The thing is that a vanishingly small portion of people who listen to music on a new album normally pay to do so. Practically everybody first hears some of it on the radio first, paying nothing at all, and only then decides to pay anything for it. And most people who hear it on the radio don't buy it at all.
What would be most interesting is to find out how many people downloaded the album multiple times (with the same contact info) and how much they paid in total. If you view this (downloads plus the large amount of attention this move got) as the newfangled equivalent of airplay, with people paying again as actual purchases, it's more reasonable to consider the "freeloaders" as people getting marketted to who weren't interested. Of course, there's no way to determine, due to the way they set up the site, how many people decided they want to have the album and didn't pay for it.
Consider this: you go into a record store and you see that they have a new album that you haven't listened to but you've heard a lot about it. You go over to the listening booth, but it's got a long line. Then you discover that they'll let you just take a copy of the album home for free. The obvious thing to do is take a copy home and listen to it there, and come back and buy another copy for real if you like it. Of course, with this being the most reasonable behavior, even if everybody who takes the album comes back and buys it, that's 50% "freeloaders".
The reason this comes up is that (reportedly) ISO wants to have a standardized file format for office documents that everybody can convert all of their old documents to, preserving the meanings of the originals, even if that meaning depends on doing something oddly or wrong.
New documents wouldn't be created with errors marked, but documents converted from formats defined de facto by hopelessly irreparable programs, where the conversion is done competantly, would mark the errors they contain.
The key point is that, with ODF v1.2, which is in progress as a further ISO specification, ISO wants the format to be able to handle conversion of all of the world's existing legacy documents. Some of these documents only make sense based on errors in the legacy applications that were used to generate them, and getting actually correct calculation would destroy the comprehensibility of the documents. For example, if a spreadsheet has a calculation error, and this error leads to the final results being different, and the spreadsheet is part of a document justifying taking a particular action based on the result, understanding the document depends on being able to see the calculation that the author saw, and not the correct calculation, which would be incoherent. Current ODF is fine for making correct decisions going forward, but it is inadaquate to understanding past mistakes. And it means that, if you use a broken old program like Excel 2007 to prepare your taxes, and you convert it to ODF and send it in, the ODF document will contain no clues as to why you're trying to pay a different amount from the total given at the end, because the information that the math is broken in the source in a particular way is not representable in ODF.
Furthermore, the OASIS committee responsible for developing ODF has broken down entirely, at least in Sam Hiser's view, over the issue of how this should be handled, with Sun ignoring the need entirely, while the OpenDocument Foundation, trying to go forward in ISO, insists on having something get done.
As far as I can tell, CDF is actually totally irrelevant to this whole thing, except that it's from the W3C, which is simply not the OASIS ODF TC, and hasn't broken down. CDF is essentially the concept "do the obvious XML thing for putting compound documents together". It doesn't specify the format of any component office documents, except for SVG for figures (it specifies a bunch of other formats for particular purposes, but nothing interesting or different). The main benefit of CDF seems to be that the group doesn't have the level of bad blood that there is over at OASIS, so there's a chance of producing some specification for the next version.
On the other hand, it's hard to corroborate any of this with any evidence outside of Sam Hiser.
The wifi driver is GPL (and included in the mainline linux kernel already). The wireless chip firmware is the proprietary part. But, of course, that's more open than most of the chips in the system, which can't be changed in the field at all, and when can't be modified without a chip fab. People are actually working on reverse-engineering the chip specs (it looks like an ARM920T with a radio peripheral), but it's perfectly reasonable to consider the chip as a device with a detailed specification that has a very long, particular, and incomprehensible (but carefully documented) startup sequence.
You'd do better to digitize all of your vinyl now. Just because CD reissues are generally incompetantly done doesn't mean that you can't make an effectively perfect digital recording of the signal your player produces when playing the vinyl before it gets damaged by wear and environment. It doesn't matter for the signal that goes to your speakers whether it is driven by record player or a DAC.
One thing about remastering is that the original recording may have been done with a vinyl-based idea of the threshold for perceptability. So they didn't bother with some aspects of the environment or accoustics of the studio which would make no difference in vinyl, but which come out clearly and distractingly on CD. Having it on vinyl in between effectively airbrushes out this junk. But that doesn't mean that you can't push the signal through vinyl first and then make a high-quality digital recording of the post-vinyl signal, and have your digital music player reproduce the sound of a vinyl record.
It's no worse than Aleph One, and just a unit length of "c" tape can store at least as much as a whole spool of Aleph One. The only downside with this format is that you can't cut the tape between cells; you'll always cut through a cell no matter where you cut it.
An infinite tape that's twice as long isn't any bigger. You need a continuous tape. Or if you prefer, you can get a tape that has a position for each possible state of the entirety of a regular infinite tape, although those tend to get torn too easily.
It's not so much that it's an unpopular opinion as that it's an uncommon experience. Most people seem to have driver issues with Vista (but not with XP), and, in most cases, Linux has driver support for everything, but no software set up to do anything with the device (i.e., if you plug in your USB sex toy, it'll have a driver, but there's no obvious way to tell, because there's no program that pops up and lets you use it).
According to TFA, this album has sold 4 times as many copies as Radiohead's previous album in the corresponding period. This model has failed at the goal of making sure that nobody but customers hears Radiohead's music, but I'm not sure the band minds that too much.
I think they can improve the model though: people who find the torrent without hearing about the website won't know that they can fund the band without paying organized crime most of the money. And the people who buy from the website don't find out that they can skip downloading from the official site and get the torrent once they've paid for their license, and get better files. Also, people who hear about the album aren't given a convenient way to decide if they want it or how much they want to pay, unless they find the torrent on their own. And their website is slow and complicated, and won't sell to people who don't have cell phones or don't want to give them contact info beyond billing info, so they're probably losing a lot of impulse-buy sales.
Even so, I don't think I can call an album going platinum in a week a failure.
My opinion (based on a lot of anecdotes but nothing formal or statistically valid) is that, when people are under too much systemic strain, whatever body part is under the heaviest use breaks down. Systemic strain causes something to go wrong; computer use causes it to be CTS, as opposed to, say, a heart attack.
Oversimplifying somewhat, stress tends to override the normal tendancy to rest when you're too tired to protect yourself, and your ability to relax and recover. At that point, it's a question of what you're damaging.
There's a lot less interdependance in math than people tend to assume, though. The normal high school presentation of the math is heavily interdependant, but most of that math was originally worked out differently anyway, and there are plenty of alternative explanations. Of course, you have to find a presentation that avoids using anything you don't know, which can be difficult if you've decided you don't like something that's commonly assumed.
On the other hand, a lot of the really important concepts get glossed over in high school, because they're going for the simplest explanation of each concept, and the really important thing to get is that some concepts which have different explanations are equivalent (e.g., the fundamental theorem of calculus is essentially "the antiderivative and the indefinite integral are the same thing"; but you can show this with a lot of algebra and such, or geometrically: "the rate at which the area of the space under a function changes as you move the far boundary is the value of the function, obviously").
School also tends to put too much of a focus on computation, which is fine for arithmatic, since you will actually need to be able to multiply 6 by 9 someday when you don't have a calculator (or your calculator is full of other computations), but it doesn't make too much sense for integrals and derivatives, where, in practice, you'll stick it into Mathematica or do it numerically.
With all of the people ditching Vista for XP (enough that OEMs bother to support it), Linux has the clear advantage that nobody tries to force you to use bad versions and that there's more flexibility in what you can upgrade independantly.
I think a lot of Linux distributions fail to push this advantage as much as they could (upgrade your system, and everything will be exactly the same, unless you switch to a new theme, except that newer hardware will work, more features can be enabled, and stuff will work more smoothly), but they're still far ahead of Microsoft, which has a slew of arbitrary regressions and reorganizations when they have new versions (e.g., in XP, dragging a file into a batch file window waiting for a filename will insert that filename; in Vista, this doesn't work).
People choosing between paying $12 for an album and not getting the album won't necessarily be the same as people who, given the choice of how much to pay, would pick $12 or more. Huge radiohead fans would buy an album for whatever it costs, but still wouldn't necessarily prefer to overpay just in case. And I don't think people will decide they're short by enough to justify doing a second monetary transaction; there's a convenience cost to the process that makes it unpleasant to do it twice (especially with the store slashdotted).
FWIW, I'm one of the most frequent buyers at Magnatune.com, and I never buy anything there without first listening to it enough to know it well. I always pay $10 for albums, and I'd probably choose $8 or less if I hadn't heard the album.
I doubt anybody would be using the basketball court at 1192991880. It'll probably be a bit cold for outdoor basketball and there wasn't anybody at 1190572680, when it was quite nice out.
The problem with this model is that people haven't heard the album, and therefore don't know how good it is, so they can't decide in an informed fashion how much they want to pay for it. Even under the assumption that people will be happiest if they pay what they feel something is worth, I expect that people's happiness falls off more quickly on the overpaying side than the underpaying side, and that people expect this is general, so people will underpay to maximize their expected happiness if they don't know what they will feel something is worth.
One did Tae Kwon Do as a kid (with sparring and destruction of lumber), and two (including me) do Aikido. Our style, at least, regularly practices having somebody really try to hit you, and putting them neatly on the ground.
Of course, the practical martial aspect of a black belt in anything is really that people on the street tend to decide to mess with somebody else instead, because you look vaguely pleased at the prospect of being attacked. And the actual practical aspect of Aikido, in any case, is that you don't fall and hurt yourself when your porch steps are unexpectedly coated in a sheet of ice.
If you can't stand the thought of buying a computer from a Chinese company while the mess is going on in Myanmar, just do what I did and buy a computer from Lenovo last year. Or, if your time machine isn't working, buy a used one made last year.
Alternatively, plan to buy a new Thinkpad as soon as the mess is over, and use your current computer until then. If you want to be political, call up Lenovo and let them know. It does nobody any good to silently boycott a company, since they don't know why their sales are dropping, so they don't know what to do to rectify the situation.
Anyway, I don't see you getting a new computer any time soon, since you'll obviously have to wait until 2009 at the earliest to get one from an American company, right?
So take a screenshot, but file the identifying information and a description, rather than the screenshot. If, later, there is some question as to whether there was content with that description at that location, you can produce the screenshot. In general, you're not supposed to produce evidence of things which the other side hasn't disputed, even lacking some reason not to make the evidence public, just because it wastes time.
It's so that intermediary software can manipulate the files without knowing anything about the semantics. For example, jabber makes good use of it so that clients can support a variety of extensions while services only need to handle a single function while letting messages with additional contents pass through intact.
I can just see it: a virtual world as the unifying interface for information about the real world, with news searchable by location and marked on the map. And current satellite images projected onto the virtual ground, allowing users to observe the real world in places they aren't physically located. And, above it all, bloggers looking down from their dirigibles, identifiable by their avatars' red capes and aviator goggles...
I'm a coder, and I don't spend more than 35 hours a week in the office. My productivity is rarely limited by time, but instead by how many clever solutions I can come up with. That's the point of not giving overtime to the people who don't get overtime: if your salary is dictated by your productivity, and your productivity isn't determined by the number of hours you spend at the job, there's no reason for your employer to pay you to sit at your desk like a zombie when you've done all of the thinking that you can for the day, assuming there's no reason for you to sit there then, either.
Coders should get overtime for going to meetings, but otherwise, there shouldn't be any reason for coders to try pulling long hours on the project.
Those Europeans spend the extra 5 hours per week sprinting on a soccer field while we're hard at work in our comfortable office chairs eating junk food for dinner as we work into the evening. Just because we're productive doesn't mean we get off our butts to do it.
Slashdot Mirror
The thing is that a vanishingly small portion of people who listen to music on a new album normally pay to do so. Practically everybody first hears some of it on the radio first, paying nothing at all, and only then decides to pay anything for it. And most people who hear it on the radio don't buy it at all.
What would be most interesting is to find out how many people downloaded the album multiple times (with the same contact info) and how much they paid in total. If you view this (downloads plus the large amount of attention this move got) as the newfangled equivalent of airplay, with people paying again as actual purchases, it's more reasonable to consider the "freeloaders" as people getting marketted to who weren't interested. Of course, there's no way to determine, due to the way they set up the site, how many people decided they want to have the album and didn't pay for it.
Consider this: you go into a record store and you see that they have a new album that you haven't listened to but you've heard a lot about it. You go over to the listening booth, but it's got a long line. Then you discover that they'll let you just take a copy of the album home for free. The obvious thing to do is take a copy home and listen to it there, and come back and buy another copy for real if you like it. Of course, with this being the most reasonable behavior, even if everybody who takes the album comes back and buys it, that's 50% "freeloaders".
The reason this comes up is that (reportedly) ISO wants to have a standardized file format for office documents that everybody can convert all of their old documents to, preserving the meanings of the originals, even if that meaning depends on doing something oddly or wrong.
New documents wouldn't be created with errors marked, but documents converted from formats defined de facto by hopelessly irreparable programs, where the conversion is done competantly, would mark the errors they contain.
The key point is that, with ODF v1.2, which is in progress as a further ISO specification, ISO wants the format to be able to handle conversion of all of the world's existing legacy documents. Some of these documents only make sense based on errors in the legacy applications that were used to generate them, and getting actually correct calculation would destroy the comprehensibility of the documents. For example, if a spreadsheet has a calculation error, and this error leads to the final results being different, and the spreadsheet is part of a document justifying taking a particular action based on the result, understanding the document depends on being able to see the calculation that the author saw, and not the correct calculation, which would be incoherent. Current ODF is fine for making correct decisions going forward, but it is inadaquate to understanding past mistakes. And it means that, if you use a broken old program like Excel 2007 to prepare your taxes, and you convert it to ODF and send it in, the ODF document will contain no clues as to why you're trying to pay a different amount from the total given at the end, because the information that the math is broken in the source in a particular way is not representable in ODF.
Furthermore, the OASIS committee responsible for developing ODF has broken down entirely, at least in Sam Hiser's view, over the issue of how this should be handled, with Sun ignoring the need entirely, while the OpenDocument Foundation, trying to go forward in ISO, insists on having something get done.
As far as I can tell, CDF is actually totally irrelevant to this whole thing, except that it's from the W3C, which is simply not the OASIS ODF TC, and hasn't broken down. CDF is essentially the concept "do the obvious XML thing for putting compound documents together". It doesn't specify the format of any component office documents, except for SVG for figures (it specifies a bunch of other formats for particular purposes, but nothing interesting or different). The main benefit of CDF seems to be that the group doesn't have the level of bad blood that there is over at OASIS, so there's a chance of producing some specification for the next version.
On the other hand, it's hard to corroborate any of this with any evidence outside of Sam Hiser.
The wifi driver is GPL (and included in the mainline linux kernel already). The wireless chip firmware is the proprietary part. But, of course, that's more open than most of the chips in the system, which can't be changed in the field at all, and when can't be modified without a chip fab. People are actually working on reverse-engineering the chip specs (it looks like an ARM920T with a radio peripheral), but it's perfectly reasonable to consider the chip as a device with a detailed specification that has a very long, particular, and incomprehensible (but carefully documented) startup sequence.
You'd do better to digitize all of your vinyl now. Just because CD reissues are generally incompetantly done doesn't mean that you can't make an effectively perfect digital recording of the signal your player produces when playing the vinyl before it gets damaged by wear and environment. It doesn't matter for the signal that goes to your speakers whether it is driven by record player or a DAC.
One thing about remastering is that the original recording may have been done with a vinyl-based idea of the threshold for perceptability. So they didn't bother with some aspects of the environment or accoustics of the studio which would make no difference in vinyl, but which come out clearly and distractingly on CD. Having it on vinyl in between effectively airbrushes out this junk. But that doesn't mean that you can't push the signal through vinyl first and then make a high-quality digital recording of the post-vinyl signal, and have your digital music player reproduce the sound of a vinyl record.
It's no worse than Aleph One, and just a unit length of "c" tape can store at least as much as a whole spool of Aleph One. The only downside with this format is that you can't cut the tape between cells; you'll always cut through a cell no matter where you cut it.
An infinite tape that's twice as long isn't any bigger. You need a continuous tape. Or if you prefer, you can get a tape that has a position for each possible state of the entirety of a regular infinite tape, although those tend to get torn too easily.
It's not so much that it's an unpopular opinion as that it's an uncommon experience. Most people seem to have driver issues with Vista (but not with XP), and, in most cases, Linux has driver support for everything, but no software set up to do anything with the device (i.e., if you plug in your USB sex toy, it'll have a driver, but there's no obvious way to tell, because there's no program that pops up and lets you use it).
According to TFA, this album has sold 4 times as many copies as Radiohead's previous album in the corresponding period. This model has failed at the goal of making sure that nobody but customers hears Radiohead's music, but I'm not sure the band minds that too much.
I think they can improve the model though: people who find the torrent without hearing about the website won't know that they can fund the band without paying organized crime most of the money. And the people who buy from the website don't find out that they can skip downloading from the official site and get the torrent once they've paid for their license, and get better files. Also, people who hear about the album aren't given a convenient way to decide if they want it or how much they want to pay, unless they find the torrent on their own. And their website is slow and complicated, and won't sell to people who don't have cell phones or don't want to give them contact info beyond billing info, so they're probably losing a lot of impulse-buy sales.
Even so, I don't think I can call an album going platinum in a week a failure.
My opinion (based on a lot of anecdotes but nothing formal or statistically valid) is that, when people are under too much systemic strain, whatever body part is under the heaviest use breaks down. Systemic strain causes something to go wrong; computer use causes it to be CTS, as opposed to, say, a heart attack.
Oversimplifying somewhat, stress tends to override the normal tendancy to rest when you're too tired to protect yourself, and your ability to relax and recover. At that point, it's a question of what you're damaging.
There's a lot less interdependance in math than people tend to assume, though. The normal high school presentation of the math is heavily interdependant, but most of that math was originally worked out differently anyway, and there are plenty of alternative explanations. Of course, you have to find a presentation that avoids using anything you don't know, which can be difficult if you've decided you don't like something that's commonly assumed.
On the other hand, a lot of the really important concepts get glossed over in high school, because they're going for the simplest explanation of each concept, and the really important thing to get is that some concepts which have different explanations are equivalent (e.g., the fundamental theorem of calculus is essentially "the antiderivative and the indefinite integral are the same thing"; but you can show this with a lot of algebra and such, or geometrically: "the rate at which the area of the space under a function changes as you move the far boundary is the value of the function, obviously").
School also tends to put too much of a focus on computation, which is fine for arithmatic, since you will actually need to be able to multiply 6 by 9 someday when you don't have a calculator (or your calculator is full of other computations), but it doesn't make too much sense for integrals and derivatives, where, in practice, you'll stick it into Mathematica or do it numerically.
With all of the people ditching Vista for XP (enough that OEMs bother to support it), Linux has the clear advantage that nobody tries to force you to use bad versions and that there's more flexibility in what you can upgrade independantly.
I think a lot of Linux distributions fail to push this advantage as much as they could (upgrade your system, and everything will be exactly the same, unless you switch to a new theme, except that newer hardware will work, more features can be enabled, and stuff will work more smoothly), but they're still far ahead of Microsoft, which has a slew of arbitrary regressions and reorganizations when they have new versions (e.g., in XP, dragging a file into a batch file window waiting for a filename will insert that filename; in Vista, this doesn't work).
Actually, he's a major supporting character in Cory Doctorow's book.
People choosing between paying $12 for an album and not getting the album won't necessarily be the same as people who, given the choice of how much to pay, would pick $12 or more. Huge radiohead fans would buy an album for whatever it costs, but still wouldn't necessarily prefer to overpay just in case. And I don't think people will decide they're short by enough to justify doing a second monetary transaction; there's a convenience cost to the process that makes it unpleasant to do it twice (especially with the store slashdotted).
FWIW, I'm one of the most frequent buyers at Magnatune.com, and I never buy anything there without first listening to it enough to know it well. I always pay $10 for albums, and I'd probably choose $8 or less if I hadn't heard the album.
I doubt anybody would be using the basketball court at 1192991880. It'll probably be a bit cold for outdoor basketball and there wasn't anybody at 1190572680, when it was quite nice out.
The problem with this model is that people haven't heard the album, and therefore don't know how good it is, so they can't decide in an informed fashion how much they want to pay for it. Even under the assumption that people will be happiest if they pay what they feel something is worth, I expect that people's happiness falls off more quickly on the overpaying side than the underpaying side, and that people expect this is general, so people will underpay to maximize their expected happiness if they don't know what they will feel something is worth.
42.39561 -71.13051
1192991880
One did Tae Kwon Do as a kid (with sparring and destruction of lumber), and two (including me) do Aikido. Our style, at least, regularly practices having somebody really try to hit you, and putting them neatly on the ground.
Of course, the practical martial aspect of a black belt in anything is really that people on the street tend to decide to mess with somebody else instead, because you look vaguely pleased at the prospect of being attacked. And the actual practical aspect of Aikido, in any case, is that you don't fall and hurt yourself when your porch steps are unexpectedly coated in a sheet of ice.
If you can't stand the thought of buying a computer from a Chinese company while the mess is going on in Myanmar, just do what I did and buy a computer from Lenovo last year. Or, if your time machine isn't working, buy a used one made last year.
Alternatively, plan to buy a new Thinkpad as soon as the mess is over, and use your current computer until then. If you want to be political, call up Lenovo and let them know. It does nobody any good to silently boycott a company, since they don't know why their sales are dropping, so they don't know what to do to rectify the situation.
Anyway, I don't see you getting a new computer any time soon, since you'll obviously have to wait until 2009 at the earliest to get one from an American company, right?
Actually, 60% of the geeks at my work are black belts. None of us even claim to drive monster trucks, though.
So take a screenshot, but file the identifying information and a description, rather than the screenshot. If, later, there is some question as to whether there was content with that description at that location, you can produce the screenshot. In general, you're not supposed to produce evidence of things which the other side hasn't disputed, even lacking some reason not to make the evidence public, just because it wastes time.
It's so that intermediary software can manipulate the files without knowing anything about the semantics. For example, jabber makes good use of it so that clients can support a variety of extensions while services only need to handle a single function while letting messages with additional contents pass through intact.
I can just see it: a virtual world as the unifying interface for information about the real world, with news searchable by location and marked on the map. And current satellite images projected onto the virtual ground, allowing users to observe the real world in places they aren't physically located. And, above it all, bloggers looking down from their dirigibles, identifiable by their avatars' red capes and aviator goggles...
I'm a coder, and I don't spend more than 35 hours a week in the office. My productivity is rarely limited by time, but instead by how many clever solutions I can come up with. That's the point of not giving overtime to the people who don't get overtime: if your salary is dictated by your productivity, and your productivity isn't determined by the number of hours you spend at the job, there's no reason for your employer to pay you to sit at your desk like a zombie when you've done all of the thinking that you can for the day, assuming there's no reason for you to sit there then, either.
Coders should get overtime for going to meetings, but otherwise, there shouldn't be any reason for coders to try pulling long hours on the project.
Those Europeans spend the extra 5 hours per week sprinting on a soccer field while we're hard at work in our comfortable office chairs eating junk food for dinner as we work into the evening. Just because we're productive doesn't mean we get off our butts to do it.