As far as this particular project, the hardware costs are probably not more than $1 million, it will probably cost $5-10 million to design the system, which is justifiable, and then the other $21 million are all administrative costs. Then the project will over-run when the people running the project change their minds halfway through (and then again change their minds back, or just to something completely different), causing the engineering costs to skyrocket, which in turn causes the administrative costs to skyrocket. I wouldn't be all that surprised if this $32 million project ends up costing $70 million. It happens all the time.
The article was pretty weak in info, but $32mil should get you more than $1mil in equipment. Actually, if this is truly could computing you are buying X number of cpu years and Y number of petabytes worth of diskspace with a guarantee of that X will be delivered and that Y will be of some assurance against failure.
Cloud computing is just a segue to computing as a service. Think of it in terms of power, phone, etc. You pay by the use in some manner or another and billed accordingly.
Yes and no. With medical insurance, you and the insurer knows that about 90% of your total cost to the insurance company will be at the end of your life. Fire and auto and even life insurance don't know this. Nor do you. Its more random.
Life insurance when you are young is cheap, because odds are you are not going to die. Health insurance is not cheap, and you don't need it until you are older. Its more cost effective to pay out of pocket when you are younger vs having insurance.
The button I use to turn off wifi is the mouse button. Its actually more intuitive and better located than a hardware button. All of my wireless networking options are available in the same place. Typically, any hardware toggle that can be done in software is better in software. Take the caps lock key for example. I don't know of anything that requires this key today, but if there were a need, a simple software toggle would be sufficient vs the numerous inadvertent activations that happens all the time. Ever try to edit a file in vi when the caps lock gets hit accidentally?
Tehy are following the old "throwaway" paradigm rather than the greener "reuse" philosophy. Bad, bad, bad policy.
This is only speculation, but I would bet that cars are the most reused and recycled consumer product in the US. Ever heard the saying, "How come my $1,000 car has so many $200 parts?"? Ever been to a junk yard/pick and pull yard?
I don't get the cash for clunkers thing. Seems like more sensationalism politics.
Human males are attracted to just post-pubescent girls as that is their most fertile time.
Is this true? Human females are most fertile about 5-7 days out of ever 28 days for about 30 years of their lifetime. Unless you know the woman or she gives you a clue, you never know when these days are. Humans are a little unique in the animal kingdom because of the so-called hidden estrus.
I think he has a semi hidden http://profile.hisname.com/ that is given out, but wants http://www.hisname.com/ or http://hisname.com/ to say something more generic besides "Hey it worked! Do not contact the apache people about this website not having any info, ask the bozo that put up this site instead!" or the default spamming of GoDaddy ads. There is always "Under construction" and "Nothing to see here, move along", or having characters from a random number generator from a lava lamp? That could be cool, but odds are it would be just random.
So, the question is how to fill up blank space on a personal website that's not so personal?
That's pretty open ended. Hmm, dancing hamsters? Already done. Stretched but holes? Done. Girl in tub? Done. Popups and redirects to random porn sites while maximizing all of the windows? Done.
I'm guessing I'll get no mods or no positive ones, but asking a bunch of strangers what to put on a personal website thats not personal is pretty open ended. I dunno, how about making it like a wall on facebook where random people can put random things on the site with ad revenue? Even that is not too original, and is subject to abuse. Its your site, if someone has a creative answer, then that will supplant this post.
If a woman and a man can perform equally at math, but the woman has to study n% longer, then the man is inherently better at math.
As a mathematician, I can assure you that the time a student must spend to learn the material is no indicator of their ability with it.
Isn't there also a saying that goes something like "If you haven't found something new in math by 30 years of age, then you never will"? Point being, ability is ability.
I'd love to see the studies you claim make this a well understood fact.
I'm not going to do a cited paper, so give me some latitude here with some well understood facts.
Its nice to believe that there is some equal playing ground in life, but its the differences between people that make things interesting. This perennial debate over the sexes being the same is quixotic. All sex based species have differences between the sexes for survival of the species. Humans have not evolved any more than the animals that they have domesticated. Dogs still bury bones in the corner of a carpeted room because its in their genes to do so. Cats kill birds and bring them home even though they have plenty of food because its in their genes. Dogs are not cats.
Humans are not genetically different from the hunters and gathers from around 100,000 years ago. Meaning they are not any smarter, even though some of them know how to do partial differential equations and some don't. In humans, its the males that typically did the hunting and females did the child rearing and gathering. Female humans have wider hips for giving birth which limits their ability to run and catch prey which is needed for protein in their diet. Hunting abilities gave men better spacial abilities, the ability to plan and execute a plan, and also men have a much greater upper body strength and lung capacity. These are well understood facts for anyone who knows a little about human evolution or biology. Gathering abilities enable women to have better periphery short range vision (eg, why they can find things in the refrigerator that were right in front of the man's face!).
To say that women and men are the same is nonproductive because by definition they are different.
Maybe I'm clueless, and I'll be corrected shortly, but a) didn't ext3 bring this functionality back in in 2000 or so? b) don't most distributions format their partitions with the options to not do fsck's periodically based on mount count or time?
<insert paragraph break about here>
I know that every system I ever have to create a filesystem manually I remove the counts to prevent that quick reboot from being a slow reboot and a trip to the data center to babysit the thing through a fsck.
Of course how many of us are likely to have a 16 or 24 core box sitting around anytime soon?
In the US, we have 8 core boxes today. 4 core notebooks. 16 core is in preproduction.
Moore's law is still live and well. Linux and the other OSes need to get their act together for these bigger SMP (or whatever you want to call it) boxes.
www.Google.com is not public property. We go to their private servers and bring them our business because they have the best search resource available to us, and because they are mostly neutral.
But they don't have to be. They are, but they are not legally required to be. And no one would ever accuse them of being neutral on the "Sponsored links" sections.
Exactly. Everyone who remembers back when search technology was more primitive and search engines honored the <meta> tag with keywords and every fledgling software company would put the big guys products in the keywords in order to get traffic from search engines. In fact, the top hits on Google for html meta tag talks about what these are and how they don't work anymore.
If targeted advertising and direct competition by name was a trademark violation, I believe that Microsoft would have put Apple out of business by now.
Every halfwit wants a webpage with advertising on it, creating piles of redundant sites. Tech support website - there's a million of them, and they have different "guru" users, and people as the same questions on every site. Too much information, most of it wrong.
You must be new here or have tailored you settings to ignore things like ask.slashdot.org and all of the twit comments from knowitall college students.
Don't get me started on porn - seen her, seen her, yeah this is a copy of that other site, yeah these are all copyrighted images with the logos removed.
Fuck you internet, and fuck you google.
Life happens. You should check it out sometime. This should be the last website you ever visit: http://www.shibumi.org/eoti.htm
Can you here me? Hello? Hello? Oh, sorry, what did you say, the connection broke up a second.
People have spoken (no pun intended) that they prefer convenience, availability, and portability over service quality. People accept lower quality audio compared to even the 60s, 70s and 80s for the ability to have more variety of music at their disposal, lower quality video (DVD, cable) over high definition (OTH, Blu-ray), and of course the unreliable wireless phone service over reliable wired phone service.
Beyond which, human voice can impart additional meaning in tone that text can't. We probably could make better voicemail systems, but I don't see a lot of effort going into that. It isn't really a revenue generator for anyone, and the existing systems aren't that bad to use. 1 button to delete, 1 to save, 1 to repeat. I'd like to see fast forward and rewind like old tape based answering machines had, but that's about all it needs.
More arguments against your own case. There is no market for a better voicemail system. Would you pay for one? I consider voicemail a last resort if the person's phone is off or whatever the sequence is when the person does not answer the phone. Odds are the call was recorded in their log, and 99.9% of the time the voicemail says "I called you, can you call me?", which is redundant because why would someone call someone if they didn't want to talk to them? Text messages, voice mail, a note, interdepartmental mail or postal mail are all asynchronous means of communicating without using voice. AND I CAN CONVEY ADDITIONAL MEANING IF NEEDED!!!!
I guess if you are musically inclined or have superior voicemail skills, then voicemail might be viewed as a feature over other means of communication. But for the rest of us, you will either call back or I'll call you back, or maybe, just maybe I'm ignoring your phone calls and voice mails for a reason, and you will figure that out in time, yet in the meantime you will only continue to annoy me by calling and, and making me delete every one of your voicemails without listening to them. Here is a typical interaction with my voice mail:
In our society, a 2 second delay at a stoplight will get a honk behind you. That simple voicemail interaction takes about 30 seconds for one message. And about 1 minute if you have to delete 5-10 messages.
Thats immediately a mod up here on slashdot, but this is simply not the truth.
Television in the US typically has at least 2 or more means of acquiring content. Cable (Cox, Verizon, and ComCast come to mind). In areas where these services are not available there is usually satellite or over the air. Probably less than 1% of the population has fewer than 2 of these options. This is NOT a monopoly.
Same goes with telephones. Why don't people complain that their phone service costs as much or more than internet or cable when telephone service is a 100 year old technology?
Its called a free market, and for most people, their telephone and their television are their most valued leisure activity, or at least its the most common form of leisure activity across most all ethnicities and age groups over 99% of the population. The internet is a thing for younger people or at most 1/2 of the population.
IMO these sorts of niche channels will be the first to go under an internet video regime.
Yes, no, maybe.
First question. If I were to go to the "internet" for the Food Channel or GolfTV, who would I pay to watch these "channels"?
In my area the internet channel would come from a) Verizon -- a television, internet, and phone provider or b) Cox Communications -- a television, internet, and phone provider. I cannot get these niche channels over the air. I could get them via satellite. So the only loser or outlier here are the satellite providers.
Second question. Why in the world do people "watch" channels like The Weather Channel, The GolfTV Channel, or the Food Channel (or any other channel or radio) vs using the internet?
Because they can zone out to them with no thought whatsoever. No clicking of a mouse. No lags or jaggies on the video. No buffering. No registration. No downloads. Its just there. Fire and forget.
By and large, television and radio are broadcast mediums. They are not "I want to watch this now" mediums. Sure people can go out of their way and build a MythTV setup or buy a TiVo or rent a DVR from their TV provider, just as they could do with VCRs or audio cassettes for almost 30 years now.
The fact is that is common for people to put their TV on TWC, GTV, HGTV, CNN, or Food Channel or whatever and they do other things and not necessarily watch the content, its just on while they do other things. Or if they do watch the content, they don't pay too much attention to it. The Weather Channel is a very popular channel, yet less than 10% of the content is ever relevant to the individual. The point I'm trying to make is that the fire and forget with no effort is not anywhere near available on the internet today, and if it were to be available tomorrow, the same people would provide the service.
If anything, I would think that the niche channels are the only ones that could survive internet video. The "premium" content is already available for pay or free download today without advertisements. Fewer people are interested in premium content, and even fewer are willing to pay for premium content, but many people would immediately switch television providers if they did not have some of their niche channels.
If you could do anything, without limitations, what would you do?
With or without longterm consequences?
If you could be anyone, make yourself become any kind of person, what kind of person would you be?
I would be Arnold Schwarzenegger. I've only got 5 inches of height to gain and other physical characteristics to change. I've only got to figure out how to become unparalyzed, backtrack 20 years, move from one country to another, get involved in weight lifting/body building, become the best in the world at that, move to another country, then start a new career in acting, and then start another career in politics. I'll start my time machine now!
If you could have any life you wanted, what kind of life would you have?
I really regret snapping my spinal column in a car accident when I was 17. So, I would like to become mobile again.
For those that do not know, lithium is a commonly prescribed medication for people with bipolar/manic depression disorder. Suicide is the only top 10-20 killer among all age groups in the US. The people most likely to commit suicide are bipolar people as opposed to people who are "normal" or those with other psychiatric disorders (major/minor depression, schizophrenia, etc). Similar studies to the one in this story have been done in Texas where lithium levels in the water supply are significantly above average compared to other states and the hospitalizations and suicide rate of bipolar people are less in Texas than other states. Yes, these studies are correlational, but anyone with a basic knowledge of statistics knows that correlation is well beyond the mantra shouted here that "correlation != causation".
Case in point with Nirvana's Lithium lyrics, the author of the song, Kurt Cobain, was bipolar, and he is now dead from suicide. The reason suicide is so common with bipolar people is because it is so difficult for them to handle the swings from the feelings of mania and euphoria down to the feelings of worthlessness and despair. Also, heavy substance abuse, particularly with central nervous system depressants like alcohol and heroin are common among bipolar people because they temporarily relieve stress (a trigger for instability) and well alcohol and heroin are quite pleasant drugs to do in the first place. Its not uncommon for them to semi-regularly do drugs like cocaine, MDMA, or LSD to bring back the familiar feelings of mania and euphoria.
Its common for the drug use or other unconventional social behaviors to be incorrectly deemed as causal towards the feelings and behaviors of people with bipolar disorder. I know someone very well who has bipolar disorder who has gone back and forth between a highly functional, well educated, intelligent, middle-class professional to chronic alcoholism, homelessness, in and out of jail and unemployment, to back again to the functional part. In our society, its not very permitted for people to take weeks, months or years away from activities like work or school which is what most people do from 5-65 years of age, and any and all deviations from consistency are heavily punished due to lower pay, lack of promotions, loss of jobs, jail, hospitalization, etc, which is enough to make any "normal" person depressed.
Apple LOVES vendor lock in, just like MSFT. If they switched positions tomorrow Apple would be just as nasty when it comes to anti competitive practices as MSFT... They are just MSFT on a smaller scale, that's all.
But companies love to be anthropomorphized. Lets be fair here. I like it that the type of computers I'm a specialist in administering are vendor locked into using Linux. I'm typing this from my MacBook Pro, and I actually thought about this lockin thing when I bought it. I was thinking, "Should I spend this much money or buy something cheaper?" I also thought, "You know my music is pretty vendor locked into iTunes, do I want this?"
And my answer to myself was yes and yes. I can buy a new computer anytime I want, and practically 100% of my files are able to be read on another computer with different software, but I cannot think of another laptop or desktop computer that I would like to use. Their professional lines are exactly that, the other stuff is pretty good as well.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks for inventing distributed computing.
As far as this particular project, the hardware costs are probably not more than $1 million, it will probably cost $5-10 million to design the system, which is justifiable, and then the other $21 million are all administrative costs. Then the project will over-run when the people running the project change their minds halfway through (and then again change their minds back, or just to something completely different), causing the engineering costs to skyrocket, which in turn causes the administrative costs to skyrocket. I wouldn't be all that surprised if this $32 million project ends up costing $70 million. It happens all the time.
The article was pretty weak in info, but $32mil should get you more than $1mil in equipment. Actually, if this is truly could computing you are buying X number of cpu years and Y number of petabytes worth of diskspace with a guarantee of that X will be delivered and that Y will be of some assurance against failure.
Cloud computing is just a segue to computing as a service. Think of it in terms of power, phone, etc. You pay by the use in some manner or another and billed accordingly.
Traditional Windows users don't like virtual desktops. I never understood why. Couldn't do without them myself.
They do. Typical Windows users maximize everything and click on the little thingy on the bottom just like you click on virtual workspaces.
BTW, OS X has virtual workspaces and their dock scales. Oh, and it runs unix too.
That "good enough" is the antithesis of good engineering.
Look at the bell curve. Look at a field of corn, look at the height of people in a crowd.
The middle of the bell curve is where the money is, because that is where most people are.
But that's what insurance is.
Yes and no. With medical insurance, you and the insurer knows that about 90% of your total cost to the insurance company will be at the end of your life. Fire and auto and even life insurance don't know this. Nor do you. Its more random.
Life insurance when you are young is cheap, because odds are you are not going to die. Health insurance is not cheap, and you don't need it until you are older. Its more cost effective to pay out of pocket when you are younger vs having insurance.
The button I use to turn off wifi is the mouse button. Its actually more intuitive and better located than a hardware button. All of my wireless networking options are available in the same place. Typically, any hardware toggle that can be done in software is better in software. Take the caps lock key for example. I don't know of anything that requires this key today, but if there were a need, a simple software toggle would be sufficient vs the numerous inadvertent activations that happens all the time. Ever try to edit a file in vi when the caps lock gets hit accidentally?
I do. Because I say so. (just kidding, not really)
Tehy are following the old "throwaway" paradigm rather than the greener "reuse" philosophy. Bad, bad, bad policy.
This is only speculation, but I would bet that cars are the most reused and recycled consumer product in the US. Ever heard the saying, "How come my $1,000 car has so many $200 parts?"? Ever been to a junk yard/pick and pull yard?
I don't get the cash for clunkers thing. Seems like more sensationalism politics.
Human males are attracted to just post-pubescent girls as that is their most fertile time.
Is this true? Human females are most fertile about 5-7 days out of ever 28 days for about 30 years of their lifetime. Unless you know the woman or she gives you a clue, you never know when these days are. Humans are a little unique in the animal kingdom because of the so-called hidden estrus.
This was already overruled by the supreme court because of that pesky 5th amendment.
Sounds like this would be great for the end user. All live recordings would be reduced to free because here is the current value: http://www.archive.org/details/etree . Most all software would be free because of http://www.gnu.org/ and http://kernel.org/ , and http://sf.net/ .
Basically, everything will asymptote to $0.00, and any percentage of that is also $0.00. I doubt the lawmakers thought of it that way, now did they?
I think he has a semi hidden http://profile.hisname.com/ that is given out, but wants http://www.hisname.com/ or http://hisname.com/ to say something more generic besides "Hey it worked! Do not contact the apache people about this website not having any info, ask the bozo that put up this site instead!" or the default spamming of GoDaddy ads. There is always "Under construction" and "Nothing to see here, move along", or having characters from a random number generator from a lava lamp? That could be cool, but odds are it would be just random.
So, the question is how to fill up blank space on a personal website that's not so personal?
That's pretty open ended. Hmm, dancing hamsters? Already done. Stretched but holes? Done. Girl in tub? Done. Popups and redirects to random porn sites while maximizing all of the windows? Done.
I'm guessing I'll get no mods or no positive ones, but asking a bunch of strangers what to put on a personal website thats not personal is pretty open ended. I dunno, how about making it like a wall on facebook where random people can put random things on the site with ad revenue? Even that is not too original, and is subject to abuse. Its your site, if someone has a creative answer, then that will supplant this post.
As a mathematician, I can assure you that the time a student must spend to learn the material is no indicator of their ability with it.
Isn't there also a saying that goes something like "If you haven't found something new in math by 30 years of age, then you never will"? Point being, ability is ability.
I'd love to see the studies you claim make this a well understood fact.
I'm not going to do a cited paper, so give me some latitude here with some well understood facts.
Its nice to believe that there is some equal playing ground in life, but its the differences between people that make things interesting. This perennial debate over the sexes being the same is quixotic. All sex based species have differences between the sexes for survival of the species. Humans have not evolved any more than the animals that they have domesticated. Dogs still bury bones in the corner of a carpeted room because its in their genes to do so. Cats kill birds and bring them home even though they have plenty of food because its in their genes. Dogs are not cats.
Humans are not genetically different from the hunters and gathers from around 100,000 years ago. Meaning they are not any smarter, even though some of them know how to do partial differential equations and some don't. In humans, its the males that typically did the hunting and females did the child rearing and gathering. Female humans have wider hips for giving birth which limits their ability to run and catch prey which is needed for protein in their diet. Hunting abilities gave men better spacial abilities, the ability to plan and execute a plan, and also men have a much greater upper body strength and lung capacity. These are well understood facts for anyone who knows a little about human evolution or biology. Gathering abilities enable women to have better periphery short range vision (eg, why they can find things in the refrigerator that were right in front of the man's face!).
To say that women and men are the same is nonproductive because by definition they are different.
Maybe I'm clueless, and I'll be corrected shortly, but a) didn't ext3 bring this functionality back in in 2000 or so? b) don't most distributions format their partitions with the options to not do fsck's periodically based on mount count or time?
<insert paragraph break about here>
I know that every system I ever have to create a filesystem manually I remove the counts to prevent that quick reboot from being a slow reboot and a trip to the data center to babysit the thing through a fsck.
Of course how many of us are likely to have a 16 or 24 core box sitting around anytime soon?
In the US, we have 8 core boxes today. 4 core notebooks. 16 core is in preproduction.
Moore's law is still live and well. Linux and the other OSes need to get their act together for these bigger SMP (or whatever you want to call it) boxes.
www.Google.com is not public property. We go to their private servers and bring them our business because they have the best search resource available to us, and because they are mostly neutral.
But they don't have to be. They are, but they are not legally required to be. And no one would ever accuse them of being neutral on the "Sponsored links" sections.
Exactly. Everyone who remembers back when search technology was more primitive and search engines honored the <meta> tag with keywords and every fledgling software company would put the big guys products in the keywords in order to get traffic from search engines. In fact, the top hits on Google for html meta tag talks about what these are and how they don't work anymore.
If targeted advertising and direct competition by name was a trademark violation, I believe that Microsoft would have put Apple out of business by now.
Every halfwit wants a webpage with advertising on it, creating piles of redundant sites. Tech support website - there's a million of them, and they have different "guru" users, and people as the same questions on every site. Too much information, most of it wrong.
You must be new here or have tailored you settings to ignore things like ask.slashdot.org and all of the twit comments from knowitall college students.
Don't get me started on porn - seen her, seen her, yeah this is a copy of that other site, yeah these are all copyrighted images with the logos removed.
Fuck you internet, and fuck you google.
Life happens. You should check it out sometime. This should be the last website you ever visit: http://www.shibumi.org/eoti.htm
Text to speech isn't anywhere near 100% yet.
Can you here me? Hello? Hello? Oh, sorry, what did you say, the connection broke up a second.
People have spoken (no pun intended) that they prefer convenience, availability, and portability over service quality. People accept lower quality audio compared to even the 60s, 70s and 80s for the ability to have more variety of music at their disposal, lower quality video (DVD, cable) over high definition (OTH, Blu-ray), and of course the unreliable wireless phone service over reliable wired phone service.
Beyond which, human voice can impart additional meaning in tone that text can't. We probably could make better voicemail systems, but I don't see a lot of effort going into that. It isn't really a revenue generator for anyone, and the existing systems aren't that bad to use. 1 button to delete, 1 to save, 1 to repeat. I'd like to see fast forward and rewind like old tape based answering machines had, but that's about all it needs.
More arguments against your own case. There is no market for a better voicemail system. Would you pay for one? I consider voicemail a last resort if the person's phone is off or whatever the sequence is when the person does not answer the phone. Odds are the call was recorded in their log, and 99.9% of the time the voicemail says "I called you, can you call me?", which is redundant because why would someone call someone if they didn't want to talk to them? Text messages, voice mail, a note, interdepartmental mail or postal mail are all asynchronous means of communicating without using voice. AND I CAN CONVEY ADDITIONAL MEANING IF NEEDED!!!!
I guess if you are musically inclined or have superior voicemail skills, then voicemail might be viewed as a feature over other means of communication. But for the rest of us, you will either call back or I'll call you back, or maybe, just maybe I'm ignoring your phone calls and voice mails for a reason, and you will figure that out in time, yet in the meantime you will only continue to annoy me by calling and, and making me delete every one of your voicemails without listening to them. Here is a typical interaction with my voice mail:
Computer voice: Voice call from 666-555-1234
Caller: "Hi, its..."
Computer voice: Message deleted
In our society, a 2 second delay at a stoplight will get a honk behind you. That simple voicemail interaction takes about 30 seconds for one message. And about 1 minute if you have to delete 5-10 messages.
Because they're largely an unregulated monopoly.
Thats immediately a mod up here on slashdot, but this is simply not the truth.
Television in the US typically has at least 2 or more means of acquiring content. Cable (Cox, Verizon, and ComCast come to mind). In areas where these services are not available there is usually satellite or over the air. Probably less than 1% of the population has fewer than 2 of these options. This is NOT a monopoly.
Same goes with telephones. Why don't people complain that their phone service costs as much or more than internet or cable when telephone service is a 100 year old technology?
Its called a free market, and for most people, their telephone and their television are their most valued leisure activity, or at least its the most common form of leisure activity across most all ethnicities and age groups over 99% of the population. The internet is a thing for younger people or at most 1/2 of the population.
IMO these sorts of niche channels will be the first to go under an internet video regime.
Yes, no, maybe.
First question. If I were to go to the "internet" for the Food Channel or GolfTV, who would I pay to watch these "channels"?
In my area the internet channel would come from a) Verizon -- a television, internet, and phone provider or b) Cox Communications -- a television, internet, and phone provider. I cannot get these niche channels over the air. I could get them via satellite. So the only loser or outlier here are the satellite providers.
Second question. Why in the world do people "watch" channels like The Weather Channel, The GolfTV Channel, or the Food Channel (or any other channel or radio) vs using the internet?
Because they can zone out to them with no thought whatsoever. No clicking of a mouse. No lags or jaggies on the video. No buffering. No registration. No downloads. Its just there. Fire and forget.
By and large, television and radio are broadcast mediums. They are not "I want to watch this now" mediums. Sure people can go out of their way and build a MythTV setup or buy a TiVo or rent a DVR from their TV provider, just as they could do with VCRs or audio cassettes for almost 30 years now.
The fact is that is common for people to put their TV on TWC, GTV, HGTV, CNN, or Food Channel or whatever and they do other things and not necessarily watch the content, its just on while they do other things. Or if they do watch the content, they don't pay too much attention to it. The Weather Channel is a very popular channel, yet less than 10% of the content is ever relevant to the individual. The point I'm trying to make is that the fire and forget with no effort is not anywhere near available on the internet today, and if it were to be available tomorrow, the same people would provide the service.
If anything, I would think that the niche channels are the only ones that could survive internet video. The "premium" content is already available for pay or free download today without advertisements. Fewer people are interested in premium content, and even fewer are willing to pay for premium content, but many people would immediately switch television providers if they did not have some of their niche channels.
If you could do anything, without limitations, what would you do?
With or without longterm consequences?
If you could be anyone, make yourself become any kind of person, what kind of person would you be?
I would be Arnold Schwarzenegger. I've only got 5 inches of height to gain and other physical characteristics to change. I've only got to figure out how to become unparalyzed, backtrack 20 years, move from one country to another, get involved in weight lifting/body building, become the best in the world at that, move to another country, then start a new career in acting, and then start another career in politics. I'll start my time machine now!
If you could have any life you wanted, what kind of life would you have?
I really regret snapping my spinal column in a car accident when I was 17. So, I would like to become mobile again.
For those that do not know, lithium is a commonly prescribed medication for people with bipolar/manic depression disorder. Suicide is the only top 10-20 killer among all age groups in the US. The people most likely to commit suicide are bipolar people as opposed to people who are "normal" or those with other psychiatric disorders (major/minor depression, schizophrenia, etc). Similar studies to the one in this story have been done in Texas where lithium levels in the water supply are significantly above average compared to other states and the hospitalizations and suicide rate of bipolar people are less in Texas than other states. Yes, these studies are correlational, but anyone with a basic knowledge of statistics knows that correlation is well beyond the mantra shouted here that "correlation != causation".
Case in point with Nirvana's Lithium lyrics, the author of the song, Kurt Cobain, was bipolar, and he is now dead from suicide. The reason suicide is so common with bipolar people is because it is so difficult for them to handle the swings from the feelings of mania and euphoria down to the feelings of worthlessness and despair. Also, heavy substance abuse, particularly with central nervous system depressants like alcohol and heroin are common among bipolar people because they temporarily relieve stress (a trigger for instability) and well alcohol and heroin are quite pleasant drugs to do in the first place. Its not uncommon for them to semi-regularly do drugs like cocaine, MDMA, or LSD to bring back the familiar feelings of mania and euphoria.
Its common for the drug use or other unconventional social behaviors to be incorrectly deemed as causal towards the feelings and behaviors of people with bipolar disorder. I know someone very well who has bipolar disorder who has gone back and forth between a highly functional, well educated, intelligent, middle-class professional to chronic alcoholism, homelessness, in and out of jail and unemployment, to back again to the functional part. In our society, its not very permitted for people to take weeks, months or years away from activities like work or school which is what most people do from 5-65 years of age, and any and all deviations from consistency are heavily punished due to lower pay, lack of promotions, loss of jobs, jail, hospitalization, etc, which is enough to make any "normal" person depressed.
Apple LOVES vendor lock in, just like MSFT. If they switched positions tomorrow Apple would be just as nasty when it comes to anti competitive practices as MSFT... They are just MSFT on a smaller scale, that's all.
But companies love to be anthropomorphized. Lets be fair here. I like it that the type of computers I'm a specialist in administering are vendor locked into using Linux. I'm typing this from my MacBook Pro, and I actually thought about this lockin thing when I bought it. I was thinking, "Should I spend this much money or buy something cheaper?" I also thought, "You know my music is pretty vendor locked into iTunes, do I want this?"
And my answer to myself was yes and yes. I can buy a new computer anytime I want, and practically 100% of my files are able to be read on another computer with different software, but I cannot think of another laptop or desktop computer that I would like to use. Their professional lines are exactly that, the other stuff is pretty good as well.