I've noticed that many Slashdotters have a
strong interest in this topic, of getting
at least partially off-grid. I admit that I
too would like that quite a lot.
So why do so many of us, on a site that by nature
of the topics covered, have a VERY high dependance
on a reliable supply of electricity, want to get
away from the single best source of such a supply
available (at least in the US)? This strikes
me as somewhat paradoxical.
Personally, I'll admit a bit of paranoia in
my motivation. I simply don't trust the
electric company to provide cheap electricity
to me for the duration of my life, and
simply can't imagine living without access to
a computer. But I doubt I share the majority
opinion in that regard.
without this incentive good TV and movies
won't get shown on broadcast television
So how does he excuse the past 20+ years of
absolute garbage on TV, all without the presence
of the broadcast flag?
More importantly, though, if the mere existence
of the broadcast flag will make him happy, then
fine, he can have his little flag.
I won't use a receiver that honors it...
And when the housewives of America learn they
can't record their soaps anymore, I suspect
even Joe and Jane Schmoe will go out of their
way to get a flagless receiver. But if the
cable companies want to transmit that
flag, hey, no problem. The only problem comes
from legislation requiring all receivers to
obey that flag.
For comparison, Audio CDs have something like
the broadcast flag in them... A bit that means,
"You do not have permission to copy this CD".
I don't think any CD-ROM drives have
ever honored that, but it exists,
none-the-less.
If waving a flag at the cable companies makes
the MPAA feel warm and fuzzy, let 'em have it.
They can argue about flagged and unflagged
content, distribution rights, timeslots, and
the like. And, as always, the rest of the
world will quietly ignore them, tape their
shows, and watch them with the commercials
(aka "pee breaks" back before the VCR)
skipped.
Read a fucking thermodynamics book,
for fuck's sake.
I believe I have identified your error...
Efficiency != absolute useable energy. Yes,
efficiency of the conversion increases with
temperature difference. But you can't just
ignore the absolute energy content and call
it a day...
Actually, in the ideal case, you can get
40kJ out of the lead and 55kJ
I have to wonder how you arrived at those
figures, as they seem... Well... TOTALLY
FICTITIOUS! By a back-of-the-napkin application
of Carnot's law (ever heard of that one?
You would have needed it to get those numbers,
or rather, the correct ballpark for the
numbers you attempted to provide - But for
reference, you could do worse than to start
with delta-T divided by T-max), I get 95.6%
efficiency for the lead, and 75.6% for the water.
That doesn't give numbers anywhere near
your range - Under ideal conditions, you could
extract 59KJ from dropping lead from 500C
to 22C, and 215KJ by dropping 90C water to
22C. 215 still very considerably exceeds
59, does it not?
Now, when I say "back of the napkin", I almost
certainly omitted some detail that you may have
at the tip of your fingers ready to fire back at
me, no doubt with more obscenities and a hearty "gotcha".
But the ratio will remain fixed. Meaning,
if you painstakingly calculated the 40KJ figure
you tossed out with no justification, then water
would end up at 145.8KJ. No matter what
confounding factors you come up with, you'll
still get 3.644 times more useable energy
from the water than the lead, in my original
scenario.
you CANNOT take heat energy from a single
source and completely convert it into work
(which is what you are implying there).
I implied no such thing - I merely calculated
the raw difference in thermal energy, figuring
that illustrating your error with two substances
having vastly different specific heats, lead and
water, you might get the hint and accept
your error with dignity.
But just for argument's sake, let's apply "AlienW's
Law" rather than Carnot's. You ended up getting a
not insignificant yield from a 68C temperature drop
in water - By your numbers, the conversion
favorably compared with 500C lead! And you would
call such a basically-free (on the short term, at least)
source of energy a load of cow excrement?
You are wrong on both counts. The temperature
difference matters a hell of a lot more than
specific heat.
Oh good, thank you for enlightening me. So, for
example, you would assert that you can extract
more energy from a kilogram of lead at 500C,
than you could from a kilogram of water at 90C?
Dropping the lead to room temperature (22C)
requires it to lose 61.7KJ. Dropping the water
to room temperature requires it to lose
284.6KJ.
Without your tremendously informative commentary,
I simply would not have realized that
61.7 > 284.6. Thank you, kind sir, for
revealing this secret to me.
As far as climactic change: bullshit.
You won't change the temperature of the
ocean by even 0.1 degrees this way. All
you are doing is mixing the water.
I don't really expect you to understand this,
but mixing matters far more than mean temperature,
in this case. According to some models
(R X Huang, "Mixing and energetics of the
oceanic thermohaline circulation", JPO,
29:-746, 1999, for example), the rate of thermal
mixing contributes as one of the LARGEST
sources of global climatic change, and
(other than Coriolis effect) singlehandedly
determines where and how fast surface ocean
currents will flow.
But then, you've probably never heard of that whole
"gulf stream" thing, preferring to study the Bible
for your weather reports.
Er, no, not really. Granted, this
particular guy sounds a few gallons
short of a hogshead, but deriving useable
energy from cooling things off works
exactly the same way as by heating
them up - Namely, we can use the transfer
of energy from the warmer side to the colder
side to perform useful work (such as generating
electricity). The absolute temperatures
involves don't particularly matter.
So why do virtually all human-created
energy extraction technologies use warmer
than ambient going to ambient as the two sides?
Simple... We humans have enjoyed, at least for
the past few millenia, a really easy way
to get things hot (ie, fire and a supply of
fuel that literally grows on (as?) trees).
We have not had a convenient
way of making something colder-than-ambient,
except very recently (within the past
century), and even then only by using the
hot-to-ambient conversion to get electricity
to do the ambient-to-cold conversion - Sort
of trading one for the other, with a net
loss in both conversions.
Deep ocean water, however, provides exactly
that - A nearly limitless supply of something
colder than ambient, with a high enough
specific heat that the energy we can extract
from the temperature gradient FAR exceeds
the energy needed to pump it in the first
place.
Imagine the climactic effects, and effects
on the oceans ecosystems
Now, here you make a good point.
In the short term, or on a small scale, I
would tend to say that we couldn't even
come close to the natural processes
that mix the oceans. But then, people
thought the same about burning wood and
later oil, until just the past few decades.
How do you use the internet? Do you do cd
www.slashdot.org;ls then look for the article
you are after?
Two points...
First, I would point out that the web, as it
exists, stores quite a lot of material that
I've never seen, and didn't choose where to
file it. So yes, to find something I've
never seen before, I would go to Google
first. However...
For something I have seen, however, yes,
I would get to it pretty much the same way I
traverse a directory hierarchy... So to get to
a particular FP on Slashdot, I might traverse
the tree:
Bookmarks
News
Tech
Slashdot (At this point, the navigation moves from local to remote)
YRO
Change the URL bar to the date I want, such as
"http://yro.slashdot.org/index.pl?issue=20050418"
"PayPal deals blow to Freenet"
Of course, this has the distinct disadvantage
that not all websites have as logical of a
layout as Slashdot, but the same idea holds.
And, for totally factual info such as guides,
references, or the like, I don't even read it
live on-line - I make a local copy and file it
away neatly in my own directory hierarchy, so
I can always find it quickly and reliably, even
if I lose my net connection or the site itself
ceases to exist.
The 1926 printing is significant, it is the
latest edition that is out of copyright.
Umm... For books of a primarily graphical nature
(such as an atlas), I would tend to agree that
paper still beats digital by a safe margin.
But why, if you actually want to purchase
a copy of it (and not just for the purpose of
saving it from oblivion by scanning and uploading
it somewhere), would you care that its copyright
has expired? I doubt just for the price, since
you probably paid more for a copy that old in good
condition than you would have for a five year old
second-hand copy of the latest version (if one
exists - I don't know the history of that particular
book)...
That is because, usually, the author is
selling his/her license to the publishers
who provide the upfront money to produce
the books/pay the author.
At least with peer-reviewed journals, that
does not hold true. The author usually has
to actually pay to have their
submissions printed in such publications.
For textbooks, it depends. For few-author
textbooks, the author makes a few bucks, so
your argument holds. For the sort of textbooks
with dozens of authors, in some cases the
authors don't even know they have their name
attached to the book, and those who do usually
get "non-financial compensation" only, ie,
no cash but they can list the book on their
CV as a publication.
Don't mistake the world of academic publishing
for the "real" world of publishing. Academics
publish for fame, not fortune, and the leeches
that do the physical printing get to rob
both ends of the process (thus the
massive interest in purely on-line peer-reviewed
journals, with a massive backlash by traditional
journal publishers such as Elsevier).
In trying to submit a post while logged in
and not as an AC
Okay, strange indeed! I have yet to bother
filling in the verification box, and have posted
at least four or five times (and again with
this post) without a problem.
Perhaps they only care about it from certain
IP ranges? That would (at least partially)
explain why Slashdot has taken to portscanning
people recently... Though exactly what they
hope to find, or how they tie it in with
image verification, I have no idea.
btw, anyone else think this image verification
thing is annoying?
Ummm... You posted that under your own account. If you
actually log in, you can ignore the image verification
box, you only need that if you want to post anonymously.
Once, actually, I did. To unlock extra
features of the program. But no, other
than that, I have not. In that regard,
I appreciate the Open Source movement
all the more - It means I don't need
to use shareware, and therefore, don't
feel bad about not registering.
But regardless of your intent, you've
nicely illustrated my point - I remember
reading a story a few years ago, from the
author of some once-popular shareware program
(really fuzzy on the details, perhaps someone
will recognize this and post a link in response).
Basically, he had gotten sick of people,
on learning he wrote the program in question,
thanking him and saying what a great program,
and that they had registered it. And he would
respond something like "No, you didn't. No
one registered. Not a single person.
Ever."
Due to anonymity in the transaction, this
maps to a non-iterated example of the Prisoner's
Dilemma. And as much as we might wish otherwise,
only one rational course of action exists in
that scenario - Defect.
Ah yes, charging money for SDK's is
the sure fire way to make your platform
popular.
When you want people to buy your over-priced
sun-hats in Florida in the summer, you offer
them free water to lure them in. 90% will
just take advantage of you, but water costs
(almost) nothing, and the other 10% count as
sales you might have otherwise missed.
When you have a monopoly on water (or more
accurately, people don't realize they can
get water from anyone but you), you charge
an arm and a leg for the water, and make them
buy a hat before you'll even allow
them to buy your water.
Wormholes with smooth or classical
spacetimes appear to be unstable and
fall apart quickly.
Mathematically, physics says the same
thing about a stable fixed-point in a
static magnetic field.
And yet...
I have one of those cool
little-magnet-levitating-over-a-big-magnet
toys sitting on my desk at home, happily
violating the (human-formalized) laws of
physics.
Funny how, despite the numbers just not
working well, little things like "friction"
in the real world make sooooo many
"impossible" things work just fine... All
those nasty infinite series that would otherwise
make the world very messy to calculate,
eventually taper off to nothing, in a very
real and practical way.
Listeners could buy whatever they like
as they hear it.
Umm...
Now, for the most part, I won't go so far as
to actively find and download pirated music.
I suspect I fall in the minority (of people
who realize they can download just
about any song without paying for it) in that
regard.
But this? Not actively seeking it out,
sure. But passively not deleting a song
I've already downloaded? It would take the
honesty of a saint for anyone to actually
go out of their way to pay for something
they already have.
Can you imagine how much business I'd lose
if I put him in front of a client?
I agree with the rest of your points, explained
as you did. But thist one still bothers me...
Why would you put one of your developers in
front of a client? I mean, sure, you might
walk a very important client around your
site to gladhand a few of your more presentable
people, but in general, just a bad idea. IT and
PR do not mix, and never will. You keep the
IT guys (and I use that gender-laden term
deliberately) in the basement with endless
free caffeinated beverages, and you keep the
marketing and HR women in the front office for
potential customers to meet with. Deviate
much from that pattern, and both sides suffer.
HELLO! Where do these people come from and
why are they interviewing with me for 6 figures
instead of the local McDonalds for $6/hr?
Like myself, I would say they come from the
C world, have learned Java involuntarily,
and hold it at roughly the level of disdain
it deserves.
"A dumbed-down vesion of C++" makes
a pretty damned good description of
Java, in general - Take a good, clear, flexible,
generally-powerful language, C, extend it to allow
better abstraction and data encapsulation, C++,
then strip away all the underlying features
that make it "powerful" in the name of
"safety": Java. That nicely sums it up.
And even with that increased "safety",
you can still shoot yourself in the foot
(though you might need to wait for garbage
collection to finish before the bullet actually
leaves the barrel). Bugs result from programmer
errors, not from the language used. Whether you
add machine words, dereferenced pointers, or
abstract objects that represent integers at
some ambiguous level, if you expect 2 plus 2 to
equal 3, your program won't work.
As for design patterns - Some of us can actually
design and implement an idea. Some of us
can recite textbooks to you. In my experience,
those two categories very rarely overlap. If you
want the latter rather than the former, your loss.
Point taken, but you need to go evern further than that...
Namely, Self-hosted or externally-hosted?
If the former, sure, I can see this as working at many
businesses. Hell, where I work, all of our retail
folks use what amount to X-Terms to connect to a central
Linux server anyway. Extending that to something like
Word or Excel makes sense, in that context.
I took the original idea to mean "externally
hosted", basically turning the idea of "software" into
a form of pseudo-public utility. No fuss, no muss, just
pay your subscription and you use your local computer as
nothing more than a local storage medium with a display,
keyboard, and mouse.
Name me a time when affordable removable media were larger than
fixed media, so you could reliably back up to one disc.
When CD-Rs first came out, they compared favorably to hard drives
of the time. I still had a 340MB drive when they initially hit
the market, and still only had a 1.2GB drive when I first got a
CD burner.
10 years later, and while HDDs have increased in size by literally
a factor of 1200, writeable optical media have increased by only a
factor of seven (thirty if you allow DSDL DVDs, of which I don'tbelieve
I've ever personally seen one burned rather than pressed). And
now with BR/HD, we might improve the situation somewhat, but they
both still leave a dismally large gap.
In particular, consider the most likely course of near-future
improvements - We won't see another major optical disc
advancement for another five years, but in that same time,
we'll all have 5-8TB drives in our desktop machines. Back
to the days of 80-disc backups. So as I said, they may as
well propose reintroducing the floppy.
I, for one, look forward to this day when PCs
don't need a swath of fixed-purpose thick-client
software.
Do you also look forward to not having the
option of "owning" any of the software you have
on your machine? To needing to pay a monthly
subscription to use your own computer, just like
phone, cable, or power bills today? To having
the possibility that whoever controls the server
will decide to do away with a package you
consider absolutely critical, and you have
no recourse whatsoever?
I, for one, do not. I'll put up with needing to
maintain my own PC, as long as I get to call it
"my own pc" and have it function how I want.
Oh goody. 100GB per disc. It'll only take me
eight of them to back up my files. I can hardly wait.
Of course, no matter which format wins, home-burnable
discs won't have support for more than one layer for another
5-8 years, at which time they'll still cost more than pressed
discs loaded with content.
Can we please stop dicking about with these useless incremental
improvements in write-once offline-able storage media? Put ALL this
crap to a halt until you can give me a holographic disc on which a
high-end home user can do a complete back up. Currently that means
250GB would BARELY suffice (many of us would still need three
or four of them), and a terabyte would actually make me happy... Even
at $5 per disc, since I'd only need one per backup, I would consider
that a suitable solution.
I don't care if Blu-ray or HD-DVD wins. They both suck, and compared
to modern HDDs, the proponents of each may as well try to reintroduce
the 3.5" floppy for all the difference it would make.
Passport didn't fail for lack of Microsoft's
trying, or even all that much on (lack of) technical
merits (it had flaws, no argument there, but
for the most part it did work acceptibly
well).
It failed because, on the corporate side,
no one wanted to hand Microsoft another
monopoly, over the "electronic identification"
market - Thus, really only Microsoft-run sites
and a handful of "partners" accepted it. On
the personal side, those who actually care
about such issues abhorred the idea of having
a single, non-anonymous identity, and those
with only little bit of a clue liked it but
worried about how microsoft would treat their
information (while the masses of lemmings out
there use the same password for any website
that asks, their ATM pin, and their email,
so didn't have a problem keeping track of
all those nasty passwords in the first place).
And what do we have with this new system, that
will make it any better?
Companies might use it, but they'll each want
to run their own server, making it no more
useful than just having 200 accounts spread
across as many websites, as we have now. Those
who really understand all this still won't
want to use anything that doesn't guarantee
total anonymity, and those with a partial clue
will still worry about who can do what with their
info. And, of course, the lemmings will just
see it as one more request for their ATM pin
number, but otherwise won't notice the difference.
We need decent MS office import filters. We need
a solution to spam. We need a cure for cancer. We
need new games that don't suck. Please, people, if
you code in your spare time, STOP WASTING TIME SOLVING
NON-PROBLEMS!
Slashdot Mirror
I've noticed that many Slashdotters have a strong interest in this topic, of getting at least partially off-grid. I admit that I too would like that quite a lot.
So why do so many of us, on a site that by nature of the topics covered, have a VERY high dependance on a reliable supply of electricity, want to get away from the single best source of such a supply available (at least in the US)? This strikes me as somewhat paradoxical.
Personally, I'll admit a bit of paranoia in my motivation. I simply don't trust the electric company to provide cheap electricity to me for the duration of my life, and simply can't imagine living without access to a computer. But I doubt I share the majority opinion in that regard.
Any thoughts?
without this incentive good TV and movies won't get shown on broadcast television
So how does he excuse the past 20+ years of absolute garbage on TV, all without the presence of the broadcast flag?
More importantly, though, if the mere existence of the broadcast flag will make him happy, then fine, he can have his little flag.
I won't use a receiver that honors it... And when the housewives of America learn they can't record their soaps anymore, I suspect even Joe and Jane Schmoe will go out of their way to get a flagless receiver. But if the cable companies want to transmit that flag, hey, no problem. The only problem comes from legislation requiring all receivers to obey that flag.
For comparison, Audio CDs have something like the broadcast flag in them... A bit that means, "You do not have permission to copy this CD". I don't think any CD-ROM drives have ever honored that, but it exists, none-the-less.
If waving a flag at the cable companies makes the MPAA feel warm and fuzzy, let 'em have it. They can argue about flagged and unflagged content, distribution rights, timeslots, and the like. And, as always, the rest of the world will quietly ignore them, tape their shows, and watch them with the commercials (aka "pee breaks" back before the VCR) skipped.
I get 95.6% efficiency for the lead, and 75.6% for the water
Ah, dear me. Before you bother crucifying me, I'll save you the trouble and retract paragraphs 2 and 3 - The first and last two, however, still stand.
Read a fucking thermodynamics book, for fuck's sake.
I believe I have identified your error... Efficiency != absolute useable energy. Yes, efficiency of the conversion increases with temperature difference. But you can't just ignore the absolute energy content and call it a day...
Actually, in the ideal case, you can get 40kJ out of the lead and 55kJ
I have to wonder how you arrived at those figures, as they seem... Well... TOTALLY FICTITIOUS! By a back-of-the-napkin application of Carnot's law (ever heard of that one? You would have needed it to get those numbers, or rather, the correct ballpark for the numbers you attempted to provide - But for reference, you could do worse than to start with delta-T divided by T-max), I get 95.6% efficiency for the lead, and 75.6% for the water. That doesn't give numbers anywhere near your range - Under ideal conditions, you could extract 59KJ from dropping lead from 500C to 22C, and 215KJ by dropping 90C water to 22C. 215 still very considerably exceeds 59, does it not?
Now, when I say "back of the napkin", I almost certainly omitted some detail that you may have at the tip of your fingers ready to fire back at me, no doubt with more obscenities and a hearty "gotcha". But the ratio will remain fixed. Meaning, if you painstakingly calculated the 40KJ figure you tossed out with no justification, then water would end up at 145.8KJ. No matter what confounding factors you come up with, you'll still get 3.644 times more useable energy from the water than the lead, in my original scenario.
you CANNOT take heat energy from a single source and completely convert it into work (which is what you are implying there).
I implied no such thing - I merely calculated the raw difference in thermal energy, figuring that illustrating your error with two substances having vastly different specific heats, lead and water, you might get the hint and accept your error with dignity.
But just for argument's sake, let's apply "AlienW's Law" rather than Carnot's. You ended up getting a not insignificant yield from a 68C temperature drop in water - By your numbers, the conversion favorably compared with 500C lead! And you would call such a basically-free (on the short term, at least) source of energy a load of cow excrement?
Check. Your turn.
Never used one of those new 24" Widescreen Dell LCD's have you? 12ms response time, 1920x1200 resolution, and all the pixels really exist...
Yeah, but after buying one on of those, you can't afford a quad-GPU system.
Or games.
Or food.
You are wrong on both counts. The temperature difference matters a hell of a lot more than specific heat.
Oh good, thank you for enlightening me. So, for example, you would assert that you can extract more energy from a kilogram of lead at 500C, than you could from a kilogram of water at 90C?
Dropping the lead to room temperature (22C) requires it to lose 61.7KJ. Dropping the water to room temperature requires it to lose 284.6KJ.
Without your tremendously informative commentary, I simply would not have realized that 61.7 > 284.6. Thank you, kind sir, for revealing this secret to me.
As far as climactic change: bullshit. You won't change the temperature of the ocean by even 0.1 degrees this way. All you are doing is mixing the water.
I don't really expect you to understand this, but mixing matters far more than mean temperature, in this case. According to some models (R X Huang, "Mixing and energetics of the oceanic thermohaline circulation", JPO, 29:-746, 1999, for example), the rate of thermal mixing contributes as one of the LARGEST sources of global climatic change, and (other than Coriolis effect) singlehandedly determines where and how fast surface ocean currents will flow.
But then, you've probably never heard of that whole "gulf stream" thing, preferring to study the Bible for your weather reports.
Luckily it's pure grade-A horse poop.
Er, no, not really. Granted, this particular guy sounds a few gallons short of a hogshead, but deriving useable energy from cooling things off works exactly the same way as by heating them up - Namely, we can use the transfer of energy from the warmer side to the colder side to perform useful work (such as generating electricity). The absolute temperatures involves don't particularly matter.
So why do virtually all human-created energy extraction technologies use warmer than ambient going to ambient as the two sides? Simple... We humans have enjoyed, at least for the past few millenia, a really easy way to get things hot (ie, fire and a supply of fuel that literally grows on (as?) trees). We have not had a convenient way of making something colder-than-ambient, except very recently (within the past century), and even then only by using the hot-to-ambient conversion to get electricity to do the ambient-to-cold conversion - Sort of trading one for the other, with a net loss in both conversions.
Deep ocean water, however, provides exactly that - A nearly limitless supply of something colder than ambient, with a high enough specific heat that the energy we can extract from the temperature gradient FAR exceeds the energy needed to pump it in the first place.
Imagine the climactic effects, and effects on the oceans ecosystems
Now, here you make a good point. In the short term, or on a small scale, I would tend to say that we couldn't even come close to the natural processes that mix the oceans. But then, people thought the same about burning wood and later oil, until just the past few decades.
How do you use the internet? Do you do cd www.slashdot.org;ls then look for the article you are after?
Two points...
First, I would point out that the web, as it exists, stores quite a lot of material that I've never seen, and didn't choose where to file it. So yes, to find something I've never seen before, I would go to Google first. However...
For something I have seen, however, yes, I would get to it pretty much the same way I traverse a directory hierarchy... So to get to a particular FP on Slashdot, I might traverse the tree:
Bookmarks
News
Tech
Slashdot (At this point, the navigation moves from local to remote)
YRO
Change the URL bar to the date I want, such as "http://yro.slashdot.org/index.pl?issue=20050418"
"PayPal deals blow to Freenet"
Of course, this has the distinct disadvantage that not all websites have as logical of a layout as Slashdot, but the same idea holds. And, for totally factual info such as guides, references, or the like, I don't even read it live on-line - I make a local copy and file it away neatly in my own directory hierarchy, so I can always find it quickly and reliably, even if I lose my net connection or the site itself ceases to exist.
directory where I save PDF shopping receipts
Directory where you... Save... PDF receipts?
Brilliant!
I would like to thank you. It never occurred to me to print my order confirmation pages to PDF. What a truly wonderful idea!
Well, it doesn't so much matter for myself, but if I can convince my SO to do that, I'll save a ream of paper per month. DAMN that girl can shop...
The 1926 printing is significant, it is the latest edition that is out of copyright.
Umm... For books of a primarily graphical nature (such as an atlas), I would tend to agree that paper still beats digital by a safe margin.
But why, if you actually want to purchase a copy of it (and not just for the purpose of saving it from oblivion by scanning and uploading it somewhere), would you care that its copyright has expired? I doubt just for the price, since you probably paid more for a copy that old in good condition than you would have for a five year old second-hand copy of the latest version (if one exists - I don't know the history of that particular book)...
That is because, usually, the author is selling his/her license to the publishers who provide the upfront money to produce the books/pay the author.
At least with peer-reviewed journals, that does not hold true. The author usually has to actually pay to have their submissions printed in such publications.
For textbooks, it depends. For few-author textbooks, the author makes a few bucks, so your argument holds. For the sort of textbooks with dozens of authors, in some cases the authors don't even know they have their name attached to the book, and those who do usually get "non-financial compensation" only, ie, no cash but they can list the book on their CV as a publication.
Don't mistake the world of academic publishing for the "real" world of publishing. Academics publish for fame, not fortune, and the leeches that do the physical printing get to rob both ends of the process (thus the massive interest in purely on-line peer-reviewed journals, with a massive backlash by traditional journal publishers such as Elsevier).
In trying to submit a post while logged in and not as an AC
Okay, strange indeed! I have yet to bother filling in the verification box, and have posted at least four or five times (and again with this post) without a problem.
Perhaps they only care about it from certain IP ranges? That would (at least partially) explain why Slashdot has taken to portscanning people recently... Though exactly what they hope to find, or how they tie it in with image verification, I have no idea.
Wierd.
btw, anyone else think this image verification thing is annoying?
Ummm... You posted that under your own account. If you actually log in, you can ignore the image verification box, you only need that if you want to post anonymously.
I guess you've never paid for shareware then.
Once, actually, I did. To unlock extra features of the program. But no, other than that, I have not. In that regard, I appreciate the Open Source movement all the more - It means I don't need to use shareware, and therefore, don't feel bad about not registering.
But regardless of your intent, you've nicely illustrated my point - I remember reading a story a few years ago, from the author of some once-popular shareware program (really fuzzy on the details, perhaps someone will recognize this and post a link in response). Basically, he had gotten sick of people, on learning he wrote the program in question, thanking him and saying what a great program, and that they had registered it. And he would respond something like "No, you didn't. No one registered. Not a single person. Ever."
Due to anonymity in the transaction, this maps to a non-iterated example of the Prisoner's Dilemma. And as much as we might wish otherwise, only one rational course of action exists in that scenario - Defect.
Ah yes, charging money for SDK's is the sure fire way to make your platform popular.
When you want people to buy your over-priced sun-hats in Florida in the summer, you offer them free water to lure them in. 90% will just take advantage of you, but water costs (almost) nothing, and the other 10% count as sales you might have otherwise missed.
When you have a monopoly on water (or more accurately, people don't realize they can get water from anyone but you), you charge an arm and a leg for the water, and make them buy a hat before you'll even allow them to buy your water.
Wormholes with smooth or classical spacetimes appear to be unstable and fall apart quickly.
Mathematically, physics says the same thing about a stable fixed-point in a static magnetic field.
And yet...
I have one of those cool little-magnet-levitating-over-a-big-magnet toys sitting on my desk at home, happily violating the (human-formalized) laws of physics.
Funny how, despite the numbers just not working well, little things like "friction" in the real world make sooooo many "impossible" things work just fine... All those nasty infinite series that would otherwise make the world very messy to calculate, eventually taper off to nothing, in a very real and practical way.
Listeners could buy whatever they like as they hear it.
Umm...
Now, for the most part, I won't go so far as to actively find and download pirated music. I suspect I fall in the minority (of people who realize they can download just about any song without paying for it) in that regard.
But this? Not actively seeking it out, sure. But passively not deleting a song I've already downloaded? It would take the honesty of a saint for anyone to actually go out of their way to pay for something they already have.
I suspect that they're also observing HOW people solve the puzzles.
Except, the way they want you to submit answers wouldn't tend to reveal anything about the method used to get to those answers...
Can you imagine how much business I'd lose if I put him in front of a client?
I agree with the rest of your points, explained as you did. But thist one still bothers me...
Why would you put one of your developers in front of a client? I mean, sure, you might walk a very important client around your site to gladhand a few of your more presentable people, but in general, just a bad idea. IT and PR do not mix, and never will. You keep the IT guys (and I use that gender-laden term deliberately) in the basement with endless free caffeinated beverages, and you keep the marketing and HR women in the front office for potential customers to meet with. Deviate much from that pattern, and both sides suffer.
HELLO! Where do these people come from and why are they interviewing with me for 6 figures instead of the local McDonalds for $6/hr?
Like myself, I would say they come from the C world, have learned Java involuntarily, and hold it at roughly the level of disdain it deserves.
"A dumbed-down vesion of C++" makes a pretty damned good description of Java, in general - Take a good, clear, flexible, generally-powerful language, C, extend it to allow better abstraction and data encapsulation, C++, then strip away all the underlying features that make it "powerful" in the name of "safety": Java. That nicely sums it up.
And even with that increased "safety", you can still shoot yourself in the foot (though you might need to wait for garbage collection to finish before the bullet actually leaves the barrel). Bugs result from programmer errors, not from the language used. Whether you add machine words, dereferenced pointers, or abstract objects that represent integers at some ambiguous level, if you expect 2 plus 2 to equal 3, your program won't work.
As for design patterns - Some of us can actually design and implement an idea. Some of us can recite textbooks to you. In my experience, those two categories very rarely overlap. If you want the latter rather than the former, your loss.
Home or work environments?
Point taken, but you need to go evern further than that...
Namely, Self-hosted or externally-hosted?
If the former, sure, I can see this as working at many businesses. Hell, where I work, all of our retail folks use what amount to X-Terms to connect to a central Linux server anyway. Extending that to something like Word or Excel makes sense, in that context.
I took the original idea to mean "externally hosted", basically turning the idea of "software" into a form of pseudo-public utility. No fuss, no muss, just pay your subscription and you use your local computer as nothing more than a local storage medium with a display, keyboard, and mouse.
Name me a time when affordable removable media were larger than fixed media, so you could reliably back up to one disc.
When CD-Rs first came out, they compared favorably to hard drives of the time. I still had a 340MB drive when they initially hit the market, and still only had a 1.2GB drive when I first got a CD burner.
10 years later, and while HDDs have increased in size by literally a factor of 1200, writeable optical media have increased by only a factor of seven (thirty if you allow DSDL DVDs, of which I don'tbelieve I've ever personally seen one burned rather than pressed). And now with BR/HD, we might improve the situation somewhat, but they both still leave a dismally large gap.
In particular, consider the most likely course of near-future improvements - We won't see another major optical disc advancement for another five years, but in that same time, we'll all have 5-8TB drives in our desktop machines. Back to the days of 80-disc backups. So as I said, they may as well propose reintroducing the floppy.
I, for one, look forward to this day when PCs don't need a swath of fixed-purpose thick-client software.
Do you also look forward to not having the option of "owning" any of the software you have on your machine? To needing to pay a monthly subscription to use your own computer, just like phone, cable, or power bills today? To having the possibility that whoever controls the server will decide to do away with a package you consider absolutely critical, and you have no recourse whatsoever?
I, for one, do not. I'll put up with needing to maintain my own PC, as long as I get to call it "my own pc" and have it function how I want.
Oh goody. 100GB per disc. It'll only take me eight of them to back up my files. I can hardly wait.
Of course, no matter which format wins, home-burnable discs won't have support for more than one layer for another 5-8 years, at which time they'll still cost more than pressed discs loaded with content.
Can we please stop dicking about with these useless incremental improvements in write-once offline-able storage media? Put ALL this crap to a halt until you can give me a holographic disc on which a high-end home user can do a complete back up. Currently that means 250GB would BARELY suffice (many of us would still need three or four of them), and a terabyte would actually make me happy... Even at $5 per disc, since I'd only need one per backup, I would consider that a suitable solution.
I don't care if Blu-ray or HD-DVD wins. They both suck, and compared to modern HDDs, the proponents of each may as well try to reintroduce the 3.5" floppy for all the difference it would make.
Passport didn't fail for lack of Microsoft's trying, or even all that much on (lack of) technical merits (it had flaws, no argument there, but for the most part it did work acceptibly well).
It failed because, on the corporate side, no one wanted to hand Microsoft another monopoly, over the "electronic identification" market - Thus, really only Microsoft-run sites and a handful of "partners" accepted it. On the personal side, those who actually care about such issues abhorred the idea of having a single, non-anonymous identity, and those with only little bit of a clue liked it but worried about how microsoft would treat their information (while the masses of lemmings out there use the same password for any website that asks, their ATM pin, and their email, so didn't have a problem keeping track of all those nasty passwords in the first place).
And what do we have with this new system, that will make it any better?
Companies might use it, but they'll each want to run their own server, making it no more useful than just having 200 accounts spread across as many websites, as we have now. Those who really understand all this still won't want to use anything that doesn't guarantee total anonymity, and those with a partial clue will still worry about who can do what with their info. And, of course, the lemmings will just see it as one more request for their ATM pin number, but otherwise won't notice the difference.
We need decent MS office import filters. We need a solution to spam. We need a cure for cancer. We need new games that don't suck. Please, people, if you code in your spare time, STOP WASTING TIME SOLVING NON-PROBLEMS!