The slashdot story is incorrect - the house was incorrectly valued at $400 million, not $800 million (meaning that the tax rate is double what the story made it appear to be - not 1% but 2%).
According to the article, the real problem was that while the error was caught in a timely manner by the tax people, the bad data had already made it into other systems. Those other instances were never corrected.
I'm curious why those involved with budgeting never questioned why they suddenly had an extra $8 million to play with. Someone more in touch with government and their community should have wondered what was going on.
Also, it seems a lot like counting their chicks before they've hatched. They had already distributed funds that hadn't even been collected yet. If any big player (particularly businesses) were to fail then the same problem would have arisen - funds were distributed and budgeted against that could not be collected.
That isn't even a single order of magnitude more pixels - just little more than half. If we were comparing PAL instead of NTSC the difference with HDTV would be even less.
I mean we're going to have one guy (Jobs) essentially controlling two companies that will between them produce the content, the distribution network, the playback codec and the playback device.
And in other news, the Open Office suite has been released as a Firefox Plugin. Analysts predict that not only will this draw users away from from IE, but millions will also switch away from Office.
An interesting quote from the article, "What we're really waiting for is someone to release a linux distribution as a Firefox plugin. This will spell certain death to both IE and Windows simultaneously. The big hurdle is to figure out how to launch Firefox before the OS has even booted."
They are trying to come up with a DRM scheme with an algorithm complex enough to not fit on the front of a T-Shirt. They want us to have to use the front AND back of the shirt this go-around.
From the pictures, that ramp appears to stick up at least 3 inches above the road surface. I don't know about you, but if I saw anything remotely that large sticking up, I'd be hitting the breaks or changing lanes to avoid it. That could be a real danger unless 100% of the drivers were already familiar with it. I would be very surprised if they tried to use it on roads with speed limits greater than 35 MPH or so.
Why not set up wiki software on your own site and manage wiki permissions as you see fit? It doesn't sound like you expected a bunch of strangers to compose the book for you, so the main gain of it being on wikibooks is negated.
1994: L.A. TheaterWorks does a live production of the original Koch script. Featured actors include several from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Brent Spiner and Will Wheaton do a creditable job, as does Armin Shimerman ("Quark"). Leonard Nimoy, as Professor Pearson, seems to have a bad throat problem, so his voice is very hoarse and his energy level is low and unfocused. Gates McFadden (Dr. Crusher), as Carla Philips the reporter, is pretentious and stiff. It was directed by John de Lancie ("Q"), whom I have grown to appreciate as an actor. It was performed live before an audience as part of the L.A. Theaterworks regular broadcasts in November of 1994. This is a pretty good production, though not the best that the Theaterworks and producer Susan Lowenberg have done. Tapes or a catalog of their productions can be obtained by calling them at, 1-800-708-8863, or their website at http://www.latw.org/.
From your website: I just posted a comment on Slashdot talking about Firefox's market share. I asked that no one bother to visit my site, on account of its general dullness and for fear of it breaking under the weight.
I've now had more visitors in the last half an hour than I've probably had in the last two months... Go figure.
Maybe it's time to add some new content.
Nah, don't bother. None of us will be back. Sometimes I like to visualize Slashdot as a massive crowd of people in a museum. Instead of taking our time and moving around in small groups looking at exhibits, we all crowd and push to look at one single thing. We all talk about it intensely for a little bit, then it drops off the radar never to be revisited (until the story is duped).
National Geographic had an article about India's film industry not long ago. Basically the thing condensed down to the following:
India's movies are typically boiler-plate, and most are based upon the same recurring theme.
Religion and social norms drastically influence the movies. The whole act of dating / courting would be considered extremely backwards and controlled here in the USA. It would be the type of thing we would attribute to the Amish, or the way things were 100 years ago here.
Most of the movies are very surrealistic. The characters will suddenly break into song and dance - a literal music video within the movie. The characters will change costumes and locations many times during the song, and then the song ends and suddenly it's back to a "normal" movie again.
The movies are a source of escapism to a mainly impoverished society. Many movies are shown in tents and other ramshackle theaters that look very seedy at best. Their target audience doesn't want to see realism, or even something down to earth. They want to see love stories where a poor person is escalated into another caste because their lover (not in the literal sense) is wealthy. They want to see 20 exotic locations that they will never get to physically visit, all compressed into a single movie, even though there is no reason whatsoever within the plot or storyline to visit 20 different locations.
The simple fact is that these type of movies would not go over well here in the US. In the vast bulk of films the production levels are so low they simply wouldn't be taken seriously. Indian movie goers simply don't demand much of their movies, so Bollywood keeps churning out the same thing over and over.
In my opinion it is similar to soap operas here in the US. Many people (myself included) look down on soap operas. They seem to be more about quantity than quality, and have a certain cheesy aura to them. However there are those that love them and can't get enough of them. What Bollywood produces is similar, except the cheesy factor is greatly amplified.
This is interesting. My first thought was why not use an external HDD - it would cost a fraction of the price, and would not be nearly as appealing a target for thieves.
Having worked in a hospital for a number of years, the real purpose behind this is evident. Hospitals like to give doctors stuff. Expensive stuff like PDAs and wristwatches, as well as basic stuff like umbrellas, pens, satchels and the free food and drinks well stocked in the physician break rooms. Hospitals make their money by having patients, and besides the Emergency Department, all patients are admitted to the hospital (or referred to for various procedures) by doctors. So hospitals like to give things to physicians to thank them for making them money. In the USA laws exist, and have been strengthened in the last several years, seriously limiting what hospitals can provide for physicians. This is of course to keep these gifts from becoming outright bribes.
Now in the case of these iPods we see a loophole. A way for the hospital to purchase really, really nice gifts for their doctors, under the pretense that it has some medical use. Quite interesting indeed.
There are some photos of me in TIFF format. What's that got to do with these iPods?
Dan East
(I had to submit this post 11 times before it was accepted - the other times I just got a blank page. Anybody have a fix? This happens to me all the time. If I preview I get the toolbar and sidebar but no actual body.)
Apple expects you to do the reasonable thing - buy one of them PowerBook-iPod-charger-thingies. You just plug your iPod into the USB port of the charger (aka PowerBook). Yeah, they're a little on the big side for a power supply, but I've heard they can be used for other things too.
You mean like how the USA passed a law that forced Google to remove links to anti-Scientology websites?
The US did not pass a law to force Google to do anything. Scientologists were able to get a judge to rule that the DMCA protected one of their documents - a document which those websites made available online. It was a copyright issue, the websites merely had to remove the offending content.
It would be no different if a website contained the full text of a Harry Potter book. Our laws would protect that copyrighted content as well. Slightly different than the spin you put on it - as if our government is passing laws to at the bequest of specific organizations to control Google. Sheesh.
Couldn't they keep the gmail.com addresses, and simply require the users to access them via googlemail.com? So all the UK user would see is someone@googlemail.com, although anyone could still email them them as someone@gmail.com.
If so this isn't nearly as big an issue at it would seem.
Interesting, because this month is also the 20th anniversary for another OS and mouse-driven GUI - Amiga OS 1.0. The Commodore Amiga 1000 first shipped in October, 1985. It's truly a shame it did not become more mainstream, because the Amiga's GUI completely blew Windows away.
It took Microsoft at least another decade to offer a gui as smooth and responsive as the Amiga's, with the release of Windows 95. Yep, 10 years before they had a mouse pointer that properly followed the physical mouse like the Amiga's, instead of the herky-jerky mouse movement Window's users had to put up with.
[The USA] is seen as arrogant and determined to remain the sheriff of the world wide web, regardless of whatever the rest of the world may think.
The first sentence of the BBC story is enough to discourage me from reading the rest of the article. Sheriff? So the USA polices the internet in some way? That is ridiculous. The only purpose of that article is to incite readers by scaring them into thinking the US has far more control of the internet than it actually does.
I worked at a video store for quite a while, and it was blatantly obvious that the majority of people rented new releases, and only rented a specific movie once. The pay-per-view market is the same as the video rental market, so it is logical to expect the same trends. Why do you think video stores have dozens of copies of new releases, and only one or two of movies more than a year or two old? Because people aren't renting (or pay-per-viewing) movies they've already seen multiple times.
If the majority of people watched pay-per-view movies more than once, then the broadcasters would offer a lot more non-first-run movies. The market demands something new - something they haven't seen before. It is this demand that is partially to blame for the mind-numbing movies that Hollywood keeps producing. If people wanted quality instead of quantity then we would see Hollywood change their behavior. This is the same driving force with Pay-per-view and movie rentals. People simply want to watch something they haven't already seen, even if it is mediocre at best.
I think this is too expensive. Here's why. The majority of people that watch a movie Pay-Per-View do not go out and buy the movie, nor do they watch it on Pay-Per-View again. Now there are always exceptions - people that really like a specific movie so they go out and buy it. However for most it is about watching something new and different, not watching the same movie over and over (think about how many movies you've rented from the movie store more than once).
So the extra cost is pure profit for Comcast and the movie producers. It's another a way of getting someone to commit to buy a movie before they've watched it - before they find out it is another one of the mindless, forgettable flick comprising 95% of what Hollywood produces these days.
Why do you think they've started premiering movies world-wide? So as many people can see it as possible before negative word of mouth spread, reducing ticket sales. This is similar, but more on an individual scale.
Now if they put a burner in their box, and let the customer burn their own copy for say $5 extra, then that would be reasonable.
Yeah. Let's also hope an old black woman with telepathic ability can draw all the non-evil people together so they can wage battle with the evil survivors.
Also- can anyone explain why data is still so damn expensive?
Sure. Carriers would prefer a small number of people to pay extremely high rates than a whole lot of people paying a reasonable rate. Otherwise they have to invest a lot more in their infrastructure to support the extra traffic. Competition is the only way to help the consumer in this area - the threat of completely losing a customer to a competitor is the only real motivation for a carrier to do anything. All the carriers have their data rates set very high, so at the moment no carrier is much more appealing than the others. As long as there is a group of people willing to pay a high price to utilize a worthwhile amount of available bandwidth the carrier is happy.
Same thing happens with gas stations. Ever notice how groups of gas stations within sight of each other sell gas at nearly the same price? Can't you just picture the managers, who have a tiny amount of say in the price of gas, looking over at their "competitor" and winking and nodding as they decide how high they will set their price?
Slashdot Mirror
Why not disassemble the game and take a look at what the program is designed to do?
Dan East
The slashdot story is incorrect - the house was incorrectly valued at $400 million, not $800 million (meaning that the tax rate is double what the story made it appear to be - not 1% but 2%).
According to the article, the real problem was that while the error was caught in a timely manner by the tax people, the bad data had already made it into other systems. Those other instances were never corrected.
I'm curious why those involved with budgeting never questioned why they suddenly had an extra $8 million to play with. Someone more in touch with government and their community should have wondered what was going on.
Also, it seems a lot like counting their chicks before they've hatched. They had already distributed funds that hadn't even been collected yet. If any big player (particularly businesses) were to fail then the same problem would have arisen - funds were distributed and budgeted against that could not be collected.
Dan East
"it can give you orders of magnitude higher resolution."
That statement is inaccurate.
NTSC DVD: 640x480=307200 pixels
HDTV: 1920x1080=2073600 pixels
2073600/307200=6.75
That isn't even a single order of magnitude more pixels - just little more than half. If we were comparing PAL instead of NTSC the difference with HDTV would be even less.
Dan East
I mean we're going to have one guy (Jobs) essentially controlling two companies that will between them produce the content, the distribution network, the playback codec and the playback device.
Are you talking about Sony?
Dan East
The email from CmdrTaco to ScuttleMonkey should be an interesting read.
Dan East
Which is why the NSA hasn't gone public about their quantum computers yet. We'll be watching a show about it on the History channel in 15 years.
Dan East
Maybe it's just me, but the way the story is worded makes me feel a little sorry for the algae.
Dan East
And in other news, the Open Office suite has been released as a Firefox Plugin. Analysts predict that not only will this draw users away from from IE, but millions will also switch away from Office.
An interesting quote from the article, "What we're really waiting for is someone to release a linux distribution as a Firefox plugin. This will spell certain death to both IE and Windows simultaneously. The big hurdle is to figure out how to launch Firefox before the OS has even booted."
Dan East
They are trying to come up with a DRM scheme with an algorithm complex enough to not fit on the front of a T-Shirt. They want us to have to use the front AND back of the shirt this go-around.
Dan East
From the pictures, that ramp appears to stick up at least 3 inches above the road surface. I don't know about you, but if I saw anything remotely that large sticking up, I'd be hitting the breaks or changing lanes to avoid it. That could be a real danger unless 100% of the drivers were already familiar with it. I would be very surprised if they tried to use it on roads with speed limits greater than 35 MPH or so.
Dan East
Why not set up wiki software on your own site and manage wiki permissions as you see fit? It doesn't sound like you expected a bunch of strangers to compose the book for you, so the main gain of it being on wikibooks is negated.
Dan East
1994: L.A. TheaterWorks does a live production of the original Koch script. Featured actors include several from Star Trek: The Next Generation. Brent Spiner and Will Wheaton do a creditable job, as does Armin Shimerman ("Quark"). Leonard Nimoy, as Professor Pearson, seems to have a bad throat problem, so his voice is very hoarse and his energy level is low and unfocused. Gates McFadden (Dr. Crusher), as Carla Philips the reporter, is pretentious and stiff. It was directed by John de Lancie ("Q"), whom I have grown to appreciate as an actor. It was performed live before an audience as part of the L.A. Theaterworks regular broadcasts in November of 1994. This is a pretty good production, though not the best that the Theaterworks and producer Susan Lowenberg have done. Tapes or a catalog of their productions can be obtained by calling them at, 1-800-708-8863, or their website at http://www.latw.org/.
m l
http://www.greatnorthernaudio.com/sf_radio/wow.ht
Dan East
From your website:
I just posted a comment on Slashdot talking about Firefox's market share. I asked that no one bother to visit my site, on account of its general dullness and for fear of it breaking under the weight.
I've now had more visitors in the last half an hour than I've probably had in the last two months... Go figure.
Maybe it's time to add some new content.
Nah, don't bother. None of us will be back. Sometimes I like to visualize Slashdot as a massive crowd of people in a museum. Instead of taking our time and moving around in small groups looking at exhibits, we all crowd and push to look at one single thing. We all talk about it intensely for a little bit, then it drops off the radar never to be revisited (until the story is duped).
Dan East
National Geographic had an article about India's film industry not long ago. Basically the thing condensed down to the following:
India's movies are typically boiler-plate, and most are based upon the same recurring theme.
Religion and social norms drastically influence the movies. The whole act of dating / courting would be considered extremely backwards and controlled here in the USA. It would be the type of thing we would attribute to the Amish, or the way things were 100 years ago here.
Most of the movies are very surrealistic. The characters will suddenly break into song and dance - a literal music video within the movie. The characters will change costumes and locations many times during the song, and then the song ends and suddenly it's back to a "normal" movie again.
The movies are a source of escapism to a mainly impoverished society. Many movies are shown in tents and other ramshackle theaters that look very seedy at best. Their target audience doesn't want to see realism, or even something down to earth. They want to see love stories where a poor person is escalated into another caste because their lover (not in the literal sense) is wealthy. They want to see 20 exotic locations that they will never get to physically visit, all compressed into a single movie, even though there is no reason whatsoever within the plot or storyline to visit 20 different locations.
The simple fact is that these type of movies would not go over well here in the US. In the vast bulk of films the production levels are so low they simply wouldn't be taken seriously. Indian movie goers simply don't demand much of their movies, so Bollywood keeps churning out the same thing over and over.
In my opinion it is similar to soap operas here in the US. Many people (myself included) look down on soap operas. They seem to be more about quantity than quality, and have a certain cheesy aura to them. However there are those that love them and can't get enough of them. What Bollywood produces is similar, except the cheesy factor is greatly amplified.
Dan East
This is interesting. My first thought was why not use an external HDD - it would cost a fraction of the price, and would not be nearly as appealing a target for thieves.
Having worked in a hospital for a number of years, the real purpose behind this is evident. Hospitals like to give doctors stuff. Expensive stuff like PDAs and wristwatches, as well as basic stuff like umbrellas, pens, satchels and the free food and drinks well stocked in the physician break rooms. Hospitals make their money by having patients, and besides the Emergency Department, all patients are admitted to the hospital (or referred to for various procedures) by doctors. So hospitals like to give things to physicians to thank them for making them money. In the USA laws exist, and have been strengthened in the last several years, seriously limiting what hospitals can provide for physicians. This is of course to keep these gifts from becoming outright bribes.
Now in the case of these iPods we see a loophole. A way for the hospital to purchase really, really nice gifts for their doctors, under the pretense that it has some medical use. Quite interesting indeed.
Dan East
There are some photos of me in TIFF format. What's that got to do with these iPods?
Dan East
(I had to submit this post 11 times before it was accepted - the other times I just got a blank page. Anybody have a fix? This happens to me all the time. If I preview I get the toolbar and sidebar but no actual body.)
Apple expects you to do the reasonable thing - buy one of them PowerBook-iPod-charger-thingies. You just plug your iPod into the USB port of the charger (aka PowerBook). Yeah, they're a little on the big side for a power supply, but I've heard they can be used for other things too.
Dan East
You mean like how the USA passed a law that forced Google to remove links to anti-Scientology websites?
The US did not pass a law to force Google to do anything. Scientologists were able to get a judge to rule that the DMCA protected one of their documents - a document which those websites made available online. It was a copyright issue, the websites merely had to remove the offending content.
It would be no different if a website contained the full text of a Harry Potter book. Our laws would protect that copyrighted content as well. Slightly different than the spin you put on it - as if our government is passing laws to at the bequest of specific organizations to control Google. Sheesh.
Dan East
Couldn't they keep the gmail.com addresses, and simply require the users to access them via googlemail.com? So all the UK user would see is someone@googlemail.com, although anyone could still email them them as someone@gmail.com.
If so this isn't nearly as big an issue at it would seem.
Dan East
Interesting, because this month is also the 20th anniversary for another OS and mouse-driven GUI - Amiga OS 1.0. The Commodore Amiga 1000 first shipped in October, 1985. It's truly a shame it did not become more mainstream, because the Amiga's GUI completely blew Windows away.
It took Microsoft at least another decade to offer a gui as smooth and responsive as the Amiga's, with the release of Windows 95. Yep, 10 years before they had a mouse pointer that properly followed the physical mouse like the Amiga's, instead of the herky-jerky mouse movement Window's users had to put up with.
Dan East
[The USA] is seen as arrogant and determined to remain the sheriff of the world wide web, regardless of whatever the rest of the world may think.
The first sentence of the BBC story is enough to discourage me from reading the rest of the article. Sheriff? So the USA polices the internet in some way? That is ridiculous. The only purpose of that article is to incite readers by scaring them into thinking the US has far more control of the internet than it actually does.
Dan East
I worked at a video store for quite a while, and it was blatantly obvious that the majority of people rented new releases, and only rented a specific movie once. The pay-per-view market is the same as the video rental market, so it is logical to expect the same trends. Why do you think video stores have dozens of copies of new releases, and only one or two of movies more than a year or two old? Because people aren't renting (or pay-per-viewing) movies they've already seen multiple times.
If the majority of people watched pay-per-view movies more than once, then the broadcasters would offer a lot more non-first-run movies. The market demands something new - something they haven't seen before. It is this demand that is partially to blame for the mind-numbing movies that Hollywood keeps producing. If people wanted quality instead of quantity then we would see Hollywood change their behavior. This is the same driving force with Pay-per-view and movie rentals. People simply want to watch something they haven't already seen, even if it is mediocre at best.
Dan East
I think this is too expensive. Here's why. The majority of people that watch a movie Pay-Per-View do not go out and buy the movie, nor do they watch it on Pay-Per-View again. Now there are always exceptions - people that really like a specific movie so they go out and buy it. However for most it is about watching something new and different, not watching the same movie over and over (think about how many movies you've rented from the movie store more than once).
So the extra cost is pure profit for Comcast and the movie producers. It's another a way of getting someone to commit to buy a movie before they've watched it - before they find out it is another one of the mindless, forgettable flick comprising 95% of what Hollywood produces these days.
Why do you think they've started premiering movies world-wide? So as many people can see it as possible before negative word of mouth spread, reducing ticket sales. This is similar, but more on an individual scale.
Now if they put a burner in their box, and let the customer burn their own copy for say $5 extra, then that would be reasonable.
Dan East
Yeah. Let's also hope an old black woman with telepathic ability can draw all the non-evil people together so they can wage battle with the evil survivors.
Dan East
Also- can anyone explain why data is still so damn expensive?
Sure. Carriers would prefer a small number of people to pay extremely high rates than a whole lot of people paying a reasonable rate. Otherwise they have to invest a lot more in their infrastructure to support the extra traffic. Competition is the only way to help the consumer in this area - the threat of completely losing a customer to a competitor is the only real motivation for a carrier to do anything. All the carriers have their data rates set very high, so at the moment no carrier is much more appealing than the others. As long as there is a group of people willing to pay a high price to utilize a worthwhile amount of available bandwidth the carrier is happy.
Same thing happens with gas stations. Ever notice how groups of gas stations within sight of each other sell gas at nearly the same price? Can't you just picture the managers, who have a tiny amount of say in the price of gas, looking over at their "competitor" and winking and nodding as they decide how high they will set their price?
Dan East