Because the people who QFD the functionality of mass-market software aren't interested in giving you good things, they're interested in giving you things with (price/effort)*e^(-ttm) maximized.
If the most popular UI (Windows) and Multi-media lib (DirectX) were open-source, no doubt you'd see the things you talk about.
And its competition (Mac) is too busy hoarding the toilet paper to provide more than basically marketable functionality, as smooth and blue as it is.
Meanwhile, their open competition (Linux/X/BSD/etc.) is too busy trying to figure out how this week's herd of distro drops works to do any plush development, and can't normalize the HW interface tightly enough to achieve critical mass.
(It's not 15 years old, but you might want to bookmark it, to keep it readily accessible.)
Find me a libray full of paper journals that has every issue of every volume of every title available on the stacks at the same time, or even guarantees that any one of them will come available within a year after you slip a request in the box.
The Internet means you copy it onto the server once, and 6 billion people can find it and borrow it at the same time. Try that with paper.
We have a trillion-dollar infrastructure designed to make it possible with only a few thousand dollars of investment by the server end. The dollars governments and universities spend as grant and library money could be used to support the journal-publishing societies directly, with the result that the end product is free information. You only need to think outside the transactional box and repipe the cashflows to take the subscribers out of the stream.
Since all the worthwhile publications are produced as adjuncts to professional and academic societies, it should be simple to convince them to apply for online-publication grants to cover their costs; if necessary to lobby the NSF to create such a grant program.
Issues of persistence are in the long run economically equal in paper and online realms.
Online is the way to go and print is going to go the way of the Woolly Mammoth.
Electronic handling of peer-review, electronic publishing, and electronic indexing are all far, far cheaper than any ink-and-paper process.
Since the main economic force behind basic research in academia is the infusion of money from government and institutional sources, those sources are going to want to reduce the net cost of the enterprise. Note that the only people who pay $290/year for a journal subscription are the same people who paid for the research. And of course they have to buy every journal remotely related to a field they fund. Times every university library frequented by one of their grantees.
Plus all the time the grantee spends dicking around with paper and paper indexes.
Anything that reduces this cost will make the grantors happier.
And, they will realize that making access easier and cheaper will increase the possibility that interesting correlations will arise. The more energy and eyeballs you can afford to put into the system, and the more comparison you get out of that energy, the more likely you are to shake loose an idea from disparate facts.
Print journals are an albatross around the neck of science. Free information should be just that, since taxpayers paid for it so it would be free in the first place.
They can keep their costs low because the people involved will tolerate that pay and those conditions for the payback of being in the porn business, being around porn and porn stars.
I.e., you get part of your pay in product, the product being eyeball time on T&A...&D&P, &c.
There's never a shortage of consumers of porn, and there will never be a shortage of production-side personnel willing to trade some of their pay rate for a chance to hobnob with the knobjobs.
Security? Sure. That's got to be part of it. But I bet there's an inverse proportion of it in reality vs. what was demonstrated in that article.
Until the cloners genetically engineer our sexual hormones out of existence, this is how it will be.
1. You can spend 17 years letting "your little mistake" turn into a disaffected, cold-blooded maniac killer (hint: this doesn't require video games); or,
2. You can pop your head in his room for five minutes a month and say "Whatcha up to, sport? You're not jacking off? Too bad. That's all I had when I was a kid. Nope. Not even an Atari. What're you playing? 'Nazi Zombie Quake-Engine Columbine Guns Of Doom'? Cool. Look at the blood. Hey! Was that an eyeball? You know this is just a game, right? No biggie. Just annealing your spin-glass a little. Ciao, big guy." Then you can go back to your Bud and your fishin' show and grinding your teeth over the way the shop-lead gets on your ass about losing tools in peoples' oilpans.
The opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference. And being embarassed in front of your own sprog is nothing compared to explaining his history-making crime to the world.
Did anyone else do a doubletake on this? Or did I just miss a motherboard chipset in the 8xx series that happened to have the same number as Intel's old 32-bit mil-spec CPU line?
Unless you believe that cryonics is capable of paying off in reanimation.
Then your model falls apart, because the frozen will return to manage their money.
But your fear is already doomed to be realized. Inheritance preserves wealth almost as surely as Trust does. We're already overrun with inbred billionaire brats. So whether their parents are popsicles or worm-food is moot.
If you're miscalculating your orbit as badly as implied here, they and a few seconds of panicky stickhandling when you re-enter the atmosphere are what keeps you from hitting the planet, splat, we can rebuild him, etc., etc.
Any orbit that gains significant altitude (radial distance) is elliptical, and turning elliptical orbits into circular ones takes more than just a little "maneuvering", unless they're only slightly eccentric.
You're not going to go hell-bent up to 180 miles and then just sort of float and puff-puff steer to 220 miles. Not unless you want to go back down to 140 miles a few minutes later. You need to fire main engines and reduce your radial momentum and acceleration both to zero. Maneuvering thrust is only for fifth-decimal-place stuff like attitude control and easing up to a space station for docking.
And thanks for the pointer to the Niven book. There's so much cloying fantasty and ersatz science in SF these days that I've given up everything in the written forms but collecting signed copies of books I've read.
Orbital altitude is determined solely by final speed.
I.e., once you shut off the thrust, you are in the highest orbit you will ever have.
If you think you will "coast" to a higher orbit after an impulse of thrust, you need to think about adding wings to your coaster, because you're gonna need them to help you miss the Earth on the way down.
To change a circular orbit, you do not push up, and you do not push down, you push with or against the direction of travel, tangential to your orbit. And you do so constantly, and constantly adjusting your attitude to keep the thrust purely tangential, because, again, once you shut off the thrust, you are in your new orbit, and if you add any radial thrust, you're in an elliptical orbit. And we're back to needing those wings.
>>Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
Pablo never programmed one.
--Blair
Re:So where does the information come from?
on
A Map to Nowhere?
·
· Score: 2
My soul doesn't need a shell.
Certainly not a fragile, bulbous, smelly one like this.
--Blair
"Or wouldn't you rather be a pig?"
Re:..."Whispered the Washington Post"...
on
A Map to Nowhere?
·
· Score: 2
Flamebait?
Never. I was dead serious. Genomics is a simple syllogism. Gene sequences A acts in time sequence B and environment C to produce Protein D. And all higher-order set combinatorics of sequences and environments and proteins. Listing the genome was just a start. What follows will simply require some real computing power.
The Spectator had no business pretending that the Washington Post can whisper, and it had no business spreading FUD about the ability of genomics to succeed in determining the detailed mechanisms of genetics.
But there is a gentleman's agreement, a societal norm, a convenience, and every other kind of non-contract contract up to but not quite including an easement on your eyeballs.
Advertisers get value for their ad dollar because the television programmers deliver your attention span. Television programmers get value for their effort by selling your attention to the advertisers. You get value for your time and attention by receiving entertainment and information as moving pictures on a box in your own livingroom. Without that natural exchange, there would be no business called television.
So, if it becomes possible for a significant number of television viewers to avoid paying their attention to the advertisers' messages, that business is going to go away. Television will fold harder than the Internet did once people found out the ROI on a banner ad was 1% of what they were paying for it.
And if you demand payment for the time you spend observing commercial filmlets, you will be charged to watch the rest of the programming. At which point there's no reason to watch the commercial filmlets. So if you want to watch the programming, you will have to make up the money the advertisers no longer pay. But television programmers aren't stupid, and after tens or hundreds of experiments will find a way to get some sort of advertising through to you so they can get money from both ends again.
Your cost for video entertainment is offset by the advertisers' payments. They don't require anyone to return the favor, but if people don't watch their ads they will stop paying. Simple business.
...kicking the crap out of an old woman.... Sure, it might be fun, and it feels good while you're doing it, but, after all is done, what have you accomplished really?
Sent a message to the rest of the old women who try to spray you with perfume as you walk by.
Slashdot Mirror
Because the people who QFD the functionality of mass-market software aren't interested in giving you good things, they're interested in giving you things with (price/effort)*e^(-ttm) maximized.
If the most popular UI (Windows) and Multi-media lib (DirectX) were open-source, no doubt you'd see the things you talk about.
And its competition (Mac) is too busy hoarding the toilet paper to provide more than basically marketable functionality, as smooth and blue as it is.
Meanwhile, their open competition (Linux/X/BSD/etc.) is too busy trying to figure out how this week's herd of distro drops works to do any plush development, and can't normalize the HW interface tightly enough to achieve critical mass.
--Blair
1. Wouldn't a PC with the right peripherals and SW do what is being proposed?
2. The handheld industry is borging up a storm, combining cell-phone, PDA, personal music player, personal voice recorder, still camera, video camera, wireless web, PC, radio, tv, etc. functions in all 2^N-1 combinations into spaces smaller than the Apple Newton.
--Blair
P.S. The 2^Nth combo is just you and your imagination, sunshine.
So, before long every type of film will have been made, and all films will be derivatives
Yes, but whatever you do, don't parody one of the worst books ever written...
--Blair
P.S. The phrase "there's nothing new under the sun" comes from Ecclesiastes. I.e., your thesis is 2,000 years old.
What is it with the freakin' Yankees hats?
Are all webcams now required to render people as wearing them, in random colors, like some sort of Yahoo! Games avatar?
Are we sure these are two different guys?
Is the red-hatted one actually mugging for the camera?
And why is the blue-hatted one wearing the same sweater I'm wearing right now?
--Blair
Find me an intellectually significant online resource that was available 15 years ago that is still just as accessable.
www.onelook.com
(It's not 15 years old, but you might want to bookmark it, to keep it readily accessible.)
Find me a libray full of paper journals that has every issue of every volume of every title available on the stacks at the same time, or even guarantees that any one of them will come available within a year after you slip a request in the box.
The Internet means you copy it onto the server once, and 6 billion people can find it and borrow it at the same time. Try that with paper.
We have a trillion-dollar infrastructure designed to make it possible with only a few thousand dollars of investment by the server end. The dollars governments and universities spend as grant and library money could be used to support the journal-publishing societies directly, with the result that the end product is free information. You only need to think outside the transactional box and repipe the cashflows to take the subscribers out of the stream.
Since all the worthwhile publications are produced as adjuncts to professional and academic societies, it should be simple to convince them to apply for online-publication grants to cover their costs; if necessary to lobby the NSF to create such a grant program.
Issues of persistence are in the long run economically equal in paper and online realms.
--Blair
Online is the way to go and print is going to go the way of the Woolly Mammoth.
Electronic handling of peer-review, electronic publishing, and electronic indexing are all far, far cheaper than any ink-and-paper process.
Since the main economic force behind basic research in academia is the infusion of money from government and institutional sources, those sources are going to want to reduce the net cost of the enterprise. Note that the only people who pay $290/year for a journal subscription are the same people who paid for the research. And of course they have to buy every journal remotely related to a field they fund. Times every university library frequented by one of their grantees.
Plus all the time the grantee spends dicking around with paper and paper indexes.
Anything that reduces this cost will make the grantors happier.
And, they will realize that making access easier and cheaper will increase the possibility that interesting correlations will arise. The more energy and eyeballs you can afford to put into the system, and the more comparison you get out of that energy, the more likely you are to shake loose an idea from disparate facts.
Print journals are an albatross around the neck of science. Free information should be just that, since taxpayers paid for it so it would be free in the first place.
--Blair
They can keep their costs low because the people involved will tolerate that pay and those conditions for the payback of being in the porn business, being around porn and porn stars.
I.e., you get part of your pay in product, the product being eyeball time on T&A...&D&P, &c.
--Blair
Only if it's a hands-on position.
--Blair
Sex sells. Both ways.
There's never a shortage of consumers of porn, and there will never be a shortage of production-side personnel willing to trade some of their pay rate for a chance to hobnob with the knobjobs.
Security? Sure. That's got to be part of it. But I bet there's an inverse proportion of it in reality vs. what was demonstrated in that article.
Until the cloners genetically engineer our sexual hormones out of existence, this is how it will be.
--Blair
Chinese Glorious People's Fly-by-Wire Cactus Wren!
--Blair
1. You can spend 17 years letting "your little mistake" turn into a disaffected, cold-blooded maniac killer (hint: this doesn't require video games); or,
2. You can pop your head in his room for five minutes a month and say "Whatcha up to, sport? You're not jacking off? Too bad. That's all I had when I was a kid. Nope. Not even an Atari. What're you playing? 'Nazi Zombie Quake-Engine Columbine Guns Of Doom'? Cool. Look at the blood. Hey! Was that an eyeball? You know this is just a game, right? No biggie. Just annealing your spin-glass a little. Ciao, big guy." Then you can go back to your Bud and your fishin' show and grinding your teeth over the way the shop-lead gets on your ass about losing tools in peoples' oilpans.
The opposite of love isn't hate, it's indifference. And being embarassed in front of your own sprog is nothing compared to explaining his history-making crime to the world.
--Blair
Did anyone else do a doubletake on this? Or did I just miss a motherboard chipset in the 8xx series that happened to have the same number as Intel's old 32-bit mil-spec CPU line?
--Blair
Yeah. Sure. Socialized lunacy.
Unless you believe that cryonics is capable of paying off in reanimation.
Then your model falls apart, because the frozen will return to manage their money.
But your fear is already doomed to be realized. Inheritance preserves wealth almost as surely as Trust does. We're already overrun with inbred billionaire brats. So whether their parents are popsicles or worm-food is moot.
--Blair
What do wings have to do with eliptical orbits?
If you're miscalculating your orbit as badly as implied here, they and a few seconds of panicky stickhandling when you re-enter the atmosphere are what keeps you from hitting the planet, splat, we can rebuild him, etc., etc.
Any orbit that gains significant altitude (radial distance) is elliptical, and turning elliptical orbits into circular ones takes more than just a little "maneuvering", unless they're only slightly eccentric.
You're not going to go hell-bent up to 180 miles and then just sort of float and puff-puff steer to 220 miles. Not unless you want to go back down to 140 miles a few minutes later. You need to fire main engines and reduce your radial momentum and acceleration both to zero. Maneuvering thrust is only for fifth-decimal-place stuff like attitude control and easing up to a space station for docking.
And thanks for the pointer to the Niven book. There's so much cloying fantasty and ersatz science in SF these days that I've given up everything in the written forms but collecting signed copies of books I've read.
--Blair
...which web-marketing company first proffered the meme that a banner view was worth dollars, rather than the mills it's actually worth?
That guy owes me and my friends a few trillion dollars.
--Blair
Er, no.
Orbital altitude is determined solely by final speed.
I.e., once you shut off the thrust, you are in the highest orbit you will ever have.
If you think you will "coast" to a higher orbit after an impulse of thrust, you need to think about adding wings to your coaster, because you're gonna need them to help you miss the Earth on the way down.
To change a circular orbit, you do not push up, and you do not push down, you push with or against the direction of travel, tangential to your orbit. And you do so constantly, and constantly adjusting your attitude to keep the thrust purely tangential, because, again, once you shut off the thrust, you are in your new orbit, and if you add any radial thrust, you're in an elliptical orbit. And we're back to needing those wings.
--Blair
And slowly, across the nation, work grinds to a halt for all Slashdot'ers...
Slashdot has been Starwarsed.
--Blair
>>Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. -- Pablo Picasso
Pablo never programmed one.
--Blair
My soul doesn't need a shell.
Certainly not a fragile, bulbous, smelly one like this.
--Blair
"Or wouldn't you rather be a pig?"
Flamebait?
Never. I was dead serious. Genomics is a simple syllogism. Gene sequences A acts in time sequence B and environment C to produce Protein D. And all higher-order set combinatorics of sequences and environments and proteins. Listing the genome was just a start. What follows will simply require some real computing power.
The Spectator had no business pretending that the Washington Post can whisper, and it had no business spreading FUD about the ability of genomics to succeed in determining the detailed mechanisms of genetics.
--Blair
No. Of course not. Nobody is requiring you.
But there is a gentleman's agreement, a societal norm, a convenience, and every other kind of non-contract contract up to but not quite including an easement on your eyeballs.
Advertisers get value for their ad dollar because the television programmers deliver your attention span. Television programmers get value for their effort by selling your attention to the advertisers. You get value for your time and attention by receiving entertainment and information as moving pictures on a box in your own livingroom. Without that natural exchange, there would be no business called television.
So, if it becomes possible for a significant number of television viewers to avoid paying their attention to the advertisers' messages, that business is going to go away. Television will fold harder than the Internet did once people found out the ROI on a banner ad was 1% of what they were paying for it.
And if you demand payment for the time you spend observing commercial filmlets, you will be charged to watch the rest of the programming. At which point there's no reason to watch the commercial filmlets. So if you want to watch the programming, you will have to make up the money the advertisers no longer pay. But television programmers aren't stupid, and after tens or hundreds of experiments will find a way to get some sort of advertising through to you so they can get money from both ends again.
Your cost for video entertainment is offset by the advertisers' payments. They don't require anyone to return the favor, but if people don't watch their ads they will stop paying. Simple business.
--Blair
"Dvorak missed the point."
...kicking the crap out of an old woman.... Sure, it might be fun, and it feels good while you're doing it, but, after all is done, what have you accomplished really?
Sent a message to the rest of the old women who try to spray you with perfume as you walk by.
--Blair
That's it. You don't forget a name like Cartwright-Chickering, and it popped up in one of the alternate titles.
--Blair
"Where's the power to mod when you need it?"
If there is a supernatural genetic force, then there's no need for a nucleic genetic force.
--Blair
"Occam is sporting a goat."
The Spectator is mentally unbalanced.
And all this crap about not ever knowing how it works is dreadful FUD.
--Blair
"Allele your nucleotide base are bond to us."