Notice how all the Soccer/Football videos are popular in the US. That's because everyone else in the entire world has seen those clips a million times already!
Why Apple wants free music The recording industry keeps asking for tiered pricing on iTunes, and Apple keeps saying no. This seems odd--why can't the two agree on how to make the most money off online music sales? In fact, I'm sure they agree, and I'm sure the recording industry is right: more money could be made with tiered pricing. The real problem is a conflict of interests--the recording industry makes money off music, and Apple makes money off iPods. Here are some numbers: in under 3 years, 600 million songs have been purchased on the iTunes music store. Apples cut of that comes to just over $210 million. Meanwhile, the Apple has sold 6.5 million iPods in the last quarter of 2005 alone. That's well over $1 billion in just 3 months; the money from iTunes is pocket change.
From the perspective, it's clear why Apple doesn't want to raise prices on iTunes. They could double revenue from the music store and they still wouldn't approach iPod level revenue. While the recording industry is interested in iTunes to generate revenue, Apple doesn't it see this way. They have other things in mind for iTunes:
1. Apple does not trust a 3rd party to develop a music store for the iPod. They have two reasons for this: first, making good software is tough, and I don't believe they would trust someone else to do it for them. iTunes is easy-to-use, well designed, and well programmed, and the iPod is all the more successful because of this. Second, depending on a 3rd party for a business critical application could put them in a strategic bind in the future. Napster's subscription model and other byzantine DRM restrictions pose obvious problems here.
2. The more stuff people put on their iPods, the better for Apple. I think this is Apple's main concern. Everyone who has taken Econ 101 knows about complement products--when the price of DVD's goes down, sales of DVD players increase. Alcohol prices on the rise? Bad news for Trojan. Music is a complement to the iPod, and the lower the price of music, the more iPods Apple can sell. If it were up to Apple, music downloads would be free, and we'd all be out buying 60GB iPods because our old 10GB models just can't fit everything. Do you think Apple is concerned that people are using iTunes to steal music? Not at all! Free music makes it easier for Apple to push their new, high capacity iPods. The motivation for the two latest additions to iTunes becomes clear in this light: fill up people's iPods faster (videos) and without asking for money (Podcasts).
It's not quite the same thing. Technology is a tool that helps you create art--it's not a replacement for or a new way of creating art. Learning the fundamentals of design and drawing are immensely helpful if you want to be a succesful artist, even if the learning itself is somewhat unpleasant.
To give an analogy from computer programming, not everyone likes learning about pointers or data types or other fundamentals to Computer Science, and you can probably get a job in the real world without it. However, learning about those things builds a mental capacity and trains a type of thinking that's critical to being a succesful programmer. Even if you don't use those specific things in your job, the learning experience itself is valuable. When art/design students don't have the learning experience that includes a base in traditional art/realism, they lose something.
I don't see why people hate giving others referals. I mean, when people get referal bucks it only costs Amazon.com money--why is everyone on the lookout to save Amazon a few dollars? It's not like it hurts you to help out someone in this case.
I don't necessarilly agree--I dropped my CS major at UCLA in favor of "Mathematics of Computation" because I felt the curriculum was inadequate. If you care enough, compare a mid-tier CS program (like UCLA or UCI) to a top-tier CS program, like the one at Stanford. There are significant differences. For example, consider the way assembly language is taught. At UCLA, freshmen must spend an entire quarter learning assembly, and much of the time is actually spent learning simple but tedious concepts, like, how to create a while loop in assembly. Compare this to Stanford--they spend just a few weeks on assembly, and focus on the way several levels of pointers work out in assembly. Learning this is more challenging than the UCLA class, and wastes less time too.
This might sound like a trite example, but there many more instances where a mid-tier CS program wastes students time. Often, the professors seem to think that assigning lots of work translates to a high quality program. What they ignore is that the type of work students are doing also matters.
Umm...it's part of the operation of a college. The citizens of California also pay for the raquet ball courts at the UCLA Recreation Center and the UCLA Arcade. There's more to a university than books and professors.
To make it look adequate on a Palm: 1. Download etext 2. Run through gut.pl (http://www.ee.ryerson.ca:8080/~elf/gut/ [ryerson.ca]) - followed by deleting the legal stuff if you like 3. Convert to Plucker / iSilo or whatever you like 4. Read
Haha! I laughed out loud when I read this--I mean, what was the original poster thinking; it's so simple!
"You don't. You use something that's actually cross-platform and isn't Windows-specific. Not all internet users run Windows (I sure don't). It's the internet, not the Wintelnet."
I hate to break it to you, but everyone who counts uses Windows. You can use all the Linux you want, but it doesn't make sense for companies to accomodate to less than 5% of the market.
I don't see anyone would be up in arms about this. Keeping track of evidence and testimonies, paying attention is difficult, to say the least, for individuals with no legal training. A method of keeping track of evidence to help juries make reasoned decisions will lead to more fair trials. Additionally, resolving issues faster is in the interests of everyone involved: the defendant, the plaintiff, and the jury. The only ones who lose are lawyers who charge by the hour!
For the tech illiterate users, MS products might be safer. Most people won't read Slashdot to find out about the latest vulnerabilities in Mozilla/Firefox, and might not hear about this. MS's autoupdate ensures that people will get patches for IE and other MS products.
Once again, Econ 101: Supply of IT workers increases, wages drop. Product per dollar for IT workers increases since their wages drop, so companies hire more wokers at the lower wage. Since you're competing with countries where a standard salary for tech workers is around ~$20,000, this is not a good thing.
"If you were after THAT - shouldn't you rather go for DNA samples of each passenger before a flight (and discard the samples unchecked in case the flight landed safely)?"
That takes a while. They want to be able to inform the families of the deceased as quickly as possible.
Ooooh... you remind me of the Hot Air Balloon joke (the first half):
A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a woman below. He descended a bit more and shouted, "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."
The woman below replied, "You are in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You are between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude."
"You must be an engineer," said the balloonist.
"I am," replied the woman. "How did you know?"
"Well," answered the balloonist, "Everything you told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help so far."
The woman below responded, "You must be in management."
"I am," replied the balloonist. "How did you know?"
"Well," said the woman, "You don't know where you are or where you are going. You have risen to where you are, due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it's my fault."
I think the fundamental problem is that it creates a situation that can never reach equilibrium. Encylopedias aren't quite as good an example as software, since they never required a large amount of labor from a single person to begin with (except editors, most people probably worked on 1-2 articles only).
I guess the first question is, why would anyone work on an open source project to begin with? I've never worked on one, so I wouldn't know from first hand experience, but my guess is that it's mosly: 1) they enjoy programming, and (possibly) don't have a job related to programming (students?), or their programming related job is dull, 2) they think the end product will be useful and 3) Well I actually don't know what 3 is. I'll use it to encompass all the miscalaneous reasons, such as wanting to get work experience (semi related to 1), moral conviction, whatever. But anyways back to 1 and 2, which I think are the primary reasons.
1 is the most obvious on how it creates a situation that cannot reach equilibrium. I'll discuss this section using some abstractions, which is kind of hokey, but I think the Slashdot crowd is tolerant of that kind of thing. Suppose that there is a demand for W amount of programming, computer related work. Making web browsers for libraries, word processors for Russian Banks, whatever. So to do W work, there are P programmers need. Ok, fine. So they do W work, but for the reasons listed above, probably #1, they produce Wo amount of open source work that's available free. So for every Windows, there's a Linux, for every Photoshop, there's a GIMP. Assuming this software is usable, (I'll discuss this assumption later, heh) consumers/companies/purchasers will prefer the free stuff. Duh. Basic economics. And more basic economics tells us that a portion of those P programmers will be fired because of the decreased demand for commercial products. So now there are P-Po programmers working. The problem is that decreases the amount of work done on both commercial products and open source products, and as a result reduce the quality of open source products. This point is key: open source products have dubious
usability, and as they become less useful, commerical products become a better option. This resets the cycle, with more programmers hired/graduated until open source becomes a viable option again.
The use of open source software is checked by the fact that, for the most part, it is not very useable by non-techies. However, this does not prevent it from supplanting some commercial software apps, examples being Bugzilla, Apache and Linux.
More fundamentally, however, the entire concept of open source is scary: work is being done without compensation. This idea is, despite what Slashdot nuts will say, communist and dangerous. Software has low, even negligible, variable costs: it is the fixed costs that are important. A program may take $2,000,000 dollars to create, wages, rent, whatever counted, and cost only $1/100,000 for the bandwidth required to distribute it. This is, among a few other factors, make open source possible. If one enjoys programming, it seems like a win-win: you do something you like, a user saves 50 bucks. But by giving away your software, your replacing a paid programmer. Unlike the Wikipedia example, programmers can't just do something else that is productive. A MD can go on practicing medicine even when there's no need for him to write encyclopedia articles. A programmer doesn't have much else to do. I'm sure a teacher wouldn't appreciate if I went down to a school, told him to beat it, and taught the class myself for free. The difference is that, because of low variable costs, open source programming is actually feasible, and the destructive aspect is less visible.
The buggy whip example is irrelevant: when buggy whip producers when out of bussiness, it wans't because someone was giving away buggy whips. It was because the whips themselves were useless. Programming is still useful, despite open source software potentially rendering
Please do not mod this as a troll on reflex. I'm continually scared by the opensource movement. This is probably the best example: true, encyclopedias aren't a huge bussiness, but the entire industry might have been eliminated. And who (potentially) can profit from it? The people who use Wikipedia, and in thsi case, a select group who (if they want to take the oppurtunity) can publish it and reap the profits. The people who contribute never get compensated. It's probably impossible, since the labor is so diffused. In my opinion, writing an encylopedia article or editing are skilled jobs and should be paid. It's sad and scary to see them eliminated.
Why should they pay any? All the profit generated by corporations will end up in the hands of individuals, so the money will be taxed as income. Meanwhile, taxes on corporations restricts growth in the long run and are difficult to enforce.
"collective public ownership of the means of production"
That is exactly what communism is--the state controls the facotrs of production: land, labor and capitol.
Current state of nanotechnology?
on
Nano Body Building
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
I hear a lot of predictions about what nanotechnology might be able to do in 10-20 years. Can someone point me to some articles showing what researchers have been able to do with nanotechnology today?
Slashdot Mirror
They're going to delay movie releases to combat piracy? Brilliant!
Notice how all the Soccer/Football videos are popular in the US. That's because everyone else in the entire world has seen those clips a million times already!
http://fifthroom.blogspot.com/2006/01/why-apple-wa nts-free-music.html
Why Apple wants free music
The recording industry keeps asking for tiered pricing on iTunes, and Apple keeps saying no. This seems odd--why can't the two agree on how to make the most money off online music sales? In fact, I'm sure they agree, and I'm sure the recording industry is right: more money could be made with tiered pricing. The real problem is a conflict of interests--the recording industry makes money off music, and Apple makes money off iPods. Here are some numbers: in under 3 years, 600 million songs have been purchased on the iTunes music store. Apples cut of that comes to just over $210 million. Meanwhile, the Apple has sold 6.5 million iPods in the last quarter of 2005 alone. That's well over $1 billion in just 3 months; the money from iTunes is pocket change.
From the perspective, it's clear why Apple doesn't want to raise prices on iTunes. They could double revenue from the music store and they still wouldn't approach iPod level revenue. While the recording industry is interested in iTunes to generate revenue, Apple doesn't it see this way. They have other things in mind for iTunes:
1. Apple does not trust a 3rd party to develop a music store for the iPod. They have two reasons for this: first, making good software is tough, and I don't believe they would trust someone else to do it for them. iTunes is easy-to-use, well designed, and well programmed, and the iPod is all the more successful because of this. Second, depending on a 3rd party for a business critical application could put them in a strategic bind in the future. Napster's subscription model and other byzantine DRM restrictions pose obvious problems here.
2. The more stuff people put on their iPods, the better for Apple. I think this is Apple's main concern. Everyone who has taken Econ 101 knows about complement products--when the price of DVD's goes down, sales of DVD players increase. Alcohol prices on the rise? Bad news for Trojan. Music is a complement to the iPod, and the lower the price of music, the more iPods Apple can sell. If it were up to Apple, music downloads would be free, and we'd all be out buying 60GB iPods because our old 10GB models just can't fit everything. Do you think Apple is concerned that people are using iTunes to steal music? Not at all! Free music makes it easier for Apple to push their new, high capacity iPods. The motivation for the two latest additions to iTunes becomes clear in this light: fill up people's iPods faster (videos) and without asking for money (Podcasts).
It's not quite the same thing. Technology is a tool that helps you create art--it's not a replacement for or a new way of creating art. Learning the fundamentals of design and drawing are immensely helpful if you want to be a succesful artist, even if the learning itself is somewhat unpleasant.
To give an analogy from computer programming, not everyone likes learning about pointers or data types or other fundamentals to Computer Science, and you can probably get a job in the real world without it. However, learning about those things builds a mental capacity and trains a type of thinking that's critical to being a succesful programmer. Even if you don't use those specific things in your job, the learning experience itself is valuable. When art/design students don't have the learning experience that includes a base in traditional art/realism, they lose something.
I don't see why people hate giving others referals. I mean, when people get referal bucks it only costs Amazon.com money--why is everyone on the lookout to save Amazon a few dollars? It's not like it hurts you to help out someone in this case.
I don't necessarilly agree--I dropped my CS major at UCLA in favor of "Mathematics of Computation" because I felt the curriculum was inadequate. If you care enough, compare a mid-tier CS program (like UCLA or UCI) to a top-tier CS program, like the one at Stanford. There are significant differences. For example, consider the way assembly language is taught. At UCLA, freshmen must spend an entire quarter learning assembly, and much of the time is actually spent learning simple but tedious concepts, like, how to create a while loop in assembly. Compare this to Stanford--they spend just a few weeks on assembly, and focus on the way several levels of pointers work out in assembly. Learning this is more challenging than the UCLA class, and wastes less time too.
This might sound like a trite example, but there many more instances where a mid-tier CS program wastes students time. Often, the professors seem to think that assigning lots of work translates to a high quality program. What they ignore is that the type of work students are doing also matters.
Umm...it's part of the operation of a college. The citizens of California also pay for the raquet ball courts at the UCLA Recreation Center and the UCLA Arcade. There's more to a university than books and professors.
To make it look adequate on a Palm:
1. Download etext
2. Run through gut.pl (http://www.ee.ryerson.ca:8080/~elf/gut/ [ryerson.ca]) - followed by deleting the legal stuff if you like
3. Convert to Plucker / iSilo or whatever you like
4. Read
Haha! I laughed out loud when I read this--I mean, what was the original poster thinking; it's so simple!
"You don't. You use something that's actually cross-platform and isn't Windows-specific. Not all internet users run Windows (I sure don't). It's the internet, not the Wintelnet."
I hate to break it to you, but everyone who counts uses Windows. You can use all the Linux you want, but it doesn't make sense for companies to accomodate to less than 5% of the market.
I don't see anyone would be up in arms about this. Keeping track of evidence and testimonies, paying attention is difficult, to say the least, for individuals with no legal training. A method of keeping track of evidence to help juries make reasoned decisions will lead to more fair trials. Additionally, resolving issues faster is in the interests of everyone involved: the defendant, the plaintiff, and the jury. The only ones who lose are lawyers who charge by the hour!
For the tech illiterate users, MS products might be safer. Most people won't read Slashdot to find out about the latest vulnerabilities in Mozilla/Firefox, and might not hear about this. MS's autoupdate ensures that people will get patches for IE and other MS products.
That article makes no sense.
1. Walmart pressured Vlasic to sell pickles cheaper.
2. ????
3. Walmart is evil!!
Once again, Econ 101: Supply of IT workers increases, wages drop. Product per dollar for IT workers increases since their wages drop, so companies hire more wokers at the lower wage. Since you're competing with countries where a standard salary for tech workers is around ~$20,000, this is not a good thing.
"If you were after THAT - shouldn't you rather go for DNA samples of each passenger before a flight (and discard the samples unchecked in case the flight landed safely)?"
That takes a while. They want to be able to inform the families of the deceased as quickly as possible.
Ooooh... you remind me of the Hot Air Balloon joke (the first half):
A man in a hot air balloon realized he was lost. He reduced altitude and spotted a woman below. He descended a bit more and shouted, "Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don't know where I am."
The woman below replied, "You are in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You are between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude."
"You must be an engineer," said the balloonist.
"I am," replied the woman. "How did you know?"
"Well," answered the balloonist, "Everything you told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help so far."
The woman below responded, "You must be in management."
"I am," replied the balloonist. "How did you know?"
"Well," said the woman, "You don't know where you are or where you are going. You have risen to where you are, due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it's my fault."
Usually just writing, "WTF" is enough, but not in this case: what the fuck are you talking about? And why the fuck is this +5 insightful.
Can I mod this, -1 stupid?
I think the fundamental problem is that it creates a situation that can never reach equilibrium. Encylopedias aren't quite as good an example as software, since they never required a large amount of labor from a single person to begin with (except editors, most people probably worked on 1-2 articles only).
I guess the first question is, why would anyone work on an open source project to begin with? I've never worked on one, so I wouldn't know from first hand experience, but my guess is that it's mosly: 1) they enjoy programming, and (possibly) don't have a job related to programming (students?), or their programming related job is dull, 2) they think the end product will be useful and 3) Well I actually don't know what 3 is. I'll use it to encompass all the miscalaneous reasons, such as wanting to get work experience (semi related to 1), moral conviction, whatever. But anyways back to 1 and 2, which I think are the primary reasons.
1 is the most obvious on how it creates a situation that cannot reach equilibrium. I'll discuss this section using some abstractions, which is kind of hokey, but I think the Slashdot crowd is tolerant of that kind of thing. Suppose that there is a demand for W amount of programming, computer related work. Making web browsers for libraries, word processors for Russian Banks, whatever. So to do W work, there are P programmers need. Ok, fine. So they do W work, but for the reasons listed above, probably #1, they produce Wo amount of open source work that's available free. So for every Windows, there's a Linux, for every Photoshop, there's a GIMP. Assuming this software is usable, (I'll discuss this assumption later, heh) consumers/companies/purchasers will prefer the free stuff. Duh. Basic economics. And more basic economics tells us that a portion of those P programmers will be fired because of the decreased demand for commercial products. So now there are P-Po programmers working. The problem is that decreases the amount of work done on both commercial products and open source products, and as a result reduce the quality of open source products. This point is key: open source products have dubious
usability, and as they become less useful, commerical products become a better option. This resets the cycle, with more programmers hired/graduated until open source becomes a viable option again.
The use of open source software is checked by the fact that, for the most part, it is not very useable by non-techies. However, this does not prevent it from supplanting some commercial software apps, examples being Bugzilla, Apache and Linux.
More fundamentally, however, the entire concept of open source is scary: work is being done without compensation. This idea is, despite what Slashdot nuts will say, communist and dangerous. Software has low, even negligible, variable costs: it is the fixed costs that are important. A program may take $2,000,000 dollars to create, wages, rent, whatever counted, and cost only $1/100,000 for the bandwidth required to distribute it. This is, among a few other factors, make open source possible. If one enjoys programming, it seems like a win-win: you do something you like, a user saves 50 bucks. But by giving away your software, your replacing a paid programmer. Unlike the Wikipedia example, programmers can't just do something else that is productive. A MD can go on practicing medicine even when there's no need for him to write encyclopedia articles. A programmer doesn't have much else to do. I'm sure a teacher wouldn't appreciate if I went down to a school, told him to beat it, and taught the class myself for free. The difference is that, because of low variable costs, open source programming is actually feasible, and the destructive aspect is less visible.
The buggy whip example is irrelevant: when buggy whip producers when out of bussiness, it wans't because someone was giving away buggy whips. It was because the whips themselves were useless. Programming is still useful, despite open source software potentially rendering
Please do not mod this as a troll on reflex. I'm continually scared by the opensource movement. This is probably the best example: true, encyclopedias aren't a huge bussiness, but the entire industry might have been eliminated. And who (potentially) can profit from it? The people who use Wikipedia, and in thsi case, a select group who (if they want to take the oppurtunity) can publish it and reap the profits. The people who contribute never get compensated. It's probably impossible, since the labor is so diffused. In my opinion, writing an encylopedia article or editing are skilled jobs and should be paid. It's sad and scary to see them eliminated.
Why should they pay any? All the profit generated by corporations will end up in the hands of individuals, so the money will be taxed as income. Meanwhile, taxes on corporations restricts growth in the long run and are difficult to enforce.
"Scott McLoud, the author of a very helpful guide (in comic-book form) called ''Understanding Comics,'' "
A very appropriate typo.
"collective public ownership of the means of production"
That is exactly what communism is--the state controls the facotrs of production: land, labor and capitol.
I hear a lot of predictions about what nanotechnology might be able to do in 10-20 years. Can someone point me to some articles showing what researchers have been able to do with nanotechnology today?
RTFA - They don't.
Path dependence seems like another word for industry standard.