Slashdot summaries are frequently a bunch of opinions stated as if true, followed by pointless questions, submitted by people with a vested interest in the topic.
With the exception of 'vested interests' (which could usefully be replaced with 'extreme bias'), how is that different from Slashdot discussions?
the cost of adapting and extending it, for example in writing printer and scanner drivers...
Why are they writing their own drivers? As a sizable buyer of equipment (the government, not the single department) they could simply tell HP and other vendors that the government will only be considering equipment that has Linux drivers.
And HP and the other vendors will look at the relatively tiny size of the buyer insisting on new drivers compared to the enormous market market of people not so insisting... and will let the bid due by date slide past without lifting a finger.
This is driven (pardon the pun) by several effects:
Despite it's huge absolute size, the German government isn't buying 100,000 printers at a pop - it's buying 10 here and 100 there, and 20 elsewhere spread out over years.
Despite maybe buying 100,000 printers over a decade the German government almost certainly isn't buying a single model - they're buying 1,000 of this, 500 of that, 2,000 of the other.
Nor is writing drivers a one-time cost. They have be maintained and updated as firmware and hardware changes - and new drivers have to be written as new models come onto the market in the hopes that German government may buy that model.
The problem is, while you say you want to chose, you're not actually making a choice - you're dictating a solution based on ideological goals.
I do not live in germany, but it saddens me how public institutions, which I pay for, cover themselves by unrealistic clauses in public bidding to make sure only MS software gets through.
And how is that worse than forcing the software of your choice down their throats?
The idea of landing a big number of first-time customers sounds great until the customers start coming in. From the experiences of business owners I know, Grouponers were, simply put, cheap (not condemning cheap people here, as the times demand it for many.) If the groupon is "get $50 for $25," you better damn be sure most customers will spend the $50 and not a penny more. And if it's a restaurant, they'll tip on the $25.
I expect that those customers will not be back; they will move on to the next goupon.They're not looking for a new place to eat; they're looking for a deal.
Congratulations - you've just proved advertising doesn't work. I bet you can prove that bumblebees can't fly either.
It's not often I agree with a piece in the Guardian, but on this occasion, I think they're onto something. I remember the build-up to the first dotcom bust and a lot of the signs are showing up again. The over-valued floatations of profitless companies are certainly the most obvious of these, but there's a lot more than that out there if you want to look for it.
You can *always* find signs to support your position if you look. The question is whether what you've found is a valid sign properly interpreted - or an ambivalent or invalid sign you've spun to reach your foregone conclusion.
I just ask a simple question: "Is this company selling a product that people will buy?" If the answer's no, then the company's story probably isn't going to have a happy ending.
If you have a 100% accurate method of determining what people will buy - your fortune is made. Otherwise, you're just another armchair analyst blowing smoke.
The value of the product to users is determined by the number of your friends that use it. It's value to consumers massively diminishes if large swathes of your friends dont use it.
But, in the case of Facebook, for most people large swathes of their friends do use it. It's nothing like MSN Messenger, because you're comparing a chat channel (apples) to a social network (oranges).
What this effectively means is that Facebook cannot charge users for content.
An unsupported assumption, because they are doing so with no visible short term effects.
So if they can't charge, how do they generate income? As we know, its largely advertising revenue.
For Facebook, that's changing - as they're now collecting revenues from games hosted on their site. They're getting into being content hosts and that's considerably more stable over the long term than ad revenue and it does not depend on how many friends are playing the game.
Typical American shit. We only celebrate NASA's accomplishments (or joint NASA/Russian missions).
Go to Russia, and you'll find pretty much the same thing. Nationalism isn't limited to America, not by a long shot. Hell, go to Canada and ask 'em about the Shuttle - but be seated and have a beverage at hand because odds are you're going to be treated to 15 minute spiel about the Shuttle and Station robotic arms.
The average American knows jackshit about all the Soviet "firsts" and accomplishments (basically everything but the first man on the moon).
Well, other than exaggerating about the Soviet firsts and accomplishments... So what? They didn't accomplish much other than firsts. Great propaganda (which you've bought into hook, line, and sinker), but no followup and not really useful for exploration or exploitation. Their most significant 'accomplishment' in that respect, the stations they launched from the 70's through the 90's is forever marred by their lack of documentation - meaning there can be few or nor lessons learned.
hey totally miss the main selling point of a laptop: Small and light.
I was thinking much the same thing. Plus, rest assured that if it comes apart that easily on the workbench... it'll come apart even faster when you drop it or when it gets knocked off a desk. Not to mention those kids of 'slip fasteners' (or whatever the technical terms is for things held together by friction and a modest amount of spring tension) tend to wear out and loosen pretty quickly under real world use.
To sum it up: rather worthless - except for blondie if one is attracted to the type.
Yep, very idealistic but seriously lacking in real world qualities.
The ironic part is, Slashdot routinely takes corporations to task for not spending on R&D - yet when they do spend on R&D, Slashdot doesn't want them to profit from it.
It's a shame that the X-Prize donors only fund single prizes. It would vastly increase the rate of technological development if they were regular contests.
It's worth pointing out that back in the days of aviation prizes - there was no cash award. But people and companies competed anyways, because developing the technology usually translated into directly being more competitive in the market. Even if it didn't, the publicity was invaluable.
There isn't a market for suborbital flight, let alone a competitive one. I grant that there is a lot of promise and potential, and a lot of people have bet money on that basis... But the market doesn't exist, it's entirely theoretical.
Meanwhile, you have the suborbital X-Prize. After 9 years with no attempts, Burt Rutan's team met the minimum requirements for the X-Prize.
I have it from several very reliable sources that Rutan was ready to compete several years before he actually did - but he waited for for the prize to be fully funded before going ahead.
DARPA had the right idea, the X-Prize donors don't.
That's because the space fanboy/advocate community in general really doesn't have any idea how the real world of economics and technology development works. Nor do they care - all they want is "teh sh1ny l33tness".
Large utility-scale installations make money in the long run, selling power at market rates. This has been true for a couple years now (primarily because of new markets for renewable energy credits in many states).
Or, in other words, they don't actually make money - they just funnel money from the taxpayer into their profit column. (Tax credits are just government grants with a lot less paperwork.)
Pulling the plug, any general can do, but most generals don't know anything about BGP.
That's the thing - generals don't need to. That's what staff officers are for, the general says "I want this done" and the staff figures out how to make it so - or tells the general that it can't be done, or at least not exactly what he wants.
My guess is that there was a contingency plan for this (maybe as a military defense measure), that that plan took some thought by a technically savvy person, but, having a plan, it probably wasn't much more than a few phone calls to execute it.
While TFA is theoretically about Hollywood not making SF/Fantasy movies - it's really an extended rant about Hollywood not making movies that are nominally SF/Fantasy but show lots (and lots) of female skin.
I know from experience that the first part is where a huge percentage of the cost resides. Time and materials to machine a duplicate part once the programming, tooling, and inspection systems are set up and proven would be cheap.
That's true to some extent, but you still have to test, verify, and QA the new part - and that's where the real costs are in manufacturing a spacecraft. And not only do you do that to each individual part, you do it to assemblies as they are built up, and then to units built of those assemblies, and so on up the chain to complete spacecraft.
You can bet that they make spares (and certify them) for most components just in case something goes wrong and the thing needs to be replaced before launch.
For most parts, but by no means all. They stopped building complete backup spacecraft or sparing all components decades ago, it was simply too expensive.
As a professional astronomer I hoped this thing would never have happened. It costs 6 billion and at this price tag a 5% overrun is $300 million, about six times the cost of the entire SDSS project, which has undoubtedly gave us more science that James Webb ever will.
Science isn't something you can measure by how many buckets you collect. Not all buckets have the same value.
True, Hubble and JWST make great pictures, function as amazing PR machines, but most science at the end of the day comes from survey imaging and spectroscopic observations.
If you honestly believe that all Hubble and JWST are doing or will do is collect pretty pictures, you're either hopelessly ignorant or hopelessly biased. But ff you want to talk spectroscopy - consider that four of the Hubble five main instruments are dedicated to spectroscopy, and two of JWST's three main instruments are so dedicated. If you want to talk surveys... Check out Hubble's schedule from Feb 14, 2011, or January 29, 2011 for some recent survey campaigns that Hubble is participating in.
it shouldn't cost anything like N times as much to build N of these at the same time, right?
It depends on how you calculate N.
If you look at the total cost of the satellite (cost to procure the bird + the birds amortized share of the R&D program), then yes - N drops considerably. But that's not really an accurate method of accounting in this instance because you're performing the R&D no matter how many you build.
If you define N as the opportunity cost (just the direct costs to procure the bird), then maybe - N does drop, but not as much as you might think.
The reason it doesn't drop as much as you might think is the massive amount of man hours devoted to testing, verification, and QA of each component.
I would gladly donate money for such a project so long as I was promised that the content of the movie would remain as graphic as necessary to properly maintain the themes of the Bioshock story.
A talented writer and director could make a PG rated version and still maintain the theme. There's nothing at all inherent in the theme that requires buckets of blood being thrown about.
First sentence in the first section. "The average age for a video game player is 35".
The current price of tea in China is equally irrelevant - because they aren't making a game or opening a teashop. They're making a movie.
Who the hell do they think their target audience would be for a movie of the same title and content?
Gamers - of all ages. And gamers who take their kids to the movies. And kids who go to movies who aren't gamers or taken by gamer parents. And pretty much anyone else who is interested in a film of a given genre. (Sci-fi/Horror in this case.)
The guys with the money aren't completely stupid - they know very well that of the 5 million or so who bought the game (BOTE from the Wikipedia entry on the game) only a portion are going to go see the film. That's a damm small potential audience for a $160 million dollar film.
With those kind of numbers, that's not the next Exorcist... that's the next Heaven's Gate. That's why they're trying to reach a broader audience.
Which market is better to exploit / market fear? A young, highly educated market or a older less-educated market?
In a reality where "young" equated with "highly educated" and "older" equated with "less educated", that would be a valid question. But we don't live in such a world.
He did his stint on CNN but exploiting fear in liberals is difficult compared to exploiting fear in conservatives. The current liberal market is younger and college level educated.
Oh, it's trivially easy to exploit the fears of liberals and the "educated" - you just have to find their buttons.* (And I find it interesting that you've conflated the two.) Being college educated (which isn't the same as being educated) just means that you've spent a lot of years in school - it doesn't mean you don't come with your own set of blinders, fears, and mythperceptions. (Nor does being "college educated" automagically equate to being liberal either.)
*As Rupert Murdoch does on the Right - so does the Huffington Post and the Daily Kos on the Left.
No, I didn't miss you points - I showed the factual errors in the assumptions that underlie your points. You're falsely projecting from your experience backwards into a very different era.
But it's sobering to remember that when it was given, putting a man on the moon was 7 years in the future. Now it's nearly 40 years in the past. At least as far as human space travel is concerned, that breathtaking pace has come to a grinding halt.
It's even more sobering when you realize that the lunar landing only happened that early because it was artificially accelerated. The result was that human space travel was forced down into an evolutionary dead end - where it has been stalled ever since because too many people don't realize the cost of the misstep.
Things would probably be very different had they continued on their original "slow steady progress" model (which would have had on on the Moon maybe in the 80's, but more likely around the turn of the century), rather than being perverted into the "if it isn't a Giant Leap is isn't worth doing" model.
For the FBI to dedicate this much time studying it makes me sit back and scratch my head. Truth be told, the Central Library in any given city is far more dangerous...
Not in 1971 it wasn't. At least not without weeks and months of rooting around in a wide variety of books with the vague hope of finding what you're looking for.
Like many here on Slashdot you have no freaking idea how hard it was to get this kind of information before the BBS's and eventually widespread public access to the internet.
Eventually, the early crop of computer underground "anarchists" on the BBS scene took the book concept and created digital extensions of the information in the form of "G-Files" and early 8-bit graphics. By the time the Anarchist Cookbook made it to the Internet, it was no longer a book. It was a movement, one without direction or guidance or measurable intent, all loosely bound together by a set of files that had been slapped with the same Anarchist Cookbook brand name.
I bet you think you kids invented sex too... (You didn't.) That 'movement' existed before the widespread public internet, before BBS's.
We were passing around second and third generation photocopies from the Cookbook in Junior High by 1974. And there weren't coin operated photocopiers on every corner then either... (Generally you had to have stealth access to one in a business or a sympathetic adult providing access.) Why do you think that when files sharing BBS's became common over a decade later that somebody thought it was a good idea to sit down and type all that stuff in?
Slashdot Mirror
On what planet? Slashdot summaries have been a mixture of fact, fancy, opinion, etc... as long as I've been around. (I.E. over a decade.)
With the exception of 'vested interests' (which could usefully be replaced with 'extreme bias'), how is that different from Slashdot discussions?
And HP and the other vendors will look at the relatively tiny size of the buyer insisting on new drivers compared to the enormous market market of people not so insisting... and will let the bid due by date slide past without lifting a finger.
This is driven (pardon the pun) by several effects:
The problem is, while you say you want to chose, you're not actually making a choice - you're dictating a solution based on ideological goals.
And how is that worse than forcing the software of your choice down their throats?
Congratulations - you've just proved advertising doesn't work. I bet you can prove that bumblebees can't fly either.
You can *always* find signs to support your position if you look. The question is whether what you've found is a valid sign properly interpreted - or an ambivalent or invalid sign you've spun to reach your foregone conclusion.
If you have a 100% accurate method of determining what people will buy - your fortune is made. Otherwise, you're just another armchair analyst blowing smoke.
And not knocking houses down won't eliminate homelessness and poverty.
So your point is... what?
But, in the case of Facebook, for most people large swathes of their friends do use it. It's nothing like MSN Messenger, because you're comparing a chat channel (apples) to a social network (oranges).
An unsupported assumption, because they are doing so with no visible short term effects.
For Facebook, that's changing - as they're now collecting revenues from games hosted on their site. They're getting into being content hosts and that's considerably more stable over the long term than ad revenue and it does not depend on how many friends are playing the game.
Go to Russia, and you'll find pretty much the same thing. Nationalism isn't limited to America, not by a long shot. Hell, go to Canada and ask 'em about the Shuttle - but be seated and have a beverage at hand because odds are you're going to be treated to 15 minute spiel about the Shuttle and Station robotic arms.
Well, other than exaggerating about the Soviet firsts and accomplishments... So what? They didn't accomplish much other than firsts. Great propaganda (which you've bought into hook, line, and sinker), but no followup and not really useful for exploration or exploitation. Their most significant 'accomplishment' in that respect, the stations they launched from the 70's through the 90's is forever marred by their lack of documentation - meaning there can be few or nor lessons learned.
I was thinking much the same thing. Plus, rest assured that if it comes apart that easily on the workbench... it'll come apart even faster when you drop it or when it gets knocked off a desk. Not to mention those kids of 'slip fasteners' (or whatever the technical terms is for things held together by friction and a modest amount of spring tension) tend to wear out and loosen pretty quickly under real world use.
Yep, very idealistic but seriously lacking in real world qualities.
The ironic part is, Slashdot routinely takes corporations to task for not spending on R&D - yet when they do spend on R&D, Slashdot doesn't want them to profit from it.
It's worth pointing out that back in the days of aviation prizes - there was no cash award. But people and companies competed anyways, because developing the technology usually translated into directly being more competitive in the market. Even if it didn't, the publicity was invaluable.
There isn't a market for suborbital flight, let alone a competitive one. I grant that there is a lot of promise and potential, and a lot of people have bet money on that basis... But the market doesn't exist, it's entirely theoretical.
I have it from several very reliable sources that Rutan was ready to compete several years before he actually did - but he waited for for the prize to be fully funded before going ahead.
That's because the space fanboy/advocate community in general really doesn't have any idea how the real world of economics and technology development works. Nor do they care - all they want is "teh sh1ny l33tness".
Or, in other words, they don't actually make money - they just funnel money from the taxpayer into their profit column. (Tax credits are just government grants with a lot less paperwork.)
That's the thing - generals don't need to. That's what staff officers are for, the general says "I want this done" and the staff figures out how to make it so - or tells the general that it can't be done, or at least not exactly what he wants.
Precisely.
Well, not that I have anything against tits! :)
While TFA is theoretically about Hollywood not making SF/Fantasy movies - it's really an extended rant about Hollywood not making movies that are nominally SF/Fantasy but show lots (and lots) of female skin.
That's true to some extent, but you still have to test, verify, and QA the new part - and that's where the real costs are in manufacturing a spacecraft. And not only do you do that to each individual part, you do it to assemblies as they are built up, and then to units built of those assemblies, and so on up the chain to complete spacecraft.
For most parts, but by no means all. They stopped building complete backup spacecraft or sparing all components decades ago, it was simply too expensive.
Science isn't something you can measure by how many buckets you collect. Not all buckets have the same value.
If you honestly believe that all Hubble and JWST are doing or will do is collect pretty pictures, you're either hopelessly ignorant or hopelessly biased. But ff you want to talk spectroscopy - consider that four of the Hubble five main instruments are dedicated to spectroscopy, and two of JWST's three main instruments are so dedicated. If you want to talk surveys... Check out Hubble's schedule from Feb 14, 2011, or January 29, 2011 for some recent survey campaigns that Hubble is participating in.
It depends on how you calculate N.
If you look at the total cost of the satellite (cost to procure the bird + the birds amortized share of the R&D program), then yes - N drops considerably. But that's not really an accurate method of accounting in this instance because you're performing the R&D no matter how many you build.
If you define N as the opportunity cost (just the direct costs to procure the bird), then maybe - N does drop, but not as much as you might think.
The reason it doesn't drop as much as you might think is the massive amount of man hours devoted to testing, verification, and QA of each component.
A talented writer and director could make a PG rated version and still maintain the theme. There's nothing at all inherent in the theme that requires buckets of blood being thrown about.
The current price of tea in China is equally irrelevant - because they aren't making a game or opening a teashop. They're making a movie.
Gamers - of all ages. And gamers who take their kids to the movies. And kids who go to movies who aren't gamers or taken by gamer parents. And pretty much anyone else who is interested in a film of a given genre. (Sci-fi/Horror in this case.)
The guys with the money aren't completely stupid - they know very well that of the 5 million or so who bought the game (BOTE from the Wikipedia entry on the game) only a portion are going to go see the film. That's a damm small potential audience for a $160 million dollar film.
With those kind of numbers, that's not the next Exorcist... that's the next Heaven's Gate. That's why they're trying to reach a broader audience.
In a reality where "young" equated with "highly educated" and "older" equated with "less educated", that would be a valid question. But we don't live in such a world.
Oh, it's trivially easy to exploit the fears of liberals and the "educated" - you just have to find their buttons.* (And I find it interesting that you've conflated the two.) Being college educated (which isn't the same as being educated) just means that you've spent a lot of years in school - it doesn't mean you don't come with your own set of blinders, fears, and mythperceptions. (Nor does being "college educated" automagically equate to being liberal either.)
*As Rupert Murdoch does on the Right - so does the Huffington Post and the Daily Kos on the Left.
No, I didn't miss you points - I showed the factual errors in the assumptions that underlie your points. You're falsely projecting from your experience backwards into a very different era.
It's even more sobering when you realize that the lunar landing only happened that early because it was artificially accelerated. The result was that human space travel was forced down into an evolutionary dead end - where it has been stalled ever since because too many people don't realize the cost of the misstep.
Things would probably be very different had they continued on their original "slow steady progress" model (which would have had on on the Moon maybe in the 80's, but more likely around the turn of the century), rather than being perverted into the "if it isn't a Giant Leap is isn't worth doing" model.
Not in 1971 it wasn't. At least not without weeks and months of rooting around in a wide variety of books with the vague hope of finding what you're looking for.
Like many here on Slashdot you have no freaking idea how hard it was to get this kind of information before the BBS's and eventually widespread public access to the internet.
I bet you think you kids invented sex too... (You didn't.) That 'movement' existed before the widespread public internet, before BBS's.
We were passing around second and third generation photocopies from the Cookbook in Junior High by 1974. And there weren't coin operated photocopiers on every corner then either... (Generally you had to have stealth access to one in a business or a sympathetic adult providing access.) Why do you think that when files sharing BBS's became common over a decade later that somebody thought it was a good idea to sit down and type all that stuff in?