Buy this book. The author knows Vista way better than even Bill Gates does, and might even make you crack a smile now and then as you learn. Imagine that.
PBS has been struggling for years to figure out how to compete against the Discovery nonfiction channels (TLC, Animal Planet, Discovery Channel, and their lesser siblings) in science programming, and to a lesser extent, National Geographic and other comers. PBS has also struggled to see how the long-form documentary can continue to hold market share in a world that won't watch YouTube videos that run longer than two minutes.
The old guard in television cannot fully grok the mindset of those who've come of age during the internet age and its panoply of media choices. But they do understand that without adaptation, they will die. So they tend to focus on acquiring the look-and-feel of new media (but not the vital essences), hoping that will make them seem relevant to new-media users. Lipstick on a pig, and all that. Very nice lipstick, sometimes, but....
NOVA wisely invested early in web programming, and their science websites are superb examples of what can be done with Web 1.0. (Heh heh, I should disclose I wrote one of those to go along with the film I made. You can see it here. Check out the "Dispatches" section for some old-skool science blogging.)
NOVA on television has resisted surrendering its brand identity against immense financial pressure, as well as cultural pressure to "liven up," "get hip," and other assorted me-too thinking that says no one will sit and watch a quality hour anymore. NOVA hasn't quite caved, but you can see the difference when comparing latest product against films from earlier years. Still, once you see what they've been up against, NOVA is still a marvel of principle and plain old stubbornness.
As for the purported modern lack of an audience for high-quality single-subject programs...I don't buy it.
I'm part of the PBS advisory panel that's "focus-grouping" these new shows. (They don't even know I'm one of their past producers...and I ain't sayin'.) Trust me, PBS has marshaled extraordinary user input throughout the development of this new programming. They have done their homework. Nonetheless, I've been thinking it was the wrong homework assignment.
IMO, focus-group design by consensus can yield good quality, but not brilliance. Can anyone imagine focus-grouping The Secret Life of Machines? The Day the Universe Changed? (Or to stretch it a bit, even Mystery Science Theater 3000?) Those shows, and other greats, rely on irrepressible characters who, like the author of a great book, slowly but surely make you realize they're in on a great secret. And that they want to let you in on it.
Ok, some of these people are not poster children for The Seven Habits of Successful People, and could probably use a better haircut, but you just know they'd be doing this show for free (or maybe they did). It's not their panache but their passion that infects you like a Russian hacker's virus and absorbs you into their conspiracy. Their world is more full of dynamite and diamond pipes and Tesla coils and grizzly bears taking sunbaths and...and...they seem to have figured out how one thing connects to another. Their world is equal parts revealed truth and grand fun. Maybe even more grand fun than revealed truth. They make you realize the riches of the world lie around your feet like November leaves in such abundance that you haven't even noticed them as you kick your way forward each day.
They open your eyes. They make you stay awake in your bed way too late and dream about the places you really can't wait any longer to go...and damn it, someday you will...then you fall asleep.
I love Wired magazine, and have all kinds of cool electronica, and download books off Demonoid while I'm TiVoing BBC docs while I'm walking the stacks at the library while I'm listening to a podcast. But that doesn't mean I want a science show modeled on Entertainment Tonight's magazine format. I don't want hip poseurs, even if they've been coached not to seem like poseurs. I don't want beautiful people
Umm, I was referring to /. readers' SEX LIVES lol
on
One Big Bang, Or Many?
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· Score: 1
"The one-way journey from the heart of a galaxy into the oblivion of a black hole probably takes about 200,000 years..."
"...scientists figured that material moving at 177 000km an hour would still take eons to cross into a black hole."
Eons are the largest division of geologic time. There have been just four of them since the formation of the Earth. In rough terms, that's a billion years each.
Maybe the reporter can get a job working on unit conversion for the next Mars probe. (*cough*)
In the glory days of the dotcom boom, FreePC gave away 10,000 computers, free, nada, goose-egg. No shipping, no contracts, no obligations EXCEPT you had to run their advertising overlay when you were browsing the Web.
I know because I got one. I still couldn't believe it when the UPS man showed up with the boxes. It may be that there are VERY FEW things in life that are free, but this was one of them.
They were cheapie little Compaqs with a Cyrix M-II CPU but at least you could brag that the price/performance ratio was extraordinarily high. Actually, they ran fine, certainly good enough for browsing...especially after you wiped off the disk and put a fresh install of Windows on it. (My mom still uses that machine to this day.)
(From the previous post...) "The reason nature has adopted the flapping wing is simply because it cannot emulate a shaft unidirctionally rotating in a bearing in a biological structure, so it had to make do."
Au contraire. Mother Nature is one hell of an engineer. I remember reading about the design of bacterial rotary flagellae in Scientific American a few years back, and marvelling at the elegance of the motor.
Here's an article from Wikipedia that describes it pretty well (excerpted below). The filament is composed of the protein flagellin and is a hollow tube 20 nanometers thick. It is helical, and has a sharp bend just outside the outer membrane called the "hook" which allows the helix to point directly away from the cell. A shaft runs between the hook and the basal body, passing through protein rings in the cell's membranes that act as bearings.
The bacterijjkklellum is driven by a rotary engine composed of protein, located at the flagellum's anchor point on the inner cell membrane. The engine is powered by proton motive force, i.e., by the flow of protons across the bacterial cell membrane due to a concentration gradient set up by the cell's metabolism (in Vibrio species the motor is a sodium ion pump, rather than a proton pump). The rotor transports protons across the membrane, and is turned in the process. The rotor by itself can operate at 6,000 to 17,000 rpm, but with a filament attached usually only reaches 200 to 1000 rpm.
In Spring of 2000, my LeadTek GeForce 256 came with a fan, a noisy little bugger that failed in less than a year. Here's a picture . So did most of the other flavors (Asus, Guillemot, etc.), as a fan was specified on the nVidia reference design. I ended up taking the fan off, and attaching a large passive heatsink. End of problem.
How long before those cams are connected to some flash ram in the black box that's already installed in new cars, "strictly to assist safety research"? How long before someone (or some insurance company) sues to recover those images, to be used against the driver in a civil suit? How long before some lame-o legislature grants law enforcement a "right" to those images, probably citing a desire to "protect the children"? How long, in short, before the government has a digital videocam watching your every move while you drive your car? Think they'll only be interested in accident-related activities? I don't.
Be afraid. The future is now, and it does not like you or your silly privacy rights.
The parent refers to the length of an Earth day when the planet's rotation is measured against the "fixed" stars (sidereal time). More precisely, this "sidereal day" is 23 hours 56 minutes 4.091 seconds. Measured against the sun, however, the length of an Earth day is 24 hours. When you use the fixed stars as a frame of reference, the motion of the entire solar system puts a little extra "English" on the spin of the Earth.
Re:where is it now? - Dino-iron is not extinct yet
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Happy Birthday, UNIVAC I
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· Score: 5, Informative
Here's a great freeware UNIVAC simulator you can use until you get your own UNIVAC off eBay. MTBF on those babies was somewhere around 10 hours due to the use of vacuum tubes...hopefully your PC running this sim will post somewhat better reliability numbers.:D If you'd like to see some dino-iron in person, a similar-era ENIAC resides in a basement museum in the Engineering School at the University of Michigan. This page is full of good information and links. Also, check out this list if you're interested in restorations of other ancient machines such as Crays and Cybers; my favorites are the Royal-McBee LGP 21 and 30 machines, immortalized in the Jargon File mythologies about Real Programmers. Read The Story of Mel and be enlightened (as well as entertained) about how a True Master thinks when dealing with the limitations of old hardware. It's so Zen it will make you clap with one hand.
If Mac OSX were the dominant OS, then worms would be predominantly written for it, and would drive up its TCO. If Linux were the dominant OS, then worms would be predominantly written for it, and would drive up its TCO. Etc., etc. Sure, OSX or Linux or [insert pet OS here] would be tougher to exploit, but that wouldn't mean much in the long run against people dedicated to making mischief. The fact that Windows' codebase is such a piece of Swiss cheese makes it particularly worm-prone, but the main problem it has with worms and viruses is due to Windows being the monoculture, and not due to Windows' shortcomings as an OS. So maybe the point is, everyone wins if there is less monoculture, and more heteroculture, in the mix of OSes in general use.
An decent article, albeit with a lot of the same yakkety-yak -- but then suddenly, you hit the money quote:
Maybe it's the record industry that's getting a free ride from file-sharing - a massive marketing system that allows music lovers to get exposed to all kinds of music without the record industry having to pay a cent.
That describes my experience EXACTLY. If you're like me, you remember not too long ago when anytime you met someone in a band, you couldn't wait to ask them what they'd been listening to lately. When everytime you were at the book store, you rifled through the back of music mags looking at the What's Hot list. When you watched MTV late at night (when the format went off tight rotation) hoping to pick up some first-hand "insider" knowledge of whose star was poised for imminent ascendence. You'd go to the record store, buy a few CDs from the list you'd put together, buy a few more that you hoped would pan out, and go home. I considered myself lucky if, after all the advance work, I ended up with one out of three that actually made it into regular play.
Then, everything changed. In my case it started with Hotline. I noticed that in addition to warez, there were sporadic postings of music...and suddenly, a veritable flood. Mostly, it was bands I'd never heard of before. After a brief period of being annoyed at having to look harder for Bryce plugins or KPT add-ons or whatever the hell I was cruising for, I decided to check out some of these MP3s. It was like taking a starving Ethiopian to Royal Fork Buffet. I tried entire genres of music I'd never heard before. Electronic music suddenly made sense. Soon, I was arranging lists of sites that specialized in types of music I couldn't have even named a year before. As James Burke might say, it was The Day The Universe Changed.
Within six months, I ran across the early version of Napster. It was buggy as hell, but the idea of looking on someone else's hard disk to see what they were listening to was like the gift of Promethian fire. It empowered me. Instead of being a remora fish picking among musical scraps left over by people who "knew" what was happening in music, I started becoming someone who knew what was happening. My listening habits started diverging from, and then absolutely veering away from, the Top 100. For the first time, it became transparently obvious that mass music is a processed, focus-group-derived product like mass food or mass clothing or mass anything else. It's not that I felt snooty, just awakened...and for the first time ever, in command of what I listened to. I entered a golden age of enjoying music like never before. Now, I could go to the record store and buy CDs with a 90% or even 100% success rate, compared to maybe 30% in the old days. I no longer felt ripped off. The more I downloaded, the more CDs I felt like buying.
Bottom line: P2P is the greatest marketing tool ever devised for music. I have hit my forehead and said 'Doh!' about a thousand times over the last few years as I've watched the ham-fisted tactics of the RIAA, and their utter inability to change with, and exploit, the revolution in music. They should be getting fatter and happier than ever by seizing new technologies, and surging forward with the explosive push of free, ubiquitous marketing and feedback provided by P2P.
Instead, they are suing 12-year-olds and college students, and selling "secure" DRM CDs that won't play on your computer. They are flunking Business 101 not only by alienating an entire generation of customers, but BY TRYING TO DISMANTLE ONE OF THE MOST ASTONISHING FREE MARKETING GIFTS EVER BESTOWED ON AN INDUSTRY.
The logical next step would be a program that would listen to, and enjoy, the music that other computers write and sing.
Think of the time it would free up, and the money it would save - you would never have to buy CDs. *cough* of course, some people have already eliminated that expense.
WhenU chief executive Avi Naider is unfortunately quoted as saying "This is a victory for consumer choice..."
Naider is practicing what George Orwell called NewSpeak in the novel 1984. NewSpeak is the deconstruction of language so that it loses all its meaning even as it gains a pseudo-patriotic emotional tone. Disagree with NewSpeak and eventually you become a Thought Criminal (DMCA anyone?). Tell me how Naider's asinine statement is any different from some of Orwell's classics:
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
Check out this site for a NewSpeak dictionary and other interesting stuff. In a world filled with PR bullshit from Microsoft, RIAA, SCO, and [fill in favorite political party here], there are damned few "victories for consumer choice," and ignorance is not strength, it's dire peril.
You need to read Peopleware, by Tom DeMarco and Timothy Lister. Although it's about software development, and not IT support per se, it speaks directly to your situation. No new age crap, no six-point programs, just smart, experience-based advice. It's a short read that will leave you saying "of course" on nearly every page.
You probably already understand one of its key points (or will very soon): it's not sustainable for you or anyone else to work more than about 40 hours, week in, week out, without turning crispy. Work is different from time in front of keyboard or slumped in your chair. You can rack up a lot of hours north of 40/week, but in the long run will have almost nothing to show for them. Additionally, the book will tell you how to say no, as you requested.
One more thing. If you are supporting 100 people, then your days are unquestionably one series of interruptions crashing into each other. There's strong practical advice here about how to minimize interruptions, and work toward having an environment in which you can actually get something done without having to use "hiding" tricks. One of the stories in the book is about a developer who was so bugged by interruptions in his cubicle that he took to working in a toilet in the men's room for an hour at a time. I hope you aren't near that point yet.
Here's the book at Amazon: but you can get at the library, and probably faster.
...and I can tell you that while it's astonishingly easy to think of fascinating ideas for science films, it's damned tough to think up a format that is fresh, emotionally engaging, and revelatory. Everytime I go the bookstore or the library and wander around for a few hours, I leave with my head swimming with ideas that make me feel passionate and excited, ideas that make me want to run up to strangers and say "Jeezus this world is mad cool." Yet, in the course of a year, if I can turn six of these ideas into show treatments, and three of those into shows, I am beating the game.
The reality is, it simply doesn't matter how "good" a show is if no one watches it. In fact, an otherwise high-quality show that fails to be interesting to millions of people can poison the well for other shows down the line. Discovery, PBS, National Geographic, take your pick; they're all in a perpetual scramble for eyeballs. No one at any of these places has yet figured out a fail-safe algorithm for finding and producing shows that people will watch without clicking through to the next channel. All they know is that the most-watched shows hook viewers emotionally. If they don't see the potential for that in your proposal, it ends up in the circular file.
I don't lament this. We live in an economically free, market-driven society. Ideas and stories, like other products, compete among each other for our money and (especially in television) our time. A lot of the comments I read above implied that if we as a society could only impose, from the top down, a grand realignment of the values we place on science and knowledge, our science journalism would become both smarter and more mainstream. Fine, as long as we're at it, let's also impose from the top down a hunger for good government, spiritual advancement, and healthy living. All admirable goals, but unfortunately, utopias are far easier to applaud than they are to implement. Kind of like software development schedule utopias. (*cough, cough*)
So back here on planet Earth, pragmatists chip away at problems from the bottom up. Successful science shows and journalism seek to tap the emotions of viewers, knowing that if you win their hearts, their minds follow. To that end, these are the goals of a good science journalist: to not only inform, but reveal; to not only show how things work, but to incite strong feelings that this knowledge is important and sometimes even miraculous; to make clear that this world of disconnected parts is actually connected beneath the surface by beautiful and unifying principles; to show that if you understand why a whip cracks you also understand why an F15 booms and a nuclear reactor glows in blue Cherenkov light under water. And just as importantly, to also make science seem as much a natural and exciting part of life as getting laid, carving on a snowboard, fighting with your brother, and watching Shawshank Redemption for the third time. Connection.
I did a show and a website on El Nino for NOVA a few years back. (Yes, it told a human story as well as a scientific story.) It was re-broadcast in Germany last year, and four million people watched it. I sit here at my desk sometimes and think about that kind of thing, and I have never gotten used to it. I read, I think, I drink coffee, and then I type while I play mp3s. In other words, I'm pretty much like the rest of the crowd here on Slashdot. Yet sometimes, the ideas embodied in those keystrokes end up being injected into four million skulls. Trust me, the responsibility you feel to use that privilege wisely and effectively is enormous. Maybe that's what evangelical Christians feel when they hear the "good news" and want to spread it.
It's knee-jerk easy to say we need less Joe Millionaire and Britney, and more NOVA and JYW. However, this ignores the reality that we are complex social primates driven far more by emotion than Western science has traditionally admitted. Even a solitary, consuming interest in science is ultimately an emotional urge. Are you hankering to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, uncover the faint traces of Pluto somewhere among fifty thousand starfield photographs, or invent a way of copying fragments of DNA? Andrew Wiles, Clyde Tombaugh, and Kary Mullis each threw themselves into science not because they were excited by university labs, jargon, and academic papers, but because they fell in love with their ideas, pined and trembled for them, stayed up late and got up early in hopes of seeing if they could use them to recast the way we see the world. The rest of it is just window dressing.
Unfortunately, many people were inoculated against science in school the way they were inoculated against Shakespeare. After something's been forced down your throat like cod liver oil, you lose your taste for it. (I still remember my old physics teacher's dandruff, droning voice, and drudgerous lab assignments.)
There is an antidote. I said it earlier, but it bears repeating. If you win their hearts, their minds will follow. The best science shows are the ones that make viewers feel caught up, and emotionally invested in, the underlying science story. If you're a good writer, you find a way to do this naturally, from the bottom up. It turns out that Aristotle's dramatic principles apply to science stories like any other flavor of story. The shitty shows I've seen (and they are legion) try to fake it. You can tell when the people who made them did it for money, not love. Ultimately, in this business, you either love what you're writing about...or you're a hack.
So the question was, "Can science journalism be entertaining and responsible?" In other words, can science journalism thrill your heart as well as your head? Kinda like asking if your girlfriend can be both entertaining and responsible, can give your, ummm, heart a shiver as well as your mind. If she can't...better change the channel.
"Credit cards weren't invented last year. Back when they were invented, this was some major technology. Can you imagine? A piece of plastic with a magnetic stripe on the back?"
No offense, but you have to look back a little farther than that for the roots of credit card technology.
Back when credit cards were REALLY invented (1950), there was no mag stripe, just the embossed account numbers on the plastic. When you presented your card to a merchant, they were supposed to check a book of closed/fraudulent account numbers to make sure yours wasn't listed (I think they mailed these out monthly). The account numbers, like many state's driver's licenses or physician's DEA numbers, could also be checked for internal validity by using an algorithm. (Big flaw in that system was that your clerks had to have passed ninth grade math -- digital calculators were still decades in the future.)
I agree with your point that credit card companies pass costs through rather than absorb them. Fraud is simply a cost of doing business to them, and they make a hell of lot more money if they paper over fraud and ID theft. Why? Because the key to the credit card issuing game is, well, issuing. If publicity about stolen accounts give potential new card holders the willies, then the pyramid starts to fall apart.
Credit cards are the crack cocaine of the financial world, and the card issuers are the guys selling the rocks. They know it's a statistical certainty that x-percent of people who get cards will spend them to the max and then be unable to pay the cards off, and so, prevent being kicked to the highest APR bracket. Your first rock is usually free, too... ID theft and computer fraud are simply a tax the card issuers are willing to pay to keep the crack house open.
So we hear about this cracker who stole two million numbers or whatever. For every one of these guys, how many do we NOT hear about?
Both the original article and the parent above remind me of one of the better Twilight Zone episodes. "Steel" takes place in a future where boxing between humans has been outlawed, and replaced by boxing between robots. Lee Marvin plays a down-on-his-luck former chapmpion boxer who is now the manager of the robot Battling Maxo. After booking Maxo in prize match against a latest-model fighter bot, he discovers Maxo needs an expensive repair. Marvin is broke and can't afford it. Desperate for the prize money, Marvin replaces Maxo with a different robot -- himself in disguise -- and goes into the ring. He gets his ass kicked while the crowd jeers at him, calling him a piece of junk, never realizing they're watching the only display of real courage they'll ever again see in an era of mechanized fighting. Reminds me of the Hemingway quote: "A man can be defeated but not destroyed."
Heh heh, so ICANN and VeriSign are duking it out. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." The problem is, what if they're both your enemy? Then who's your friend?
Which brings to mind another aphorism. "When elephants fight, it's the grass that gets trampled."
Consider this quote from the article: VeriSign runs dot-com, dot-net and dot-org under agreements with ICANN that prevent VeriSign from raising the wholesale price of the addresses it sells ($6), or substantially changing the way it runs the domains.
At VeriSign, domain names are six bucks wholesale; thirty-five bucks retail. This makes the bottled-water business look positively low-margin. The actual cost of service provided by VeriSign (less overhead for executive salaries, Aereon chairs, and Napoleonesque offices) is less than a dime. The markup on domain name registration is already expressed in scientific notation. But of course, even when you have a monopoly (as VeriSign has), everything is never quite enough.
The history of VeriSign (and its predecessor, Network Solutions) and of ICANN is a textbook story of the effects of greed and commercial selfishness vs. political and parochial power-hunger upon the internet. Check it out yourself. If you want to see the future of the net, you need only take a look at its past.
Right, a contract once signed should not ever ever ever be subject to modification. People who sign contracts should have a firm grasp of all future events and circumstances or should just put down the pen. Next thing you know, we'd have divorce laws, the dissolution of the ABM treaty, Poland joining NATO, and Enron re-upping their accounting contract with Arthur Andersen.
As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of a small mind."
Technological advances driven by wireless networking (both telecom and datacom) are starting to render obsolete the idea that spectrum is a severely limited resource that must be lorded and hoarded by the FCC. Ten years ago, during its planning, Iridium seemed like a technological miracle solution to an intractable problem. No one foresaw ubiquitous digital cell networks and two-cents-a-minute rates. Now these guys are supposed to peer another decade forward and once again envision what not only doesn't exist, but hasn't been invented...and then bind themselves to a cool billion or two of investment.
Stuff like this doesn't encourage innovation, it encourages entrenchment and protection of obsolete technologies.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, great review, but it's a *bit* long.
Here's the missing metareview:
Buy this book. The author knows Vista way better than even Bill Gates does, and might even make you crack a smile now and then as you learn. Imagine that.
PBS has been struggling for years to figure out how to compete against the Discovery nonfiction channels (TLC, Animal Planet, Discovery Channel, and their lesser siblings) in science programming, and to a lesser extent, National Geographic and other comers. PBS has also struggled to see how the long-form documentary can continue to hold market share in a world that won't watch YouTube videos that run longer than two minutes.
The old guard in television cannot fully grok the mindset of those who've come of age during the internet age and its panoply of media choices. But they do understand that without adaptation, they will die. So they tend to focus on acquiring the look-and-feel of new media (but not the vital essences), hoping that will make them seem relevant to new-media users. Lipstick on a pig, and all that. Very nice lipstick, sometimes, but....
NOVA wisely invested early in web programming, and their science websites are superb examples of what can be done with Web 1.0. (Heh heh, I should disclose I wrote one of those to go along with the film I made. You can see it here. Check out the "Dispatches" section for some old-skool science blogging.)
NOVA on television has resisted surrendering its brand identity against immense financial pressure, as well as cultural pressure to "liven up," "get hip," and other assorted me-too thinking that says no one will sit and watch a quality hour anymore. NOVA hasn't quite caved, but you can see the difference when comparing latest product against films from earlier years. Still, once you see what they've been up against, NOVA is still a marvel of principle and plain old stubbornness.
As for the purported modern lack of an audience for high-quality single-subject programs...I don't buy it.
I'm part of the PBS advisory panel that's "focus-grouping" these new shows. (They don't even know I'm one of their past producers...and I ain't sayin'.) Trust me, PBS has marshaled extraordinary user input throughout the development of this new programming. They have done their homework. Nonetheless, I've been thinking it was the wrong homework assignment.
IMO, focus-group design by consensus can yield good quality, but not brilliance. Can anyone imagine focus-grouping The Secret Life of Machines? The Day the Universe Changed? (Or to stretch it a bit, even Mystery Science Theater 3000?) Those shows, and other greats, rely on irrepressible characters who, like the author of a great book, slowly but surely make you realize they're in on a great secret. And that they want to let you in on it.
Ok, some of these people are not poster children for The Seven Habits of Successful People, and could probably use a better haircut, but you just know they'd be doing this show for free (or maybe they did). It's not their panache but their passion that infects you like a Russian hacker's virus and absorbs you into their conspiracy. Their world is more full of dynamite and diamond pipes and Tesla coils and grizzly bears taking sunbaths and...and...they seem to have figured out how one thing connects to another. Their world is equal parts revealed truth and grand fun. Maybe even more grand fun than revealed truth. They make you realize the riches of the world lie around your feet like November leaves in such abundance that you haven't even noticed them as you kick your way forward each day.
They open your eyes. They make you stay awake in your bed way too late and dream about the places you really can't wait any longer to go...and damn it, someday you will...then you fall asleep.
I love Wired magazine, and have all kinds of cool electronica, and download books off Demonoid while I'm TiVoing BBC docs while I'm walking the stacks at the library while I'm listening to a podcast. But that doesn't mean I want a science show modeled on Entertainment Tonight's magazine format. I don't want hip poseurs, even if they've been coached not to seem like poseurs. I don't want beautiful people
Wow, this is even worse than I thought!
heh heh
Unfortunately, even Single Big Bang might not apply to the worst cases, where the best-fit theory is probably Eternal Stasis. :-)
"The one-way journey from the heart of a galaxy into the oblivion of a black hole probably takes about 200,000 years..."
"...scientists figured that material moving at 177 000km an hour would still take eons to cross into a black hole."
Eons are the largest division of geologic time. There have been just four of them since the formation of the Earth. In rough terms, that's a billion years each.
Maybe the reporter can get a job working on unit conversion for the next Mars probe. (*cough*)
Oops, wrong thread...thought I had something there for moment.
In the glory days of the dotcom boom, FreePC gave away 10,000 computers, free, nada, goose-egg. No shipping, no contracts, no obligations EXCEPT you had to run their advertising overlay when you were browsing the Web.
I know because I got one. I still couldn't believe it when the UPS man showed up with the boxes. It may be that there are VERY FEW things in life that are free, but this was one of them.
They were cheapie little Compaqs with a Cyrix M-II CPU but at least you could brag that the price/performance ratio was extraordinarily high. Actually, they ran fine, certainly good enough for browsing...especially after you wiped off the disk and put a fresh install of Windows on it. (My mom still uses that machine to this day.)
(From the previous post...) "The reason nature has adopted the flapping wing is simply because it cannot emulate a shaft unidirctionally rotating in a bearing in a biological structure, so it had to make do."
Au contraire. Mother Nature is one hell of an engineer. I remember reading about the design of bacterial rotary flagellae in Scientific American a few years back, and marvelling at the elegance of the motor.
Here's an article from Wikipedia that describes it pretty well (excerpted below).
The filament is composed of the protein flagellin and is a hollow tube 20 nanometers thick. It is helical, and has a sharp bend just outside the outer membrane called the "hook" which allows the helix to point directly away from the cell. A shaft runs between the hook and the basal body, passing through protein rings in the cell's membranes that act as bearings.
The bacterijjkklellum is driven by a rotary engine composed of protein, located at the flagellum's anchor point on the inner cell membrane. The engine is powered by proton motive force, i.e., by the flow of protons across the bacterial cell membrane due to a concentration gradient set up by the cell's metabolism (in Vibrio species the motor is a sodium ion pump, rather than a proton pump). The rotor transports protons across the membrane, and is turned in the process. The rotor by itself can operate at 6,000 to 17,000 rpm, but with a filament attached usually only reaches 200 to 1000 rpm.
In Spring of 2000, my LeadTek GeForce 256 came with a fan, a noisy little bugger that failed in less than a year. Here's a picture . So did most of the other flavors (Asus, Guillemot, etc.), as a fan was specified on the nVidia reference design. I ended up taking the fan off, and attaching a large passive heatsink. End of problem.
How long before those cams are connected to some flash ram in the black box that's already installed in new cars, "strictly to assist safety research"? How long before someone (or some insurance company) sues to recover those images, to be used against the driver in a civil suit? How long before some lame-o legislature grants law enforcement a "right" to those images, probably citing a desire to "protect the children"? How long, in short, before the government has a digital videocam watching your every move while you drive your car? Think they'll only be interested in accident-related activities? I don't.
Be afraid. The future is now, and it does not like you or your silly privacy rights.
The parent refers to the length of an Earth day when the planet's rotation is measured against the "fixed" stars (sidereal time). More precisely, this "sidereal day" is 23 hours 56 minutes 4.091 seconds. Measured against the sun, however, the length of an Earth day is 24 hours. When you use the fixed stars as a frame of reference, the motion of the entire solar system puts a little extra "English" on the spin of the Earth.
Here's a great freeware UNIVAC simulator you can use until you get your own UNIVAC off eBay. MTBF on those babies was somewhere around 10 hours due to the use of vacuum tubes...hopefully your PC running this sim will post somewhat better reliability numbers. :D If you'd like to see some dino-iron in person, a similar-era ENIAC resides in a basement museum in the Engineering School at the University of Michigan. This page is full of good information and links. Also, check out this list if you're interested in restorations of other ancient machines such as Crays and Cybers; my favorites are the Royal-McBee LGP 21 and 30 machines, immortalized in the Jargon File mythologies about Real Programmers. Read The Story of Mel and be enlightened (as well as entertained) about how a True Master thinks when dealing with the limitations of old hardware. It's so Zen it will make you clap with one hand.
If Mac OSX were the dominant OS, then worms would be predominantly written for it, and would drive up its TCO. If Linux were the dominant OS, then worms would be predominantly written for it, and would drive up its TCO. Etc., etc. Sure, OSX or Linux or [insert pet OS here] would be tougher to exploit, but that wouldn't mean much in the long run against people dedicated to making mischief. The fact that Windows' codebase is such a piece of Swiss cheese makes it particularly worm-prone, but the main problem it has with worms and viruses is due to Windows being the monoculture, and not due to Windows' shortcomings as an OS. So maybe the point is, everyone wins if there is less monoculture, and more heteroculture, in the mix of OSes in general use.
It's the British version of the American past-tense "learned."
So now you've learnt something new for today...
An decent article, albeit with a lot of the same yakkety-yak -- but then suddenly, you hit the money quote:
Maybe it's the record industry that's getting a free ride from file-sharing - a massive marketing system that allows music lovers to get exposed to all kinds of music without the record industry having to pay a cent.
That describes my experience EXACTLY. If you're like me, you remember not too long ago when anytime you met someone in a band, you couldn't wait to ask them what they'd been listening to lately. When everytime you were at the book store, you rifled through the back of music mags looking at the What's Hot list. When you watched MTV late at night (when the format went off tight rotation) hoping to pick up some first-hand "insider" knowledge of whose star was poised for imminent ascendence. You'd go to the record store, buy a few CDs from the list you'd put together, buy a few more that you hoped would pan out, and go home. I considered myself lucky if, after all the advance work, I ended up with one out of three that actually made it into regular play.
Then, everything changed. In my case it started with Hotline. I noticed that in addition to warez, there were sporadic postings of music...and suddenly, a veritable flood. Mostly, it was bands I'd never heard of before. After a brief period of being annoyed at having to look harder for Bryce plugins or KPT add-ons or whatever the hell I was cruising for, I decided to check out some of these MP3s. It was like taking a starving Ethiopian to Royal Fork Buffet. I tried entire genres of music I'd never heard before. Electronic music suddenly made sense. Soon, I was arranging lists of sites that specialized in types of music I couldn't have even named a year before. As James Burke might say, it was The Day The Universe Changed.
Within six months, I ran across the early version of Napster. It was buggy as hell, but the idea of looking on someone else's hard disk to see what they were listening to was like the gift of Promethian fire. It empowered me. Instead of being a remora fish picking among musical scraps left over by people who "knew" what was happening in music, I started becoming someone who knew what was happening. My listening habits started diverging from, and then absolutely veering away from, the Top 100. For the first time, it became transparently obvious that mass music is a processed, focus-group-derived product like mass food or mass clothing or mass anything else. It's not that I felt snooty, just awakened...and for the first time ever, in command of what I listened to. I entered a golden age of enjoying music like never before. Now, I could go to the record store and buy CDs with a 90% or even 100% success rate, compared to maybe 30% in the old days. I no longer felt ripped off. The more I downloaded, the more CDs I felt like buying.
Bottom line: P2P is the greatest marketing tool ever devised for music. I have hit my forehead and said 'Doh!' about a thousand times over the last few years as I've watched the ham-fisted tactics of the RIAA, and their utter inability to change with, and exploit, the revolution in music. They should be getting fatter and happier than ever by seizing new technologies, and surging forward with the explosive push of free, ubiquitous marketing and feedback provided by P2P.
Instead, they are suing 12-year-olds and college students, and selling "secure" DRM CDs that won't play on your computer. They are flunking Business 101 not only by alienating an entire generation of customers, but BY TRYING TO DISMANTLE ONE OF THE MOST ASTONISHING FREE MARKETING GIFTS EVER BESTOWED ON AN INDUSTRY.
Nuff said.
The logical next step would be a program that would listen to, and enjoy, the music that other computers write and sing.
Think of the time it would free up, and the money it would save - you would never have to buy CDs. *cough* of course, some people have already eliminated that expense.
Naider is practicing what George Orwell called NewSpeak in the novel 1984. NewSpeak is the deconstruction of language so that it loses all its meaning even as it gains a pseudo-patriotic emotional tone. Disagree with NewSpeak and eventually you become a Thought Criminal (DMCA anyone?). Tell me how Naider's asinine statement is any different from some of Orwell's classics:
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
Check out this site for a NewSpeak dictionary and other interesting stuff. In a world filled with PR bullshit from Microsoft, RIAA, SCO, and [fill in favorite political party here], there are damned few "victories for consumer choice," and ignorance is not strength, it's dire peril.
You probably already understand one of its key points (or will very soon): it's not sustainable for you or anyone else to work more than about 40 hours, week in, week out, without turning crispy. Work is different from time in front of keyboard or slumped in your chair. You can rack up a lot of hours north of 40/week, but in the long run will have almost nothing to show for them. Additionally, the book will tell you how to say no, as you requested.
One more thing. If you are supporting 100 people, then your days are unquestionably one series of interruptions crashing into each other. There's strong practical advice here about how to minimize interruptions, and work toward having an environment in which you can actually get something done without having to use "hiding" tricks. One of the stories in the book is about a developer who was so bugged by interruptions in his cubicle that he took to working in a toilet in the men's room for an hour at a time. I hope you aren't near that point yet.
Here's the book at Amazon: but you can get at the library, and probably faster.
...and I can tell you that while it's astonishingly easy to think of fascinating ideas for science films, it's damned tough to think up a format that is fresh, emotionally engaging, and revelatory. Everytime I go the bookstore or the library and wander around for a few hours, I leave with my head swimming with ideas that make me feel passionate and excited, ideas that make me want to run up to strangers and say "Jeezus this world is mad cool." Yet, in the course of a year, if I can turn six of these ideas into show treatments, and three of those into shows, I am beating the game.
The reality is, it simply doesn't matter how "good" a show is if no one watches it. In fact, an otherwise high-quality show that fails to be interesting to millions of people can poison the well for other shows down the line. Discovery, PBS, National Geographic, take your pick; they're all in a perpetual scramble for eyeballs. No one at any of these places has yet figured out a fail-safe algorithm for finding and producing shows that people will watch without clicking through to the next channel. All they know is that the most-watched shows hook viewers emotionally. If they don't see the potential for that in your proposal, it ends up in the circular file.
I don't lament this. We live in an economically free, market-driven society. Ideas and stories, like other products, compete among each other for our money and (especially in television) our time. A lot of the comments I read above implied that if we as a society could only impose, from the top down, a grand realignment of the values we place on science and knowledge, our science journalism would become both smarter and more mainstream. Fine, as long as we're at it, let's also impose from the top down a hunger for good government, spiritual advancement, and healthy living. All admirable goals, but unfortunately, utopias are far easier to applaud than they are to implement. Kind of like software development schedule utopias. (*cough, cough*)
So back here on planet Earth, pragmatists chip away at problems from the bottom up. Successful science shows and journalism seek to tap the emotions of viewers, knowing that if you win their hearts, their minds follow. To that end, these are the goals of a good science journalist: to not only inform, but reveal; to not only show how things work, but to incite strong feelings that this knowledge is important and sometimes even miraculous; to make clear that this world of disconnected parts is actually connected beneath the surface by beautiful and unifying principles; to show that if you understand why a whip cracks you also understand why an F15 booms and a nuclear reactor glows in blue Cherenkov light under water. And just as importantly, to also make science seem as much a natural and exciting part of life as getting laid, carving on a snowboard, fighting with your brother, and watching Shawshank Redemption for the third time. Connection.
I did a show and a website on El Nino for NOVA a few years back. (Yes, it told a human story as well as a scientific story.) It was re-broadcast in Germany last year, and four million people watched it. I sit here at my desk sometimes and think about that kind of thing, and I have never gotten used to it. I read, I think, I drink coffee, and then I type while I play mp3s. In other words, I'm pretty much like the rest of the crowd here on Slashdot. Yet sometimes, the ideas embodied in those keystrokes end up being injected into four million skulls. Trust me, the responsibility you feel to use that privilege wisely and effectively is enormous. Maybe that's what evangelical Christians feel when they hear the "good news" and want to spread it.
It's knee-jerk easy to say we need less Joe Millionaire and Britney, and more NOVA and JYW. However, this ignores the reality that we are complex social primates driven far more by emotion than Western science has traditionally admitted. Even a solitary, consuming interest in science is ultimately an emotional urge. Are you hankering to prove Fermat's Last Theorem, uncover the faint traces of Pluto somewhere among fifty thousand starfield photographs, or invent a way of copying fragments of DNA? Andrew Wiles, Clyde Tombaugh, and Kary Mullis each threw themselves into science not because they were excited by university labs, jargon, and academic papers, but because they fell in love with their ideas, pined and trembled for them, stayed up late and got up early in hopes of seeing if they could use them to recast the way we see the world. The rest of it is just window dressing.
Unfortunately, many people were inoculated against science in school the way they were inoculated against Shakespeare. After something's been forced down your throat like cod liver oil, you lose your taste for it. (I still remember my old physics teacher's dandruff, droning voice, and drudgerous lab assignments.)
There is an antidote. I said it earlier, but it bears repeating. If you win their hearts, their minds will follow. The best science shows are the ones that make viewers feel caught up, and emotionally invested in, the underlying science story. If you're a good writer, you find a way to do this naturally, from the bottom up. It turns out that Aristotle's dramatic principles apply to science stories like any other flavor of story. The shitty shows I've seen (and they are legion) try to fake it. You can tell when the people who made them did it for money, not love. Ultimately, in this business, you either love what you're writing about...or you're a hack.
So the question was, "Can science journalism be entertaining and responsible?" In other words, can science journalism thrill your heart as well as your head? Kinda like asking if your girlfriend can be both entertaining and responsible, can give your, ummm, heart a shiver as well as your mind. If she can't...better change the channel.
"Credit cards weren't invented last year. Back when they were invented, this was some major technology. Can you imagine? A piece of plastic with a magnetic stripe on the back?"
No offense, but you have to look back a little farther than that for the roots of credit card technology.
Back when credit cards were REALLY invented (1950), there was no mag stripe, just the embossed account numbers on the plastic. When you presented your card to a merchant, they were supposed to check a book of closed/fraudulent account numbers to make sure yours wasn't listed (I think they mailed these out monthly). The account numbers, like many state's driver's licenses or physician's DEA numbers, could also be checked for internal validity by using an algorithm. (Big flaw in that system was that your clerks had to have passed ninth grade math -- digital calculators were still decades in the future.)
I agree with your point that credit card companies pass costs through rather than absorb them. Fraud is simply a cost of doing business to them, and they make a hell of lot more money if they paper over fraud and ID theft. Why? Because the key to the credit card issuing game is, well, issuing. If publicity about stolen accounts give potential new card holders the willies, then the pyramid starts to fall apart.
Credit cards are the crack cocaine of the financial world, and the card issuers are the guys selling the rocks. They know it's a statistical certainty that x-percent of people who get cards will spend them to the max and then be unable to pay the cards off, and so, prevent being kicked to the highest APR bracket. Your first rock is usually free, too... ID theft and computer fraud are simply a tax the card issuers are willing to pay to keep the crack house open.
So we hear about this cracker who stole two million numbers or whatever. For every one of these guys, how many do we NOT hear about?
Both the original article and the parent above remind me of one of the better Twilight Zone episodes. "Steel" takes place in a future where boxing between humans has been outlawed, and replaced by boxing between robots. Lee Marvin plays a down-on-his-luck former chapmpion boxer who is now the manager of the robot Battling Maxo. After booking Maxo in prize match against a latest-model fighter bot, he discovers Maxo needs an expensive repair. Marvin is broke and can't afford it. Desperate for the prize money, Marvin replaces Maxo with a different robot -- himself in disguise -- and goes into the ring. He gets his ass kicked while the crowd jeers at him, calling him a piece of junk, never realizing they're watching the only display of real courage they'll ever again see in an era of mechanized fighting. Reminds me of the Hemingway quote: "A man can be defeated but not destroyed."
Works out to about 60 or 70 Large per "sales and service [employee]." This is BONUS dough, on top of regular salary.
Just where would these people rush off to in the current abysmal telecom job market if they didn't get the bribe money?????
Heh heh, so ICANN and VeriSign are duking it out. "The enemy of my enemy is my friend." The problem is, what if they're both your enemy? Then who's your friend?
Which brings to mind another aphorism. "When elephants fight, it's the grass that gets trampled."
Consider this quote from the article: VeriSign runs dot-com, dot-net and dot-org under agreements with ICANN that prevent VeriSign from raising the wholesale price of the addresses it sells ($6), or substantially changing the way it runs the domains.
At VeriSign, domain names are six bucks wholesale; thirty-five bucks retail. This makes the bottled-water business look positively low-margin. The actual cost of service provided by VeriSign (less overhead for executive salaries, Aereon chairs, and Napoleonesque offices) is less than a dime. The markup on domain name registration is already expressed in scientific notation. But of course, even when you have a monopoly (as VeriSign has), everything is never quite enough.
The history of VeriSign (and its predecessor, Network Solutions) and of ICANN is a textbook story of the effects of greed and commercial selfishness vs. political and parochial power-hunger upon the internet. Check it out yourself. If you want to see the future of the net, you need only take a look at its past.
Rahter than skipping commercials, I wish there was a way to skip lawyers.
Right, a contract once signed should not ever ever ever be subject to modification. People who sign contracts should have a firm grasp of all future events and circumstances or should just put down the pen. Next thing you know, we'd have divorce laws, the dissolution of the ABM treaty, Poland joining NATO, and Enron re-upping their accounting contract with Arthur Andersen.
As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of a small mind."
Technological advances driven by wireless networking (both telecom and datacom) are starting to render obsolete the idea that spectrum is a severely limited resource that must be lorded and hoarded by the FCC. Ten years ago, during its planning, Iridium seemed like a technological miracle solution to an intractable problem. No one foresaw ubiquitous digital cell networks and two-cents-a-minute rates. Now these guys are supposed to peer another decade forward and once again envision what not only doesn't exist, but hasn't been invented...and then bind themselves to a cool billion or two of investment.
Stuff like this doesn't encourage innovation, it encourages entrenchment and protection of obsolete technologies.