How did they do with rocket engine design? Lack of innovation due the lack of reward for innovation led directly to the failure of the N-1 and with it the Soviet manned lunar program. One design bureau was granted a monopoly on rocket engines and he felt he only needed to design an engine good enough for an ICBM. Thus the fiasco of the N1 having something like 30 engines in its first stage as compared to the five in the Saturn V.
The Soviet space program is actually a pretty damn good example of how lack of competition kills innovation.
Wasn't that the Soviet Union's method of development? I don't recall many great technical innovations coming out of the design bureaus.
Why is there a need to innovate if you can make money just selling the same old shit? Your quarterly stock profits will look better, and if an upstart does come out of the woodwork, they either will have to produce closed hardware or license the "open" tech from you. In either case, your superior manufacturing capability means that you'll squelch the new competitor, so no one will fund them to begin with.
The only possible way around that would be to have the government fund the development of new tech, but how much in taxes do you think people want to pay for a better framerate in Doom 3?
Which means somebody builds it cheaper and puts you out of business. Have you seen what nVidia and ATI pay their engineers? If they were in a simple commodity market, those engineering departments would be the first thing cut. In the realm of tangible goods, there is no business case to do R&D if you can free-ride on somebody else's and then undercut them on price.
The only way around this would be for each new video card to be patented, and I have a feeling the open hardware advocates don't see that as a good alternative either.
If his idea is to write a comprehensive CS textbook, then that probably is a mistake.
And what a magnificient mistake it has turned out to be! By just trying to do it, he has contributed more to the discipline than many of the "critics" on Slashdot.
Perhaps, but ethics have a lot to do with System Administration jobs. Would you trust a known cheater with the root account? I'm assuming you've grown up quite a bit and are a trustworthy individual now, but that does bear thinking about.
Re:Tivo's popular because of non-technical people.
on
TiVo to Offer SDK
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Popularity comes from making it easy to use and marketing/brand naming. Microsoft, AOL and others have shown that to the average joe six pack it's not about innovation.
I'm about to do something I never thought I would -- defend AOL. At the time the original AOL was released, it was innovative. Nobody else was packaging a bulletin board system that was as friendly or as feature laden. People started to get on to AOL who found Compuserve or the local BBS scene far too intimidating.
The Internet sort of drove a stake in to that model, and it can be argued that AOL hasn't done any innovation lately (except in the creative marketing and creative accounting fields), but the original product took off because it was something different from what was already out there. Isn't that innovation by definition?
TiVo seems to be in a similar boat. They've brought a technology to the masses that only the truly geeky could have had before. The real question is can TiVo find a way to add a feature that makes owning a TiVo and paying the service contract worthwhile? And before you say that there is nothing out there, remember that many analysts didn't think TiVo would make it this far, as everyone already owned a VCR to tape Friends.
Dream on. Soyuz ain't big enough to manhandle the Hubble, and the Chinese program is still in its infancy. Nobody is going to go save Hubble if NASA doesn't.
I think it is more of a case of "why spend money on it when AAC is just as good?" I would guess that less than one tenth of one percent of the market lists.ogg support as a make or break decision when buying a music player.
I seem to have plenty of non-encumbered AAC and MP3 files on my iPod. The Sony players required DRM enabled ATRAC only. You don't have to buy songs from the iTunes Music Store if you don't want to and your iPod will work fine. No, the iPod won't play.ogg files, but that is a very small loss compared to playing ATRAC only.
Let's say that SuperMegaMart wants to open a store on protected land. Joe Littleguy gets out and starts complaining about them. SMM sues JL for libel, knowing full well that they will spend $10M including JL's costs when they lose. In the meantime they spend $1M to get a gag order on JL and manage to go ahead and build their store. They already budgeted that $10M as "expected legal costs" for opening the store. They even get to write down those costs against their taxes!
As long as the big guy's resources far exceed those of the little guy, this kind of strategy works. It even deters little guys from suing in the first place, because what happens if they do screw up a little and lose? All fo the sudden they're liable for millions in legal fees and judgements.
As has been pointed out, knowingly distributing trade secrets provided by a third party has been criminalized in more than a few states, so this argument is a non-starter. I actually hope that Nick escapes this without too much trouble, but he's learning that there are things a thirteen year old can get away with that an adult without the last name of Bush can't.
Apple are as ignorant, greedy, and willing to manipulate the courts as any other corporation.
Or any other human being, which is one area at least where corporations and persons seem to be the same.
Also, are you asserting that Apple is suing a thirteen year old? If so, I suggest that you re-read the article. Nick started Think Secret when he was thirteen, but has graduated high school now and is attending Harvard. He's an adult now, with adult rights and liabilities. Perhaps Apple has waited as long as it has to actually sue him because he was a minor?
OK, but to be even more pedantic, the LEM was renamed the Lunar Module well before one of them went to the Moon. Someone at NASA didn't like the word "excursion."
Also, I believe the only SIII Stage ever in Earth orbit was Skylab. The third stage was responsible for TLI and ended up in a solar orbit or was crashed onto the lunar surface to help with lunar seismology.
You still missed Point 1 of my post, however. It was a joke, son. A j o k e. Factual accuracy is secondary. I'm surprised none of you literalists have called me on my INTERCAL claim so far...
One: You might just try looking up the definition of the word joke.
Two: Bill Gates and Paul Allen made their first mint selling BASIC for Z80 family CPUs. Bill got himself in a lot of trouble by complaining that the homebrew set was freely copying MS-BASIC instead of paying Microsoft for it. You could get BASIC if you wanted it.
Point the Third:Among other languages, I've coded in Binary, Assembler (several flavors), BASIC, and INTERCAL. Of the four, BASIC was the least pleasant. Thus the joke.
The all-night pizza place at my alma mater was so bad that we considered throwing away the contents and eating the box instead. It couldn't taste any worse and the box wasn't quite as greasy as the pie.
This fine establishment was also routinely closed by the Health Department and burned down at least once. I sometimes marvel that I survived college.
Passwords can be cracked. Should we stop using them? Locks can be picked. Do you leave your house door open?
Properly handled IDs do contribute to security, but they are not a panacea. Nor is anything else for that matter. Security is a process, not a technology, but dismissing a unified government employee ID as "totally useless" is just disengenous. At a minimum, it increases security by lowering the training burden on the officers responsible for checking on access rights. Can it be defeated? Sure. Is it harder to defeat than the hodgepodge of identification systems currently in use by federal agencies? Yes, it is. The current FDA IDs are a joke, for example. I would bet any talented forger would have no trouble producing a reasonable copy of one with today's technology.
Yeah, because stuff shot into orbit stays there without any help. All of that crap would reenter before we got around to using it, even if the orbital inclination was anywhere near to where we'd want it.
Furthermore, the dummy payload is specially designed with the mass and center of gravity of the satellites Delta will launch in the future. Not only does this prove that the payload won't unbalance the rocket, it also allows accurate measurement of the stresses that will occur. The early Saturns carried "boilerplate" LMs and Command Modules for exactly the same purpose.
I thought the point of the previous post was that the Mac didn't have anything that Dell did. OSX is a major part of why people buy Macs, which was my point.
The truth is that for $800 a Dell is a much better computer than an eMac.
That $800 Dell is a real dog when running OSX. In fact, I've been unable to even get it to install. I can at least run XP, albeit slowly, on the eMac. I own both a Mac and a Dell. I use the Dell for playing games. I work on the Mac. It has all the power of my old Debian based system with the added advantage of not having to deal with the Free Software Taliban that populate most Debian support fora. That's also worth a few bucks right there.
But if they did notice, you get canned. Too much risk for the benefit. Backing management's stupid decisions whilst looking for a better job is reality in the tech industry.
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How did they do with rocket engine design? Lack of innovation due the lack of reward for innovation led directly to the failure of the N-1 and with it the Soviet manned lunar program. One design bureau was granted a monopoly on rocket engines and he felt he only needed to design an engine good enough for an ICBM. Thus the fiasco of the N1 having something like 30 engines in its first stage as compared to the five in the Saturn V. The Soviet space program is actually a pretty damn good example of how lack of competition kills innovation.
What are you smoking? The only "democracy" you would create is that of the grave. The dead are always equal.
The only possible way around that would be to have the government fund the development of new tech, but how much in taxes do you think people want to pay for a better framerate in Doom 3?
The only way around this would be for each new video card to be patented, and I have a feeling the open hardware advocates don't see that as a good alternative either.
Go make some. You may have trouble getting the VC to build fabs, though. Information may want to be free, but rent still wants to be paid.
And what a magnificient mistake it has turned out to be! By just trying to do it, he has contributed more to the discipline than many of the "critics" on Slashdot.
Perhaps, but ethics have a lot to do with System Administration jobs. Would you trust a known cheater with the root account? I'm assuming you've grown up quite a bit and are a trustworthy individual now, but that does bear thinking about.
I'm about to do something I never thought I would -- defend AOL. At the time the original AOL was released, it was innovative. Nobody else was packaging a bulletin board system that was as friendly or as feature laden. People started to get on to AOL who found Compuserve or the local BBS scene far too intimidating.
The Internet sort of drove a stake in to that model, and it can be argued that AOL hasn't done any innovation lately (except in the creative marketing and creative accounting fields), but the original product took off because it was something different from what was already out there. Isn't that innovation by definition?
TiVo seems to be in a similar boat. They've brought a technology to the masses that only the truly geeky could have had before. The real question is can TiVo find a way to add a feature that makes owning a TiVo and paying the service contract worthwhile? And before you say that there is nothing out there, remember that many analysts didn't think TiVo would make it this far, as everyone already owned a VCR to tape Friends.
And tomato thrusters.
Maybe they should have Alton Brown guest star instead of the TNG retreads then.
Dream on. Soyuz ain't big enough to manhandle the Hubble, and the Chinese program is still in its infancy. Nobody is going to go save Hubble if NASA doesn't.
I think it is more of a case of "why spend money on it when AAC is just as good?" I would guess that less than one tenth of one percent of the market lists .ogg support as a make or break decision when buying a music player.
I seem to have plenty of non-encumbered AAC and MP3 files on my iPod. The Sony players required DRM enabled ATRAC only. You don't have to buy songs from the iTunes Music Store if you don't want to and your iPod will work fine. No, the iPod won't play .ogg files, but that is a very small loss compared to playing ATRAC only.
Nope. Here's a counter-example:
Let's say that SuperMegaMart wants to open a store on protected land. Joe Littleguy gets out and starts complaining about them. SMM sues JL for libel, knowing full well that they will spend $10M including JL's costs when they lose. In the meantime they spend $1M to get a gag order on JL and manage to go ahead and build their store. They already budgeted that $10M as "expected legal costs" for opening the store. They even get to write down those costs against their taxes!
As long as the big guy's resources far exceed those of the little guy, this kind of strategy works. It even deters little guys from suing in the first place, because what happens if they do screw up a little and lose? All fo the sudden they're liable for millions in legal fees and judgements.
As has been pointed out, knowingly distributing trade secrets provided by a third party has been criminalized in more than a few states, so this argument is a non-starter. I actually hope that Nick escapes this without too much trouble, but he's learning that there are things a thirteen year old can get away with that an adult without the last name of Bush can't.
Or any other human being, which is one area at least where corporations and persons seem to be the same.
Also, are you asserting that Apple is suing a thirteen year old? If so, I suggest that you re-read the article. Nick started Think Secret when he was thirteen, but has graduated high school now and is attending Harvard. He's an adult now, with adult rights and liabilities. Perhaps Apple has waited as long as it has to actually sue him because he was a minor?
Also, I believe the only SIII Stage ever in Earth orbit was Skylab. The third stage was responsible for TLI and ended up in a solar orbit or was crashed onto the lunar surface to help with lunar seismology.
You still missed Point 1 of my post, however. It was a joke, son. A j o k e. Factual accuracy is secondary. I'm surprised none of you literalists have called me on my INTERCAL claim so far...
Two: Bill Gates and Paul Allen made their first mint selling BASIC for Z80 family CPUs. Bill got himself in a lot of trouble by complaining that the homebrew set was freely copying MS-BASIC instead of paying Microsoft for it. You could get BASIC if you wanted it.
Point the Third:Among other languages, I've coded in Binary, Assembler (several flavors), BASIC, and INTERCAL. Of the four, BASIC was the least pleasant. Thus the joke.
In BASIC. Kids these days...
This fine establishment was also routinely closed by the Health Department and burned down at least once. I sometimes marvel that I survived college.
Properly handled IDs do contribute to security, but they are not a panacea. Nor is anything else for that matter. Security is a process, not a technology, but dismissing a unified government employee ID as "totally useless" is just disengenous. At a minimum, it increases security by lowering the training burden on the officers responsible for checking on access rights. Can it be defeated? Sure. Is it harder to defeat than the hodgepodge of identification systems currently in use by federal agencies? Yes, it is. The current FDA IDs are a joke, for example. I would bet any talented forger would have no trouble producing a reasonable copy of one with today's technology.
Furthermore, the dummy payload is specially designed with the mass and center of gravity of the satellites Delta will launch in the future. Not only does this prove that the payload won't unbalance the rocket, it also allows accurate measurement of the stresses that will occur. The early Saturns carried "boilerplate" LMs and Command Modules for exactly the same purpose.
I thought the point of the previous post was that the Mac didn't have anything that Dell did. OSX is a major part of why people buy Macs, which was my point.
That $800 Dell is a real dog when running OSX. In fact, I've been unable to even get it to install. I can at least run XP, albeit slowly, on the eMac. I own both a Mac and a Dell. I use the Dell for playing games. I work on the Mac. It has all the power of my old Debian based system with the added advantage of not having to deal with the Free Software Taliban that populate most Debian support fora. That's also worth a few bucks right there.
But if they did notice, you get canned. Too much risk for the benefit. Backing management's stupid decisions whilst looking for a better job is reality in the tech industry.