decode the image in the light.
Well what happened is that I almost never pay attention to my snail mail so when some time later the forms arrived I didn't realize I had them till shortly after they were due. The bank just said too bad. I lost six hundred dollars because I didn't notice one thin unremarkable envelope in my mail.
The bank was WaMu. I have since switched to BofA
I dunno about the rest of you but I find having to keep schedules and remember due dates worse than just having more to do. For instance I would rather have tax forms be twice as long than give up the easy extensions. Heck, as long as the government owes you money they don't even sweat late returns unlike dealing with my nasty bank.
Cringely didn't call it sinister or even imply that it was. He just suggested that google was positioning itself to take advantage of the coming bandwidth shortage. The only passage that even suggests sinisterness was his aside that maybe gathering up leasing deals should trigger government scrutiny and that seemed to be only a remark on policy not google's plan.
It's only the tinfoil hat slashdoters that added the word sinister.
Having had to deal with a bank to get credit card charges reversed I can safely say it isn't a pleasant experience. It involves lots of forms and remembering to do things at the right time and spending time on telephone lines. In short it is a pretty good incentive not to be careless with your banking security.
All that not refunding the customer's money would accomplish is hurt a lot of people and discourage people from using online banking or encourage them to change banks. People are never going to become security gurus just so they can bank online and if you make banking online too risky or hard they will just give it up.
By making sure it is the bank who has to pay for security losses while still making sure people have some incentive (annoyance, possibility they might pay next time or lossing $50) to be safe you end up with the best results. The bank is the entity that can roll out new security solutions and most easily improve security practices so giving them incentives to improve security is the best move.
The question about what the government should do is admittedly more murky. I still tend to think that government is just the composition of all the citizens who live in the country (or should be). Thus the governments moral responsibilities are the same as those of its citizens. In other words if it's wrong for me and all my friends to try and benefit ourselves by screwing someone else over it's still wrong for us to form a club which does it for us.
However, this is besides the point. Even if you think the government should only be interested in looking our for US citizens this has no bearing on the morality of a *company* relocating jobs.
What I object to is the claim of the moral high ground by opponents of outsourcing as if taking a job from a rich person and giving it to a poor person (in a legal way) was a moral wrong. Even if the government should try and stop it this doesn't make the company wrong to do it.
Why should the guy from india get it up the ass? Denying the guy in the third world the job screws him over far worse than denying the guy in the US the job. Hell if you live in the US and end up having to work at McDonalds you may still have better health care and other advantages than the guy in the third world.
Now sure I don't expect people to be selfless but don't try and hide your selfishness under the cloak of moral righteousness. Every employer who takes jobs from the US and moves them to the third world is improving the world. If you want to selfishly try to convince him to do otherwise that's fine, we all spend money on ourselves that we could give to charity, but don't try and take the moral high ground while you do it.
It really annoys me that large amounts of money are being spent and risk being taken (by leaving nuclear waste in temporary storage) to make sure it doesn't leak 1000 years in the future.
Either in 1000 years we will have crazy advanced technology and it will be cheaper (time value of money) to clean up any spill then than it is to over-engineer and stall now or civilization will have collapsed and it really won't matter (given the population densities of uncivilized people the potential harm now from not acting is greater than the damage to a future uncivilized society).
People are no less morally worthy because they live in Bangalore India rather than Bangor Maine. Sure it might suck if you lose your job because it moved overseas to India but it doesn't suck anymore than if you lost your job because it moved to another state. There is no justification to be up in arms about India attracting tech jobs than there is to be up in arms because Virginia and other states with lower paid programmers are attracting tech jobs from Silicon Valley.
Moreover, the people in the third world benefit far more from these jobs than do Americans. The difference in lifestyle a good job makes in the US (where social services and other benefits provide a safety net) is a lot smaller than the difference it makes to someone in a third world country. Relative to the countries 'taking' our jobs we are the very wealthy and it is disgusting that we whine when they want even an unequal share of our prosperity. If you believe the we should tax the rich to provide benefits to the poor, or just don't believe in making laws/policies to keep the rich rich and the poor poor it is hypocritical to complain when the truly poorly off start making some money by working harder for less money than people in the US do.
In the long run (and perhaps medium or even short term) I think outsourcing will benefit us, not only by making the world a richer and thus safer place but also by cheaper goods and economies of scale but even if this wasn't true it wouldn't be good grounds for complaining about outsourcing.
Bitching about outsourcing is just selfish pouting because someone else wants a poor version of the opportunities we enjoy!
Bad UI design occurs for the same reason that bad programming occurs. A need for backwards compatibility and unforeseen complications. In both circumstances total rewrites can address the problem but economics make these sort of rewrites infrequent. It's just a bit harder for UI design than programming.
Sure good UI design requires more research or experience but it would be the same if programmers had the same needs as normal users. The problem is figuring out beforehand what users will need to do and what they won't. If you get the wrong answer to this question, just like if you get the wrong answer to what an API needs to be able to do, you will later need to work around it with bad hacks. Worse unlike API changes every change in the UI is visible to the end user who will resent changes, even ones that make it better and more useful.
If you want a good example just look at the resistance to the change in the word API to the new ribbon interface.
Ultimately the problem is the reaction of users to changes. Here there is no difference between programmers and luddittes. Each likes to use what they know and hates to change. If anything programmers are worse, just like at how religiously they defend ridiculous programs like vi.
I think a perfect example is OS X. It just works for the users like my grandpa who want that but offers easy access to the command line and BSD parts for the technically inclined.
The key is good UI design, in particular good separation between advanced options and standard options. Windows fails because far too frequently a normal user needs to go access the advanced features so all the advanced features and terminology are there to confuse the user. Try sharing files in windows and you need to do arcane things like change the workgroup name. Just to check if I could uninstall programs I've needed to run msconfig. Conversely on a mac the normal user just deals with the preference pane and never has to run command line programs or the like.
I don't mean to be a mac zealot. They've done things wrong as well (I'm pretty pissed about their special power cord) but they did a good job of separating advanced from basic features, partially because they were willing to jettison the old ways of doing things.
In any case good design doesn't require a choice between power and ease of use. It just requires a clear cut distinction so the normal user never needs to deal with the advanced features.
This isn't really a big deal or very surprising. Most judges aren't too familiar with the internet and technology and at the non-appealete level where they are dealing with a big well funded company who is likely suing someone who hasn't put much money into the legal defense it isn't surprising that one would get bad deciscions like this in unsettled areas of the law.
What really matters is what happens when these issues reach the appealete (damn lack of spellcheck on IE) courts. By that point hopefully the EFF and other organizations have gotten involved to put up a real legal fight and the judges have more time to learn about the technology and issues.
I find the claim that listening to an audio CD will degrade your (non-protected) video output extremely fishy.
It sounds to me like a misreading of the spec. Likely the spec requires degrading the signal when any part of THAT signal is protected, i.e., you have to degrade the audio signal if you are listening to a CD while the computer reads some text but this doesn't affect the video.
The automatic echo cancellation seems even more fishy. In order to do auto echo cancellation one only needs access to the sound coming in from the microphone. I can't think of any time access to this information is likely to be restricted.
Many of these points are simply too extreme and need documentation.
So yes I will admit that I hate MS. I don't hate the people who work there, have known some and got along quite well with them, I don't even hate Gates and company. Gates seems like a well-intentioned man who is doing much good in the world. I even acknowledge the many useful products microsoft makes and the contributions of microsoft research to the CS world. Given that Gates is donating so much of his loot to charity I'm not even willing to say that MS on the whole causes harm.
However, I do resent and dislike the company. Primarily I dislike them because of their constant success in scuttling real competition on product merits. We can go back to the DiskDoubler stuff back in dos (or early windows I don't remember) where the company with the superior product was pushed out of the market by IP infringement on MS's part and while I believe they did ultimatly win the lawsuit it was too late for them to grab mindshare. This practice continued with the netscape bundling dispute not to mention their relationship with the mac. Most recently we see it with their opposition to ODF and the political manipulations in both the UK and here to stop municipalities from using FOSS.
In short I hate MS for the same reason anyone hates a monopoly. I think their domination of the OS market has been used to stifle free competition that might have brought better technology to the desktop. Even now as virtual machines become more popular and we should see an age of OS agnosticism MS is trying to prevent that outcome by controlling just enough of.net technologies to make sure write once run anywhere never succeeds.
More personally I resent them for forcing me to make a choice between compatibility and access to windows documents and programs and running an OS I prefer. Admittedly if their own OS was a bit less clunky, a bit more elegant and most importantly had less of a sharp divide between developer and user (as OS X manages) I probably would be happy.
First of all the disk startup sector playlist OS X uses (creates a list of all the sectors you tend to use in booting and just reads them from disk at startup in the most efficient order) ends up speeding up boot up pretty impressively.
But now suppose you want to do something more than this and really just read things in from a memory image. At some time I wondered why they didn't do this and then it became clear that device initialization and dependency tracking make this impossible. The problem is how the OS boots is dependent on the results of querying devices and it must set these devices up as well. For instance you want your network to be configured as the result of values from the DHCP server not just whatever values you had last time. Also you don't want to use the image of processes that think they are still talking to some no longer existent name server or other expired data.
This having been said I think there is a lot of improvement that can be had. OS X starts up pretty quick but it could be faster and the programs still can take awhile to start. Explicit dependency graphs combined with the priority that some startup process should execute with could make things even better by allowing you to get started right away while utility processes are still being starting and executing in the background. User programs that are set to being at startup should be able to be loaded and launched with some equivalent of nice even if they are to execute at some other priority once working.
If one wants to get really fancy you could probably work out a system that accelerates launching applications in general. It should be possible to use code/data dependency analysis to create modified executables whose (detectably) non-input/state dependent initialization work is already finished. Even more ambitiously one could try to create a 'playlist' of system calls that the application makes when initializing and try to optimize the execution of these calls. To get really crazy one might try to combine this with some type of profiling and data/code dependency analysis to check if some later commonly used image can be used (e.g., cache the results of telling the application that yes the resolution is greater than 320x200).
I think the prospect of an automatic version of this is to go to an all JITed world where the OS is integrated with the compiler. Using partial analysis and clever caching techniques one could probably crazily speed up the startup times of most programs. Besides it would allow architecture independence.
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No, they didn't want their competitors muscling in on the agreement or otherwise getting wind of their plans.
Not to mention the other reasons to make confidentiality agreements. If you are buying up big plots of land you don't want to announce it otherwise you will get hold outs who can block the deal unless they are given big payoffs.
Thanks, I couldn't think of good examples. I said there was an argument that it was bad policy but I'm not convinced.
Hence the reason I offered the analogy of taking tax breaks that you don't support. Do you refuse to take tax breaks that you think are bad policy?
Slavery, Racism and sexism have very specific and compelling reasons why they are wrong. If someone engages in a perfectly legal and commonly accepted practice you have the burden of explaining what is morally wrong about it.
This is just standard buisness practice. States compete to attract large companies with jobs and those large companies do their best to cut good deals for them.
There is nothing even slightly unethical about this. One might argue that such a system is undesierable as it gives large companies an advantage over small companies, and their is some truth to that, but on the other hand large companies may have requirements that aren't easily dealt with in non-negotiated ways.
So I certainly see an argument for the federal government outlawing states from making deals with companies to attract them (some sorts of tax breaks are already forbidden) google certainaly didn't do anything immoral by using the same system that everyone else does. I mean that's like arguing your a bad person for taking advantage of Bush's tax breaks just because you voted against them.
I have to say that I'm extremely exasperated by the complaints against google for censoring their content. Yes, censorship is bad but it really pisses me off when people blame a company just for being tangled up in some unpalatable area even if their actions are a net benefit. The, quite compelling, justification that google gave for engaging in censorship was that if they didn't do it the Chinese would have access to even less information and that more censor friendly companies would take over.
This law still presents the danger of similar bad consequences. To the extent that foreign companies can still censor material we may see companies like Google who reluctantly censor material at government request replaced with foreign companies eager to please censoring government to curry favor. The net effect of this might be to create a second economy in censor friendly IT information. The last thing we want is to have a Chinese company position itself as a more censor-friendly alternative to google to all the oppressive regimes around the world.
So I'm unsure about the goodness of this bill. It may be on net positive or it may not.
What I would surely support would be an international treaty, signed by as many free societies as possible, that agrees to impose penalties on ANY company that colludes with government censorship. If the Chinese alternative to google can't avail itself of EU/US financial markets, get ad money from companies operating in these environments or otherwise access the free world it would prevent a censor friendly company from rising to offer an alternative to the free speech friendly services. Even better it would provide the best kind of pressure, internal demands by corporations who want to make money, on places like China to relax their censoring laws so their companies can compete in the world market.
Not to mention the fact that an international treaty like this would be more resistant to things like the US-Saudi friendship.
Well the cable company is effectively serving as a sorta ISP. You are paying them for the pipes that brings things to your house.
Still, ultimately I agree with you. I think we should just eliminate the notion of phone and cable companies and just let them all (and anyone else who wants) compete for our buisness as ISPs. We can then buy some nice little internet appliance connect it to our TV and get our shows on demand.
However, my point is that you shouldn't expect the number of commercials to decrease that much. If it does we will likely have to start really paying for the shows. In fact I think one of the primary things holding us back from this model is that the people making the shows need to make sure it isn't too easy to skip commercials. I'm not totally sure what to do about this because I really like having TV around but there are lots of channels I don't like enough to actually pay for.
Ohh you're saying there are MORE than 6 minutes of commercial time per 30 minutes? That means the cost to purchase the show commercial free should be even greater.
'These asshats' have a product and they are offering to sell/give it to you. If you don't like it you don't have to buy it but the idea that you are OWED ad free TV or they are committing some sin for not giving you the entertainment you want is just absurd.
And how is this content that you have paid for? Because you ordered basic cable? That money goes to the cable operator to pay for the network (the coaxial stuff all over town). The cable company is just passing on the content they get from the networks or other stations already containing most (all?) of the commercials and annoying distractions you noted.
In fact the wikipedia article on US cable TV seems to suggest that cable companies are legally required to carry local channels meaning that as far as network TV goes you aren't paying for a dime of content only the convenience of not having to use an antenna. In fact I believe that all the non-premium channels aren't paid at all by the local cable company and are entirely funded by commercials.
So no you have not paid for the content and that is why they have commercials. Sure you might think that cable networks aren't as pricey as you have to pay (probably thanks to your government and all the monopolies they grant the cable company plus hurdles like universal roll-out) but that is a totally different matter about deregulation not about commercials.
It's like you paid your $10 to get into CES/E3/linuxworld type event and now you're bitching about those 'asshats' who put their annoying logo all over the swag you paid for. I mean Jesus Christ this is as bad as the people who get all bent out of shape over wikipedia. If you think you aren't getting a sufficient amount of enjoyment for dollar of cable then DON'T BUY IT.
Maybe you do in the abstract but I suspect when you go to the theater you don't bother to think about which theater has fewer ads. Different theaters do have more or less ads but even the people who bitch the most about the ads pick their theaters based on location, size, or theater quality never number of ads. I mean hell at the movie theaters if you care enough you can just show up a few minutes late but most people seem to prefer taking their seat early and not rushing to avoiding the commercials.
In fact I tend to think that while people like complaining about previews they actually appreciate them. They don't like the previews themselves but they like the buffer zone of time that lets them buy candy or stop in the restroom (hence why these previews are also worth a whole lot more money than most ads to the theater).
Also the bit about 'more than their job' isn't quite right. We have psychological needs for different sorts of things through the day and watching TV (even commercials) is down time that is necessery to do one's job. I mean if they really didn't like commercials they could just get up and go somewhere else for the 5 minutes.
You illustrate my point perfectly. You find commercials annoying and complain about them but it doesn't sound like you stop watching TV when you don't have a DVR. Heck I suspect you don't even care enough to change which shows you watch based on differences in the length of commercials.
We clearly do have a choice. Different theaters get to choose how many ads they show before the film (though the film has some control over this too). Certainly the studio and the theater together have this control and if people were stopping going to that theater or those films because of the number of ads they would reduce them.
This is even more obvious on TV. Different channels (in consultation with affiliates) can choose to allocate commercials as they see fit. If ABC could make more money by stealing viewers from NBC by offering fewer commercials they would do so.
Just look at the radio stations where people DO care enough about commercials to change which channels they listen to or skip away. Their FM stations vigorously compete on how man and how frequent their commercials are.
It just seems to me like all this grousing about commercials is like complaining that the free T-shirt you got at E3 has some companies name all over it. Commercials are how we pay for our TV and people's actions reveal that they would rather pay the price in commercials than in cash or in worse programs.
Of course a big part of the reason that cable is so cheap per show is that they show advertising. To answer all those people who are bitching about having to pay for cable when it has commercials I want to point out that you pay a relatively small amount for quality (and many not so quality) cable shows because of these commercials. Sure you can argue that the locally inserted commercials by the cable company are a needless waste (but remember cable has far fewer customers than phone so they must split up the cost of their network over fewer people) but if you want big budget shows with high production values you either need to charge the way HBO does (10-15 bucks per channel per month) or fund them with commercials.
.2c. Given a 30minute program has 6 minutes of commercials that means about $1.20 of commercials (I suspect this might be a hit high but still roughly on target). Throw in the costs of the lost commercials from reruns (how frequently have you seen the same program a second time?) and the $1.99 price begins to seem relatively reasonable. Remember the viewers that are being lost to download aren't the people who are leaving their TV on while they do something else, they are the valuable viewers who are watching closely.
I suspect others will point out that the amount the advertiser is paying per viewer is much smaller than the cost of say an iTunes download hence it should be economical to have relatively cheap commercial free download, e.g., each downloader just needs to cover the total amount an advertiser would have paid to get commercials to you. From my quick google research it seems likely that the cost per impression in the male 18-34 age group (also the download group) it is about
If you are willing to watch commercials in your download then it's a different story but if you aren't you have to ay to replace the money the commercials would have brought in.
Also these sort of pay per show model is only ever going to be an alternative to the normal model never a replacement. Sure we will pay for commercial free versions of our favorite shows we follow but most TV watching is done casually (I wonder if there is anything on) and no matter how much you bitch about commercials I doubt you would pay to watch a show just because you had 30minutes to kill but you will watch a show with commercials for that reason. We vote with our actions and those say we want a flat rate model that lets us watch shows for no extra cost when we feel like it.
It's just the same way that people bitch about ads at the start of movies but no matter how much people bitch they never go spend an extra $2 to go to the theater with less ads.
Yes, this was why I said it was written very confusingly.
Only one photon passed through at a time but the image was then reconstructed from MANY such photons. The advance that was made was a way to slow down/store all these photons sent individually in a way that made it easier to extract the image from them.
The Image is NOT encoded into one photon, at least not in a way that can be extracted again. Each individual photon is in a superposition of having gone all the possible paths and the set of those possible paths is the information to be extracted but when measured each photon will only reveal a small amount of information so it is only in the aggregate (by measuring lots of photons) that the initial image can be reproduced. At least this is what the article sounds like it is saying it wasn't very clear.
In fact it is probably best to think of this without quantum mechanics at all. What they did is pretty much like figuring out the shape of an object by shooting BBs at it and looking at which ones make it past the object.
The part that is supposedly new and interesting is the way they collected the photons at the other end. It didn't seem very clear on this but apparently by catching many of the photons in their device at one time it made it much easier to decode the image in the light.
Well what happened is that I almost never pay attention to my snail mail so when some time later the forms arrived I didn't realize I had them till shortly after they were due. The bank just said too bad. I lost six hundred dollars because I didn't notice one thin unremarkable envelope in my mail.
The bank was WaMu. I have since switched to BofA
I dunno about the rest of you but I find having to keep schedules and remember due dates worse than just having more to do. For instance I would rather have tax forms be twice as long than give up the easy extensions. Heck, as long as the government owes you money they don't even sweat late returns unlike dealing with my nasty bank.
Cringely didn't call it sinister or even imply that it was. He just suggested that google was positioning itself to take advantage of the coming bandwidth shortage. The only passage that even suggests sinisterness was his aside that maybe gathering up leasing deals should trigger government scrutiny and that seemed to be only a remark on policy not google's plan.
It's only the tinfoil hat slashdoters that added the word sinister.
Having had to deal with a bank to get credit card charges reversed I can safely say it isn't a pleasant experience. It involves lots of forms and remembering to do things at the right time and spending time on telephone lines. In short it is a pretty good incentive not to be careless with your banking security.
All that not refunding the customer's money would accomplish is hurt a lot of people and discourage people from using online banking or encourage them to change banks. People are never going to become security gurus just so they can bank online and if you make banking online too risky or hard they will just give it up.
By making sure it is the bank who has to pay for security losses while still making sure people have some incentive (annoyance, possibility they might pay next time or lossing $50) to be safe you end up with the best results. The bank is the entity that can roll out new security solutions and most easily improve security practices so giving them incentives to improve security is the best move.
The question about what the government should do is admittedly more murky. I still tend to think that government is just the composition of all the citizens who live in the country (or should be). Thus the governments moral responsibilities are the same as those of its citizens. In other words if it's wrong for me and all my friends to try and benefit ourselves by screwing someone else over it's still wrong for us to form a club which does it for us.
However, this is besides the point. Even if you think the government should only be interested in looking our for US citizens this has no bearing on the morality of a *company* relocating jobs.
What I object to is the claim of the moral high ground by opponents of outsourcing as if taking a job from a rich person and giving it to a poor person (in a legal way) was a moral wrong. Even if the government should try and stop it this doesn't make the company wrong to do it.
Why should the guy from india get it up the ass? Denying the guy in the third world the job screws him over far worse than denying the guy in the US the job. Hell if you live in the US and end up having to work at McDonalds you may still have better health care and other advantages than the guy in the third world.
Now sure I don't expect people to be selfless but don't try and hide your selfishness under the cloak of moral righteousness. Every employer who takes jobs from the US and moves them to the third world is improving the world. If you want to selfishly try to convince him to do otherwise that's fine, we all spend money on ourselves that we could give to charity, but don't try and take the moral high ground while you do it.
It really annoys me that large amounts of money are being spent and risk being taken (by leaving nuclear waste in temporary storage) to make sure it doesn't leak 1000 years in the future.
Either in 1000 years we will have crazy advanced technology and it will be cheaper (time value of money) to clean up any spill then than it is to over-engineer and stall now or civilization will have collapsed and it really won't matter (given the population densities of uncivilized people the potential harm now from not acting is greater than the damage to a future uncivilized society).
People are no less morally worthy because they live in Bangalore India rather than Bangor Maine. Sure it might suck if you lose your job because it moved overseas to India but it doesn't suck anymore than if you lost your job because it moved to another state. There is no justification to be up in arms about India attracting tech jobs than there is to be up in arms because Virginia and other states with lower paid programmers are attracting tech jobs from Silicon Valley.
Moreover, the people in the third world benefit far more from these jobs than do Americans. The difference in lifestyle a good job makes in the US (where social services and other benefits provide a safety net) is a lot smaller than the difference it makes to someone in a third world country. Relative to the countries 'taking' our jobs we are the very wealthy and it is disgusting that we whine when they want even an unequal share of our prosperity. If you believe the we should tax the rich to provide benefits to the poor, or just don't believe in making laws/policies to keep the rich rich and the poor poor it is hypocritical to complain when the truly poorly off start making some money by working harder for less money than people in the US do.
In the long run (and perhaps medium or even short term) I think outsourcing will benefit us, not only by making the world a richer and thus safer place but also by cheaper goods and economies of scale but even if this wasn't true it wouldn't be good grounds for complaining about outsourcing.
Bitching about outsourcing is just selfish pouting because someone else wants a poor version of the opportunities we enjoy!
Bad UI design occurs for the same reason that bad programming occurs. A need for backwards compatibility and unforeseen complications. In both circumstances total rewrites can address the problem but economics make these sort of rewrites infrequent. It's just a bit harder for UI design than programming.
Sure good UI design requires more research or experience but it would be the same if programmers had the same needs as normal users. The problem is figuring out beforehand what users will need to do and what they won't. If you get the wrong answer to this question, just like if you get the wrong answer to what an API needs to be able to do, you will later need to work around it with bad hacks. Worse unlike API changes every change in the UI is visible to the end user who will resent changes, even ones that make it better and more useful.
If you want a good example just look at the resistance to the change in the word API to the new ribbon interface.
Ultimately the problem is the reaction of users to changes. Here there is no difference between programmers and luddittes. Each likes to use what they know and hates to change. If anything programmers are worse, just like at how religiously they defend ridiculous programs like vi.
I think a perfect example is OS X. It just works for the users like my grandpa who want that but offers easy access to the command line and BSD parts for the technically inclined.
The key is good UI design, in particular good separation between advanced options and standard options. Windows fails because far too frequently a normal user needs to go access the advanced features so all the advanced features and terminology are there to confuse the user. Try sharing files in windows and you need to do arcane things like change the workgroup name. Just to check if I could uninstall programs I've needed to run msconfig. Conversely on a mac the normal user just deals with the preference pane and never has to run command line programs or the like.
I don't mean to be a mac zealot. They've done things wrong as well (I'm pretty pissed about their special power cord) but they did a good job of separating advanced from basic features, partially because they were willing to jettison the old ways of doing things.
In any case good design doesn't require a choice between power and ease of use. It just requires a clear cut distinction so the normal user never needs to deal with the advanced features.
This isn't really a big deal or very surprising. Most judges aren't too familiar with the internet and technology and at the non-appealete level where they are dealing with a big well funded company who is likely suing someone who hasn't put much money into the legal defense it isn't surprising that one would get bad deciscions like this in unsettled areas of the law.
What really matters is what happens when these issues reach the appealete (damn lack of spellcheck on IE) courts. By that point hopefully the EFF and other organizations have gotten involved to put up a real legal fight and the judges have more time to learn about the technology and issues.
I find the claim that listening to an audio CD will degrade your (non-protected) video output extremely fishy.
It sounds to me like a misreading of the spec. Likely the spec requires degrading the signal when any part of THAT signal is protected, i.e., you have to degrade the audio signal if you are listening to a CD while the computer reads some text but this doesn't affect the video.
The automatic echo cancellation seems even more fishy. In order to do auto echo cancellation one only needs access to the sound coming in from the microphone. I can't think of any time access to this information is likely to be restricted.
Many of these points are simply too extreme and need documentation.
So yes I will admit that I hate MS. I don't hate the people who work there, have known some and got along quite well with them, I don't even hate Gates and company. Gates seems like a well-intentioned man who is doing much good in the world. I even acknowledge the many useful products microsoft makes and the contributions of microsoft research to the CS world. Given that Gates is donating so much of his loot to charity I'm not even willing to say that MS on the whole causes harm.
.net technologies to make sure write once run anywhere never succeeds.
However, I do resent and dislike the company. Primarily I dislike them because of their constant success in scuttling real competition on product merits. We can go back to the DiskDoubler stuff back in dos (or early windows I don't remember) where the company with the superior product was pushed out of the market by IP infringement on MS's part and while I believe they did ultimatly win the lawsuit it was too late for them to grab mindshare. This practice continued with the netscape bundling dispute not to mention their relationship with the mac. Most recently we see it with their opposition to ODF and the political manipulations in both the UK and here to stop municipalities from using FOSS.
In short I hate MS for the same reason anyone hates a monopoly. I think their domination of the OS market has been used to stifle free competition that might have brought better technology to the desktop. Even now as virtual machines become more popular and we should see an age of OS agnosticism MS is trying to prevent that outcome by controlling just enough of
More personally I resent them for forcing me to make a choice between compatibility and access to windows documents and programs and running an OS I prefer. Admittedly if their own OS was a bit less clunky, a bit more elegant and most importantly had less of a sharp divide between developer and user (as OS X manages) I probably would be happy.
First of all the disk startup sector playlist OS X uses (creates a list of all the sectors you tend to use in booting and just reads them from disk at startup in the most efficient order) ends up speeding up boot up pretty impressively.
But now suppose you want to do something more than this and really just read things in from a memory image. At some time I wondered why they didn't do this and then it became clear that device initialization and dependency tracking make this impossible. The problem is how the OS boots is dependent on the results of querying devices and it must set these devices up as well. For instance you want your network to be configured as the result of values from the DHCP server not just whatever values you had last time. Also you don't want to use the image of processes that think they are still talking to some no longer existent name server or other expired data.
This having been said I think there is a lot of improvement that can be had. OS X starts up pretty quick but it could be faster and the programs still can take awhile to start. Explicit dependency graphs combined with the priority that some startup process should execute with could make things even better by allowing you to get started right away while utility processes are still being starting and executing in the background. User programs that are set to being at startup should be able to be loaded and launched with some equivalent of nice even if they are to execute at some other priority once working.
If one wants to get really fancy you could probably work out a system that accelerates launching applications in general. It should be possible to use code/data dependency analysis to create modified executables whose (detectably) non-input/state dependent initialization work is already finished. Even more ambitiously one could try to create a 'playlist' of system calls that the application makes when initializing and try to optimize the execution of these calls. To get really crazy one might try to combine this with some type of profiling and data/code dependency analysis to check if some later commonly used image can be used (e.g., cache the results of telling the application that yes the resolution is greater than 320x200).
I think the prospect of an automatic version of this is to go to an all JITed world where the OS is integrated with the compiler. Using partial analysis and clever caching techniques one could probably crazily speed up the startup times of most programs. Besides it would allow architecture independence.