Re:Previously Read Books?
on
King Rat
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Why should he? A review isn't about retelling a story, it's about helping other people decide whether or not they want to read it. By immediately awknowledging the similarity of the work to works by other popular authors, you can pique the interest of people who are interested in those authors.
Shit, I wouldn't have cared if I hadn't seen Gaiman's name. I just read (and liked, despite myself) American Gods and was hoping to find something new with the same epic feel and mythological flavor, only with a denoument that wasn't as glib...
However, transferring the entire contents of each of, say, 25 drive arrays to each of 25 computers on the other side of the room would be pretty impressive.
Comparing that to their current speed is going to drive how the value and scalability of this line more than anything else.
your car is a Mini Cooper and you are on the island of Nevis
This reminds me of an example from my physics class. The set up is, you are in the middle of a frictionless lake with your physics book. You're then supposed to chuck the book towards the opposite shore, and the resulting reaction will propel you to safety.
However, right after the words "middle of a frictionless lake," my friend blurts out "Oh yeah? How did I get there?"
This is the same question I'd ask the Cooper on Nevis.
Well, yeah. You can't use a 2.5 Gb/s line for one computer when your fastest processor has a 3.2 gB/s memory bus. You'd have maybe 16 clock cycles per byte to do operations...
Well, a good use for 2.5 Gb/s is connecting large remote offices. 2.5 Gb/s can allow office A to connect to some 83 standard hard drives in office B like they were right inside the machine. It could connect 25 machines with maxed out 100baseT networking...basically, it could completely eliminate the need for redundant servers at the second office. And no need for a large second IT department.
This line is the kind of thing which would make it worthwhile to open a second office in a cheaper environment. Run it from your small corporate office in the city to the "office where work actually gets done" in the boondocks and you'll suddenly be able to perform YOUR CHOICE of hiring twice as many competent workers, or doubling the salary of all your Chief Officers.
I was going to mod you +1, Insightful, but decided it was just too creepy that I could actually imagine a CEO somewhere saying, "Gasp! We can't promote him! He understands numbers! Get one of those idiots we were going to fire otherwise...oh! And give him more money -- he'll need a Volvo or nobody will listen to him!"
Yeah, I've heard that bullshit before. You know, the bullshit about mechanical shock destroying all these ipod hard drives and there's a sinister Apple plot to prevent the story from breaking.
Well, here's a little anecdotal evidence for you. I have four friends with iPods, they've had them for a year or longer, no hard disc failures. They didn't keep them in vacuums, either. I personally jog with mine daily, dropped it a half dozen times from heights you don't even want to think about the poor thing plumetting from, all of this with no damage whatsoever. Not a single bad sector, no problems whatsoever.
In fact, you might even say that the small, mobile hard drive inside of my iPod was MADE to travel with! Welcome to the future!
At the same time, CF cards burn out after less than a thousand hours of access time. That's about 100 times less reliable than the iPod hard drive, all things considered. I have actually had CF cards go on me, and when they go, it kind of sucks. Whole sections of the card are suddenly inaccessible -- not just individual sectors, but huge amounts of data. I had the file descriptor fail on one of my cards, and I lost a whole day's worth of pictures. Since them, I've stuck to SmartMedia...in fact, the 128 meg smartmedia card I bought in 2001 is still running strong after at least a thousand reads.
I don't know about you, but actual failures after a less than a month of constant use make a device far more reliable than theoretical failures that can be minimized through good engineering -- which Toshiba's microdrives have.
I don't know. What you're talking about seems remarkably similar to the Linux install on my iPod. Which, BTW, only cost $538.96, has greater reliability, a faster overall transfer rate and 5 times the storage of the CF card.
God, it never seemed like such a good deal before.
Then you don't understand what a street team really is. Probably because you're equating all advertising with big corporate advertising. There's a big difference.
Let's say you're in a band. You're playing your first show in a new city where very few people know who you are. You can't rely on the promoter, because he's only worried about covering the guarantee, not drumming up interest in your band. If there are members of your street team in that city, they donate their time to put up your posters, and encourage people to go to the show. Sometimes they hand out mix cds, stickers and other promos. A good street team can mean the difference between a bombed show and a packed house.
For example, this ska band played our local dive club. They didn't announce it, besides a small ad in the local subversive independent newspaper. I never would have known about it, except my buddy's on their street team. He downloaded pdfs of their posters, hit up the local universities, trendy streets, etc. As a result, the house was PACKED. Last time I saw them, at the same club, there were ten people and most of them just wanted to drink. Which worked out great for us, because bands are always more enthusiastic when there's a packed house.
The key here is that my buddy loves the band and was willing to devote his time to help out. The band is empowering him with free marketting materials and paying him back with gear and exclusives.
What you're talking about -- paying somebody to like their products, when they're really ambivalent -- is quite different, and doesn't work as well because it's an artificial manipulation of a natural process. If somebody you know says "my new Nokia phone is mad phat yo," it's quite different from a random person telling you "Hey, check out this new NOKIA PHONE, isn't it MAD PHAT, YO?" It's also nothing new...beer companies have been paying pretty girls to give out swag for as long as I can remember. It helps push the brand, I guess...but if you asked me what I thought of Molsen, I wouldn't tell you I loved it because some sorority chick pretended to laugh at my jokes.
The other way to look at it is that you're going to get word of mouth no matter what. By helping the superfans who are already spreading the word about your product do so more effectivly (with free shirts, stickers, posters, etc), you can use the energy that already exists to its maximum potential.
What you're talking about -- paying people to pretend they like something to their friends -- will never work. But giving them good stuff and relying on them to spread the word DOES work.
Great acts have been doing this for years (though it is only now becoming more structured). Fans appreciate it and so do most potential fans...after all, music isn't QUITE like a digital phone. People WANT to like your band -- they want good new music and chances are if they listen with an open mind they might like you. But there's a lot of encouragement needed to get people to this level, and a little discouragement goes a long way. I heard bad things about John Mayer well before I listened to his music, and it took his appearance on Dave Chapelle (and, er, MacWorld) to encourage me to listen. I'm not a fan, but it wasn't as bad as I'd been told.
Advertising is essential to visibility and so long as it's obnoxious, it's really worthwhile. After all, self promotion only goes so far and there's nothing more effective than an angry mob of fans trying to get you on TRL or their local top 10 countdown.
You don't really need a centralized authority...just a network that does what it's told. "Priority" is not what I'm suggesting...more like sculpted packet queueing. This sort of functionality already exists on a service level for connecting throttling. But the key here is that different sorts of throttling work best for different applications. Certainly for VOIP operations, you're better off throttling by reducing the size of each packet but keeping the time between packets relatively even. For large data transfers, the time between packets is less important than the amount of data. And for some activities (such as gaming and SSH), getting any message across is more important than getting the WHOLE message accross.
You could enforce the sculpting by setting maximum packet size for each type of transfer...maybe the low latency packets have a maximum of 10 kilobytes before a second packet has to be requested, whereas the high speed packets have a 100 kilobyte cut off. Low latency requests automatically get a higher priority than high speed ones, but getting less data makes them noticably less efficient. High speed requests take longer to serve, but have more bytes served over time. Speed constant requests would have a sort of "enforced buffer," giving them higher priority but reduced usefulness by forcing you to fill the buffer no matter what (thus enticing engineers to use no more data than they absolutely had to, keeping overall network bandwidth own).
Anyhow, it's just an idea, but it's one that counters the author's estimation that ALL value-adds decrease the overall value. What he meant to say was that any sort of INCOMPATIBILITY reduces the value of the network, and to a point he's wrong about that too. Newer SPAM-proof SMTP servers that check addresses certainly add value to the global internet system from the standpoint of just about everybody...but they are technically incompatible with the Old Way of leaving all relays open and delivering whatever you've been told.
Here's a thought experiment for the MegaCorps: what if it is simply not possible to make profit on the internet?
Oh come on now. The internet is making money for a lot of people, just not as an advertising vehicle. For one thing, people are using the internet to find information about products and services. Feeding the right information to them is very worthwhile and will be as important in the future as standard marketting. Already music labels (large and small) are employing digital street teams to seed positive feedback about their movies over the net. And it's not always as obnoxious and obvious as you might think...I was on the street team for the last Queens of the Stone Age album and think I drummed up quite a bit of support for the record on forums and such I was already a part of.
Then there's the other business uses of the internet...we use it to telesupport our software. Install PCAnywhere along with the software, give people a five minute introduction on how to start the host when we need them to, and viola! We no longer have to drive to client sites to perform support, and we can have multiple levels of support working simultaneously at the office. Then there's the company groupware server, the Citrix server which allows our remote staff to connect from home, and the massive online knowledge bases we can use to help troubleshoot problems.
Oh, and our provider makes PLENTY of money off of us using the internet for these purposes. So do the companies that made the software we use. In fact, there is so much money being made off these relatively mundane uses of the internet that I bet the "content" side can be made basically free...so long as nobody expects to be paid to generate it.
Even then, there are plenty of folks who will generate content for "free," or through pledges. Shit, I'm one of them. Shit, I've even been known to give away bandwidth to worthy causes.
Well, for what it's worth, when slashdot first reported on this site a year or two ago, advertising on the Internet was waning in usefulness. I remember because I worked for an advertising supported company at the time and was pretty annoyed at the way they seemed to be gloating over the "fall."
Of course, advertising has since sprung back fairly well.
Incidentally, my junk filter at work was pretty good when I ran it (it was an add-on to Firebird), but I don't use it anymore. Firebird's default anti-pop up settings stop the ads that really bother me, i don't care about the rest.
Here, here. I think maximizing the routing of internet to return small packets of information with less lag (and less speed), large packets of information with more lag but more speed, and streams of information at a constant rate with constant lag would help everybody. So long as the trade off was enforced at all points, I think it would be honored by protocol developers.
I'd also like to get a hold of that "broadcast" thing we were all promised for telecasts, internet radio, etc...
Laserdiscs are not great visual quality...they're just RF modulated video on a format that doesn't degrade like tape does. The resolution is about the same as SVHS. Color reproduction on Laserdisc is better than VHS but nowhere near as crisp as DVD, in fact I've noticed that reds on the star wars LDs I have bleed really badly, to a level that's almost distracting.
Ripping from the laserdisc would give you the same visual quality as you got from the laserdisc player, only the color bleed will be accentuated by block noise unless you pump a lot of bits at it. A softening filter might help a little, but it'll also decrease your effective resolution. So you'll end up with a really high quality compressed rip of kind of crappy video.
The best part of laserdiscs is the digital audio (your choice of CD quality stereo or a fully digital 5.1 track on the SE THX version)...and of course, when you convert this to DVD audio you gain nothing. You don't lost anything perceptible, either, but compressing an uncompressed digital audio track doesn't help you out anyway.
In fact, the only benefit I can see to making a DVD of the laserdisc is being able to get rid of your laserdisc player. Personally, I like mine, without it I'd have a big empty space on my entertainment center, and I'd have to buy something to fill it up:).
Well, if Peter Jackson meant to steal the idea from George Lucas, he screwed up. Jackson's revisions were actually enjoyable to watch, which destroys the value in re-releasing the "archival quality original" in about 10 years...
You think all programming should start with assembly (a language that 90% of all modern programmers never use)? Fine. But I disagree with you, so I will continue to teach classes on programming in Java at my local library. You are welcome to contact the library board and start teaching a competing class in APL.
It would be interesting to see how many students you enroll compared to me in an "all's fair" environment like a free night class. I am willing to bet you will get few to none. For one reason, because assembly is a pretty useless skill. For another, you seem to be an elitist dick. "Kids who have no business programming"...what the hell do you mean? Anybody who has the desire to write a program has BUSINESS programming. It has no basis on whether or not they can spit out really efficient machine code or immediately grasp complicated cpncepts -- there are dozens of important skills a programmer needs to master, of which no one makes or breaks a coder. I've met fantastic GUI programmers who never got the hang of database programming. And I've met a lot of algorithmic geniuses who couldn't make a usable GUI if their life depended on it.
Kids want to learn because they're young and eager and life hasn't yet crushed their expectations. We should teach them before they lose their wonder...not berate them with archaic syntax. I grew up on BASIC. A lot of people never get past it, but the more the merrier.
Word. I don't see how this is any worse than, i dunno, OWNING a cell phone. In fact, I trust Microsoft more than I trust Verizon. Microsoft might have locked me indefinitely into an upgrade path, but they did it through enticing features and a massive application pool, not a mandatory contract. And Microsoft isn't allowed to charge me $175 to switch providers...
Um, when your name is Stephen Wolfram, and your publisher is Wolfram Media, you self published.
Would you like me to further explain the difference between a major publishing company like, say, Random House, and a company that you started and named after yourself?
Okay. Here's a hint. The major publisher will give you an advance on money they think your book will make when it sells, money which they hope to recoup via sales. When you want to release your book because you think it is good or useful, but can't prove that it will provide the level of sales needed to support a major publishing house run of the book, you self publish. Which means finding your own editors, your own binders, your own distributors, and it means sending out your own copies for review. It's something you only do if you think it's worth it, or if you're a major egotist with cash to burn. I'd say either of these describes Mr. Wolfram.
Uh, it's fairly obvious you've never read the book.
He is adamant that there is no God which created everything, yet he points to artificial order which could only be created by an intelligent designer.
He doesn't bring up God at any point. In fact, he fairly well proves that outside force is not necessary for complexity. A system can generate its own, and that complexity further generates order.
He totally discounts the view that these patterns are the result of accepted scientific theories like evolution and geology and says that evolution and geology are directed by the patterns.
He says the scientific theories like evolution and geology are extensions of patterns he's finding in everything. Why does this discount them? If you discover a large rock in the sand, and I use GPR to prove it's a giant, buried boulder, that doesn't discount that on the surface it looks a lot like a large rock.
In fact, the only things I agree with are your assumption that the contents are "nothing new." They're old concepts he's assembled to illustrate the usefulness of studying simple programmatic models as well as trying to create equations.
The AC is half right. It is not a great work like the Principia Mathematica. He spends way too much time dwelling on his cellular automata. His book could have used an editor willing to tell the brooding genius that his ideas weren't really explained well. His layman's language and reiteration of his WAY understated hypothesis make him seem like more of an amateur than he is.
But he's not doing it for the money. The book is huge, printed using an expensive process and self-published. Even still, it was cheap...$45, less than half the cost of a physics textbook and about what I'd expect to pay for a good poetry collection. To self produce and distribute such a massive and expensive to produce book, even with the massive press behind it, he can't have recouped enough to make the effort worthwhile.
It's my opinion that Stephen really thought he was on to something. It's also my opinion that he was on to something, but that he dwelled too much in the mechanics to really explain what he was doing to people who don't care about cellular automata. I also wonder if his programs are influenced by hidden variables (like his choice of borders, and their effects). Really, this book needs a companion volume written by somebody who can explain what the Stephen's talking about when he says "New Kind of Science" without going on and on about series numbers and alternating gray squares.
Actually, that's not what he's saying at all. In fact, I'm not sure you're saying anything at all. "Combinatorial effects of different combinations?" Somebody's been using the Pseudoscientific Bullshit generator.
You're still more succinct than Wolfram, who over the course of these 600 pages reiterates his position several thousand times without ever really stating what it is he's claiming. It's damned annoying, considering I spent $45 to get thusly annoyed.
Here's what I got from Wolfram's book. Anything around you that seems completely random, impossible to generate, isn't necessarily so. There are patterns in the randomness which are the result of the interaction between the intracicies of the process and the data, ones that act one each other regarless of the starting form. And the end result of that, is that complex ordered forms are to be expected even when performing very simple comparisons.
I know, you've heard all this before. You assumed everybody agreed with it. What Wolfram's done is give a "pep talk" to people trying to perform complicated models that they should step back and see if they can't get their model to create itself by simplifying the rules. That's the "new kind of science"...boiling complex multivariable equations down to the processes that generated them.
If anything, AKOS is a computer-science primer for everybody BUT physcists. There's a chapter on applications of it (chapter 8 i think). It's the most useful one in the book.
Slashdot Mirror
Why should he? A review isn't about retelling a story, it's about helping other people decide whether or not they want to read it. By immediately awknowledging the similarity of the work to works by other popular authors, you can pique the interest of people who are interested in those authors.
Shit, I wouldn't have cared if I hadn't seen Gaiman's name. I just read (and liked, despite myself) American Gods and was hoping to find something new with the same epic feel and mythological flavor, only with a denoument that wasn't as glib...
You just shamelessly admitted to exposing a guy's private credit records to your co-workers.
That can't be legal.
If you hackers watched the Simpsons properly, you'd know that the secret to making Wine faster is to put anti-freezein it.
You're right.
However, transferring the entire contents of each of, say, 25 drive arrays to each of 25 computers on the other side of the room would be pretty impressive.
Comparing that to their current speed is going to drive how the value and scalability of this line more than anything else.
your car is a Mini Cooper and you are on the island of Nevis
This reminds me of an example from my physics class. The set up is, you are in the middle of a frictionless lake with your physics book. You're then supposed to chuck the book towards the opposite shore, and the resulting reaction will propel you to safety.
However, right after the words "middle of a frictionless lake," my friend blurts out "Oh yeah? How did I get there?"
This is the same question I'd ask the Cooper on Nevis.
Well, yeah. You can't use a 2.5 Gb/s line for one computer when your fastest processor has a 3.2 gB/s memory bus. You'd have maybe 16 clock cycles per byte to do operations...
Well, a good use for 2.5 Gb/s is connecting large remote offices. 2.5 Gb/s can allow office A to connect to some 83 standard hard drives in office B like they were right inside the machine. It could connect 25 machines with maxed out 100baseT networking...basically, it could completely eliminate the need for redundant servers at the second office. And no need for a large second IT department.
This line is the kind of thing which would make it worthwhile to open a second office in a cheaper environment. Run it from your small corporate office in the city to the "office where work actually gets done" in the boondocks and you'll suddenly be able to perform YOUR CHOICE of hiring twice as many competent workers, or doubling the salary of all your Chief Officers.
I was going to mod you +1, Insightful, but decided it was just too creepy that I could actually imagine a CEO somewhere saying, "Gasp! We can't promote him! He understands numbers! Get one of those idiots we were going to fire otherwise...oh! And give him more money -- he'll need a Volvo or nobody will listen to him!"
Yeah, I've heard that bullshit before. You know, the bullshit about mechanical shock destroying all these ipod hard drives and there's a sinister Apple plot to prevent the story from breaking.
Well, here's a little anecdotal evidence for you. I have four friends with iPods, they've had them for a year or longer, no hard disc failures. They didn't keep them in vacuums, either. I personally jog with mine daily, dropped it a half dozen times from heights you don't even want to think about the poor thing plumetting from, all of this with no damage whatsoever. Not a single bad sector, no problems whatsoever.
In fact, you might even say that the small, mobile hard drive inside of my iPod was MADE to travel with! Welcome to the future!
At the same time, CF cards burn out after less than a thousand hours of access time. That's about 100 times less reliable than the iPod hard drive, all things considered. I have actually had CF cards go on me, and when they go, it kind of sucks. Whole sections of the card are suddenly inaccessible -- not just individual sectors, but huge amounts of data. I had the file descriptor fail on one of my cards, and I lost a whole day's worth of pictures. Since them, I've stuck to SmartMedia...in fact, the 128 meg smartmedia card I bought in 2001 is still running strong after at least a thousand reads.
I don't know about you, but actual failures after a less than a month of constant use make a device far more reliable than theoretical failures that can be minimized through good engineering -- which Toshiba's microdrives have.
I'm thinking about selling my Slashdot account on ebay. I'm a level 56 Star Wars nerd / level 52 Apple zealot.
I don't know. What you're talking about seems remarkably similar to the Linux install on my iPod. Which, BTW, only cost $538.96, has greater reliability, a faster overall transfer rate and 5 times the storage of the CF card.
God, it never seemed like such a good deal before.
Then you don't understand what a street team really is. Probably because you're equating all advertising with big corporate advertising. There's a big difference.
Let's say you're in a band. You're playing your first show in a new city where very few people know who you are. You can't rely on the promoter, because he's only worried about covering the guarantee, not drumming up interest in your band. If there are members of your street team in that city, they donate their time to put up your posters, and encourage people to go to the show. Sometimes they hand out mix cds, stickers and other promos. A good street team can mean the difference between a bombed show and a packed house.
For example, this ska band played our local dive club. They didn't announce it, besides a small ad in the local subversive independent newspaper. I never would have known about it, except my buddy's on their street team. He downloaded pdfs of their posters, hit up the local universities, trendy streets, etc. As a result, the house was PACKED. Last time I saw them, at the same club, there were ten people and most of them just wanted to drink. Which worked out great for us, because bands are always more enthusiastic when there's a packed house.
The key here is that my buddy loves the band and was willing to devote his time to help out. The band is empowering him with free marketting materials and paying him back with gear and exclusives.
What you're talking about -- paying somebody to like their products, when they're really ambivalent -- is quite different, and doesn't work as well because it's an artificial manipulation of a natural process. If somebody you know says "my new Nokia phone is mad phat yo," it's quite different from a random person telling you "Hey, check out this new NOKIA PHONE, isn't it MAD PHAT, YO?" It's also nothing new...beer companies have been paying pretty girls to give out swag for as long as I can remember. It helps push the brand, I guess...but if you asked me what I thought of Molsen, I wouldn't tell you I loved it because some sorority chick pretended to laugh at my jokes.
Well, that's one way to look at it.
The other way to look at it is that you're going to get word of mouth no matter what. By helping the superfans who are already spreading the word about your product do so more effectivly (with free shirts, stickers, posters, etc), you can use the energy that already exists to its maximum potential.
What you're talking about -- paying people to pretend they like something to their friends -- will never work. But giving them good stuff and relying on them to spread the word DOES work.
Great acts have been doing this for years (though it is only now becoming more structured). Fans appreciate it and so do most potential fans...after all, music isn't QUITE like a digital phone. People WANT to like your band -- they want good new music and chances are if they listen with an open mind they might like you. But there's a lot of encouragement needed to get people to this level, and a little discouragement goes a long way. I heard bad things about John Mayer well before I listened to his music, and it took his appearance on Dave Chapelle (and, er, MacWorld) to encourage me to listen. I'm not a fan, but it wasn't as bad as I'd been told.
Advertising is essential to visibility and so long as it's obnoxious, it's really worthwhile. After all, self promotion only goes so far and there's nothing more effective than an angry mob of fans trying to get you on TRL or their local top 10 countdown.
You don't really need a centralized authority...just a network that does what it's told. "Priority" is not what I'm suggesting...more like sculpted packet queueing. This sort of functionality already exists on a service level for connecting throttling. But the key here is that different sorts of throttling work best for different applications. Certainly for VOIP operations, you're better off throttling by reducing the size of each packet but keeping the time between packets relatively even. For large data transfers, the time between packets is less important than the amount of data. And for some activities (such as gaming and SSH), getting any message across is more important than getting the WHOLE message accross.
You could enforce the sculpting by setting maximum packet size for each type of transfer...maybe the low latency packets have a maximum of 10 kilobytes before a second packet has to be requested, whereas the high speed packets have a 100 kilobyte cut off. Low latency requests automatically get a higher priority than high speed ones, but getting less data makes them noticably less efficient. High speed requests take longer to serve, but have more bytes served over time. Speed constant requests would have a sort of "enforced buffer," giving them higher priority but reduced usefulness by forcing you to fill the buffer no matter what (thus enticing engineers to use no more data than they absolutely had to, keeping overall network bandwidth own).
Anyhow, it's just an idea, but it's one that counters the author's estimation that ALL value-adds decrease the overall value. What he meant to say was that any sort of INCOMPATIBILITY reduces the value of the network, and to a point he's wrong about that too. Newer SPAM-proof SMTP servers that check addresses certainly add value to the global internet system from the standpoint of just about everybody...but they are technically incompatible with the Old Way of leaving all relays open and delivering whatever you've been told.
Here's a thought experiment for the MegaCorps: what if it is simply not possible to make profit on the internet?
Oh come on now. The internet is making money for a lot of people, just not as an advertising vehicle. For one thing, people are using the internet to find information about products and services. Feeding the right information to them is very worthwhile and will be as important in the future as standard marketting. Already music labels (large and small) are employing digital street teams to seed positive feedback about their movies over the net. And it's not always as obnoxious and obvious as you might think...I was on the street team for the last Queens of the Stone Age album and think I drummed up quite a bit of support for the record on forums and such I was already a part of.
Then there's the other business uses of the internet...we use it to telesupport our software. Install PCAnywhere along with the software, give people a five minute introduction on how to start the host when we need them to, and viola! We no longer have to drive to client sites to perform support, and we can have multiple levels of support working simultaneously at the office. Then there's the company groupware server, the Citrix server which allows our remote staff to connect from home, and the massive online knowledge bases we can use to help troubleshoot problems.
Oh, and our provider makes PLENTY of money off of us using the internet for these purposes. So do the companies that made the software we use. In fact, there is so much money being made off these relatively mundane uses of the internet that I bet the "content" side can be made basically free...so long as nobody expects to be paid to generate it.
Even then, there are plenty of folks who will generate content for "free," or through pledges. Shit, I'm one of them. Shit, I've even been known to give away bandwidth to worthy causes.
Well, for what it's worth, when slashdot first reported on this site a year or two ago, advertising on the Internet was waning in usefulness. I remember because I worked for an advertising supported company at the time and was pretty annoyed at the way they seemed to be gloating over the "fall."
Of course, advertising has since sprung back fairly well.
Incidentally, my junk filter at work was pretty good when I ran it (it was an add-on to Firebird), but I don't use it anymore. Firebird's default anti-pop up settings stop the ads that really bother me, i don't care about the rest.
Here, here. I think maximizing the routing of internet to return small packets of information with less lag (and less speed), large packets of information with more lag but more speed, and streams of information at a constant rate with constant lag would help everybody. So long as the trade off was enforced at all points, I think it would be honored by protocol developers.
I'd also like to get a hold of that "broadcast" thing we were all promised for telecasts, internet radio, etc...
What good is a LD to DVD rip?
:).
Laserdiscs are not great visual quality...they're just RF modulated video on a format that doesn't degrade like tape does. The resolution is about the same as SVHS. Color reproduction on Laserdisc is better than VHS but nowhere near as crisp as DVD, in fact I've noticed that reds on the star wars LDs I have bleed really badly, to a level that's almost distracting.
Ripping from the laserdisc would give you the same visual quality as you got from the laserdisc player, only the color bleed will be accentuated by block noise unless you pump a lot of bits at it. A softening filter might help a little, but it'll also decrease your effective resolution. So you'll end up with a really high quality compressed rip of kind of crappy video.
The best part of laserdiscs is the digital audio (your choice of CD quality stereo or a fully digital 5.1 track on the SE THX version)...and of course, when you convert this to DVD audio you gain nothing. You don't lost anything perceptible, either, but compressing an uncompressed digital audio track doesn't help you out anyway.
In fact, the only benefit I can see to making a DVD of the laserdisc is being able to get rid of your laserdisc player. Personally, I like mine, without it I'd have a big empty space on my entertainment center, and I'd have to buy something to fill it up
Well, if Peter Jackson meant to steal the idea from George Lucas, he screwed up. Jackson's revisions were actually enjoyable to watch, which destroys the value in re-releasing the "archival quality original" in about 10 years...
There's yet to be an actual press release
So what you're saying is...it's NOT official.
You think all programming should start with assembly (a language that 90% of all modern programmers never use)? Fine. But I disagree with you, so I will continue to teach classes on programming in Java at my local library. You are welcome to contact the library board and start teaching a competing class in APL.
It would be interesting to see how many students you enroll compared to me in an "all's fair" environment like a free night class. I am willing to bet you will get few to none. For one reason, because assembly is a pretty useless skill. For another, you seem to be an elitist dick. "Kids who have no business programming"...what the hell do you mean? Anybody who has the desire to write a program has BUSINESS programming. It has no basis on whether or not they can spit out really efficient machine code or immediately grasp complicated cpncepts -- there are dozens of important skills a programmer needs to master, of which no one makes or breaks a coder. I've met fantastic GUI programmers who never got the hang of database programming. And I've met a lot of algorithmic geniuses who couldn't make a usable GUI if their life depended on it.
Kids want to learn because they're young and eager and life hasn't yet crushed their expectations. We should teach them before they lose their wonder...not berate them with archaic syntax. I grew up on BASIC. A lot of people never get past it, but the more the merrier.
Word. I don't see how this is any worse than, i dunno, OWNING a cell phone. In fact, I trust Microsoft more than I trust Verizon. Microsoft might have locked me indefinitely into an upgrade path, but they did it through enticing features and a massive application pool, not a mandatory contract. And Microsoft isn't allowed to charge me $175 to switch providers...
Um, when your name is Stephen Wolfram, and your publisher is Wolfram Media, you self published.
Would you like me to further explain the difference between a major publishing company like, say, Random House, and a company that you started and named after yourself?
Okay. Here's a hint. The major publisher will give you an advance on money they think your book will make when it sells, money which they hope to recoup via sales. When you want to release your book because you think it is good or useful, but can't prove that it will provide the level of sales needed to support a major publishing house run of the book, you self publish. Which means finding your own editors, your own binders, your own distributors, and it means sending out your own copies for review. It's something you only do if you think it's worth it, or if you're a major egotist with cash to burn. I'd say either of these describes Mr. Wolfram.
Uh, it's fairly obvious you've never read the book.
He is adamant that there is no God which created everything, yet he points to artificial order which could only be created by an intelligent designer.
He doesn't bring up God at any point. In fact, he fairly well proves that outside force is not necessary for complexity. A system can generate its own, and that complexity further generates order.
He totally discounts the view that these patterns are the result of accepted scientific theories like evolution and geology and says that evolution and geology are directed by the patterns.
He says the scientific theories like evolution and geology are extensions of patterns he's finding in everything. Why does this discount them? If you discover a large rock in the sand, and I use GPR to prove it's a giant, buried boulder, that doesn't discount that on the surface it looks a lot like a large rock.
In fact, the only things I agree with are your assumption that the contents are "nothing new." They're old concepts he's assembled to illustrate the usefulness of studying simple programmatic models as well as trying to create equations.
I have an account AND an review.
The AC is half right. It is not a great work like the Principia Mathematica. He spends way too much time dwelling on his cellular automata. His book could have used an editor willing to tell the brooding genius that his ideas weren't really explained well. His layman's language and reiteration of his WAY understated hypothesis make him seem like more of an amateur than he is.
But he's not doing it for the money. The book is huge, printed using an expensive process and self-published. Even still, it was cheap...$45, less than half the cost of a physics textbook and about what I'd expect to pay for a good poetry collection. To self produce and distribute such a massive and expensive to produce book, even with the massive press behind it, he can't have recouped enough to make the effort worthwhile.
It's my opinion that Stephen really thought he was on to something. It's also my opinion that he was on to something, but that he dwelled too much in the mechanics to really explain what he was doing to people who don't care about cellular automata. I also wonder if his programs are influenced by hidden variables (like his choice of borders, and their effects). Really, this book needs a companion volume written by somebody who can explain what the Stephen's talking about when he says "New Kind of Science" without going on and on about series numbers and alternating gray squares.
Actually, that's not what he's saying at all. In fact, I'm not sure you're saying anything at all. "Combinatorial effects of different combinations?" Somebody's been using the Pseudoscientific Bullshit generator.
You're still more succinct than Wolfram, who over the course of these 600 pages reiterates his position several thousand times without ever really stating what it is he's claiming. It's damned annoying, considering I spent $45 to get thusly annoyed.
Here's what I got from Wolfram's book. Anything around you that seems completely random, impossible to generate, isn't necessarily so. There are patterns in the randomness which are the result of the interaction between the intracicies of the process and the data, ones that act one each other regarless of the starting form. And the end result of that, is that complex ordered forms are to be expected even when performing very simple comparisons.
I know, you've heard all this before. You assumed everybody agreed with it. What Wolfram's done is give a "pep talk" to people trying to perform complicated models that they should step back and see if they can't get their model to create itself by simplifying the rules. That's the "new kind of science"...boiling complex multivariable equations down to the processes that generated them.
If anything, AKOS is a computer-science primer for everybody BUT physcists. There's a chapter on applications of it (chapter 8 i think). It's the most useful one in the book.