Actually, yes. This is exactly the sort of thing that the RIAA should be fighting. At the very least, artists should be fighting to get a small cut of what they were originally owed.
Of course, the RIAA has various political interests (including the failure of online distribution), so this probably won't happen.
The fact that the RIAA couldn't even prevent the loudness wars shows that they've long since given up on their artists.
I'd have agreed with you a year ago. However, the iPhone OS seems to deal rather well with native applications. (App store complaints aside, users seem to love it)
Also, the point of ActiveX was never to expose the full OS to web applications, but rather was to extend native application functionality to the web browser. Java, C#, and numerous other technologies do a competent job of sandboxing web apps (Google Chrome even sandboxes each browser tab). A lot of progress has been made on this front, and more will continue to be made as we slowly rebuild our trust in native web applications. If anything, ActiveX was far ahead of its time, but suffered from a horrendously bad security model.
Even if it wasn't great when initially released, at least the KDE project was able to get their KDE 4.x releases out and stabilized relatively quickly.
You just glossed over one hell of a screw-up.
Even the colossal failure of Windows Vista doesn't compare to the initial KDE 4 releases. At least Vista was feature-complete, and usable most of the time.
His philosophy sometimes conflicts with other models, or even other ways of doing business, but like all visionary folks, sometimes that's not such a bad thing in the long run.
We're drifting dangerously offtopic here, but I should point out that the TV spots don't make up a terribly large portion of the budget. Most pharma marketing can be broken down to two categories
1) Patient awareness -- The original sales projections for Viagra were way off, because ED was originally believed to be far less common than it is. Most men weren't going to talk to their doctor about something that was embarrassing and didn't have a cure. Most TV spots fall under this category.
2) Doctor awareness -- Educational materials for doctors preaching the benefits of New Drug X over Old Drug Y (mostly citing clinical trials and the like -- the FDA won't approve a drug that's less effective/more dangerous than an existing one). For a myriad of reasons, doctors are very busy people, and this approach tends to require patience. A consequence of a private healthcare system is that the pharma industry bears part of the burden of keeping doctors up to date on this part of their education.
(Diisclaimer: I used to work for a pharma company, but not in marketing. I don't believe everything the industry does is golden -- just that they unfairly get a bad rap for struggling to maintain what is a very difficult business. Also consider that a product's R&D budget doesn't include the R&D budgets for the 9 other products that didn't make it to market.)
That is the biggest question, and the answer is a resounding yes.
Then it's not much of a question, is it?
Even though I agree with you on a basic level, I'm not sure I agree with the principle. Without patents, what drives innovation to produce the newest and greatest green FOO? The R&D expenses for some of this stuff can be quite high.
(Also, how many lights do you have that CFLs are a cost-prohibitive option? I replace them one by one as they burn out. A 3-pack of good-quality CFLs costs about $6 at Wal-Mart. Still about 3x the cost of the same number of incandescents, although the CFLs last a lot longer, and use sufficiently less energy to pay for themselves over their lifetime)
The patent process for pharmaceuticals is (very) different from the regular process. In the US, drug patents are usually applied for and granted 8-12 years before the drug is brought to market, and even a few years before human trials begin.
Purported "HIV wonder drugs" sadly seem to be about as commonplace as perpetual motion devices these days.
"Every day an important green tech innovation is hindered from coming to market is another day we harm our planet and another day lost in creating green businesses and green jobs. Applications in this pilot program will see a significant savings in pendency, which will help bring green innovations to market more quickly."
I'd consider myself a reasonably strong environmentalist, but cannot for the life of me comprehend that quote. Aren't products released to market all the time with a "Patent Pending" status? Wouldn't environmentalism benefit from weaker patents surrounding green tech?
The same logic has been applied to drug patents, which only last 7-12 years in the US, purportedly to widen availability of generic drugs, as well as to keep the industry on its toes. (As the law of unintended consequences goes, this makes non-generics outlandishly expensive, and makes pharma a very high-risk industry, given the incredibly high R&D costs of developing/testing new drugs)
Honest question: Is Craig actually rich? From what I can tell, the staff at CL actually take steps to minimize their revenues -- to make just enough to cover costs and pay their (few) employees a good salary.
Sidenote: When did the Fairbanks craigslist (finally) split off of the Anchorage one? Back when I lived there, it was maddening to have the entire (rather large) state lumped into one bunch.
Now, in New Jersey I have the opposite problem. Being on the cusp of the NYC suburbs, there are 3-4 separate CL sites that post sales/jobs within 20 minutes of my house.
Same reason why newspapers and magazines print in columns. Unfortunately, proper columns still aren't a part of the CSS specification, meaning that it'll be several years before we see them in the wild on the web.
A draft specification has languished within the w3c for 8 or so years. Firefox and webkit both offer their own proprietary implementations that should be vaguely compatible with the draft specification.
IE doesn't offer support for anything of this sort. (In fact, Microsoft's own documentation offers a surprisingly handy reference to the many bits of CSS that IE chooses to ignore)
Bin Laden is estimated to be between 6'4" and 6'6" -- in other words, he'll stand out from any crowd. He's also allegedly on dialysis, which considerably restricts the number of places he could stay for any length of time in a 3rd-world country.
(Of course, Bin Laden's harmless now. His money's gone, and he's no longer the demagogue he once was. If we manage to quell the insurgency and set up stable governments in Iraq and Afghanistan, the terrorism problem can be dealt with using a great deal of perseverance and patience -- very much like the way the UK successfully dealt with the IRA.)
Does the emulator run well on the $300 entry-level PC from Dell? If not, the PC needs an upgrade.
Actually, depending on the quality of the emulator, it very well might not. For a long time, emulating PPC on an x86 platform was considered the "holy grail" of hardware emulation. There's just no way to do it simply or efficiently.
PearPC can emulate a PPC macintosh, although it employs some clever tricks to make it run at a vaguely usable speed. Even then, you still take more than a tenfold performance hit. Apple's Rosetta software is the first (and only AFAIK) successful PPC emulation solution out there.
Vodafone has a 45% stake in Verizon Wireless (Verizon has the other 55%). As others have mentioned, T-Mobile is owned by the European company known as T-Mobile.
This has everything to do with regulation and standardization, and very little to do with the telcos themselves.
I had a UK prepay phone with Tesco for a while (yes...Tesco the grocery store). I used it pretty frequently, and over the course of 6 months racked up a bill comparable to one month on Verizon (including the initial outlay for a new GSM phone). This was also around the time when the exchange rate was $2.10/£1.
I went back a few months ago for a quick visit, after having been out of the country for well over a year. Remarkably, the SIM still worked, and had my £21 of balance still intact. Coverage was also much, much better than any US carriers -- while I struggle to get service in New Jersey (the most densely populated area in the US), Tesco/O2 worked perfectly everywhere I went in the UK -- even rather remote parts of the Scottish countryside.
Verizon, on the other hand, overbill me almost every month, randomly switch my plan, renew my contract without asking me, etc, and have some of the worst phones I've ever seen. Reaching a human on the phone can take up to 2 hours, and the staff at their stores are outright rude.
I'm not one for conspiracy theories, although I wouldn't be terribly shocked if Intel surprised everybody and launched Larrabee a few months after AMD releases a competing product.
In the past, Intel's deliberately stifled product development and engaged in anticompetitive behaviors that would even make Microsoft look twice (and has been found guilty and forced to pay up to this extent). Remember how quickly Intel brought consumer x86-64 chips to market after AMD proved that the platform was technically and commercially viable?
Of course, this may be giving Intel too much credit -- the success of the 'Core' series was essentially a whole lot of luck -- Itanium and Pentium 4 were always planned to be "the way forward" for the company. When neither panned out, the company was able to fall back on its low-power mobile platform, which turned out to scale remarkably well, despite having its origins in a much older architecture.
I think he was referring to the parent. The whole point of the BSD license is to not give a rat's a** about who does what with the code.
One could easily add an extra clause to the standard BSD license that states that any derivative work must be fully compatible with the reference Btrfs implementation in order to bear the Btrfs name. Many projects include such naming clauses.
This sidesteps the "extend and embrace" problem completely.
How does Btrfs compare to ZFS? I've been using ZFS-on-FUSE, and absolutely love the incredible data integrity and volume management features that it provides. The new support for deduplication will also be wonderful once implemented.
Of course, the performance and the idea of trusting my data to FUSE leave much to be desired.
(On the downside, I'm peeved that Btrfs is GPL licensed, which will prevent it from becoming "the one true filesystem" from here on out. Windows users will be stuck with NTFS, Linux users will get Btrfs, Mac users will get whatever apple is secretly working on, and the BSD/Solaris camp will get to keep ZFS. None of them will be compatible, and FAT32 somehow remains the only viable option for removable media.)
A (very) large portion of Manhattan is heated via a central steam system. It's incredibly efficient, and is also the reason why almost no NYC buildings have noticeable smokestacks, and why the city was actually quite clean until the rise of the automobile. By concentrating the coal burning into a few points (5 IIRC), pollution in the city was greatly reduced.
On a somewhat more scary note, thanks to decades of neglect, many of the original pipes are still in use, carrying high-pressure steam. Failures are pretty spectacular...
Sun is a lot like a modern day PARC or Bell Labs. They had some absolutely incredible ideas, with great brains behind them to make the technology work. Unfortunately, they were hopeless at marketing these ideas.
I'm noticing Google begin to trend in this direction, which isn't surprising given that they now employ most of the well-known alumni of the three aforementioned companies. However, Google's past successes (as well as some of their more promising projects such as the Go language) give me some hope.
In Britain, 'IT' seems more acceptable to be used as a catchall for anything computer-related. In the US, many narrow the definition to helpdesk support, and the personnel responsible for the ongoing operation of anything computer-related. Developers and architects are separate (with DBAs and a few other positions hanging somewhere in the void between) --- I'm not sure if this is a regional distinction in the US, primarily because personnel in these fields tend to move around quite a bit.
Frankly, they're both valuable professions. I've worn both hats, and it's a bit of a shock to make the switch from one to the other, as both fields evolve and change so rapidly that it's very difficult to stay current in both. That said, I can easily understand why one would want their job title to accurate reflect their duties!
For just about anything other than visualization and server-specific stuff, Core i7s and CPUs with the same architecture have no comparison with what AMD has to offer.
At risk of sounding like an AMD fanboy, I should point out that AMD's chips are so much more expensive than the Core i7s, that you might as well buy a top-end AMD system, and replace the CPU and motherboard a year from now with whatever is the reasonably-priced state of the art at that point. You'll likely end up spending quite a bit less, and won't be stuck with an obsolete system in the future.
I won't contest that the Core i7s are impressive. However, they appear to be the CPU equivalent of the $400 video card. Completely pointless, and financially irresponsible (unless you've got a really good excuse)
The exorbitant price of high-end Intel CPUs makes the Mac Pro actually seem like a good deal.
Every time I see or hear of a reference to "The Prince", or a leader is referred to as Machiavellian, I smile at the irony. Machiavelli was being SARCASTIC when he wrote that. He was kidding!
As others in this thread have mentioned, this is a minority view amongst the scholarly community. Machiavelli certainly had one hell of a motive to sabotage the Medici government, although The Prince would have had to have been one hell of a subtle piece of sabotage.
In either event, it is generally accepted that The Prince holds up extremely well to logical scrutiny, and is consistent with the rest of his writings. There are a few troubling items in his chapter on military strategy that would appear to be patently bad advice, although it is debatable whether or not this was intentional.
George Bush was the President of the United States (and arguably the most unpopular one we've had since we've been keeping track of that data).
Michelle Obama is a full-time mother of two, who happens to be married to the man who is currently president.
Criticizing a powerful politician for a perceived ineptitude is fair-game. In fact, I'd say it's necessary for a functioning democracy. Criticizing his wife for being black is not okay.
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Actually, yes. This is exactly the sort of thing that the RIAA should be fighting. At the very least, artists should be fighting to get a small cut of what they were originally owed.
Of course, the RIAA has various political interests (including the failure of online distribution), so this probably won't happen.
The fact that the RIAA couldn't even prevent the loudness wars shows that they've long since given up on their artists.
I'd have agreed with you a year ago. However, the iPhone OS seems to deal rather well with native applications. (App store complaints aside, users seem to love it)
Also, the point of ActiveX was never to expose the full OS to web applications, but rather was to extend native application functionality to the web browser. Java, C#, and numerous other technologies do a competent job of sandboxing web apps (Google Chrome even sandboxes each browser tab). A lot of progress has been made on this front, and more will continue to be made as we slowly rebuild our trust in native web applications. If anything, ActiveX was far ahead of its time, but suffered from a horrendously bad security model.
Even if it wasn't great when initially released, at least the KDE project was able to get their KDE 4.x releases out and stabilized relatively quickly.
You just glossed over one hell of a screw-up.
Even the colossal failure of Windows Vista doesn't compare to the initial KDE 4 releases. At least Vista was feature-complete, and usable most of the time.
His philosophy sometimes conflicts with other models, or even other ways of doing business, but like all visionary folks, sometimes that's not such a bad thing in the long run.
Linus adapts, and goes with what works.
This is why Linux is slightly better than HURD.
CFLs contain 3-5mg of mercury, which is roughly the same amount as is found in 10 6oz cans of tuna.
"Low-mercury" CFLs are making their way to market, which have only 1mg of Hg in them -- the equivalent of 2 cans of tuna.
As long as you're not eating broken lightbulbs, I'd say that a week's worth of tuna sandwiches is far, far worse for you.
We're drifting dangerously offtopic here, but I should point out that the TV spots don't make up a terribly large portion of the budget. Most pharma marketing can be broken down to two categories
1) Patient awareness -- The original sales projections for Viagra were way off, because ED was originally believed to be far less common than it is. Most men weren't going to talk to their doctor about something that was embarrassing and didn't have a cure. Most TV spots fall under this category.
2) Doctor awareness -- Educational materials for doctors preaching the benefits of New Drug X over Old Drug Y (mostly citing clinical trials and the like -- the FDA won't approve a drug that's less effective/more dangerous than an existing one). For a myriad of reasons, doctors are very busy people, and this approach tends to require patience. A consequence of a private healthcare system is that the pharma industry bears part of the burden of keeping doctors up to date on this part of their education.
(Diisclaimer: I used to work for a pharma company, but not in marketing. I don't believe everything the industry does is golden -- just that they unfairly get a bad rap for struggling to maintain what is a very difficult business. Also consider that a product's R&D budget doesn't include the R&D budgets for the 9 other products that didn't make it to market.)
That is the biggest question, and the answer is a resounding yes.
Then it's not much of a question, is it?
Even though I agree with you on a basic level, I'm not sure I agree with the principle. Without patents, what drives innovation to produce the newest and greatest green FOO? The R&D expenses for some of this stuff can be quite high.
(Also, how many lights do you have that CFLs are a cost-prohibitive option? I replace them one by one as they burn out. A 3-pack of good-quality CFLs costs about $6 at Wal-Mart. Still about 3x the cost of the same number of incandescents, although the CFLs last a lot longer, and use sufficiently less energy to pay for themselves over their lifetime)
The patent process for pharmaceuticals is (very) different from the regular process. In the US, drug patents are usually applied for and granted 8-12 years before the drug is brought to market, and even a few years before human trials begin.
Purported "HIV wonder drugs" sadly seem to be about as commonplace as perpetual motion devices these days.
"Every day an important green tech innovation is hindered from coming to market is another day we harm our planet and another day lost in creating green businesses and green jobs. Applications in this pilot program will see a significant savings in pendency, which will help bring green innovations to market more quickly."
I'd consider myself a reasonably strong environmentalist, but cannot for the life of me comprehend that quote. Aren't products released to market all the time with a "Patent Pending" status? Wouldn't environmentalism benefit from weaker patents surrounding green tech?
The same logic has been applied to drug patents, which only last 7-12 years in the US, purportedly to widen availability of generic drugs, as well as to keep the industry on its toes. (As the law of unintended consequences goes, this makes non-generics outlandishly expensive, and makes pharma a very high-risk industry, given the incredibly high R&D costs of developing/testing new drugs)
Honest question: Is Craig actually rich? From what I can tell, the staff at CL actually take steps to minimize their revenues -- to make just enough to cover costs and pay their (few) employees a good salary.
Sidenote: When did the Fairbanks craigslist (finally) split off of the Anchorage one? Back when I lived there, it was maddening to have the entire (rather large) state lumped into one bunch.
Now, in New Jersey I have the opposite problem. Being on the cusp of the NYC suburbs, there are 3-4 separate CL sites that post sales/jobs within 20 minutes of my house.
Same reason why newspapers and magazines print in columns. Unfortunately, proper columns still aren't a part of the CSS specification, meaning that it'll be several years before we see them in the wild on the web.
A draft specification has languished within the w3c for 8 or so years. Firefox and webkit both offer their own proprietary implementations that should be vaguely compatible with the draft specification.
IE doesn't offer support for anything of this sort. (In fact, Microsoft's own documentation offers a surprisingly handy reference to the many bits of CSS that IE chooses to ignore)
Bin Laden is estimated to be between 6'4" and 6'6" -- in other words, he'll stand out from any crowd. He's also allegedly on dialysis, which considerably restricts the number of places he could stay for any length of time in a 3rd-world country.
(Of course, Bin Laden's harmless now. His money's gone, and he's no longer the demagogue he once was. If we manage to quell the insurgency and set up stable governments in Iraq and Afghanistan, the terrorism problem can be dealt with using a great deal of perseverance and patience -- very much like the way the UK successfully dealt with the IRA.)
Does the emulator run well on the $300 entry-level PC from Dell? If not, the PC needs an upgrade.
Actually, depending on the quality of the emulator, it very well might not. For a long time, emulating PPC on an x86 platform was considered the "holy grail" of hardware emulation. There's just no way to do it simply or efficiently.
PearPC can emulate a PPC macintosh, although it employs some clever tricks to make it run at a vaguely usable speed. Even then, you still take more than a tenfold performance hit. Apple's Rosetta software is the first (and only AFAIK) successful PPC emulation solution out there.
Vodafone has a 45% stake in Verizon Wireless (Verizon has the other 55%). As others have mentioned, T-Mobile is owned by the European company known as T-Mobile.
This has everything to do with regulation and standardization, and very little to do with the telcos themselves.
I had a UK prepay phone with Tesco for a while (yes...Tesco the grocery store). I used it pretty frequently, and over the course of 6 months racked up a bill comparable to one month on Verizon (including the initial outlay for a new GSM phone). This was also around the time when the exchange rate was $2.10/£1.
I went back a few months ago for a quick visit, after having been out of the country for well over a year. Remarkably, the SIM still worked, and had my £21 of balance still intact. Coverage was also much, much better than any US carriers -- while I struggle to get service in New Jersey (the most densely populated area in the US), Tesco/O2 worked perfectly everywhere I went in the UK -- even rather remote parts of the Scottish countryside.
Verizon, on the other hand, overbill me almost every month, randomly switch my plan, renew my contract without asking me, etc, and have some of the worst phones I've ever seen. Reaching a human on the phone can take up to 2 hours, and the staff at their stores are outright rude.
I'm not one for conspiracy theories, although I wouldn't be terribly shocked if Intel surprised everybody and launched Larrabee a few months after AMD releases a competing product.
In the past, Intel's deliberately stifled product development and engaged in anticompetitive behaviors that would even make Microsoft look twice (and has been found guilty and forced to pay up to this extent). Remember how quickly Intel brought consumer x86-64 chips to market after AMD proved that the platform was technically and commercially viable?
Of course, this may be giving Intel too much credit -- the success of the 'Core' series was essentially a whole lot of luck -- Itanium and Pentium 4 were always planned to be "the way forward" for the company. When neither panned out, the company was able to fall back on its low-power mobile platform, which turned out to scale remarkably well, despite having its origins in a much older architecture.
I think he was referring to the parent. The whole point of the BSD license is to not give a rat's a** about who does what with the code.
One could easily add an extra clause to the standard BSD license that states that any derivative work must be fully compatible with the reference Btrfs implementation in order to bear the Btrfs name. Many projects include such naming clauses.
This sidesteps the "extend and embrace" problem completely.
How does Btrfs compare to ZFS? I've been using ZFS-on-FUSE, and absolutely love the incredible data integrity and volume management features that it provides. The new support for deduplication will also be wonderful once implemented.
Of course, the performance and the idea of trusting my data to FUSE leave much to be desired.
(On the downside, I'm peeved that Btrfs is GPL licensed, which will prevent it from becoming "the one true filesystem" from here on out. Windows users will be stuck with NTFS, Linux users will get Btrfs, Mac users will get whatever apple is secretly working on, and the BSD/Solaris camp will get to keep ZFS. None of them will be compatible, and FAT32 somehow remains the only viable option for removable media.)
A (very) large portion of Manhattan is heated via a central steam system. It's incredibly efficient, and is also the reason why almost no NYC buildings have noticeable smokestacks, and why the city was actually quite clean until the rise of the automobile. By concentrating the coal burning into a few points (5 IIRC), pollution in the city was greatly reduced.
On a somewhat more scary note, thanks to decades of neglect, many of the original pipes are still in use, carrying high-pressure steam. Failures are pretty spectacular...
Sun is a lot like a modern day PARC or Bell Labs. They had some absolutely incredible ideas, with great brains behind them to make the technology work. Unfortunately, they were hopeless at marketing these ideas.
I'm noticing Google begin to trend in this direction, which isn't surprising given that they now employ most of the well-known alumni of the three aforementioned companies. However, Google's past successes (as well as some of their more promising projects such as the Go language) give me some hope.
Briefly adding my own $0.02:
In Britain, 'IT' seems more acceptable to be used as a catchall for anything computer-related. In the US, many narrow the definition to helpdesk support, and the personnel responsible for the ongoing operation of anything computer-related. Developers and architects are separate (with DBAs and a few other positions hanging somewhere in the void between) --- I'm not sure if this is a regional distinction in the US, primarily because personnel in these fields tend to move around quite a bit.
Frankly, they're both valuable professions. I've worn both hats, and it's a bit of a shock to make the switch from one to the other, as both fields evolve and change so rapidly that it's very difficult to stay current in both. That said, I can easily understand why one would want their job title to accurate reflect their duties!
Did he cross the English channel to speak with Elton John so they could sing "Rocket Man" together ? ;-))
Worse. Shatner.
For just about anything other than visualization and server-specific stuff, Core i7s and CPUs with the same architecture have no comparison with what AMD has to offer.
At risk of sounding like an AMD fanboy, I should point out that AMD's chips are so much more expensive than the Core i7s, that you might as well buy a top-end AMD system, and replace the CPU and motherboard a year from now with whatever is the reasonably-priced state of the art at that point. You'll likely end up spending quite a bit less, and won't be stuck with an obsolete system in the future.
I won't contest that the Core i7s are impressive. However, they appear to be the CPU equivalent of the $400 video card. Completely pointless, and financially irresponsible (unless you've got a really good excuse)
The exorbitant price of high-end Intel CPUs makes the Mac Pro actually seem like a good deal.
Every time I see or hear of a reference to "The Prince", or a leader is referred to as Machiavellian, I smile at the irony. Machiavelli was being SARCASTIC when he wrote that. He was kidding!
As others in this thread have mentioned, this is a minority view amongst the scholarly community. Machiavelli certainly had one hell of a motive to sabotage the Medici government, although The Prince would have had to have been one hell of a subtle piece of sabotage.
In either event, it is generally accepted that The Prince holds up extremely well to logical scrutiny, and is consistent with the rest of his writings. There are a few troubling items in his chapter on military strategy that would appear to be patently bad advice, although it is debatable whether or not this was intentional.
George Bush was the President of the United States (and arguably the most unpopular one we've had since we've been keeping track of that data).
Michelle Obama is a full-time mother of two, who happens to be married to the man who is currently president.
Criticizing a powerful politician for a perceived ineptitude is fair-game. In fact, I'd say it's necessary for a functioning democracy. Criticizing his wife for being black is not okay.