1) What incentive does a "lifetime of income" give to songwriters to write new songs?
More income. We're not in some semi-Communist society where producing one hit entitles the creator to full lifetime support with no possibility for further gain. In a capitalist market with copyright protection, a big hit might mean thousands of dollars per month for a year tapering off to a hundred a month ten years out. Income yes, but infinite wealth no. The incentive to write a new song is another year of living wages and another $100/month in retirement.
If it takes 6 months to record an album why should they still get paid for the work in 90 years?
But an artist gets zero income during the time it takes to create the copyrighted work. And the time invested is not just how long it takes to record the music or paint the picture, but all the years of developing the skill and ideas.
Some artists might get an advance on their anticipated future income from a speculative publisher, but their work doesn't actually generate any money until after it's finished.
How much should an artist be paid during the process of creation? They might toil for a year and produce something that's only marginally desired by the public. Or they could produce something brilliant in a matter of days. Paying by the hour doesn't make sense with such a variable endeavour. It's more fair to let the buyers decide how much their creation is worth through royalties.
Whether commercial success comes in two years or twenty, the public has decided it wants to buy what the artist is selling. The artist, who worked without any promise of reward, therefore deserves to be paid whenever a sale is eventually made.
For the good of society and the promotion of future creations, there should be a limit to the artificial monopoly on distribution granted by government. Maybe that should be a decade, or maybe it should be the lifetime of the creator. But an artist's reimbursement certainly shouldn't be limited to the time it takes to produce their creation.
Two other responders call you a liar, but I have the same problem in 10.4. Open Finder, go to List view, mouse over the divider between column headings. No resize icon until I click.
I posed this question when the Starcraft No-CD patch came out: What is Blizzard's motivation?
My hypothesis was that it was going to be part of a promotion for Starcraft II. Make original Starcraft a download for cheap or free to bring back old players and introduce new ones. As a map maker, the influx of players would be exciting.
But the more likely explanation is that the Mac Book Air was just released and has no CD drive. Blizzard is good at supporting Macs and keeping old games playable, so this is probably just a continuation of that policy.
The spectrum has value to data carriers. They can build transmitters and charge customers money for wireless data access. How much will the carriers charge? As much as the potential customers will pay. And the customers will value the service in comparison to other available sources.
If the carriers got this spectrum for free and had zero competition, then they could charge $1000/minute or whatever customers will pay when the only alternative is no wireless communication. All the profit goes to the carriers, not lower prices for consumers.
If, on the other hand, paying $4 billion for the spectrum makes the carrier's service too expensive to compete in the market, then well they shouldn't bid. If absolutely nobody can justify bidding that much for the spectrum, then the government will run a new auction with fewer restrictions or a lower reserve. If nobody else wants it, then I'm sure the inventors with the world-saving idea can pony up twenty bucks.
The "World cable capacity" plot at the bottom of the map is misleading. Total capacity is 7.1 tbps and used capacity is 2.1 tbps. They visualized the values as circles, so the ratio of areas should be 7.1:2.1. But instead they set the diameters to that ratio. The result is that capacity appears 9% used when it is actually 30% used (and 80% purchased).
The "Internet users affected by the Alexandria accident" plot to the left uses circles correctly.
In SI, the values are 12 m/s at an angle of 55 degrees with a mass of 160 kg, clearing a 3.8 m barrier at 10 m away.
I had some recollection that 45 degrees was the optimum launch angle, but apparently that maximizes distance, not height. Mass doesn't factor into the calculations unless you include air resistance, which the paper neglects.
The surprisingly sensitive factor is launch velocity. Lose 1 m/s and you smack into the middle of the wall. Gain 1 m/s and clear a 16 ft barrier, landing 52 ft away. It still seems phenomenal to actually get a tiger's horizontal velocity redirected at 55 degrees.
I totally agree that a person's personality is strongly tied to their body chemistry. I have personal experience with chemotherapy, a variety of psycho-active drugs, and kidney failure. What I was amazed to discover was how much these changes to my body chemistry altered my personality. I am mostly back to my old self, but with new respect for how different I could be and how much of personality is based on chemistry.
As computer nerds we are likely to think of the brain as a Turing computer. The hardware and environment don't matter, just the programming. So we assume that someone's personality is entirely determined by the capacity of their brain computer, their experiences, and conscious decisions.
But the brain's mental state is sensitive to the chemical environment influenced by the other organs and glands. Seeing how changes in kidney function changed my mental abilities, I think maybe the Egyptians were not so silly to consider the kidney and liver to be as important as the brain for carrying a person's soul.
The experience has also made me more tolerant of other personalities. I could be those people even with my own brain but a different set of organs. I wonder if there have been any studies of personality change after liver and kidney transplants. What would happen if we could someday perform a brain transplant. Should we consider the soul and identity to transfer with the brain or with the body, or is a new combination a new person?
I use Netflix/snail mail to catch up on older popular movies and indie movies. The problems with Netflix/streaming are:
1) Doesn't work on my Mac unless I boot into Windows. 2) Doesn't display on my HDTV unless I drag out the big HDMI cable and audio cable and tether down my laptop. 3) With only 6,000 titles, classic and indie movies are unavailable. Apparently so are recent blockbusters.
I have Comcast On Demand but the selection is miniscule and the interface is slow and inefficient. So I'm tempted to try something like Amazon Unbox through an X-Box or iTunes rentals through an AppleTV (neither of which I own yet). Does the Playstation 3 do movie downloads too? A Blu-Ray player would be nice.
I also have some videos that I download to my laptop, like podcasts, and would like to watch them conveniently on my TV. It sounds like AppleTV would work smoothly. Are any of the other systems good for that? Is there any other source of indie movies besides Netflix/snail mail? (Brick & mortar video rentals used to be an option, but all the ones in my neighborhood went out of business.)
And another question: How do video stores and now Netflix get their business cleared with the publishers? Do they just buy one disc at retail price and rent it to a hundred people? Or do they have to pay a royalty for each rental? Could a business do the same thing with music through the mail? Netunes?
I think your parent poster doesn't realize how long it takes to turn a basic scientific discovery into a consumer product. There is a ton of work to do: understanding the phenomenon, optimizing conditions, designing a device, patenting, building a manufacturing plant, working out failures and inefficiencies, licensing, marketing, and getting the cost low enough to be affordable outside of military and space applications.
Before I became a scientist and engineer myself I would have thought a couple years would be plenty. Now I see that ten years is more realistic, and the basic research that I do could be twenty years or more from a consumer device.
The result is that we are using big scientific breakthroughs, but the science part was done a decade ago. Current processors use strained silicon on germanium, a development similar in scope to silicon nanowire anodes. I think Slashdot even discussed it several years back.
Sometimes Slashdot discusses Apple announcements about a new laptop available today. Sometimes Slashdot talks about solid state hard drives expected in a few months. And sometimes we hear about discoveries right at the beginning of the development process, and that's just fine for science-oriented people like me.
My first computer games were in my elementary school library on TRS-80's: Oregon Trail and Worm. A year later I had my own TI-99/4A and was programming simple games myself.
I have always preferred games with lots of depth of interaction between the player and the computer, like Civilization. These days I make maps for Starcraft including adaptations of RISK, Civilization, Phantom, and Turret Defense. A game that's moddable is much more fun to me than one that's the same every time it's started up.
My first non-computer games were probably Match, War, Tag, Hide-and-Seek, Candyland, and a wide variety of other board games to follow.
In the end, this DOES result in slightly higher cost for the low end model, because the cost of production (or development) of the low end product is higher than it would have been, if the company had only been making the low end model, and that money ends up in the pockets of the manufacturers who shave overhead on production. So from that point of view it's not a good thing for the consumer, but not for the reason they are seeing.
Eh, I don't think it necessarily makes the low end model more expensive. If a company makes only one model then all of the overhead is borne by that model. If they also make a high end model then the overhead can be shared. Even if the total overhead goes up due to complexity, the portion on the low end could go down due to sharing.
When I worked at [a major, recently reported litigious auto maker] they switched their low end cars from offering a variety of sound systems to one standard system. Their profit improved by simplifying production and installing the formerly premium system on every car. In that case the price of the low end model went up, although by less than it previously cost to upgrade individually.
But for some features they continued to offer low end options even when it made production more expensive. Some "extremely budget conscious" consumers view power windows as luxuries and will buy only cars with manual windows. Adding the manual window option probably makes the low end cars more expensive than if they just put in power windows universally. But since that cost gets lost in the total price of a car, it's wise to avoid the appearance of expense rather than lose a sale to an expense-averse customer.
Yeah, there are vehicles that already adjust the number of cylinders on demand. One of them is a large domestic SUV. The advertising slogan is something like "Eight cylinders when you need them. Four when you don't."
The benefit to the vehicle owner is lower fuel costs, not an economic model to transmit his cylinder utilization to the manufacturer for a reduction in his vehicle loan payments. That'd just be silly.
If you want a car with less power, you opt for a smaller engine. If you want a single-core processor with less power, you opt for a slower clock speed. The processor you buy might be manufactured alongside the ones sold at higher speeds, but it failed testing or was intentionally crippled to maintain a distinction between high-end and low-end.
Sometimes it's easier for the manufacturer to make everything the same and then cripple or add on to create different classes. Suppose Initech developed a screaming-fast processor that they could sell for servers at $90,000 a piece. It also happens to cost only $90 to manufacturer. They could have priced them at $100 and sold 100 times as many for desktops, but the loss of profit in the server market would make it a loss. So instead they chop off 90% of the cores or reduce the clock speed by 90% on the processors destined for desktops. It's cheaper for Initech than to manufacture a second low-performance design and even the crippled processors are a better buy than the competition. It's economically wise and perfectly moral.
The tricky part with manycore processors is that halving the clock speed is usually more crippling than halving the number of cores. But it all depends on how well the software parallelizes. It could make sense to sell the somecore processors at a discount, and then three years later when the customer is thinking about buying new machines say "We could double the performance of your existing hardware for half the cost."
It might have been dumb of the customer to buy the crippled processors in the first place, but if a competitor can offer uncrippled processors for the same price then the customer won't make that mistake. And sometimes making half of a capital investment now and half later is a good business plan.
It would seem that many of the early computer programmers didn't know how to type properly. These calculator-type keyboards were okay if you were used to hunt-and-peck typing, but awful if you tried to touch type. So you either came to computers as a hunt-and-pecker, started on computers as your first exposure to typing (like me), or banged your head against the keyboard since it'd have the same outcome as applying your touch typing muscle knowledge.
Maybe it wasn't such a big deal back then for typing to be slow and inefficient. Computers didn't have much memory or much networking. A few thousand characters is all the software could take anyway, unlike today when big documents, long variable names, and online chat are common.
By the way, how many Slashdotters know how to touch type? I took a typing (as in typewriter) class in high school to fulfill some domestic skill requirement and it's one of the most useful things I ever learned. By the time my brother got to high school they were calling it keyboarding instead. Is that a common requirement these days?
Woohoo, I've had a gripe about tagging for a while but I didn't want to post off topic. Since you already started the thread and since the article is about shady Web practices, here goes.
1) Slashdot's tags are obviously manipulated. I don't bother to tag anymore because I know that the only ones that show up are from people with bots or some other scheme with the ability to promote any bizarre tag they think up.
2) Tags that pass judgement on the article, rather than merely classifying it, are the lowest form of Anonymous Cowardism. We can't see who wrote the tag, we can't respond in place, we can't moderate, and we can't even reference the tag since they appear and disappear over time without a trace.
I was about to post the same complaint, that Si has the same structure as C diamond. But then again, by the author's definition of "pretty", Si is pretty. It has extremely high symmetry in it's lowest energy state. It also happens to be a ridiculously useful chemical element.
Silicon also has at least a dozen other phases it can form at high pressure and temperature, some of which are even metallic. That might also qualify as pretty according to an emergent complexity definition.
Despite the oxymoronic name, there does exist a fun multiplayer variant of Klondike solitaire. Each person plays their own deck and columns, but the stacks where you put cards in A-2-3-...-J-Q-K order are shared. Each ace starts a new stack, so there can be multiple partially complete stacks for each suit. The first player to get all of their cards out of their columns and onto any of the stacks wins. It's fast-paced and competitive.
I've had an HDTV for a year now. Nothing huge, just a 32" Sharp LCD. I got it mainly for the better aspect ratio; I was tired of watching cropped movies and letterboxed network television. It's also wonderful for watching sports, being able to see more of the field and tons of detail.
Despite the arguments some Slashdotters have made about the human eye being unable to distinguish between HD and SD on a small screen, it's a clear improvement even for me with uncorrected 20/40 vision. Buying 1080p for $1200 rather than 720p for $800 may have been overkill, but I might use the set as a whopping big computer monitor someday.
I really don't care much about the DRM. I don't buy movies, I get them from Netflix or on cable. So the cost to me stays the same and the ability to copy is unimportant. It would be nice to just download movies and shuffle them easily between all of my computer and TV screens, but my Internet bandwidth just isn't ready for that yet.
I have HDTV now and I want to watch HD movies now. As soon as there's a non-sucky player for $100 I'm in.
I know it's popular to rip on TV around here. But if you're interested in education, you should realize that TV is education. Millions of people learn what to eat, how to manage their health, and how to interact with the world through television. One of the most popular shows is The Biggest Loser, educating people about health.
If you don't like what exactly TV is teaching then you ought to blame it on the damn free market of broadcasters.
Who needs a tax to pay for the boxes? The federal government will auction off the freed analog spectrum for around $30 billion. It can subsidize a lot of $50 converter boxes for those who still use antennas and care enough to continue getting a signal over the air. If there's one market that government has a right to screw with, it's the airwaves.
I think next year I'll finally upgrade my system. I have a TI-99/4A. I bought it a few years back when they went on sale at Sears for $100. It has 256 bytes of RAM, but will store programs in the 16 KB of video RAM.
Fifteen colors, 256 x 192 resolution, 3 MHz processor, plenty for coding and reading Slashdot. But Firefox takes forever to load from the cassette tape.
So for ten times the cost (ouch) I could get 250,000 times the RAM, 1,000 times faster clock speed, and at least 10,000,000 times the storage.
I hope my games still run: Parsec, Congo Bongo, and my favorite Alpiner.
The same argument applies to "the universe is expanding". We couldn't detect that either, because we're embedded in space time. We'd expand too. All we can see is the supposed effects of previous expansion, that of Hubble red shift. Try the dots-on-the-balloon experiment. The dots get farther apart. But the distance between them as measured by the size of a dot remains constant.
I am not an astrophysicist, so how does the expansion of space interact with the forces? If there were an ant standing on the balloon, he'd see the dots getting farther away and he might even feel a tug on his legs. But he wouldn't expand himself. Interatomic forces would keep pulling him back to his original size (unless his feet were glued to the balloon).
So if I had a meter stick floating around in intergalactic space, would distant stars expand away relative to the stick's length?
If so, then it's true that you couldn't detect changes in the speed of time by looking at your watch. But maybe you could detect it through some comparison to watch-like phenomena from the past. Or you could detect changes in some ratio of time to space.
Blog is a portmanteau of web log. Log is a perfectly cromulent verb: enter in the log of a ship or another systematic record. So if log can be a verb, it takes only an iota of imagination to verb blog too.
Oh, I don't disagree that we could be living in a simulated world. I just don't buy the Simulation Hypothesis as proof that we are living in a simulated world.
I believe that we either are living in a simulation or live in a universe where a simulation could be indistinquishable from reality. But if we are in a simulation then our world is simpler then the enclosing world or our clocks run slower.
Likewise, I believe that it's possible for life to exist in some sort of digital or analog computer within our world. But I don't think we have a good enough definition of life to recognize it. Many people say that if the physical constants were different that life could not exist, but I suspect that something matching the definition could exist even if it's totally different from our electron-proton-neutron-electromagnetism-gravity-dwelling selves.
Slashdot Mirror
More income. We're not in some semi-Communist society where producing one hit entitles the creator to full lifetime support with no possibility for further gain. In a capitalist market with copyright protection, a big hit might mean thousands of dollars per month for a year tapering off to a hundred a month ten years out. Income yes, but infinite wealth no. The incentive to write a new song is another year of living wages and another $100/month in retirement.
But an artist gets zero income during the time it takes to create the copyrighted work. And the time invested is not just how long it takes to record the music or paint the picture, but all the years of developing the skill and ideas.
Some artists might get an advance on their anticipated future income from a speculative publisher, but their work doesn't actually generate any money until after it's finished.
How much should an artist be paid during the process of creation? They might toil for a year and produce something that's only marginally desired by the public. Or they could produce something brilliant in a matter of days. Paying by the hour doesn't make sense with such a variable endeavour. It's more fair to let the buyers decide how much their creation is worth through royalties.
Whether commercial success comes in two years or twenty, the public has decided it wants to buy what the artist is selling. The artist, who worked without any promise of reward, therefore deserves to be paid whenever a sale is eventually made.
For the good of society and the promotion of future creations, there should be a limit to the artificial monopoly on distribution granted by government. Maybe that should be a decade, or maybe it should be the lifetime of the creator. But an artist's reimbursement certainly shouldn't be limited to the time it takes to produce their creation.
Two other responders call you a liar, but I have the same problem in 10.4. Open Finder, go to List view, mouse over the divider between column headings. No resize icon until I click.
If the government doesn't support science, then how does science get done?
Are there any examples of nations that have high science production without government support?
I posed this question when the Starcraft No-CD patch came out: What is Blizzard's motivation?
My hypothesis was that it was going to be part of a promotion for Starcraft II. Make original Starcraft a download for cheap or free to bring back old players and introduce new ones. As a map maker, the influx of players would be exciting.
But the more likely explanation is that the Mac Book Air was just released and has no CD drive. Blizzard is good at supporting Macs and keeping old games playable, so this is probably just a continuation of that policy.
To feed a troll - 1...
The spectrum has value to data carriers. They can build transmitters and charge customers money for wireless data access. How much will the carriers charge? As much as the potential customers will pay. And the customers will value the service in comparison to other available sources.
If the carriers got this spectrum for free and had zero competition, then they could charge $1000/minute or whatever customers will pay when the only alternative is no wireless communication. All the profit goes to the carriers, not lower prices for consumers.
If, on the other hand, paying $4 billion for the spectrum makes the carrier's service too expensive to compete in the market, then well they shouldn't bid. If absolutely nobody can justify bidding that much for the spectrum, then the government will run a new auction with fewer restrictions or a lower reserve. If nobody else wants it, then I'm sure the inventors with the world-saving idea can pony up twenty bucks.
The "World cable capacity" plot at the bottom of the map is misleading. Total capacity is 7.1 tbps and used capacity is 2.1 tbps. They visualized the values as circles, so the ratio of areas should be 7.1:2.1. But instead they set the diameters to that ratio. The result is that capacity appears 9% used when it is actually 30% used (and 80% purchased).
The "Internet users affected by the Alexandria accident" plot to the left uses circles correctly.
Clearing a 12.5 ft barrier at 33 ft away just didn't feel intuitively possible, so I found a projectile physics toy to test it:
Projectile Motion
In SI, the values are 12 m/s at an angle of 55 degrees with a mass of 160 kg, clearing a 3.8 m barrier at 10 m away.
I had some recollection that 45 degrees was the optimum launch angle, but apparently that maximizes distance, not height. Mass doesn't factor into the calculations unless you include air resistance, which the paper neglects.
The surprisingly sensitive factor is launch velocity. Lose 1 m/s and you smack into the middle of the wall. Gain 1 m/s and clear a 16 ft barrier, landing 52 ft away. It still seems phenomenal to actually get a tiger's horizontal velocity redirected at 55 degrees.
I totally agree that a person's personality is strongly tied to their body chemistry. I have personal experience with chemotherapy, a variety of psycho-active drugs, and kidney failure. What I was amazed to discover was how much these changes to my body chemistry altered my personality. I am mostly back to my old self, but with new respect for how different I could be and how much of personality is based on chemistry.
As computer nerds we are likely to think of the brain as a Turing computer. The hardware and environment don't matter, just the programming. So we assume that someone's personality is entirely determined by the capacity of their brain computer, their experiences, and conscious decisions.
But the brain's mental state is sensitive to the chemical environment influenced by the other organs and glands. Seeing how changes in kidney function changed my mental abilities, I think maybe the Egyptians were not so silly to consider the kidney and liver to be as important as the brain for carrying a person's soul.
The experience has also made me more tolerant of other personalities. I could be those people even with my own brain but a different set of organs. I wonder if there have been any studies of personality change after liver and kidney transplants. What would happen if we could someday perform a brain transplant. Should we consider the soul and identity to transfer with the brain or with the body, or is a new combination a new person?
I use Netflix/snail mail to catch up on older popular movies and indie movies. The problems with Netflix/streaming are:
1) Doesn't work on my Mac unless I boot into Windows.
2) Doesn't display on my HDTV unless I drag out the big HDMI cable and audio cable and tether down my laptop.
3) With only 6,000 titles, classic and indie movies are unavailable. Apparently so are recent blockbusters.
I have Comcast On Demand but the selection is miniscule and the interface is slow and inefficient. So I'm tempted to try something like Amazon Unbox through an X-Box or iTunes rentals through an AppleTV (neither of which I own yet). Does the Playstation 3 do movie downloads too? A Blu-Ray player would be nice.
I also have some videos that I download to my laptop, like podcasts, and would like to watch them conveniently on my TV. It sounds like AppleTV would work smoothly. Are any of the other systems good for that? Is there any other source of indie movies besides Netflix/snail mail? (Brick & mortar video rentals used to be an option, but all the ones in my neighborhood went out of business.)
And another question: How do video stores and now Netflix get their business cleared with the publishers? Do they just buy one disc at retail price and rent it to a hundred people? Or do they have to pay a royalty for each rental? Could a business do the same thing with music through the mail? Netunes?
I think your parent poster doesn't realize how long it takes to turn a basic scientific discovery into a consumer product. There is a ton of work to do: understanding the phenomenon, optimizing conditions, designing a device, patenting, building a manufacturing plant, working out failures and inefficiencies, licensing, marketing, and getting the cost low enough to be affordable outside of military and space applications.
Before I became a scientist and engineer myself I would have thought a couple years would be plenty. Now I see that ten years is more realistic, and the basic research that I do could be twenty years or more from a consumer device.
The result is that we are using big scientific breakthroughs, but the science part was done a decade ago. Current processors use strained silicon on germanium, a development similar in scope to silicon nanowire anodes. I think Slashdot even discussed it several years back.
Sometimes Slashdot discusses Apple announcements about a new laptop available today. Sometimes Slashdot talks about solid state hard drives expected in a few months. And sometimes we hear about discoveries right at the beginning of the development process, and that's just fine for science-oriented people like me.
My first computer games were in my elementary school library on TRS-80's: Oregon Trail and Worm. A year later I had my own TI-99/4A and was programming simple games myself.
I have always preferred games with lots of depth of interaction between the player and the computer, like Civilization. These days I make maps for Starcraft including adaptations of RISK, Civilization, Phantom, and Turret Defense. A game that's moddable is much more fun to me than one that's the same every time it's started up.
My first non-computer games were probably Match, War, Tag, Hide-and-Seek, Candyland, and a wide variety of other board games to follow.
Eh, I don't think it necessarily makes the low end model more expensive. If a company makes only one model then all of the overhead is borne by that model. If they also make a high end model then the overhead can be shared. Even if the total overhead goes up due to complexity, the portion on the low end could go down due to sharing.
When I worked at [a major, recently reported litigious auto maker] they switched their low end cars from offering a variety of sound systems to one standard system. Their profit improved by simplifying production and installing the formerly premium system on every car. In that case the price of the low end model went up, although by less than it previously cost to upgrade individually.
But for some features they continued to offer low end options even when it made production more expensive. Some "extremely budget conscious" consumers view power windows as luxuries and will buy only cars with manual windows. Adding the manual window option probably makes the low end cars more expensive than if they just put in power windows universally. But since that cost gets lost in the total price of a car, it's wise to avoid the appearance of expense rather than lose a sale to an expense-averse customer.
Yeah, there are vehicles that already adjust the number of cylinders on demand. One of them is a large domestic SUV. The advertising slogan is something like "Eight cylinders when you need them. Four when you don't."
The benefit to the vehicle owner is lower fuel costs, not an economic model to transmit his cylinder utilization to the manufacturer for a reduction in his vehicle loan payments. That'd just be silly.
If you want a car with less power, you opt for a smaller engine. If you want a single-core processor with less power, you opt for a slower clock speed. The processor you buy might be manufactured alongside the ones sold at higher speeds, but it failed testing or was intentionally crippled to maintain a distinction between high-end and low-end.
Sometimes it's easier for the manufacturer to make everything the same and then cripple or add on to create different classes. Suppose Initech developed a screaming-fast processor that they could sell for servers at $90,000 a piece. It also happens to cost only $90 to manufacturer. They could have priced them at $100 and sold 100 times as many for desktops, but the loss of profit in the server market would make it a loss. So instead they chop off 90% of the cores or reduce the clock speed by 90% on the processors destined for desktops. It's cheaper for Initech than to manufacture a second low-performance design and even the crippled processors are a better buy than the competition. It's economically wise and perfectly moral.
The tricky part with manycore processors is that halving the clock speed is usually more crippling than halving the number of cores. But it all depends on how well the software parallelizes. It could make sense to sell the somecore processors at a discount, and then three years later when the customer is thinking about buying new machines say "We could double the performance of your existing hardware for half the cost."
It might have been dumb of the customer to buy the crippled processors in the first place, but if a competitor can offer uncrippled processors for the same price then the customer won't make that mistake. And sometimes making half of a capital investment now and half later is a good business plan.
It would seem that many of the early computer programmers didn't know how to type properly. These calculator-type keyboards were okay if you were used to hunt-and-peck typing, but awful if you tried to touch type. So you either came to computers as a hunt-and-pecker, started on computers as your first exposure to typing (like me), or banged your head against the keyboard since it'd have the same outcome as applying your touch typing muscle knowledge.
Maybe it wasn't such a big deal back then for typing to be slow and inefficient. Computers didn't have much memory or much networking. A few thousand characters is all the software could take anyway, unlike today when big documents, long variable names, and online chat are common.
By the way, how many Slashdotters know how to touch type? I took a typing (as in typewriter) class in high school to fulfill some domestic skill requirement and it's one of the most useful things I ever learned. By the time my brother got to high school they were calling it keyboarding instead. Is that a common requirement these days?
Woohoo, I've had a gripe about tagging for a while but I didn't want to post off topic. Since you already started the thread and since the article is about shady Web practices, here goes.
1) Slashdot's tags are obviously manipulated. I don't bother to tag anymore because I know that the only ones that show up are from people with bots or some other scheme with the ability to promote any bizarre tag they think up.
2) Tags that pass judgement on the article, rather than merely classifying it, are the lowest form of Anonymous Cowardism. We can't see who wrote the tag, we can't respond in place, we can't moderate, and we can't even reference the tag since they appear and disappear over time without a trace.
I was about to post the same complaint, that Si has the same structure as C diamond. But then again, by the author's definition of "pretty", Si is pretty. It has extremely high symmetry in it's lowest energy state. It also happens to be a ridiculously useful chemical element.
Silicon also has at least a dozen other phases it can form at high pressure and temperature, some of which are even metallic. That might also qualify as pretty according to an emergent complexity definition.
Despite the oxymoronic name, there does exist a fun multiplayer variant of Klondike solitaire. Each person plays their own deck and columns, but the stacks where you put cards in A-2-3-...-J-Q-K order are shared. Each ace starts a new stack, so there can be multiple partially complete stacks for each suit. The first player to get all of their cards out of their columns and onto any of the stacks wins. It's fast-paced and competitive.
I've had an HDTV for a year now. Nothing huge, just a 32" Sharp LCD. I got it mainly for the better aspect ratio; I was tired of watching cropped movies and letterboxed network television. It's also wonderful for watching sports, being able to see more of the field and tons of detail.
Despite the arguments some Slashdotters have made about the human eye being unable to distinguish between HD and SD on a small screen, it's a clear improvement even for me with uncorrected 20/40 vision. Buying 1080p for $1200 rather than 720p for $800 may have been overkill, but I might use the set as a whopping big computer monitor someday.
I really don't care much about the DRM. I don't buy movies, I get them from Netflix or on cable. So the cost to me stays the same and the ability to copy is unimportant. It would be nice to just download movies and shuffle them easily between all of my computer and TV screens, but my Internet bandwidth just isn't ready for that yet.
I have HDTV now and I want to watch HD movies now. As soon as there's a non-sucky player for $100 I'm in.
I know it's popular to rip on TV around here. But if you're interested in education, you should realize that TV is education. Millions of people learn what to eat, how to manage their health, and how to interact with the world through television. One of the most popular shows is The Biggest Loser, educating people about health.
If you don't like what exactly TV is teaching then you ought to blame it on the damn free market of broadcasters.
Who needs a tax to pay for the boxes? The federal government will auction off the freed analog spectrum for around $30 billion. It can subsidize a lot of $50 converter boxes for those who still use antennas and care enough to continue getting a signal over the air. If there's one market that government has a right to screw with, it's the airwaves.
I think next year I'll finally upgrade my system. I have a TI-99/4A. I bought it a few years back when they went on sale at Sears for $100. It has 256 bytes of RAM, but will store programs in the 16 KB of video RAM.
Fifteen colors, 256 x 192 resolution, 3 MHz processor, plenty for coding and reading Slashdot. But Firefox takes forever to load from the cassette tape.
So for ten times the cost (ouch) I could get 250,000 times the RAM, 1,000 times faster clock speed, and at least 10,000,000 times the storage.
I hope my games still run: Parsec, Congo Bongo, and my favorite Alpiner.
I am not an astrophysicist, so how does the expansion of space interact with the forces? If there were an ant standing on the balloon, he'd see the dots getting farther away and he might even feel a tug on his legs. But he wouldn't expand himself. Interatomic forces would keep pulling him back to his original size (unless his feet were glued to the balloon).
So if I had a meter stick floating around in intergalactic space, would distant stars expand away relative to the stick's length?
If so, then it's true that you couldn't detect changes in the speed of time by looking at your watch. But maybe you could detect it through some comparison to watch-like phenomena from the past. Or you could detect changes in some ratio of time to space.
What verbing are you complaining about? Blogging?
Blog is a portmanteau of web log. Log is a perfectly cromulent verb: enter in the log of a ship or another systematic record. So if log can be a verb, it takes only an iota of imagination to verb blog too.
Oh, I don't disagree that we could be living in a simulated world. I just don't buy the Simulation Hypothesis as proof that we are living in a simulated world.
I believe that we either are living in a simulation or live in a universe where a simulation could be indistinquishable from reality. But if we are in a simulation then our world is simpler then the enclosing world or our clocks run slower.
Likewise, I believe that it's possible for life to exist in some sort of digital or analog computer within our world. But I don't think we have a good enough definition of life to recognize it. Many people say that if the physical constants were different that life could not exist, but I suspect that something matching the definition could exist even if it's totally different from our electron-proton-neutron-electromagnetism-gravity-dwelling selves.