Of course that has more to do with the post office than with Netflix or Blockbuster. I use Netflix, and they generally put a movie out in the afternoon mail if they get it in the morning mail. That's about as fast as one can ask.
I assume that Blockbuster is the same way. If not, then they're in serious trouble. I'm not going to say it's easy to achieve on a large scale, but they'd better not be any slower and I bet they can't be any faster.
I don't usually get 48 hour return time, even thoug my local distributor is only an hour's drive from here. But that's mostly the post office adding an extra travel day on one end or the other.
One could choose to alter their model to allow even faster service; say, the ability to request that a movie be sent when you put it in the mail, rather than when they get it, and trust you to be honest (and drop you if you're not). But that would involve them letting out more movies at once, which would cost them more.
Blockbuster could add service whereby you could exchange either by mail or at their place. That might work well for them, since it would mean that they could batch up returns. Mailing costs have got to be a huge chunk of Netflix's cost, since those recipient-pays envelopes have a significant surcharge. A big box of returns would cost only a few dollars. But that would mean making more copies available at the individual stores...
The release notes claim that the latest (1.0.3) improves the update process. I'm not sure what that means, but I'm hoping it means that the next update will not be yet another complete download and reinstall (and yet another attempt to reset my home page in the process.)
Not that this affects the old numbers, but maybe it'll make new numbers slightly more accurate. Not that they're anything other than a terrible proxy for Firefox adoption in the first place, but they're the easiest ones to count.
It's just me; I even found Memento and Crying Game more rewarding for already knowing the secret. I get to admire the technique with which they tell the story. I suppose that pleasure should be reserved for the second viewing.
Mostly, though, I'm just a bit boggled at the most-spoiled event of the century. I mean, you've already seen the sequel.
Spoiling the ending because somebody got to see a rough cut is one thing, but Smith isn't saying anything Lucas hasn't already made available by himself.
Yeah, I suppose that there will be many who want to go see the movie truly not knowing what happens until they see the "one true" version of it. To my tastes you really can't spoil a movie by telling me what happens; as Roger Ebert says a movie is never about what it's about but how it is about it.
Yeah, I hear they had the same problem in the 'Nam.
Seriously, that totally sucks. If you haven't got family willing to do the transfer for you, you've got friends on Slashdot. Lemme know what you want and where you need it sent.
Well, he's been doing mostly Star Wars for the last decade or so. But before that he helped write Indiana Jones, and a lot of people thought that was pretty good. He also did the story for Willow, which a lot of people liked.
And as another poster mentioned American Graffiti was quite good, with the very, very young Harrison Ford. Maybe what he needs to do is rewatch American Graffiti, which is a very different movie from everything else he's done. That's a whole non-scifi/fantasy career track he abanandoned 30+ years ago he could revisit. Perhaps he should stop trying to tell big stories and tell little ones instead.
I've seen the same thing, anecdotally. I don't know what it is AOL does to keep its users from infecting the world. I've never heard of somebody being told "we're closing your AOL account until you clean up."
Some of it must be filtering (blocking viral messages before they hit the user) on incoming mail. They may even be censoring outgoing mail. As for other worms, like sasser, I suspect they blocked the relevant ports long before XP SP2 came out.
But that's supposition. I'd love to know for sure.
I'm surprised we haven't seen that lawsuit yet. I'd guess it's because the lawyers don't think it will make them money.
(Even so, eventually you'll find some lawyer willing to take the case. He'll treat it as a lottery ticket: low odds but a big win.)
So why don't they think it'll win? I'm not a lawyer, but I suspect that the defense will run, "Look, we just carry the bits. If you don't like the bits I send you you're free to set your router to drop 'em on the floor. It's not our job to censor our customers."
I'm not sure it would fly, but my guess is that the lawyers would tell you that the risk is too low to justify a lawsuit.
Still, maybe you can make yourself a bunch of cash by becoming primary litigant on one one these. It should be easy to find a lawyer; check the news for all those companies with bogus class-action suits against them. Pick one at random. I'm not saying your suit would be bogus; I'm saying that there seem to be a class of lawyers who don't care.
Sadly, while some customers might get motivated to learn something, others would just be motivated to switch ISPs. Which costs the ISPs money, which means that they won't do it.
At least such is their thought process as often presented. I suspect it's bad cost-benefit analysis; if your dumber customers leave, it's probably a net win for you. Smarter customers mean less bandwidth (at least, they don't act as spam zombies maxing out the bandwidth) and fewer tech support hours explaining how to fix the cup holder.
The big players (AOL, Comcast) are the best targets for this logic, but they live for those left-side-of-the-bell-curve customers. They're the "default" ISPs that people get because they're so readily available, so they get all the customers who don't know better. (Hell, I don't know better; I use Verizon for my DSL but I don't let them do anything but provide me bits.)
So AOL and Comcast are in a bit of a bind; they don't want these customers, but they don't want to lose them, either. I think that they're probably going to have to use gentle persuasion to say, "Hey, it looks like you've a spam zombie. Please call your cousin's best friend to clean the crap off your computer again and give you a stern talking-to. And please stop downloading Bonzi Buddy."
Actually, "wet suit". A life jacket floats your face up and drags your legs, which means a lot of resistance to swimming. You'll get exhausted before swimming a mile in a life jacket.
In truly well-packed places, like Paris or New York, you get everywhere on foot or on public transportation and don't need a car at all. A car would be a liability, expensive to park and hard to use.
But once you get to the sort of density where Wal-Mart likes, they've centralized some of the shopping but you still have to take a car to get there. Which means you have to own a car, so you're already paying to buy it, insure it, maintain it, regardless of how many miles you drive. So you might as well take it everywhere; public transport would be nice but since you've already paid for the car it's less economically efficient for you.
So we're talking about very different kinds of centralization. Wal-Mart doesn't particularly want to go into large cities because cities already have centralization in the overall structure; you can get things from a variety of different places without travelling much. That, for many, is the best of both worlds. Assuming you like living in apartment buildings.
That's a fascinating thesis; I'd love to try it some day.
But perhaps I have the wrong equipment. When I think of vinyl, my first thought is the scratchy hiss that comes when playing a silent part of the record, especially noticeable when you first put the record on and that hiss is measured against the background noise. One can only assume that it continues under the music as well.
If that's what "warmer sound" means, perhaps you're exactly right: the music was mixed to sound great with that extra low hiss in the background. Or maybe that's just the effect of not using a Shure M25C needle in an MMF-9 turntable.
Is this going to be one of those things where audiophiles insist that old, hard-to-get, inconvenient media sound "warmer", "richer", and "fuller"? Like with the vinyl records and vacuum-tube amplifiers?
I keep waiting for somebody to insist that you haven't really heard Nelly until you've heard him on wax disc. Yeah, the click when the needle goes past the seam is kind of annoying, but the sound is harmonically vibrant and more natural.
The best programmers for any job will be the ones who are experienced both in programming and in the domain. So if somebody is smart enough and willing to work hard enough to double-major, I encourage them to do some other field of interest as well as CS.
The best code is written by CS grads, it's true, but I'm not sure it's because of the CS degree. All of the best programmers I know were top-notch programmers before entering college. College gave them experience, and knowledge, but they had developed their craft from a young age, like any other artist.
Programming really is an art form when done properly, and good programmers rely on an aesthetic sense to avoid "hackish and ugly" code. So if the non-CS people are producing it, it may be because of the reason they avoided CS in the first place. It's the same reason I avoided majoring in art: I'm just not any good at it and didn't expect them to train me well enough to make it worth my time and theirs.
I'd like to see more CS majors at least minor in some other field of interest. There will be those who wish to do CS for its own sake, usually academic: HCI research, automata theory, networking, etc. But for CS majors who want to program computers for a living, and that's a majority of them, I think that they should learn something besides computers. Science, history, business, English: anything that will give them some idea of what it is that the people who are tasking them want.
If necessary, you hire one of those guys to be project lead, and hire cheaper, less experienced programmers to just bang out the code, but I think it all works better if the entire team can both code and develop a real understanding of the requirements, because the spec is never going to quite cut it. A programmer's job isn't to work with computers; otherwise we'd just write a spec-to-software compiler. The programmer's job is to interface between the computer and the client. That works best only when the programmer speaks both languages.
I guess it's a lot to do with the work I like to hire people for. I'd rather develop deep skills in, say, the Windows API, among my existing smart people than hire some bozo because he's the guy who knows Windows API.
But, if course, it's best if you can get your hands on both.
I keep telling people that I'd much rather have a smart employee than one experienced in whatever it is I'm using. If you know any programming at all, you'll learn Java/C++/Visual.NET/whatever it is you need, if you're smart. If you're not smart, no matter what it is you know, it's not going to do me any good.
This article is about kernel development. While I appreciate the development being done to make the kernel faster/better/cheaper (well, it doesn't get any cheaper), it's already a Pretty Damn Good kernel. It sounds to me like the most crucial thing would be to solidify it and test the bejeezus out of it, then largely freeze it, because that's not where the problems are.
When people complain about MS Windows, they're not (usually) complaining about the kernel. They're talking about all of the stuff built on top of it: window manager, IE, networking, configuration. If the Linux kernel is receiving too little testing to be stable, what about the millions of lines of code that go into X windows, Gnome, CUPS (as mentioned the other day), etc.
If MS didn't have to make kernel changes to bettter support security, I suspect they wouldn't be touching it at all. BSODs are still more common than they should be, but most users find them extremely rare, and the kernel is Fast Enough relative to the work that needs to be done. The improvements in Longhorn are largely about changes above the kernel, especially in its spiffy interface.
While I'm grateful to Linus and all of the other developers for the kernel improvements, and while Open Source means never being told what to work on, kernel improvements other than stability are probably a terrible use of manpower. The kernel is a tiny fraction of the lines of code that go into a Linux distro. They are basic, and need to be rock-solid, but while performance improvements there benefit everybody, they don't benefit you at all if X, or KDE, or Konqueror, or any of the hundreds of other higher-level apps crash.
Yep, most of the fans feel that way. Many of the people who liked the first three books thought So Long and Thanks For All The Fish thought it was a far lesser book.
You might try the Dirk Gently books, which I felt were more like SLaTFATF than the Hitchhiker's books.
If you think that "It hung in the air in exactly the way that bricks don't" is funny because of the silly image and novel phrasing, you'll probably like the book. If you think it's just stupid, then by all means pick up something else. The world is too full of books to read ones you hate.
Well, truth be told, I haven't managed to see Napoleon Dynamite yet. It's on my Netflix queue. But somehow, I just _know_ I'm going to hate it, which is going to make it all the much harder for me to be "objectively" subjective and try to like it for what it is. I'll try, I really will, but 99% of the time when my friends love a cult classic, I hate it. Napoleon Dynamite has all the earmarks: quirky characters that you'd hate if you met them in real life, quotes people insist on ad infinitum, t-shirts in Hot Topic.
But then, I managed to find the humor in Rocky Horror, and I love Monty Python, so maybe there's hope for me. Or it.
The list of things that I could point out that I hated that everybody else loved... would make for a very long and boring post.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course that has more to do with the post office than with Netflix or Blockbuster. I use Netflix, and they generally put a movie out in the afternoon mail if they get it in the morning mail. That's about as fast as one can ask.
I assume that Blockbuster is the same way. If not, then they're in serious trouble. I'm not going to say it's easy to achieve on a large scale, but they'd better not be any slower and I bet they can't be any faster.
I don't usually get 48 hour return time, even thoug my local distributor is only an hour's drive from here. But that's mostly the post office adding an extra travel day on one end or the other.
One could choose to alter their model to allow even faster service; say, the ability to request that a movie be sent when you put it in the mail, rather than when they get it, and trust you to be honest (and drop you if you're not). But that would involve them letting out more movies at once, which would cost them more.
Blockbuster could add service whereby you could exchange either by mail or at their place. That might work well for them, since it would mean that they could batch up returns. Mailing costs have got to be a huge chunk of Netflix's cost, since those recipient-pays envelopes have a significant surcharge. A big box of returns would cost only a few dollars. But that would mean making more copies available at the individual stores...
Thanks, Anonymous Coward, whoever you are!
The release notes claim that the latest (1.0.3) improves the update process. I'm not sure what that means, but I'm hoping it means that the next update will not be yet another complete download and reinstall (and yet another attempt to reset my home page in the process.)
Not that this affects the old numbers, but maybe it'll make new numbers slightly more accurate. Not that they're anything other than a terrible proxy for Firefox adoption in the first place, but they're the easiest ones to count.
Yeah, I know, it was badly phrased. I hit the submit button before I finished. Mostly, I was just boggling that this was the most-spoiled movie ever.
It's just me; I even found Memento and Crying Game more rewarding for already knowing the secret. I get to admire the technique with which they tell the story. I suppose that pleasure should be reserved for the second viewing.
Mostly, though, I'm just a bit boggled at the most-spoiled event of the century. I mean, you've already seen the sequel.
Spoiling the ending because somebody got to see a rough cut is one thing, but Smith isn't saying anything Lucas hasn't already made available by himself.
Can you really spoil a movie when you can buy the book at Amazon?
Yeah, I suppose that there will be many who want to go see the movie truly not knowing what happens until they see the "one true" version of it. To my tastes you really can't spoil a movie by telling me what happens; as Roger Ebert says a movie is never about what it's about but how it is about it.
Yeah, I hear they had the same problem in the 'Nam.
Seriously, that totally sucks. If you haven't got family willing to do the transfer for you, you've got friends on Slashdot. Lemme know what you want and where you need it sent.
It's down the hall, on the right. There's extra toilet paper in the cabinet.
Well, he's been doing mostly Star Wars for the last decade or so. But before that he helped write Indiana Jones, and a lot of people thought that was pretty good. He also did the story for Willow, which a lot of people liked.
And as another poster mentioned American Graffiti was quite good, with the very, very young Harrison Ford. Maybe what he needs to do is rewatch American Graffiti, which is a very different movie from everything else he's done. That's a whole non-scifi/fantasy career track he abanandoned 30+ years ago he could revisit. Perhaps he should stop trying to tell big stories and tell little ones instead.
I've seen the same thing, anecdotally. I don't know what it is AOL does to keep its users from infecting the world. I've never heard of somebody being told "we're closing your AOL account until you clean up."
Some of it must be filtering (blocking viral messages before they hit the user) on incoming mail. They may even be censoring outgoing mail. As for other worms, like sasser, I suspect they blocked the relevant ports long before XP SP2 came out.
But that's supposition. I'd love to know for sure.
I'm surprised we haven't seen that lawsuit yet. I'd guess it's because the lawyers don't think it will make them money.
(Even so, eventually you'll find some lawyer willing to take the case. He'll treat it as a lottery ticket: low odds but a big win.)
So why don't they think it'll win? I'm not a lawyer, but I suspect that the defense will run, "Look, we just carry the bits. If you don't like the bits I send you you're free to set your router to drop 'em on the floor. It's not our job to censor our customers."
I'm not sure it would fly, but my guess is that the lawyers would tell you that the risk is too low to justify a lawsuit.
Still, maybe you can make yourself a bunch of cash by becoming primary litigant on one one these. It should be easy to find a lawyer; check the news for all those companies with bogus class-action suits against them. Pick one at random. I'm not saying your suit would be bogus; I'm saying that there seem to be a class of lawyers who don't care.
IAS
(I Sure Am).
Sadly, while some customers might get motivated to learn something, others would just be motivated to switch ISPs. Which costs the ISPs money, which means that they won't do it.
At least such is their thought process as often presented. I suspect it's bad cost-benefit analysis; if your dumber customers leave, it's probably a net win for you. Smarter customers mean less bandwidth (at least, they don't act as spam zombies maxing out the bandwidth) and fewer tech support hours explaining how to fix the cup holder.
The big players (AOL, Comcast) are the best targets for this logic, but they live for those left-side-of-the-bell-curve customers. They're the "default" ISPs that people get because they're so readily available, so they get all the customers who don't know better. (Hell, I don't know better; I use Verizon for my DSL but I don't let them do anything but provide me bits.)
So AOL and Comcast are in a bit of a bind; they don't want these customers, but they don't want to lose them, either. I think that they're probably going to have to use gentle persuasion to say, "Hey, it looks like you've a spam zombie. Please call your cousin's best friend to clean the crap off your computer again and give you a stern talking-to. And please stop downloading Bonzi Buddy."
Actually, "wet suit". A life jacket floats your face up and drags your legs, which means a lot of resistance to swimming. You'll get exhausted before swimming a mile in a life jacket.
Yes, IIADS (I Am A Distance Swimmer).
In truly well-packed places, like Paris or New York, you get everywhere on foot or on public transportation and don't need a car at all. A car would be a liability, expensive to park and hard to use.
But once you get to the sort of density where Wal-Mart likes, they've centralized some of the shopping but you still have to take a car to get there. Which means you have to own a car, so you're already paying to buy it, insure it, maintain it, regardless of how many miles you drive. So you might as well take it everywhere; public transport would be nice but since you've already paid for the car it's less economically efficient for you.
So we're talking about very different kinds of centralization. Wal-Mart doesn't particularly want to go into large cities because cities already have centralization in the overall structure; you can get things from a variety of different places without travelling much. That, for many, is the best of both worlds. Assuming you like living in apartment buildings.
That's a fascinating thesis; I'd love to try it some day.
But perhaps I have the wrong equipment. When I think of vinyl, my first thought is the scratchy hiss that comes when playing a silent part of the record, especially noticeable when you first put the record on and that hiss is measured against the background noise. One can only assume that it continues under the music as well.
If that's what "warmer sound" means, perhaps you're exactly right: the music was mixed to sound great with that extra low hiss in the background. Or maybe that's just the effect of not using a Shure M25C needle in an MMF-9 turntable.
Is this going to be one of those things where audiophiles insist that old, hard-to-get, inconvenient media sound "warmer", "richer", and "fuller"? Like with the vinyl records and vacuum-tube amplifiers?
I keep waiting for somebody to insist that you haven't really heard Nelly until you've heard him on wax disc. Yeah, the click when the needle goes past the seam is kind of annoying, but the sound is harmonically vibrant and more natural.
The best programmers for any job will be the ones who are experienced both in programming and in the domain. So if somebody is smart enough and willing to work hard enough to double-major, I encourage them to do some other field of interest as well as CS.
The best code is written by CS grads, it's true, but I'm not sure it's because of the CS degree. All of the best programmers I know were top-notch programmers before entering college. College gave them experience, and knowledge, but they had developed their craft from a young age, like any other artist.
Programming really is an art form when done properly, and good programmers rely on an aesthetic sense to avoid "hackish and ugly" code. So if the non-CS people are producing it, it may be because of the reason they avoided CS in the first place. It's the same reason I avoided majoring in art: I'm just not any good at it and didn't expect them to train me well enough to make it worth my time and theirs.
I'd like to see more CS majors at least minor in some other field of interest. There will be those who wish to do CS for its own sake, usually academic: HCI research, automata theory, networking, etc. But for CS majors who want to program computers for a living, and that's a majority of them, I think that they should learn something besides computers. Science, history, business, English: anything that will give them some idea of what it is that the people who are tasking them want.
If necessary, you hire one of those guys to be project lead, and hire cheaper, less experienced programmers to just bang out the code, but I think it all works better if the entire team can both code and develop a real understanding of the requirements, because the spec is never going to quite cut it. A programmer's job isn't to work with computers; otherwise we'd just write a spec-to-software compiler. The programmer's job is to interface between the computer and the client. That works best only when the programmer speaks both languages.
I guess it's a lot to do with the work I like to hire people for. I'd rather develop deep skills in, say, the Windows API, among my existing smart people than hire some bozo because he's the guy who knows Windows API.
But, if course, it's best if you can get your hands on both.
I keep telling people that I'd much rather have a smart employee than one experienced in whatever it is I'm using. If you know any programming at all, you'll learn Java/C++/Visual.NET/whatever it is you need, if you're smart. If you're not smart, no matter what it is you know, it's not going to do me any good.
This article is about kernel development. While I appreciate the development being done to make the kernel faster/better/cheaper (well, it doesn't get any cheaper), it's already a Pretty Damn Good kernel. It sounds to me like the most crucial thing would be to solidify it and test the bejeezus out of it, then largely freeze it, because that's not where the problems are.
When people complain about MS Windows, they're not (usually) complaining about the kernel. They're talking about all of the stuff built on top of it: window manager, IE, networking, configuration. If the Linux kernel is receiving too little testing to be stable, what about the millions of lines of code that go into X windows, Gnome, CUPS (as mentioned the other day), etc.
If MS didn't have to make kernel changes to bettter support security, I suspect they wouldn't be touching it at all. BSODs are still more common than they should be, but most users find them extremely rare, and the kernel is Fast Enough relative to the work that needs to be done. The improvements in Longhorn are largely about changes above the kernel, especially in its spiffy interface.
While I'm grateful to Linus and all of the other developers for the kernel improvements, and while Open Source means never being told what to work on, kernel improvements other than stability are probably a terrible use of manpower. The kernel is a tiny fraction of the lines of code that go into a Linux distro. They are basic, and need to be rock-solid, but while performance improvements there benefit everybody, they don't benefit you at all if X, or KDE, or Konqueror, or any of the hundreds of other higher-level apps crash.
Thanks. I'll give it a try.
If I hadn't caught Monty Python in my early teens I'd probably have felt the same way about it, so there's definitely hope.
Yep, most of the fans feel that way. Many of the people who liked the first three books thought So Long and Thanks For All The Fish thought it was a far lesser book.
You might try the Dirk Gently books, which I felt were more like SLaTFATF than the Hitchhiker's books.
If you think that "It hung in the air in exactly the way that bricks don't" is funny because of the silly image and novel phrasing, you'll probably like the book. If you think it's just stupid, then by all means pick up something else. The world is too full of books to read ones you hate.
Nope, you're not the only one.
Well, truth be told, I haven't managed to see Napoleon Dynamite yet. It's on my Netflix queue. But somehow, I just _know_ I'm going to hate it, which is going to make it all the much harder for me to be "objectively" subjective and try to like it for what it is. I'll try, I really will, but 99% of the time when my friends love a cult classic, I hate it. Napoleon Dynamite has all the earmarks: quirky characters that you'd hate if you met them in real life, quotes people insist on ad infinitum, t-shirts in Hot Topic.
But then, I managed to find the humor in Rocky Horror, and I love Monty Python, so maybe there's hope for me. Or it.
The list of things that I could point out that I hated that everybody else loved... would make for a very long and boring post.