Actually, for many years I did own a home audio CD recorder which did require "music" CD-R's. They cost negligibly more than "data" CD-R's.
What absolutely totally pissed me off beyond belief was the day I brought a CD home and it wouldn't copy, because it had some damned kind of copy protection built in that triggered the SCCS lockout in my recorder.
I kept MY end of the bargain, God damn it. I paid for every copy I made. And I was totally entitled to make those copies under the Audio Home Recording Act. And both the publishers and artists were paid for every copy.
But, noooooo, that's not good enough for the music industry. They set up a one-sided bargain and then won't even keep their side of it.
I've heard many good things about Baen and I'm sure they're admirable, but unfortunately they are not the company that publishes the books of Barbara Kingsolver, or Mark Kurlansky, or Erik Larson, or Elizabeth George...
I can name any particular song I'm interested in that there's at least a 90% chance the iTunes Music Store will have it. Not just Ashlee Simpson, either. I was watching the Sopranos, and an Artie Shaw tune called "Comes Love" is playing in the background, and I think "hmmm... that's interesting..." and four minutes and $0.99 later I had it. Ten years ago I would have had to drive half an hour to Tower Records, shuffled through the bin for Artie Shaw CD's, and had to pay $13.95 to get the one song I wanted and fifteen others I was only marginally interested in.
That's why I buy music electronically, even if it doesn't have the little CD booklet, or the LP album art, or whatever.
But I can name any particular book I'm interested in reading, and even during the period when Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powell's, and Gemstar's own store were all selling Gemstar-format eBooks, there was probably less than a 10% chance that it was available.
Baen can't do it by themselves. Enough of the book publishers need to get on board to create a store comparable to iTunes.
I'm not sure how or why it happens... my suspicion is that every new marketing manager gets to dictate his or her own personal UI preferences, as if they were part of the color scheme or branding or something. I would rather believe that than believe any other hypotheses I can come up with (such as that it is a fiendish strategy to force upgrades by making life intolerably miserable for any person or company that is trying to use a mixture of different versions of Office).
Microsoft is really much worse than other software companies at producing followup products that manage to include real improvements without adding a lot of seemingly arbitrary changes that are no better and no worse, just randomly different from the previous version. Consecutive versions of Word have always add a tendency to use about 85% or so of the same functions, but randomly distributed into different menus (or some into menus, some into toolbars) than in the previous version.
(With or without a randomly placed "preference" that puts many but not quite all of them back into pretty much but not exactly the same places as they were in the previous version).
(Just to show I'm an equal-opportunity whiner, I have to say that Apple did the same thing with the Macintosh Finder...)
I wish that manufacturers of well-liked products would routinely ombudsman who understands what it was that customers liked about the product and whose job was to make sure that the next version didn't unnecessarily throw out any babies with the bathwater.
The state of eBooks has been the same since the year 2000. It's never been a technology issue. I'm glad your new Sony is nice, and I'm sure it's a significant improvement over the Rocket eBook, but the Rocket eBook is more than good enough.
The problem is, was, and for the foreseeable future will be, as you say, "they REALLY need more books in their bookstore." (By the way, how are those books priced? There is also a problem with overpricing and greed. Circa 2000-2001 I had numerous conversations with interested onlookers about my Rocket eBook and there was always mounting interest until they said "What do the books cost?" I'd answer "Same as hardbounds for books that aren't in paper, otherwise same as a paperback." Their jaw would drop in disbelief and that would be the end of the conversation).
But it wasn't the price. It was lack of titles. An electronic bookstore with a thousand titles may give the impression of plentitude, but it's less than a good airport bookstore and it doesn't even compare to a plain old brick-and-mortar mall bookstore.
At one time, I went over the list of books chosen for Oprah's book club. At the time there were about forty titles. Something like thirty of them were available as audiobooks, yet only about six were available as eBooks in any format whatsoever. For no eBook format were more than three or four of them available.
There are numerous ways of reading eBooks that are good enough to provide a comfortable, enjoyable, "ludic" reading experience, but until you can buy the books you want at a reasonable price, it ain't gonna happen.
I own approximately $300 worth of content I purchased for my Rocket eBook which is locked down to the particular serial number of my physical device. Nuvomedia and Gemstar are long gone, the servers are shut down, there's no customer service available, the battery life on my device is now down to a couple of hours... and when the device fails I'll be the proud possessor of expensive content which is completely inaccessible to me.
I hope you have better luck with your Sony.
Isn't it time for a CLEAR code contest?
on
IOCCC 2006 is now open
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
A contestant would submit a piece of code together with the specification of what the code was supposed to do, but no other documentation.
The judges would propose a straightforward change in the specification.
The code and the revised specification would be given to an impartial panel of a hundred programmers, selected at random from the ranks of people working for a living writing code. Each of them would be asked to modify the code to meet the revised spec. They would also be instructed to fix any bugs they noticed in the code they were given. The revised code and spec would then submit each one to an impartial panel of 100 SQA testers, selected at random from the ranks of people who work for a living testing code.
The winner would be the contestant whose code, after being modified by other programmers, passed the largest number of SQA tests.
(And, yes, SQA failures due to unfixed bugs in the original code would count against the contestant).
Advertising has not always been "just part of our world." Do you think Consumer Reports should be forcibly compelled to accept advertising? Do you think they have a valid reason for not accepting it?
In the early 1900s, one could have said "Child labor has always been just part of our world," or "Fraudulent patent medicines have always been just part of our world," or "The six-day work week has always been just part of our world." That doesn't mean they were beyond criticism. Or that they should properly permeate all of our world.
Alexander Pope said "Whatever is, is right." Pangloss said "Everything's for the best in this best of all possible worlds." I say they were both full of it.
The very fact that this idea is being discussed leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
In Wikipedia's early days there was a good deal of discussion about this very point, with some conspiracy-minded contributors fearing that Jimbo Wales would talk freedom, neutrality, and noncommercialism at the start and change the rules later in the game.
There are a number of precedents for this sort of bad-faith maneuver, one of the most notorious being CDDB, which happily accepted contributions of CD track names from thousands of volunteers who believed they were contributing to an open-source project; sneakily changed their software so that it add "stealth" copyright notices giving the rights to the information to the organization; then took it private and sold people's generous volunteer work and lined their own pockets with the money.
One of Wikipedia's cornerstones is the "neutral point of view" policy. This policy is a fragile and precious thing. Innumerable people are constantly leaning on it and chipping away at it in an effort to use Wikipedia for promotion. The only reason why NPOV works is that the core of Wikipedians truly accept that WIkipedia really is neutral, and are willing to enforce the policy.
If Wikipedia ever accepts paid advertising, I believe it will destabilize the fragile balance. Advertisements will most likely be targeted to appear on the same pages as relevant article. Many WIkipedia articles about commercial products contain substantial amounts of both praise and criticism. In its nature, this material is frequently in a somewhat dynamic state of flux, with competing editors wordsmithing things back and forth; at its best, a stable state is reached in which the editors on one side of an issue grudgingly acknowledge that the wording of the material on the other side is acceptable to them.
What happens when an advertiser notices that the related article contains material that has a different spin from its marketing communications? I think the delicate house of cards comes tumbling down, that's what. I don't see how anyone can ever build a "Chinese wall" between advertising and editorial when any advertiser can be an editor.
And once it becomes generally accepted that Wikipedia is no longer neutral, WIkipedia is dead. That will unleash a flood of self-promoting crap which old-time WIkipedians will be unable to hold back.
It will also piss off everyone who, like me, has made voluntary monetary contributions to Wikimedia almost every time they've launched one of their frequent pledge drives, in the belief, which will have been shown to be naïve, that Wikipedia was promised to be noncommercial.
Wikipedia can survive a reputation for occasional inaccuracy and for "fancruft." But if it is ever seen that Wikipedia articles are a practical avenue for promotion and advertising, or that they reflect the interests of advertisors, all Jimbo's horses and all Jimbo's men will never be able to put WIkipedia together again.
And all the old-time Wikipedians will say "We told you this was going to happen." And they'll be right.
Nobody will buy this unless it works with most devices. Would you pay (say) $129.95 to eliminate two cords out of the dozen on your desk?
For it work with most devices, device makers would need to be willing to standardize on it.
If device makers were WILLING to standardize, we wouldn't HAVE umpteen different kinds of wall-wart transformers with different voltage and current requirements... and different DC plug configurations.
If every device used the same DC voltage and the same kind of low-voltage DC plug, we could have multi-outlet low-voltage power supplies in a single compact box, or built in behind the faceplace. That would achieve 90% of the convenience of this technology at 10% of the cost.
That doesn't happen because nobody voluntarily standardizes the low-voltage power inputs on their devices, and nobody will. (The only reason our vacuum cleaners and refrigerators do is because they were pushed to by electrical wiring codes, which don't exist for low-voltage electronics).
Since nobody will standardize their low-voltage power inputs, this is a nice idea that will never happen.
These are supposedly the higher-end marques. With fatter profit margins.
I can't imagine wanting to shell out extra money for a Lincoln, but there are still plenty of people who do. You'd think that the last thing Ford would want to do is to send them a message that they are sucking hind tit. Is Ford trying to get rid of them?
Hardly news. This should not be read as a mass rejection of Vista, just an indication that corporation IT departments do their job in a reasonably competent and responsive way.
It takes about a year-and-a-half before a corporation that fully intends to transition to the new OS is ready for the "rollout." Typically this involves a good deal of preparation so that everyone in the company gets their new PC, their training classes, their new application versions, and their direction for migrating at about the same time.
At the introduction of every major Windows upgrade, the same things have happened: Gartner et al have told corporations to take their time adopting the new OS, and corporations, whether because they listen to the analysts or for their own reasons, have done so.
We experienced the slowdown, particularly whenever iTunes needed to access our account. Long pauses, and frequent fairly cryptic error messages ("the iTunes store cannot perform this function at this time. Please try again later." or something like that). We all said "It's probably slow because of millions of people who got iPods on Christmas day," tried repeatedly, eventually got through.
There were however some somewhat scary error situations in which it apparently rejected valid combinations of account names and passwords.
What I don't understand is why Apple wasn't able to post some kind of notice, visible in iTunes, saying that the store was slow because of high volume.
"We're in the early days of behavioral targeting but it's an idea whose time has come,' says Simon Andrews"
So, they think of me as a "target." And they're surprised that I don't like this?
"1a. An object, such as a padded disk with a marked surface, that is shot at to test accuracy in rifle or archery practice. b. Something aimed or fired at. 2. An object of criticism or attack. 3. One to be influenced or changed by an action or event. 4. A desired goal. 5. A railroad signal that indicates the position of a switch by its color, position, and shape. 6. The sliding sight on a surveyor's leveling rod. 7. A small round shield. 8a. A structure in a television camera tube with a storage surface that is scanned by an electron beam to generate a signal output current similar to the charge-density pattern stored on the surface. b. A usually metal part in an x-ray tube on which a beam of electrons is focused and from which x-rays are emitted."
I, for one, think it is legitimate to get angry at those who regard me, even metaphorically, as something to be shot at, fired at, attacked, influenced, or changed. I don't even like being a "desired goal."
Those who "target" me should not be surprised at being a target for my anger.
I would love to see or have seen Showscan. I remember how exciting it was to show our 8 mm home movies at 54 fps. In the days before flat-panel screens I was always the guy who insisted on goosing up everyone's display settings from default 60 fps to 75 or 90.
Temporal resolution is as important as spatial resolution, and if I recall correctly Edison or Dickson actually said in so in essence that chose 16 fps for economic reasons--it was the slowest frame rate that was tolerable. 24 fps is way too slow. Even the difference between 24 fps and Todd-AO's 30 fps was meaningful.
I remember the first time I saw jugglers live, and realized how exciting it was, and how much is lost in juggling--and doubtless dance and athletic events--by the coarse temporal resolution of movies and television.
Showscan sounds as if it must be yummy. I'd love to see it. I have no doubt that the rollercoaster sequence of "This Is Cinerama" would be even more exciting in Showscan.
But as far as I know, very, very, very few movies were ever produced in it, and it wasn't or isn't successful enough for them to have shown up even in a major city like Boston.
And IMHO it has the same problem HD has and Cinerama had: it only adds value to a limited range of subject matter, which is not the storytelling mainstream of cinema.
(Parenthetically: I wonder whether the electronics for HDTV would lend themselves to being used at half the resolution and double the frame rate?)
But it's not mentioned in the "methodology" section, and I think the paragraph you mention does cast some doubt on the validity of the results:
"For those 12 in the VC who wanted to stop before the end, 5 claimed to be well-acquainted with the original Milgram study, and therefore we cannot rule out the possibility that this influenced their behaviour. However, if we treat 'wanting to stop' as a binary response variable in order to test for differences between the proportions (using binary logistic regression) then the VC was significantly different from the HC (?2 = 6.691 on 1 d.f., P = 0.0097) whereas knowledge of Milgram did not have a significant impact (?2 = 1.525 on 1 d.f., P = 0.22) and there was no interaction effect between group and knowledge of Milgram."
In the first place, this seems a little bit like throwing in a statistical fudge factor, since it does not say in their methodology that they planned to ask about knowledge of Milgram after the experiment, and they seem to have applied this statistical test a posteriori, whereas statistical tests are only valid if the test to be performed is stated in advance.
In the second place, it's all very well to say that five of the subjects "claimed to be well-acquainted" with the Milgram experiment, but that does not take into account the number of subjects that, while not well-acquainted with it, might nevertheless have had some vague or even subconscious knowledge of it. The Milgram study has been around a long time and is practically in the folkways.
There are probably millions of people who would say they knew nothing about John B. Watson's experiments with rats, who nevertheless would be extremely familiar with the idea of running rats through a maze.
I don't see anything in the study that says that they made any attempt to find out whether or not the subjects had ever heard about the original Milgram experiment.
The Milgram subjects almost certainly had no knowledge of whether the situation was real or what the purpose of the experiment was, and probably believed that they were "supposed" to follow orders.
Today's subjects may well have heard something. Even if they couldn't have named "Milgram" as the investigator, they may have had more than an inkling that the purpose of the experiment was to see whether they were virtual sadists, and may have suspected that, despite their instructions, the "approved" behavior was to not to follow orders.
Which is likely to cause you more trouble? Homeland Security being identify me wirelessly at a distance to they can yell at you "6079 Smith W. Yes, you! Bend lower, please!"
Or that Homeland Security can identify you as someone who has exhibited an unusual pattern of behavior by sabotaging my own passport, for reasons which they will not be interested in trying to understand?
Telling them that "An article in Wired says a nonworking RFID doesn't invalidate the passport, so I can still use it" is likely to be about as effective as John Gilmore saying that since nobody can show him a copy of any law that says he needs to show ID when flying, he should be able to fly without showing ID.
This is one of these silly non-products that companies like Neiman-Marcus and Hammacher Schlemmer like to have in their catalogs. It's not a real product, it's all about publicity.
It's one of these crazy but amusing-sounded "products" that sound as if they'd be appropriate for the title character in "Brewster's Millions" (who had to waste $30 million in 30 days in order to inherit $300 million).
They tend to be not-quite-one-of-a-kind items that are nevertheless certainly not mass-produced and frequently involve an obvious component of personal service or installation.
I can't seem to find any of items that must involve sending a small army of people to install them, but they've had them in the past. You know, amusement-park-sized train rides for a 400-acre backyard or live camels or that sort of thing.
I suspect that very, very, few of these items are actually sold, and I bet that in some cases the companies wait for the item to be purchased before figuring out how they are going to deliver or install it. Nieman-Marcus may or may not make money on the Virgin Galactic space flights, but their business is not built on these offerings.
These products are offered so that hundreds of local news pairs of talking heads will alternatively swivel them toward each other as Kimberly says "If you're looking for the gift for the person who has everything, take a look at _this_ from the Glooper-Gnorgl catalog!" then swivels her head toward Lance who says "That's right, it's a real home hospital complete with emergency room, three motorized gurneys, and a five-person medical staff, and it can be yours for $56,000,000!"
I saw 2001 on its first run. I'm not sure what the exact process used was. I think the credits read "Cinerama" but it was in a theatre named "Todd-AO." In any case, it was a single strip of 70mm film. They handed out little leaflets in which Arthur C. Clarke used several paragraphs explaining that the scene in which the astronauts survive the short trip through vacuum was possible.
I loved it. It blew me away. I thought it was a great film. In many scenes, you had some huge spacecraft moving slowly past you, but because there was so much detail it took that long to absorb it. And of course the "light show" sequence at the end was stunning.
Subsequently, I've seen it in ordinary movie theatres (anamorphic 35mm). It was awful. Slow and boring. You couldn't read any of the hundreds of little legends on the spacecraft controls, they were all slightly blurred. On television, it was even worse. My kids think it's a pointless, unwatchable film. I tell them, "yeah, but you haven't really _seen_ it." And they don't believe me when I say the format made a difference.
So, yes, I agree completely. 2001 is a perfect example of a movie that needed, used, and worked as a movie in a huge, detailed format. Watching it on a TV set is like trying to appreciate a symphony from an Edison cylinder recording.
But that's my point. Just how many 2001's are there?
If there were enough movies that truly needed high-definition to make HD successful, then why aren't there full-length feature movies being made and exhibited now in IMAX? I don't mean clever enhanced blowups of regular films into IMAX, I mean movies like 2001 or, I dunno, Ryan's Daughter or Lawrence of Arabia? Movies which need high definition in order to work cinematically?
There were never enough to keep Cinerama afloat. Indeed, there don't seem to have ever been enough to keep Hollywood providing 70 mm prints to the (decreasing) number of theatres that have 70 mm projectors.
For you youngsters here: Cinerama was to 35mm movies as HD is to NTSC. It used three synchronized projectors on a deeply-curved screen subtending a 146-degree arc. Everyone who has ever seen it was bowled over by it. It is still shown on rare occasions when fans arrange it. It is universally acknowledged to be better than the later wide-screen processes such as CinemaScope, VistaVision, etc. all of which were pretty much acknowledged to be ways to get something sorta-kinda-not-quite-almost like Cinerama, but on the cheap. Many who have had an opportunity to compare it with present-day IMAX have judged it to be superior, too, although that's trickier. IMAX suffers by having too much height and not enough width; when presented on a flat screen, it's flat, and when presented on a dome screen, it's hopeless washed out by cross-reflection (unlike Cinerama, which was always pitch-black in the shadows). Of course CInerama had those awful panel joints... but I digress. Here's the point:
Cinerama was never more than a footnote, because it was only suited to spectacle, not to storytelling. Only two Cinerama features were made with a conventional storyline: "How the West was Won," and "The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm." The rest were pastiches of spectacle: travelogues, ride-film-like experiences, and so forth.
It bodes very ill for high-definition that most of the "best" films are special-effects sci-fi extravaganzas.
I'm glad to see they have Casablanca on their list, but it's not clear that they're saying the actual experience of watching the movie is any better than on DVD. They seems to like the many extras bundled in. Is Rick more world-weary in high-definition? Is Ilsa lovelier? Do the heartrending scenes rend your heart any more? I haven't seen it... but I doubt it.
I like seeing superheros hurtle through space and things blow up as much as the next guy, but these are not enough to carry an expensive video format.
How, exactly, is high-definition going to help directors evoke emotion and tell a story?
...is that profits are much lower for drug products, such as vaccines and antibiotics that are extremely effective and "cure" in a small number of doses, than for drugs products that merely help, or palliate.
The invisible hand of the marketplace skews development toward drugs that must be taken forever, such as blood pressure medication, or cholesterol lowering medication, or anti-depressives and so forth. These drugs are godsends if you need them, but the fact remains that drugs that actually save lives, with a small number of doses, are less profitable than drugs that merely improve or prolong them, and need to be taken continuously and repeatedly forever.
It is this warped incentive that needs to be fixed.
The antibiotics we have are losing effectiveness. Hospital infections are becoming more and more dangerous. My generation is probably going to be the only generation in human history to live its life mostly free of the mortal fear of dying from bacterial infection. There are virtually no new antibiotics in development.
Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Compuserve's "CB simulator," Delphi, and other services provided text-based multiway services of the kind now known as "chat."
It was fairly common for someone to make a joking about how they were or were not dressed. A common reply was for someone else to type something like/view mode on
and tell the group that he or she could now verify whether or not first speaker had been telling the truth. Occasionally the first speaker would be naive and gullible enough to believe it.
Little did I know that/view mode would actually be implemented within my lifetime.
I agree with this completely. Those who lived through the Sputnik-to-Apollo era remember just how carefully and incrementally NASA proceeded. Suborbital flights before orbital flights, circumnavigating the Moon before trying to land on it, and so forth.
Engineering is an incremental process. You scale things up 20% and 30% at a time, and see which things are flexing too much or developing cracks or failing. Or you take something known, working, and reliable, and you add one new thing to it.
As Petrosky pointed out in To Engineer is Human, failure is a normal part of the engineering process and the process needs to be managed so that the failures are not catastrophic. Or at least so that the catastrophic failures are not seen as imperilling the entire project.
I can only imagine what would have happened if NASA had tried to go directly from Project Vanguard to a manned moon landing.
The problems of surviving in low gravity for extended periods of time are part of what needs to be solved in any case. If long periods of zero-G are hazardous to your health, I'll bet that long periods of 0.16-G are, too, and it's easier to spin a space station than a Moon colony.
The Manhattan Project probably did a good deal of conceptual harm, because while it was a brilliant success, not too many other programs have succeeded in the same way. Of course, not too many people have been allowed to throw around such enormous resources so freely as Groves did. The approach of immediately going full-speed-ahead on every available possibility is not one that's been tried very often. And, come to think of it, I'm not quite sure what happened to Groves, but he was apparently not perceived as a brilliant success and he sort of vanished into the mists when the project was over.
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Actually, for many years I did own a home audio CD recorder which did require "music" CD-R's. They cost negligibly more than "data" CD-R's.
What absolutely totally pissed me off beyond belief was the day I brought a CD home and it wouldn't copy, because it had some damned kind of copy protection built in that triggered the SCCS lockout in my recorder.
I kept MY end of the bargain, God damn it. I paid for every copy I made. And I was totally entitled to make those copies under the Audio Home Recording Act. And both the publishers and artists were paid for every copy.
But, noooooo, that's not good enough for the music industry. They set up a one-sided bargain and then won't even keep their side of it.
I've heard many good things about Baen and I'm sure they're admirable, but unfortunately they are not the company that publishes the books of Barbara Kingsolver, or Mark Kurlansky, or Erik Larson, or Elizabeth George...
I can name any particular song I'm interested in that there's at least a 90% chance the iTunes Music Store will have it. Not just Ashlee Simpson, either. I was watching the Sopranos, and an Artie Shaw tune called "Comes Love" is playing in the background, and I think "hmmm... that's interesting..." and four minutes and $0.99 later I had it. Ten years ago I would have had to drive half an hour to Tower Records, shuffled through the bin for Artie Shaw CD's, and had to pay $13.95 to get the one song I wanted and fifteen others I was only marginally interested in.
That's why I buy music electronically, even if it doesn't have the little CD booklet, or the LP album art, or whatever.
But I can name any particular book I'm interested in reading, and even during the period when Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Powell's, and Gemstar's own store were all selling Gemstar-format eBooks, there was probably less than a 10% chance that it was available.
Baen can't do it by themselves. Enough of the book publishers need to get on board to create a store comparable to iTunes.
I'm not sure how or why it happens... my suspicion is that every new marketing manager gets to dictate his or her own personal UI preferences, as if they were part of the color scheme or branding or something. I would rather believe that than believe any other hypotheses I can come up with (such as that it is a fiendish strategy to force upgrades by making life intolerably miserable for any person or company that is trying to use a mixture of different versions of Office).
Microsoft is really much worse than other software companies at producing followup products that manage to include real improvements without adding a lot of seemingly arbitrary changes that are no better and no worse, just randomly different from the previous version. Consecutive versions of Word have always add a tendency to use about 85% or so of the same functions, but randomly distributed into different menus (or some into menus, some into toolbars) than in the previous version.
(With or without a randomly placed "preference" that puts many but not quite all of them back into pretty much but not exactly the same places as they were in the previous version).
(Just to show I'm an equal-opportunity whiner, I have to say that Apple did the same thing with the Macintosh Finder...)
I wish that manufacturers of well-liked products would routinely ombudsman who understands what it was that customers liked about the product and whose job was to make sure that the next version didn't unnecessarily throw out any babies with the bathwater.
The state of eBooks has been the same since the year 2000. It's never been a technology issue. I'm glad your new Sony is nice, and I'm sure it's a significant improvement over the Rocket eBook, but the Rocket eBook is more than good enough.
The problem is, was, and for the foreseeable future will be, as you say, "they REALLY need more books in their bookstore." (By the way, how are those books priced? There is also a problem with overpricing and greed. Circa 2000-2001 I had numerous conversations with interested onlookers about my Rocket eBook and there was always mounting interest until they said "What do the books cost?" I'd answer "Same as hardbounds for books that aren't in paper, otherwise same as a paperback." Their jaw would drop in disbelief and that would be the end of the conversation).
But it wasn't the price. It was lack of titles. An electronic bookstore with a thousand titles may give the impression of plentitude, but it's less than a good airport bookstore and it doesn't even compare to a plain old brick-and-mortar mall bookstore.
At one time, I went over the list of books chosen for Oprah's book club. At the time there were about forty titles. Something like thirty of them were available as audiobooks, yet only about six were available as eBooks in any format whatsoever. For no eBook format were more than three or four of them available.
There are numerous ways of reading eBooks that are good enough to provide a comfortable, enjoyable, "ludic" reading experience, but until you can buy the books you want at a reasonable price, it ain't gonna happen.
I own approximately $300 worth of content I purchased for my Rocket eBook which is locked down to the particular serial number of my physical device. Nuvomedia and Gemstar are long gone, the servers are shut down, there's no customer service available, the battery life on my device is now down to a couple of hours... and when the device fails I'll be the proud possessor of expensive content which is completely inaccessible to me.
I hope you have better luck with your Sony.
A contestant would submit a piece of code together with the specification of what the code was supposed to do, but no other documentation.
The judges would propose a straightforward change in the specification.
The code and the revised specification would be given to an impartial panel of a hundred programmers, selected at random from the ranks of people working for a living writing code. Each of them would be asked to modify the code to meet the revised spec. They would also be instructed to fix any bugs they noticed in the code they were given. The revised code and spec would then submit each one to an impartial panel of 100 SQA testers, selected at random from the ranks of people who work for a living testing code.
The winner would be the contestant whose code, after being modified by other programmers, passed the largest number of SQA tests.
(And, yes, SQA failures due to unfixed bugs in the original code would count against the contestant).
Advertising has not always been "just part of our world." Do you think Consumer Reports should be forcibly compelled to accept advertising? Do you think they have a valid reason for not accepting it?
In the early 1900s, one could have said "Child labor has always been just part of our world," or "Fraudulent patent medicines have always been just part of our world," or "The six-day work week has always been just part of our world." That doesn't mean they were beyond criticism. Or that they should properly permeate all of our world.
Alexander Pope said "Whatever is, is right." Pangloss said "Everything's for the best in this best of all possible worlds." I say they were both full of it.
The very fact that this idea is being discussed leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
In Wikipedia's early days there was a good deal of discussion about this very point, with some conspiracy-minded contributors fearing that Jimbo Wales would talk freedom, neutrality, and noncommercialism at the start and change the rules later in the game.
There are a number of precedents for this sort of bad-faith maneuver, one of the most notorious being CDDB, which happily accepted contributions of CD track names from thousands of volunteers who believed they were contributing to an open-source project; sneakily changed their software so that it add "stealth" copyright notices giving the rights to the information to the organization; then took it private and sold people's generous volunteer work and lined their own pockets with the money.
One of Wikipedia's cornerstones is the "neutral point of view" policy. This policy is a fragile and precious thing. Innumerable people are constantly leaning on it and chipping away at it in an effort to use Wikipedia for promotion. The only reason why NPOV works is that the core of Wikipedians truly accept that WIkipedia really is neutral, and are willing to enforce the policy.
If Wikipedia ever accepts paid advertising, I believe it will destabilize the fragile balance. Advertisements will most likely be targeted to appear on the same pages as relevant article. Many WIkipedia articles about commercial products contain substantial amounts of both praise and criticism. In its nature, this material is frequently in a somewhat dynamic state of flux, with competing editors wordsmithing things back and forth; at its best, a stable state is reached in which the editors on one side of an issue grudgingly acknowledge that the wording of the material on the other side is acceptable to them.
What happens when an advertiser notices that the related article contains material that has a different spin from its marketing communications? I think the delicate house of cards comes tumbling down, that's what. I don't see how anyone can ever build a "Chinese wall" between advertising and editorial when any advertiser can be an editor.
And once it becomes generally accepted that Wikipedia is no longer neutral, WIkipedia is dead. That will unleash a flood of self-promoting crap which old-time WIkipedians will be unable to hold back.
It will also piss off everyone who, like me, has made voluntary monetary contributions to Wikimedia almost every time they've launched one of their frequent pledge drives, in the belief, which will have been shown to be naïve, that Wikipedia was promised to be noncommercial.
Wikipedia can survive a reputation for occasional inaccuracy and for "fancruft." But if it is ever seen that Wikipedia articles are a practical avenue for promotion and advertising, or that they reflect the interests of advertisors, all Jimbo's horses and all Jimbo's men will never be able to put WIkipedia together again.
And all the old-time Wikipedians will say "We told you this was going to happen." And they'll be right.
...by repaying them with $1.65 trillion worth of Russian intellectual property.
I'm sure the Russian government would be willing to make an official valuation of the complete works of Joseph Stalin as worth $1.65 trillion.
Then AllofMP3 could repay the RIAA by licensing them to the RIAA.
Problem solved.
Imagine downloading the audiobook version from the iTunes Music Store.
Nobody will buy this unless it works with most devices. Would you pay (say) $129.95 to eliminate two cords out of the dozen on your desk?
For it work with most devices, device makers would need to be willing to standardize on it.
If device makers were WILLING to standardize, we wouldn't HAVE umpteen different kinds of wall-wart transformers with different voltage and current requirements... and different DC plug configurations.
If every device used the same DC voltage and the same kind of low-voltage DC plug, we could have multi-outlet low-voltage power supplies in a single compact box, or built in behind the faceplace. That would achieve 90% of the convenience of this technology at 10% of the cost.
That doesn't happen because nobody voluntarily standardizes the low-voltage power inputs on their devices, and nobody will. (The only reason our vacuum cleaners and refrigerators do is because they were pushed to by electrical wiring codes, which don't exist for low-voltage electronics).
Since nobody will standardize their low-voltage power inputs, this is a nice idea that will never happen.
These are supposedly the higher-end marques. With fatter profit margins.
I can't imagine wanting to shell out extra money for a Lincoln, but there are still plenty of people who do. You'd think that the last thing Ford would want to do is to send them a message that they are sucking hind tit. Is Ford trying to get rid of them?
Hardly news. This should not be read as a mass rejection of Vista, just an indication that corporation IT departments do their job in a reasonably competent and responsive way.
It takes about a year-and-a-half before a corporation that fully intends to transition to the new OS is ready for the "rollout." Typically this involves a good deal of preparation so that everyone in the company gets their new PC, their training classes, their new application versions, and their direction for migrating at about the same time.
At the introduction of every major Windows upgrade, the same things have happened: Gartner et al have told corporations to take their time adopting the new OS, and corporations, whether because they listen to the analysts or for their own reasons, have done so.
We experienced the slowdown, particularly whenever iTunes needed to access our account. Long pauses, and frequent fairly cryptic error messages ("the iTunes store cannot perform this function at this time. Please try again later." or something like that). We all said "It's probably slow because of millions of people who got iPods on Christmas day," tried repeatedly, eventually got through.
There were however some somewhat scary error situations in which it apparently rejected valid combinations of account names and passwords.
What I don't understand is why Apple wasn't able to post some kind of notice, visible in iTunes, saying that the store was slow because of high volume.
"We're in the early days of behavioral targeting but it's an idea whose time has come,' says Simon Andrews"
So, they think of me as a "target." And they're surprised that I don't like this?
"1a. An object, such as a padded disk with a marked surface, that is shot at to test accuracy in rifle or archery practice. b. Something aimed or fired at. 2. An object of criticism or attack. 3. One to be influenced or changed by an action or event. 4. A desired goal. 5. A railroad signal that indicates the position of a switch by its color, position, and shape. 6. The sliding sight on a surveyor's leveling rod. 7. A small round shield. 8a. A structure in a television camera tube with a storage surface that is scanned by an electron beam to generate a signal output current similar to the charge-density pattern stored on the surface. b. A usually metal part in an x-ray tube on which a beam of electrons is focused and from which x-rays are emitted."
I, for one, think it is legitimate to get angry at those who regard me, even metaphorically, as something to be shot at, fired at, attacked, influenced, or changed. I don't even like being a "desired goal."
Those who "target" me should not be surprised at being a target for my anger.
I would love to see or have seen Showscan. I remember how exciting it was to show our 8 mm home movies at 54 fps. In the days before flat-panel screens I was always the guy who insisted on goosing up everyone's display settings from default 60 fps to 75 or 90.
Temporal resolution is as important as spatial resolution, and if I recall correctly Edison or Dickson actually said in so in essence that chose 16 fps for economic reasons--it was the slowest frame rate that was tolerable. 24 fps is way too slow. Even the difference between 24 fps and Todd-AO's 30 fps was meaningful.
I remember the first time I saw jugglers live, and realized how exciting it was, and how much is lost in juggling--and doubtless dance and athletic events--by the coarse temporal resolution of movies and television.
Showscan sounds as if it must be yummy. I'd love to see it. I have no doubt that the rollercoaster sequence of "This Is Cinerama" would be even more exciting in Showscan.
But as far as I know, very, very, very few movies were ever produced in it, and it wasn't or isn't successful enough for them to have shown up even in a major city like Boston.
And IMHO it has the same problem HD has and Cinerama had: it only adds value to a limited range of subject matter, which is not the storytelling mainstream of cinema.
(Parenthetically: I wonder whether the electronics for HDTV would lend themselves to being used at half the resolution and double the frame rate?)
Yeah, right.
And I'll be travelling to the spaceport in my helicar.
I'm glad they've figured out how to mix the fuel, though. I've heard that glitches can occur when rocket fuel isn't mixed well.
Also, "ouch" and "touché."
But it's not mentioned in the "methodology" section, and I think the paragraph you mention does cast some doubt on the validity of the results:
"For those 12 in the VC who wanted to stop before the end, 5 claimed to be well-acquainted with the original Milgram study, and therefore we cannot rule out the possibility that this influenced their behaviour. However, if we treat 'wanting to stop' as a binary response variable in order to test for differences between the proportions (using binary logistic regression) then the VC was significantly different from the HC (?2 = 6.691 on 1 d.f., P = 0.0097) whereas knowledge of Milgram did not have a significant impact (?2 = 1.525 on 1 d.f., P = 0.22) and there was no interaction effect between group and knowledge of Milgram."
In the first place, this seems a little bit like throwing in a statistical fudge factor, since it does not say in their methodology that they planned to ask about knowledge of Milgram after the experiment, and they seem to have applied this statistical test a posteriori, whereas statistical tests are only valid if the test to be performed is stated in advance.
In the second place, it's all very well to say that five of the subjects "claimed to be well-acquainted" with the Milgram experiment, but that does not take into account the number of subjects that, while not well-acquainted with it, might nevertheless have had some vague or even subconscious knowledge of it. The Milgram study has been around a long time and is practically in the folkways.
There are probably millions of people who would say they knew nothing about John B. Watson's experiments with rats, who nevertheless would be extremely familiar with the idea of running rats through a maze.
I don't see anything in the study that says that they made any attempt to find out whether or not the subjects had ever heard about the original Milgram experiment.
The Milgram subjects almost certainly had no knowledge of whether the situation was real or what the purpose of the experiment was, and probably believed that they were "supposed" to follow orders.
Today's subjects may well have heard something. Even if they couldn't have named "Milgram" as the investigator, they may have had more than an inkling that the purpose of the experiment was to see whether they were virtual sadists, and may have suspected that, despite their instructions, the "approved" behavior was to not to follow orders.
Which is likely to cause you more trouble? Homeland Security being identify me wirelessly at a distance to they can yell at you "6079 Smith W. Yes, you! Bend lower, please!"
Or that Homeland Security can identify you as someone who has exhibited an unusual pattern of behavior by sabotaging my own passport, for reasons which they will not be interested in trying to understand?
Telling them that "An article in Wired says a nonworking RFID doesn't invalidate the passport, so I can still use it" is likely to be about as effective as John Gilmore saying that since nobody can show him a copy of any law that says he needs to show ID when flying, he should be able to fly without showing ID.
This is one of these silly non-products that companies like Neiman-Marcus and Hammacher Schlemmer like to have in their catalogs. It's not a real product, it's all about publicity.
It's one of these crazy but amusing-sounded "products" that sound as if they'd be appropriate for the title character in "Brewster's Millions" (who had to waste $30 million in 30 days in order to inherit $300 million).
They tend to be not-quite-one-of-a-kind items that are nevertheless certainly not mass-produced and frequently involve an obvious component of personal service or installation.
This year Hammacher Schlemmer has a $15,000 rocking horse. Nieman-Marcus has a $40,000 7 foot sculpture made entirely out of pencils, but their big item is the $1,764,000.00 six-person trip into space.
I can't seem to find any of items that must involve sending a small army of people to install them, but they've had them in the past. You know, amusement-park-sized train rides for a 400-acre backyard or live camels or that sort of thing.
I suspect that very, very, few of these items are actually sold, and I bet that in some cases the companies wait for the item to be purchased before figuring out how they are going to deliver or install it. Nieman-Marcus may or may not make money on the Virgin Galactic space flights, but their business is not built on these offerings.
These products are offered so that hundreds of local news pairs of talking heads will alternatively swivel them toward each other as Kimberly says "If you're looking for the gift for the person who has everything, take a look at _this_ from the Glooper-Gnorgl catalog!" then swivels her head toward Lance who says "That's right, it's a real home hospital complete with emergency room, three motorized gurneys, and a five-person medical staff, and it can be yours for $56,000,000!"
I saw 2001 on its first run. I'm not sure what the exact process used was. I think the credits read "Cinerama" but it was in a theatre named "Todd-AO." In any case, it was a single strip of 70mm film. They handed out little leaflets in which Arthur C. Clarke used several paragraphs explaining that the scene in which the astronauts survive the short trip through vacuum was possible.
I loved it. It blew me away. I thought it was a great film. In many scenes, you had some huge spacecraft moving slowly past you, but because there was so much detail it took that long to absorb it. And of course the "light show" sequence at the end was stunning.
Subsequently, I've seen it in ordinary movie theatres (anamorphic 35mm). It was awful. Slow and boring. You couldn't read any of the hundreds of little legends on the spacecraft controls, they were all slightly blurred. On television, it was even worse. My kids think it's a pointless, unwatchable film. I tell them, "yeah, but you haven't really _seen_ it." And they don't believe me when I say the format made a difference.
So, yes, I agree completely. 2001 is a perfect example of a movie that needed, used, and worked as a movie in a huge, detailed format. Watching it on a TV set is like trying to appreciate a symphony from an Edison cylinder recording.
But that's my point. Just how many 2001's are there?
If there were enough movies that truly needed high-definition to make HD successful, then why aren't there full-length feature movies being made and exhibited now in IMAX? I don't mean clever enhanced blowups of regular films into IMAX, I mean movies like 2001 or, I dunno, Ryan's Daughter or Lawrence of Arabia? Movies which need high definition in order to work cinematically?
There were never enough to keep Cinerama afloat. Indeed, there don't seem to have ever been enough to keep Hollywood providing 70 mm prints to the (decreasing) number of theatres that have 70 mm projectors.
For you youngsters here: Cinerama was to 35mm movies as HD is to NTSC. It used three synchronized projectors on a deeply-curved screen subtending a 146-degree arc. Everyone who has ever seen it was bowled over by it. It is still shown on rare occasions when fans arrange it. It is universally acknowledged to be better than the later wide-screen processes such as CinemaScope, VistaVision, etc. all of which were pretty much acknowledged to be ways to get something sorta-kinda-not-quite-almost like Cinerama, but on the cheap. Many who have had an opportunity to compare it with present-day IMAX have judged it to be superior, too, although that's trickier. IMAX suffers by having too much height and not enough width; when presented on a flat screen, it's flat, and when presented on a dome screen, it's hopeless washed out by cross-reflection (unlike Cinerama, which was always pitch-black in the shadows). Of course CInerama had those awful panel joints... but I digress. Here's the point:
Cinerama was never more than a footnote, because it was only suited to spectacle, not to storytelling. Only two Cinerama features were made with a conventional storyline: "How the West was Won," and "The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm." The rest were pastiches of spectacle: travelogues, ride-film-like experiences, and so forth.
It bodes very ill for high-definition that most of the "best" films are special-effects sci-fi extravaganzas.
I'm glad to see they have Casablanca on their list, but it's not clear that they're saying the actual experience of watching the movie is any better than on DVD. They seems to like the many extras bundled in. Is Rick more world-weary in high-definition? Is Ilsa lovelier? Do the heartrending scenes rend your heart any more? I haven't seen it... but I doubt it.
I like seeing superheros hurtle through space and things blow up as much as the next guy, but these are not enough to carry an expensive video format.
How, exactly, is high-definition going to help directors evoke emotion and tell a story?
...is that profits are much lower for drug products, such as vaccines and antibiotics that are extremely effective and "cure" in a small number of doses, than for drugs products that merely help, or palliate.
The invisible hand of the marketplace skews development toward drugs that must be taken forever, such as blood pressure medication, or cholesterol lowering medication, or anti-depressives and so forth. These drugs are godsends if you need them, but the fact remains that drugs that actually save lives, with a small number of doses, are less profitable than drugs that merely improve or prolong them, and need to be taken continuously and repeatedly forever.
It is this warped incentive that needs to be fixed.
The antibiotics we have are losing effectiveness. Hospital infections are becoming more and more dangerous. My generation is probably going to be the only generation in human history to live its life mostly free of the mortal fear of dying from bacterial infection. There are virtually no new antibiotics in development.
Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Compuserve's "CB simulator," Delphi, and other services provided text-based multiway services of the kind now known as "chat."
/view mode on
/view mode would actually be implemented within my lifetime.
It was fairly common for someone to make a joking about how they were or were not dressed. A common reply was for someone else to type something like
and tell the group that he or she could now verify whether or not first speaker had been telling the truth. Occasionally the first speaker would be naive and gullible enough to believe it.
Little did I know that
(Subject line says all)
I agree with this completely. Those who lived through the Sputnik-to-Apollo era remember just how carefully and incrementally NASA proceeded. Suborbital flights before orbital flights, circumnavigating the Moon before trying to land on it, and so forth.
Engineering is an incremental process. You scale things up 20% and 30% at a time, and see which things are flexing too much or developing cracks or failing. Or you take something known, working, and reliable, and you add one new thing to it.
As Petrosky pointed out in To Engineer is Human, failure is a normal part of the engineering process and the process needs to be managed so that the failures are not catastrophic. Or at least so that the catastrophic failures are not seen as imperilling the entire project.
I can only imagine what would have happened if NASA had tried to go directly from Project Vanguard to a manned moon landing.
The problems of surviving in low gravity for extended periods of time are part of what needs to be solved in any case. If long periods of zero-G are hazardous to your health, I'll bet that long periods of 0.16-G are, too, and it's easier to spin a space station than a Moon colony.
The Manhattan Project probably did a good deal of conceptual harm, because while it was a brilliant success, not too many other programs have succeeded in the same way. Of course, not too many people have been allowed to throw around such enormous resources so freely as Groves did. The approach of immediately going full-speed-ahead on every available possibility is not one that's been tried very often. And, come to think of it, I'm not quite sure what happened to Groves, but he was apparently not perceived as a brilliant success and he sort of vanished into the mists when the project was over.