I've never understood people that don't demand to be paid for every hour they work....?
Depends how you're paid. And how you want to count 'work'.
If you are responsible for something, and that guarantees you a decent monthly/yearly salary and isn't an hourly rate then you take responsibility for it, and you find the way that minimizes your stress level. Being part of any organization that's going 24/7 means you necessarily have to deal with occasional things at odd hours.
As I said (and I realize you're not replying to me), I'd rather reduce the stress in the hours I'm officially at work and stay on top of problems than spend those hours scrambling to fix shit people broke in my absence. That's the difference between being responsible for something, and working for someone.
You won't get two hours off tomorrow for your 15 minutes of work at 11pm. You'll still work be at work tomorrow morning.
and you seem to have failed at reading what I said.
I'd rather spend 15 minutes dealing with a problem now than dealing with it for 2 hours tomorrow. That's why, when I'm *AT* work I am not scrambling to fix things.
your workload goes up
Depends on the problem. My point precisely was that my workload goes down the sooner I resolve issues.
If you're an employee, if you're married and have children, or you just like to sleep at night, maybe not so rosy.
My family would rather I answer e-mail for 15 minutes while I'm at home than get trapped in the office for an extra two hours tomorrow.
Struggling to think of a stereotypical/.er job like that
Engineer, scientist, IT guy, basically any IT guy for a business that works 24/7 constantly has this problem. I'm not technically an engineer but I have done a lot of engineering work as I am both a scientist and IT guy by training.
My boss authorizes things. He's a scientist too, but he controls the purse strings and access to 'secure' (not actually secure but you know what I mean) rooms and so on. If someone needs something from a lab and he's not there, and you aren't authorized to go in, well you wait until tomorrow, you try and find someone who is authorized that you can convince to let you in, or you try and cope without whatever you need.
That's an executive level cultural problem thats outside your paygrade to fix,
What do you think/. is full of? Highschool and one year out of college IT minions? My job is design systems (both technical and procedural), and to do research. My boss is a scientist who oversees research. We have procedures because we are entrusted with the publics money and someone walking away with 20 grand in computers tends to go over poorly.
its not my problem, I'll patiently wait.
maybe this is why you think we're all low level drones?
You waiting patiently is called wasting money. If you waited patiently for an hour while your boss was in a meeting then it was polite and appropriate, if you wasted a day waiting for me to do my job then that was either my fault, or yours, depending, but either way, it wasted money that could have been better spent elsewhere.
Even if it is, I'd rather spend 15 minutes at 11pm typing an e-mail that will solve a problem right then, than having to spend 2 hours fixing something first thing the next morning.
My boss is one of those guys who doesn't check his e-mail at home (or at least not very often) and not on his smartphone. But he goes home at 3 as part of his flex hours. If something happens that he's really really needed, well, you wait until tomorrow, which just adds stress, confusion and sometimes creates new problems as people try and do what they need without him, and make life hard for themselves.
I'd rather be 'on call' every day for 4 hours after work, on top of my 8 hours a day at work if that means those 8 hours aren't spent cleaning up messes created in my absence, or if that means other teams (including other time zones) can actually get their shit done on time. That makes my working hours a lot less stressful, and gives me more time during working hours to do things like post on/.
I did a job once that was multinational - next day for anything. So if we had a problem that needed authorization for spending or an engineering decision or whatever at 10 in the morning our time, we'd be stuck waiting on our arses until the next day for someone at one of the corporate offices to look at it. Which was just a huge waste of time and money, and made doing anything on site a nightmare because you could never be sure how long you'd be stuck there.
People can, and routinely do, live perfectly well without any advertizing at all.
Quite the opposite the world exists in layers upon layers of advertising. Store shelves are advertising, product colours are advertising. If you go to buy a carpet cleaning products (as I did yesterday, damn cats) the placement of one product versus another on the shelves is paid for by advertising.
That's not a claim that can withstand much scrutiny. It's simply, comprehensively, untrue.
Your statement is unfortunately the untrue one. And you even, in your last line, confound yourself by not realizing how out of touch you are.
If I need groceries, I know how to visit a grocery store.
Where is there a grocery store? Is the fact that you call it a grocery store rather than a grocer or greengrocer biasing your search results? If you use a map search to find the nearest grocery store someone has probably paid advertising dollars for you to know where they are. When you're driving along the road the business has a sign (probably several) that tell you the name of the place and probably indicate it's a grocery store. That's advertising.
In fact, do a search for your own statement a "box of M10x40 socket head cap screws in type 316 stainless steel" into google and see what happens. Aside from the indexing of this thread there are several different stores that all offer them, so how do you know which one to buy from? The first link just means they paid the most money in advertising.
And that didn't get at my real point, which is how did someone sell the first box of M10x40 socket head cap screws in type 316 stainless steel? You need it because some product manual or school or whatever told you that will solve your problem. But you aren't the first buyer ever. You're benefiting from initial advertising spending that got someone to even select a socket head cap in the first place. Even your use of the term "socket head" is sketchy, because that definition changed over time, through advertising. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw).
You invalidated your own argument with your own examples. Well done. How that gets insightful around here I'll never know.
If you search for a vacuum cleaner how does a search engine know that some dude named Dyson had a new way to make vacuums? Advertising will rank it higher, otherwise you're hoping that someone has honestly reviewed the product, and that their honest review ranks high enough in the search engine for someone to ever see it.
As much as I like search engines, search engines don't cope well with product information that is new and hard to verify, and tweaking search engine results is an exercise in advertising.
Search works really well when you already know what you're looking for. If you're looking something you don't know about, you don't even know what to search for.
I'm not even sure 1 year is short enough, but ya, if the material has to be looked at then you'd think you should do a good job training the people who have to do it. Police must have a similar problem with people who specialize in these areas for a career.
I have a 250 Mbit connection at home. I can pull down an entire steam game in about 5 min. When it's installed, I play it at 60 fps at 2560x1600.
And? I have a 50 Mb/s connection and can play 60fps at 2560x1600, but my computer cost probably 2000 bucks for the gaming related parts (18 TB of storage isn't really a gaming problem but it's hard to factor that in/out, and my now 1TB of SSD space is about 10% game playing and 90% game making), and my internet is 100 bucks a month. If you only want to spent 15 bucks a month then onlive is much much much much much cheaper than either of our setups. Our setups aren't really a good comparison to normal people.
That, and my 50Mb/s connection puts me in the top 1% of households in canada, which was my entire point of the line that this isn't a great business plan right now.
You have to keep in mind the utilization on the distributed network. Sony could probably get away with having 15 million PS3's in a data centre and be able to serve all of the gaming traffic on the PSN, ever, even though there are something like 50 million PS3's in the wild.
The question of just how much bandwidth you need, and how much latency is tolerable is a tricky question. A very good FPS on the PS3 has a 100ms or so controller response time, a bad one 133ms. We spend a lot of time teaching parallel algorithms and game design to deal with these problems, because they are tricky to solve. But right now, to a physical server in Ireland (I'm in ontario canada) I have a latency of just over 150ms, now that's not an onlive server and it's a single data point, but you get the idea that this is not a completely impossible problem to solve, even with todays technology - that technology just isn't widely proliferated in the wild. You can compress the video stream, you can actually do some sophisticated fuzzing outside of the main field of view if you want to track eye movement (which isn't all that expensive), you can do frame differentially stuff to reduce bandwidth (A LOT), etc.
Even your steam example, have you used any unmodified games on gog.com? (I sadly don't have a list) but way back in like 2000 microsoft change how direct2D worked, and colours don't work properly on some applications, I know arcanum on gog.com has this problem but I'm not sure about others. Stuff like that, or an incompatibility with new versions of windows or the like and you can see steam looking to do something similar with the steam cloud. As I said, initially for legacy games especially this is a big market, you can't execute a PS2 game properly on most new PS3's, they're low resolution, lots of the games are latency tolerant etc.
The medical industry today depends on lots of people getting sick and lots of people staying sick.
That's not true at all. The *US* medical industry depends on people getting and staying sick. Civilized countries do not have this problem to nearly the same degree because their industries are government owned and operated with rewards for making people healthy, not making money.
A government owned and operated industry is in effect the most extreme form of regulation possible, and is demonstrably appropriate for healthcare.
By the same logic that would regulate apps, numerous web-based tools for patients to help themselves should also be regulated.
Sure, as they should be. As i say somewhere above, I'm canadian. In canada chiropractors aren't allowed to present a professional opinion about vaccines because it is considered outside their expertise. That basically applies to any writing they do, web or otherwise,. Algorithms are a bit more complicated to regulate but the premise is there.
I know a lot of doctors around here (at the university I'm at, we have a teaching hospital) find that the web has done more harm than good, patients are convinced their problem must be the serious but rare case, and can't possibly be the common and not serious thing and get all upset when you tell them it's in fact not cancer or a heart attack. Granted the ones who look up symptoms and think 'hmm maybe I should just go to a doctor' aren't done any harm by it and they don't necessarily open their mouths and say they couldn't diagnose themselves.
I'm canadian, I have a somewhat different experience with medical professionals than americans have.
What do consumers get out of regulation? It isn't safety. It isn't privacy.
Around here it is both of those things, and much less privacy concerns because regulation means even if your private medical information gets out it cannot be used by your employer. Just because *your* regulations are terrible doesn't mean they have to be.
must get and use a credit card because that's the way banks make money
another way to make money or be gone....same for the web sites that use it.
That was some good crazy. In 1.5 lines you went from saying a company can only have one business model, to saying if a current business model isn't working creative people will find a new one.
If you want banks to exist, which despite the present circumstance, we do, then you need to provide them a viable business model. We could simply require that in exchange for storing peoples money "banks" get a monopoly on strippers, and so they make money on strippers but provide the service of storing money. I can't see how that plan could ever possibly work out well, but you get the idea.
Big websites I don't have a lot of sympathy for, they shouldn't be using a 3rd party advertising company to host their ads. The harder ones to deal with are the people who have a website/blog that costs say 1000 bucks a month to run, which is too much to expect someone to just contribute it to the good of society if they like having a website, and too little to have people dedicated to advertising. Adwords and doubleclick both serve that market without any obvious replacements that wouldn't have the same problems. This is where an alternate business model (like googles blogspot service) makes sense, you host through blogspot, adwords and doubleclick are all on googles blogspot. Google actually owns the advertising, the hosting etc. and can pay you for your content based on the revenue you generate, but the ads service would then be confined to google. Of course google is so big being confined 'only to google' isn't really much comfort, but then at least there's only a handful of big companies you need to regulate, and not thousands of little ones.
I specifically went down a list of google owned services because they exemplify what is wrong with the business model, (and the one thing you got right in your crazy). Credit cards, which are a generally unfair business, pad the coffers of the banks who offer competing but much more fair (and well regulated) services. If I take a loan from the bank right now for 5000, I can get it at somewhere between 3 and 7%, but if I borrow 5000 dollars on my credit card I get it at 22%. Same basic service, same usage from my perspective as an end user, but in one scenario the bank is restricted in its ability to try and layer on points, rewards and other stuff that would get you to borrow more money at the low interest rate, while they are less restricted with credit cards.
Most, if not all of the 3rd party ad services are just plain unfair businesses, with poor regulation. And that's bad for consumers. But there are also similar services, from the same companies, that are less sketchy. Until we're at a point where the ads you see will be from non sketchy business practices the vast majority of the time you simply have to block anything that even might be sketchy.
That's a significant overreach, you can't know to buy a product without some advertising to tell you it exists.
But if an ad is worth hosting, you can host it yourself, not have some 3rd party ad company do it for you, that's rife for abuse. If you want to have advertising on www.slashdot.org you can host the images text etc. on slashdot.org servers, and that means I hold you responsible for those ads. If they're sketchy, have pop ups or whatever, you approved it, you host it, it's on you. If some company wants to have the ads available for auction and you take the ad from their site and paste it into your server, then you approved it, you host it, it's on you.
That still means I want to control what code of any sort runs on my machine, so no ads that use flash or javascript, ever, and things like that, but for anyone making any money in this business you can afford to host your own ads.
Fundamentally this isn't an 'advertising is evil' problem, it's a 'advertisers are evil' and we need to limit their business models to minimize the damage they do while at the same time still allowing the legitimate need for a company to tell the world what it's products are and what they do.
It's unfortunate google doesn't take better care of the people they hire for this work, given the job as described it's not really surprising it fucks a lot of people up. You'd kinda think there should be a fairly extensive training programme first, and then a coping programme after, if nothing else because you really need to weed out the ones who are there because they enjoy it.
If people did their own research they could decide for themselves.
If people were capable of doing their own research properly there wouldn't be a need for Let me Google that for you .
Even *WITH* solid research people still institutionally do stupid things Homeopathy shouldn't get NHS funding (n.b. the first line of that article links to the proper source, but the article I linked is a bit more readable) and yet it's STILL sort of covered by the NHS.
Sorry, but the reason we have professional researchers who get paid to it is because most people can't.
I'm sure there will come a day when we in IT are forced to be certified to work on any server\computer that contains patient data
You aren't already? I'm pretty sure around here you have to have some sort of official training, though I'm not sure whether that is a token online 1 hour course or something actually involved.
I'm a comp sci researcher and to do *anything* with human subjects, even just having them look at different colours on the screen and tell us which ones are the most visible requires giant piles of paperwork about anonymizing data, data retention rules, access controls, etc. etc. Which is why I don't do that, it's not worth the effort, but the people who do (including our IT guys who run the servers it's all stored on) have to go through some degree of agreeing to follow all of the rules.
you might as well let the smart-phone treat your patient
What if that's the point of the app, and the patient doesn't see a doctor due to cost or 'ideological differences'? Granted, that is basically the case for regulation, because individual doctors can't, and don't, oversee absolutely everything used on their patients all the time, and aren't qualified or capable of knowing if everything is working anyway.
Because regulation artificially narrows the supply
And artificially strips out dangerous or faulty procedures, chemicals etc. before they experience the joys of the free market on the public who have to enjoy the burdens of what's happening. Because your medical information is *private* and letting anyone have at your private medical information without any regulation means that information could be used against you.
Because letting people take random chemicals to see if some of them cure whatever disease they have definitely isn't a good idea, but it's cheap, so we could do that.
It does however depend a lot on what apps actually do. I'm not sure you need to highly regulate the applications used by medical professionals to handle payroll or scheduling or room booking. There are custom software packages for a lot of those because all hospitals face similar problems and so on, so it makes sense then to not have to completely re-engineer your payroll system just because your hospital is not the hospital one block over. But if you're talking about tracking a patient's blood sugar and providing advice based on that tracking you're into a whole collection of privacy rules (how secure is this data? Who am I sending the data to?) and providing medical advice from something that isn't a medical professional.
Which tends to show they're talking past each other a bit. The one doctor is making an app to deal with strokes, that's almost certainly into the category of medical advice (at least potential medical advice) and tracking a lot of deeply private medical information. The other guy is helping doctors communicate information between rounds, so there are privacy implications, but he's not necessarily intending that information to ever actually see a patient.
Erm... no, we don't. We require you to have a licence and pass tests at regular intervals, and we have a system to take away that licence if you are caught violating the rules often enough.
We also require people with a higher probability of failing the test to retake it at regular intervals (both young drivers through graduated licencing and old drivers who have to retest periodically).
Not really no. That's sort of a first year analysis of the problem, but things get more sophisticated quickly.
Lets say I have two businesses at the start of some time period. Company A: Revenue 10 billion dollars, profit 1 billion dollars. Company B: Revenue 20 billion dollars, losses of 1 billion dollars.
After some time Company A: Revenue 15 Billion, profit 1.5 billion. Company B: Revenue 50 billion, losses of 2 billion.
So company B is now a much bigger company, and worth quite a bit more than before, even though it still has a negative profit by your measure.
Layered on top of those are things like relationships with other companies and corporate governance structure, which value a lot to investors. Whatever one may think of turfing out Steve Jobs, the Apple board, they at least had the ability to do that, whereas facebook shareholders can't easily turf out Zuck, for example.
This is essentially how Sony's game business still exists next to nintendo. Nintendo makes more money, by a long shot, but the Playstation ecosystem, even though it cost Sony money for quite a while, ended up quite a bit larger overall and giving shareholders more assets in total.
Ok, total value of the company at the currently listed price. The companies assets and liabilities are a separate thing, but sort of maybe factored into the share prices.
Obviously if you want to buy a lot of shares, or sell a lot of shares the price will change.
As I say, it doesn't reflect anything meaningful particularly. Share prices move for a lot of reasons.
No, that's about it. They have been running a cloud gaming service where they run the game code on their servers, and stream the data to your computer in real time. They have a 'console' that's basically a cheap video player with a controller to connect to the service if you don't want to use a PC desktop client.
That's their entire business model. And it's not all that successful. There were only really two big outfits in this business gaikai and onlive, and both exist in an effort to get bought out by a big company, or at least did, until gaikai got bought by sony. There are some smaller other asian outfits as well, but that's about it. Pay a subscription fee, play games anywhere through an onlive client (with their box), without needing to buy gaming hardware.
I would think the big market for this will shortly be legacy games, I bet 10 000 PS2's would serve the entire PSN, and be 'good enough' for legacy gaming, same sort of thing with the original xbox, and if there is a major architecture change for the PS4/Xbox3 they could need literally millions of boxes as an online service. The other avenue of course is people on laptops who can't get decent parts for whatever reason.
In the really long term obviously most game services are going this direction, but I think they're too far ahead of the curve to make enough money to cling to life for another decade or so.
Depends how much they actually had in debt too. They might have wound up *before* they had unmanageable debt, but just very low income, or they might be completely screwing nearly all of their creditors out of their investment.
but the law is having smaller and smaller ground to stand on.
I think it's the other way around, the law is going to get more and more broad, because it's going to be about what you can do with a collection of numbers (after all, everything on computers is just 1's and 0's), or the interpretation of that number rather than the number itself is what matters on you.
We prohibit things like guns (in civilized countries at least) because access to them is dangerous. But it's not the gun itself that is illegal usually, it's the possession of it, the transport of it, the sale of it etc. Lawn darts is the same thing, any use of a lawn dart is unnecessarily dangerous, so society can't be on the hook for it.
Numbers are as dangerous as they can be interpreted to be, so possession of a number that can be used to break into a bank vault or steal an mp3 will be broadly illegal, whatever form that number takes.
Missile guidance systems, made in switzerland, which they wouldn't sell to the US off and on for bombing places they disagree with.
Computer parts made by South Korea (go to iran, no apple stores, but samsung stores).
France, just sold Mistral carriers to russia.
Shall I go on? Just because the technology isn't owned by the US doesn't mean it isn't equally good and in the hands of your allies, who are willing selling to the highest bidder who may or may not be your friend.
Slashdot Mirror
I've never understood people that don't demand to be paid for every hour they work....?
Depends how you're paid. And how you want to count 'work'.
If you are responsible for something, and that guarantees you a decent monthly/yearly salary and isn't an hourly rate then you take responsibility for it, and you find the way that minimizes your stress level. Being part of any organization that's going 24/7 means you necessarily have to deal with occasional things at odd hours.
As I said (and I realize you're not replying to me), I'd rather reduce the stress in the hours I'm officially at work and stay on top of problems than spend those hours scrambling to fix shit people broke in my absence. That's the difference between being responsible for something, and working for someone.
You won't get two hours off tomorrow for your 15 minutes of work at 11pm. You'll still work be at work tomorrow morning.
and you seem to have failed at reading what I said.
I'd rather spend 15 minutes dealing with a problem now than dealing with it for 2 hours tomorrow. That's why, when I'm *AT* work I am not scrambling to fix things.
your workload goes up
Depends on the problem. My point precisely was that my workload goes down the sooner I resolve issues.
If you're an employee, if you're married and have children, or you just like to sleep at night, maybe not so rosy.
My family would rather I answer e-mail for 15 minutes while I'm at home than get trapped in the office for an extra two hours tomorrow.
Struggling to think of a stereotypical /.er job like that
Engineer, scientist, IT guy, basically any IT guy for a business that works 24/7 constantly has this problem. I'm not technically an engineer but I have done a lot of engineering work as I am both a scientist and IT guy by training.
My boss authorizes things. He's a scientist too, but he controls the purse strings and access to 'secure' (not actually secure but you know what I mean) rooms and so on. If someone needs something from a lab and he's not there, and you aren't authorized to go in, well you wait until tomorrow, you try and find someone who is authorized that you can convince to let you in, or you try and cope without whatever you need.
That's an executive level cultural problem thats outside your paygrade to fix,
What do you think /. is full of? Highschool and one year out of college IT minions? My job is design systems (both technical and procedural), and to do research. My boss is a scientist who oversees research. We have procedures because we are entrusted with the publics money and someone walking away with 20 grand in computers tends to go over poorly.
its not my problem, I'll patiently wait.
maybe this is why you think we're all low level drones?
You waiting patiently is called wasting money. If you waited patiently for an hour while your boss was in a meeting then it was polite and appropriate, if you wasted a day waiting for me to do my job then that was either my fault, or yours, depending, but either way, it wasted money that could have been better spent elsewhere.
Even if it is, I'd rather spend 15 minutes at 11pm typing an e-mail that will solve a problem right then, than having to spend 2 hours fixing something first thing the next morning.
My boss is one of those guys who doesn't check his e-mail at home (or at least not very often) and not on his smartphone. But he goes home at 3 as part of his flex hours. If something happens that he's really really needed, well, you wait until tomorrow, which just adds stress, confusion and sometimes creates new problems as people try and do what they need without him, and make life hard for themselves.
I'd rather be 'on call' every day for 4 hours after work, on top of my 8 hours a day at work if that means those 8 hours aren't spent cleaning up messes created in my absence, or if that means other teams (including other time zones) can actually get their shit done on time. That makes my working hours a lot less stressful, and gives me more time during working hours to do things like post on /.
I did a job once that was multinational - next day for anything. So if we had a problem that needed authorization for spending or an engineering decision or whatever at 10 in the morning our time, we'd be stuck waiting on our arses until the next day for someone at one of the corporate offices to look at it. Which was just a huge waste of time and money, and made doing anything on site a nightmare because you could never be sure how long you'd be stuck there.
People can, and routinely do, live perfectly well without any advertizing at all.
Quite the opposite the world exists in layers upon layers of advertising. Store shelves are advertising, product colours are advertising. If you go to buy a carpet cleaning products (as I did yesterday, damn cats) the placement of one product versus another on the shelves is paid for by advertising.
That's not a claim that can withstand much scrutiny. It's simply, comprehensively, untrue.
Your statement is unfortunately the untrue one. And you even, in your last line, confound yourself by not realizing how out of touch you are.
If I need groceries, I know how to visit a grocery store.
Where is there a grocery store? Is the fact that you call it a grocery store rather than a grocer or greengrocer biasing your search results? If you use a map search to find the nearest grocery store someone has probably paid advertising dollars for you to know where they are. When you're driving along the road the business has a sign (probably several) that tell you the name of the place and probably indicate it's a grocery store. That's advertising.
In fact, do a search for your own statement a "box of M10x40 socket head cap screws in type 316 stainless steel" into google and see what happens. Aside from the indexing of this thread there are several different stores that all offer them, so how do you know which one to buy from? The first link just means they paid the most money in advertising.
And that didn't get at my real point, which is how did someone sell the first box of M10x40 socket head cap screws in type 316 stainless steel? You need it because some product manual or school or whatever told you that will solve your problem. But you aren't the first buyer ever. You're benefiting from initial advertising spending that got someone to even select a socket head cap in the first place. Even your use of the term "socket head" is sketchy, because that definition changed over time, through advertising. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Screw).
You invalidated your own argument with your own examples. Well done. How that gets insightful around here I'll never know.
You have to know what you're searching for.
If you search for a vacuum cleaner how does a search engine know that some dude named Dyson had a new way to make vacuums? Advertising will rank it higher, otherwise you're hoping that someone has honestly reviewed the product, and that their honest review ranks high enough in the search engine for someone to ever see it.
As much as I like search engines, search engines don't cope well with product information that is new and hard to verify, and tweaking search engine results is an exercise in advertising.
Search works really well when you already know what you're looking for. If you're looking something you don't know about, you don't even know what to search for.
I'm not even sure 1 year is short enough, but ya, if the material has to be looked at then you'd think you should do a good job training the people who have to do it. Police must have a similar problem with people who specialize in these areas for a career.
I have a 250 Mbit connection at home. I can pull down an entire steam game in about 5 min. When it's installed, I play it at 60 fps at 2560x1600.
And? I have a 50 Mb/s connection and can play 60fps at 2560x1600, but my computer cost probably 2000 bucks for the gaming related parts (18 TB of storage isn't really a gaming problem but it's hard to factor that in/out, and my now 1TB of SSD space is about 10% game playing and 90% game making), and my internet is 100 bucks a month. If you only want to spent 15 bucks a month then onlive is much much much much much cheaper than either of our setups. Our setups aren't really a good comparison to normal people.
That, and my 50Mb/s connection puts me in the top 1% of households in canada, which was my entire point of the line that this isn't a great business plan right now.
You have to keep in mind the utilization on the distributed network. Sony could probably get away with having 15 million PS3's in a data centre and be able to serve all of the gaming traffic on the PSN, ever, even though there are something like 50 million PS3's in the wild.
The question of just how much bandwidth you need, and how much latency is tolerable is a tricky question. A very good FPS on the PS3 has a 100ms or so controller response time, a bad one 133ms. We spend a lot of time teaching parallel algorithms and game design to deal with these problems, because they are tricky to solve. But right now, to a physical server in Ireland (I'm in ontario canada) I have a latency of just over 150ms, now that's not an onlive server and it's a single data point, but you get the idea that this is not a completely impossible problem to solve, even with todays technology - that technology just isn't widely proliferated in the wild. You can compress the video stream, you can actually do some sophisticated fuzzing outside of the main field of view if you want to track eye movement (which isn't all that expensive), you can do frame differentially stuff to reduce bandwidth (A LOT), etc.
Even your steam example, have you used any unmodified games on gog.com? (I sadly don't have a list) but way back in like 2000 microsoft change how direct2D worked, and colours don't work properly on some applications, I know arcanum on gog.com has this problem but I'm not sure about others. Stuff like that, or an incompatibility with new versions of windows or the like and you can see steam looking to do something similar with the steam cloud. As I said, initially for legacy games especially this is a big market, you can't execute a PS2 game properly on most new PS3's, they're low resolution, lots of the games are latency tolerant etc.
addendum
The medical industry today depends on lots of people getting sick and lots of people staying sick.
That's not true at all. The *US* medical industry depends on people getting and staying sick. Civilized countries do not have this problem to nearly the same degree because their industries are government owned and operated with rewards for making people healthy, not making money.
A government owned and operated industry is in effect the most extreme form of regulation possible, and is demonstrably appropriate for healthcare.
By the same logic that would regulate apps, numerous web-based tools for patients to help themselves should also be regulated.
Sure, as they should be. As i say somewhere above, I'm canadian. In canada chiropractors aren't allowed to present a professional opinion about vaccines because it is considered outside their expertise. That basically applies to any writing they do, web or otherwise,. Algorithms are a bit more complicated to regulate but the premise is there.
I know a lot of doctors around here (at the university I'm at, we have a teaching hospital) find that the web has done more harm than good, patients are convinced their problem must be the serious but rare case, and can't possibly be the common and not serious thing and get all upset when you tell them it's in fact not cancer or a heart attack. Granted the ones who look up symptoms and think 'hmm maybe I should just go to a doctor' aren't done any harm by it and they don't necessarily open their mouths and say they couldn't diagnose themselves.
"medical professional" mythology
I'm canadian, I have a somewhat different experience with medical professionals than americans have.
What do consumers get out of regulation? It isn't safety. It isn't privacy.
Around here it is both of those things, and much less privacy concerns because regulation means even if your private medical information gets out it cannot be used by your employer. Just because *your* regulations are terrible doesn't mean they have to be.
must get and use a credit card because that's the way banks make money
another way to make money or be gone....same for the web sites that use it.
That was some good crazy. In 1.5 lines you went from saying a company can only have one business model, to saying if a current business model isn't working creative people will find a new one.
If you want banks to exist, which despite the present circumstance, we do, then you need to provide them a viable business model. We could simply require that in exchange for storing peoples money "banks" get a monopoly on strippers, and so they make money on strippers but provide the service of storing money. I can't see how that plan could ever possibly work out well, but you get the idea.
Big websites I don't have a lot of sympathy for, they shouldn't be using a 3rd party advertising company to host their ads. The harder ones to deal with are the people who have a website/blog that costs say 1000 bucks a month to run, which is too much to expect someone to just contribute it to the good of society if they like having a website, and too little to have people dedicated to advertising. Adwords and doubleclick both serve that market without any obvious replacements that wouldn't have the same problems. This is where an alternate business model (like googles blogspot service) makes sense, you host through blogspot, adwords and doubleclick are all on googles blogspot. Google actually owns the advertising, the hosting etc. and can pay you for your content based on the revenue you generate, but the ads service would then be confined to google. Of course google is so big being confined 'only to google' isn't really much comfort, but then at least there's only a handful of big companies you need to regulate, and not thousands of little ones.
I specifically went down a list of google owned services because they exemplify what is wrong with the business model, (and the one thing you got right in your crazy). Credit cards, which are a generally unfair business, pad the coffers of the banks who offer competing but much more fair (and well regulated) services. If I take a loan from the bank right now for 5000, I can get it at somewhere between 3 and 7%, but if I borrow 5000 dollars on my credit card I get it at 22%. Same basic service, same usage from my perspective as an end user, but in one scenario the bank is restricted in its ability to try and layer on points, rewards and other stuff that would get you to borrow more money at the low interest rate, while they are less restricted with credit cards.
Most, if not all of the 3rd party ad services are just plain unfair businesses, with poor regulation. And that's bad for consumers. But there are also similar services, from the same companies, that are less sketchy. Until we're at a point where the ads you see will be from non sketchy business practices the vast majority of the time you simply have to block anything that even might be sketchy.
Advertising is evil
That's a significant overreach, you can't know to buy a product without some advertising to tell you it exists.
But if an ad is worth hosting, you can host it yourself, not have some 3rd party ad company do it for you, that's rife for abuse. If you want to have advertising on www.slashdot.org you can host the images text etc. on slashdot.org servers, and that means I hold you responsible for those ads. If they're sketchy, have pop ups or whatever, you approved it, you host it, it's on you. If some company wants to have the ads available for auction and you take the ad from their site and paste it into your server, then you approved it, you host it, it's on you.
That still means I want to control what code of any sort runs on my machine, so no ads that use flash or javascript, ever, and things like that, but for anyone making any money in this business you can afford to host your own ads.
Fundamentally this isn't an 'advertising is evil' problem, it's a 'advertisers are evil' and we need to limit their business models to minimize the damage they do while at the same time still allowing the legitimate need for a company to tell the world what it's products are and what they do.
It's unfortunate google doesn't take better care of the people they hire for this work, given the job as described it's not really surprising it fucks a lot of people up. You'd kinda think there should be a fairly extensive training programme first, and then a coping programme after, if nothing else because you really need to weed out the ones who are there because they enjoy it.
If people did their own research they could decide for themselves.
If people were capable of doing their own research properly there wouldn't be a need for Let me Google that for you .
Even *WITH* solid research people still institutionally do stupid things Homeopathy shouldn't get NHS funding (n.b. the first line of that article links to the proper source, but the article I linked is a bit more readable) and yet it's STILL sort of covered by the NHS.
Sorry, but the reason we have professional researchers who get paid to it is because most people can't.
I'm sure there will come a day when we in IT are forced to be certified to work on any server\computer that contains patient data
You aren't already? I'm pretty sure around here you have to have some sort of official training, though I'm not sure whether that is a token online 1 hour course or something actually involved.
I'm a comp sci researcher and to do *anything* with human subjects, even just having them look at different colours on the screen and tell us which ones are the most visible requires giant piles of paperwork about anonymizing data, data retention rules, access controls, etc. etc. Which is why I don't do that, it's not worth the effort, but the people who do (including our IT guys who run the servers it's all stored on) have to go through some degree of agreeing to follow all of the rules.
you might as well let the smart-phone treat your patient
What if that's the point of the app, and the patient doesn't see a doctor due to cost or 'ideological differences'? Granted, that is basically the case for regulation, because individual doctors can't, and don't, oversee absolutely everything used on their patients all the time, and aren't qualified or capable of knowing if everything is working anyway.
Because regulation artificially narrows the supply
And artificially strips out dangerous or faulty procedures, chemicals etc. before they experience the joys of the free market on the public who have to enjoy the burdens of what's happening. Because your medical information is *private* and letting anyone have at your private medical information without any regulation means that information could be used against you.
Because letting people take random chemicals to see if some of them cure whatever disease they have definitely isn't a good idea, but it's cheap, so we could do that.
It does however depend a lot on what apps actually do. I'm not sure you need to highly regulate the applications used by medical professionals to handle payroll or scheduling or room booking. There are custom software packages for a lot of those because all hospitals face similar problems and so on, so it makes sense then to not have to completely re-engineer your payroll system just because your hospital is not the hospital one block over. But if you're talking about tracking a patient's blood sugar and providing advice based on that tracking you're into a whole collection of privacy rules (how secure is this data? Who am I sending the data to?) and providing medical advice from something that isn't a medical professional.
Which tends to show they're talking past each other a bit. The one doctor is making an app to deal with strokes, that's almost certainly into the category of medical advice (at least potential medical advice) and tracking a lot of deeply private medical information. The other guy is helping doctors communicate information between rounds, so there are privacy implications, but he's not necessarily intending that information to ever actually see a patient.
Erm... no, we don't. We require you to have a licence and pass tests at regular intervals, and we have a system to take away that licence if you are caught violating the rules often enough.
We also require people with a higher probability of failing the test to retake it at regular intervals (both young drivers through graduated licencing and old drivers who have to retest periodically).
Not really no. That's sort of a first year analysis of the problem, but things get more sophisticated quickly.
Lets say I have two businesses at the start of some time period.
Company A: Revenue 10 billion dollars, profit 1 billion dollars.
Company B: Revenue 20 billion dollars, losses of 1 billion dollars.
After some time
Company A: Revenue 15 Billion, profit 1.5 billion.
Company B: Revenue 50 billion, losses of 2 billion.
So company B is now a much bigger company, and worth quite a bit more than before, even though it still has a negative profit by your measure.
Layered on top of those are things like relationships with other companies and corporate governance structure, which value a lot to investors. Whatever one may think of turfing out Steve Jobs, the Apple board, they at least had the ability to do that, whereas facebook shareholders can't easily turf out Zuck, for example.
This is essentially how Sony's game business still exists next to nintendo. Nintendo makes more money, by a long shot, but the Playstation ecosystem, even though it cost Sony money for quite a while, ended up quite a bit larger overall and giving shareholders more assets in total.
Ok, total value of the company at the currently listed price. The companies assets and liabilities are a separate thing, but sort of maybe factored into the share prices.
Obviously if you want to buy a lot of shares, or sell a lot of shares the price will change.
As I say, it doesn't reflect anything meaningful particularly. Share prices move for a lot of reasons.
No, that's about it. They have been running a cloud gaming service where they run the game code on their servers, and stream the data to your computer in real time. They have a 'console' that's basically a cheap video player with a controller to connect to the service if you don't want to use a PC desktop client.
That's their entire business model. And it's not all that successful. There were only really two big outfits in this business gaikai and onlive, and both exist in an effort to get bought out by a big company, or at least did, until gaikai got bought by sony. There are some smaller other asian outfits as well, but that's about it. Pay a subscription fee, play games anywhere through an onlive client (with their box), without needing to buy gaming hardware.
I would think the big market for this will shortly be legacy games, I bet 10 000 PS2's would serve the entire PSN, and be 'good enough' for legacy gaming, same sort of thing with the original xbox, and if there is a major architecture change for the PS4/Xbox3 they could need literally millions of boxes as an online service. The other avenue of course is people on laptops who can't get decent parts for whatever reason.
In the really long term obviously most game services are going this direction, but I think they're too far ahead of the curve to make enough money to cling to life for another decade or so.
Depends how much they actually had in debt too. They might have wound up *before* they had unmanageable debt, but just very low income, or they might be completely screwing nearly all of their creditors out of their investment.
but the law is having smaller and smaller ground to stand on.
I think it's the other way around, the law is going to get more and more broad, because it's going to be about what you can do with a collection of numbers (after all, everything on computers is just 1's and 0's), or the interpretation of that number rather than the number itself is what matters on you.
We prohibit things like guns (in civilized countries at least) because access to them is dangerous. But it's not the gun itself that is illegal usually, it's the possession of it, the transport of it, the sale of it etc. Lawn darts is the same thing, any use of a lawn dart is unnecessarily dangerous, so society can't be on the hook for it.
Numbers are as dangerous as they can be interpreted to be, so possession of a number that can be used to break into a bank vault or steal an mp3 will be broadly illegal, whatever form that number takes.
Missile guidance systems, made in switzerland, which they wouldn't sell to the US off and on for bombing places they disagree with.
Computer parts made by South Korea (go to iran, no apple stores, but samsung stores).
France, just sold Mistral carriers to russia.
Shall I go on? Just because the technology isn't owned by the US doesn't mean it isn't equally good and in the hands of your allies, who are willing selling to the highest bidder who may or may not be your friend.