The only reason to put that many people (555) on a plane is money. More people on a plane = more profit.
I'm not an engineer but the way I'll bet the situation is, is that there's a really quite an incredibly small chance of the those values malfunctioning, and even a smaller chance of anyone dying because a value malfunction. So even if the chip is poorly engineered, fixing it just doesn't make sense from a cost/benefit analysis standpoint.
The problem is this:
The whole plane has been designed this way. I wonder how many safety oversights have been made in the design of this plane?
There are thousands of interconnected systems on the plane.
Dozens if not hundreds of these planes will be flying.
They will each fly thousands of hours.
Sure maybe there's a 1/10000000 chance per hour of that particular system malfunctioning, but start adding up the numbers.
Similarly the DC10 was rushed to production and numerous bone-headed design decisions, ie, lack of reasonable redundancy in control systems and cargo door problems, cause the deaths of hundreds of people and ultimately the grounding of the whole fleet until the problems were addressed.
We all know the a320 has it's problems, ie, bizarre computer control problems and (obviously) landing gear problems.
I guess we'll have to wait until one of these planes comes down, horrifically killing 600 people before the problems are addressed.
My opinion is that life is indeed the result of intelligent design, but that the intelligence in intristic rather than extrinsic, as a creationist would believe. In other words that evolution is driven by mate selection and the way in which individuals choose to interact with their environment in an intelligent way, rather than through 'randomness' which I just don't buy. By the way, IAAMM (I Am A Molecular Biologist).
This is why life appears to be designed by intelligence. Because it has been, by us.
I'm well aware that console companies turn a profit (eventually) from licensing games. You're still sort of sidesteping the point however. It doesn't change the fact that people expect to pay $199 for a console, regardless of the cost to produce it.
It's the same with milk. No grocery store turns a profit on milk, but you have sell it for the same price as the guy down the street or you'll lose customers.
I guess I didn't make it clear that my point is that it's fair to accuse MS of cheating, and manipulating the market and fostering a monopoly, which prevents their product from selling at a fair price. Which, to be quite honest, I don't even care if they are or not, or if people feel they are doing the morally right thing by buying microsoft products.
Really what I'm (and you) are talking about, escpecially when you talk about Britney Spears is what kind of perception in pop culture you can drum up about a certain product. People buy hype. It's not rational or logical, but they do. They buy crappy products and services from incompetent and ill-trained people all the time, for way too much money.
You can make money on a crappy product. People will buy it if it's marketed the right way.
An idiot can get a good job if he says the right things, or has the right credentials. Escpecially in the tech world, we all know it's about the hype, the buzz words and the latest craze.
Microsoft can (and will) ape Mac OSX all they want over the next couple years. They'll repackage the hype, put out a crappier product, and people will buy it.
Wrong again. People aren't rewarded based on their skill, or even the amount of money it costs to produce something, but rather how much people are willing to pay. This is the basis of a free market society.
That's why Xboxs are (or at least were) sold at a loss; because $199 is all people are willing to pay.
The same arguement can be made for wages. I have more schooling and training then my buddies that program computers, yet I will probably never make more money. That pretty much blows your arguement out of the water.
In a competitive market the price is always going to settle on what people are willing to pay, given a host of other factors. That's why car mechanic would never charge $500 to change one blot, cause in a competitve market he would lose customers, and be forced to lower his prices to a level that people are willing to pay.
If you look at this in terms of software then you see a problem:
Firstly, market driven prices (what people are willing to pay) are determined by supply and demand. Less supply, higher prices, more demand, higher prices, so on. This works fine when we're talking about tangable items, such as cars, or some skilled service, but not very well for software.
This is because when your supply approaches infinity, your product value drops to nothing because someone, ie linux or bitorrent, can always offer comparable software for less money, ie, free.
This isn't a moral standpoint, I'm not condoning pirating, it's just the reality.
All MS has going for them is percieved market value for their product, and a healthy dose of compelling hardware vendors to preload MS and only MS.
As a side note to some extent life *is* a gimpy little league game where everyone gets a trophy, because as long as you offer something of percieved value, people will pay. Skill / cost to produce / rarity doesn't necessarilly figure into the cost equation because more skill, more expensive materials, etc, doesn't necessarily equate to a product with a greater percieved value.
'But while they are priced like consumer electronics, the machines still aren't even remotely as easy to use, and the trend lines there aren't particularly encouraging.'...uh.. well one is.. http://www.apple.com/macmini/
...that they are planning on running OSX on a Pentium4 chip aka x86 of some sort.. It may very well be the case that intel will provide a proprietary chip.
Some people made some comments that if you want power and have the money, buy a nice PC for gaming.
Thing is that, I'm not a kid anymore. I don't want to spend $1500 on my main computer just to play games. It's not a question of affording it, it's a question of not *wanting* to spend that much just for gaming. I have tons of ram and hd space. I don't need an upgrade anything else to do anything I want to do on my pc.
I just have better things I been eyeing. Like a digital SLR camera or an ibook.
I was looking at video cards recently and my video card still runs over $200 and it's old school now. A worthwhile upgrade would set me back $400. I jumped ship and bought an XBox and Forza Racing (that game kicks total ass by the way). It cost me $230 canadian. And by the numbers it's more powerful than my PC.
A console is all about the package deal. You plug it in and it works.
Can't say that for PCs.
I'm sold now. I know I'm going to be in line to buy an XBox 360 the day it comes out.
I agree with all that. I use win2k too and it's rock solid, and my system is modded for low noice, ie, low speed fans, fanless video card. Never crashes. Ever.
Win2k is a good product.
Winxp is a bloated pile of shit. No functionality over win2k.
Unfortunately MS has not innovated in going on 5 years now. All this power under my desk and my interface is feeling really clunky and old.
Ubuntu doesn't fair much better in that regard, sorry linux geeks, but as far as interface goes, you guys follow more then you lead. Although I really admire the underlying architechture of linux.
As for the ugly, windows security is a mess. An absolute horror. I'm what you would consider 'tech savvy', and I've been rootkited twice, which is my reward for not keeping my system locked down every single second. For the average person I would imagine it's a nightmare, because an out of the box installation of windows is basically instantly comprimized.
Longhorn will be more of the same. Ugly, bloated, poor interface. It will probably signal the beginning of the end for MS on the desktop.
..there are a few specialized programs that do exactly what I want the way I want.. foobar, guitarrig, eac, reason.. that I'm just not willing to leave behind.
Other than that, I play the odd game, but my rig's getting out dated again and I'm not sure I'm willing to keep shelling out cash to upgrade. I might just buy an xbox.
However I've played with Ubuntu, and it really *really* makes me wish I had those programs under linux. It's really nice. There's not a heck of a lot that's keeping me on windows.
And for the average person that just needs email, IM and browser, linux looks pretty damn good.
IMO what cinched up the desktop market a few years ago for MS was plug and play. _Every piece of hardware works on windows_. Those of us that remember the day that it wasn't so, remember how huge of a pain in the ass hardware on a pc was; and how totaly insurmountable it was for the average person. If windows didn't expend a huge amount of resources working with hardware vendors to provide plug and play under windows, we might all be using macs right now.
That was always what was holding back linux for years, but it's just not really an issue now.
MS is going to have to pull something major out of it's ass to continue competing in the desktop market.
I have a beef with he article saying that firefox is faster, for me eplorer has always been faster. The article is kind of biased anyway.
Of course they won't because the premise of the million dollar prize is obsurdist. ie, proof of 'supernatural' powers. Supernatural as defined by Webster is something that appears to transend the laws of nature. Of course by its very nature a law can't be 'transended' or violated or it wouldn't be a law.
So JREF is banking on the fact that no one can say, psychically predict the color of the next draw of a randomly shuffled deck of cards or dowse for water; but those are really trivial cases.
The JREF website is to me overly enthusiastically skeptical. The current story linked on the front page is a good example titled 'More Kabalah Drivel'. The author makes little effort to seperate the harmless (abeit trendy) spiritual faith from a group of frauds trying to cash in on the popularity.
'THE BUBBLE PEOPLE ARE AMONG US' furthermore is in the voice of a self satisified cynic who probably wouldn't consider that his theory could be just as easily applied to himself as it could be proclaimed 'bubble people'.
Such a rigid belief in the ability of logic and knowedge smacks of the same sort of fanaticism that JREF is trying to avoid. This is because logic and knowedge hit the epistemological wall under such trival circumstances (see Gödel's incompleteness theorem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%F6del's_incompleten ess_theorem ) that the whole idea of science as a means of explaining reality is is about as convincing as saying the moon is made of green cheese or that aliens built the pyramids.
I hardly think that Randi is offering a million dollars to anyone that has proof of an exotic, unexplicable or bizzare experience, because all one would need to do is say, "I have proof of the existance of aliens" and offer Randi a few hits from the DMT pipe, or "I have proof of the existance of past lives" and offer Randi a hit from the Salvia pipe and the million would be yours.
All Randi has offered is his own false dilemma in which inexplicable phenomena are not possible because they are not statistically provable, even though is a obvious emprical fact that situations sometimes defy rationality.
..competing against product without such. I think reliability of cars is a good example of this. American car companies didn't give a shit about reliability in the '70s and nearly got killed by the Japs.
Consumers are not stupid and don't like to be abused.
There simply is no compelling reason to use a subscription system over openoffice, unless someone threatens you with physical harm.
..perhaps won't slow the flow of spam but will let you know who that bastards are that are selling your email in the first place. Buy a domain name then use a different email address of every site that asks for an email.. for example 'amazon_email@yourdomain.com' if you fill in a form at amazon.com.
You'd be suprised at the sites that promise to protect privacy and don't.
..Is about what an.MP3 is worth to me. Seems like another attempt to lend credability to selling DRM'd.MP3s at $1 a pop. Which is just never going to fly with me, ever.
Not that I willingly listen to or buy any music released by RIAA companies anyway.
True but their servers are their property and they're running a business. If they don't want everyone mirroring their results that's their right. Most people *want to* be indexed by google, and if they don't want to, they don't have to be.
Here's a 'proximate cause' for you: Creative accounting. Note that this is based on an internal study. The industry has in fact been making more money the past five years, and lying about it.
Why?
The purpose of pursuing piracy is to gain monopolistic control over *MEDIA* so that only 'the big six' (or is it five now?) can publish music. This will put independent artists out of business, in fact all record companies that aren't universal/warner/bmg/emi/sony. This is because they are trying to madate in law that all media must have digital protection. The protection will be crackable (it always is), but controlled by the RIAA, so they control who publishes.
With the advent of home studios and the digital revolution.. and internet promotion there is less and less need for a bloated recording industry. They know this.
People may pirate eminem but he still sells >10 million copies an album.
If you have better things to do then to be calling a 1 800 number over and over then crack out your old modem and get it to dial the number over and over and over and over. Also whoever answers the phone will greeted with a carrier tone:)
Slashdot Mirror
Although it doesn't stop us from putting the accused to trial over and over again until we find them guilty.
What else...... Gun registry anyone?
Our government is more than will to blow billions on this little project.
Our government basically runs 24/7 on cronyism on all levels. I doubt law enforcement or totalitarianism is on the agenda..
My Canon a70 started going glitchy a few months ago.. purple lines and what have you.. talking about moisture.. oh yeah, I live in Vancouver.
It's great they've admitted it and are fixing them.
Maybe apple should follow suit and fix the scratched nanos.. I don't own one but I've witnessed the problems with those things first hand.
Better than a class action lawsuit I guess.
The only reason to put that many people (555) on a plane is money. More people on a plane = more profit.
I'm not an engineer but the way I'll bet the situation is, is that there's a really quite an incredibly small chance of the those values malfunctioning, and even a smaller chance of anyone dying because a value malfunction. So even if the chip is poorly engineered, fixing it just doesn't make sense from a cost/benefit analysis standpoint.
The problem is this:
The whole plane has been designed this way. I wonder how many safety oversights have been made in the design of this plane?
There are thousands of interconnected systems on the plane.
Dozens if not hundreds of these planes will be flying.
They will each fly thousands of hours.
Sure maybe there's a 1/10000000 chance per hour of that particular system malfunctioning, but start adding up the numbers.
Similarly the DC10 was rushed to production and numerous bone-headed design decisions, ie, lack of reasonable redundancy in control systems and cargo door problems, cause the deaths of hundreds of people and ultimately the grounding of the whole fleet until the problems were addressed.
We all know the a320 has it's problems, ie, bizarre computer control problems and (obviously) landing gear problems.
I guess we'll have to wait until one of these planes comes down, horrifically killing 600 people before the problems are addressed.
Let's face it, the kids are getting the book thrown at them because they made the school and the admins look stupid. End of story.
Some people are raising the arguement that hacking the ibook was similar to breaking and entering..
I would say it's like being told you can stay in someone's house, then being charged with a crime for re-arranging the furniture.
Is it impolite to stay at someone's house and rearrange their furniture? Yes, should you be charged with a crime? Uhh..
The other issue is that the authorities what and have control of computers in a way that just would not be acceptable in another context.
I mean you don't get a kid to sign a EULA and there are no laws against improper use of a pen and paper.
Law makers have been really sneaky violating civil rights with computing.
mac gaming will probably takeoff when it hits intel cause:
a) the hardware will be cheaper and more accessable and of equivalent power.
b) There will be less programming challenges in porting games.
c) More people will buy macs when they move to intel, again because they will be cheaper and more powerful.
The video card issue I think is really holding back macs.
My opinion is that life is indeed the result of intelligent design, but that the intelligence in intristic rather than extrinsic, as a creationist would believe. In other words that evolution is driven by mate selection and the way in which individuals choose to interact with their environment in an intelligent way, rather than through 'randomness' which I just don't buy. By the way, IAAMM (I Am A Molecular Biologist).
This is why life appears to be designed by intelligence. Because it has been, by us.
I'm well aware that console companies turn a profit (eventually) from licensing games. You're still sort of sidesteping the point however. It doesn't change the fact that people expect to pay $199 for a console, regardless of the cost to produce it.
It's the same with milk. No grocery store turns a profit on milk, but you have sell it for the same price as the guy down the street or you'll lose customers.
I guess I didn't make it clear that my point is that it's fair to accuse MS of cheating, and manipulating the market and fostering a monopoly, which prevents their product from selling at a fair price. Which, to be quite honest, I don't even care if they are or not, or if people feel they are doing the morally right thing by buying microsoft products.
Really what I'm (and you) are talking about, escpecially when you talk about Britney Spears is what kind of perception in pop culture you can drum up about a certain product. People buy hype. It's not rational or logical, but they do. They buy crappy products and services from incompetent and ill-trained people all the time, for way too much money.
You can make money on a crappy product. People will buy it if it's marketed the right way.
An idiot can get a good job if he says the right things, or has the right credentials. Escpecially in the tech world, we all know it's about the hype, the buzz words and the latest craze.
Microsoft can (and will) ape Mac OSX all they want over the next couple years. They'll repackage the hype, put out a crappier product, and people will buy it.
Wrong again. People aren't rewarded based on their skill, or even the amount of money it costs to produce something, but rather how much people are willing to pay. This is the basis of a free market society.
That's why Xboxs are (or at least were) sold at a loss; because $199 is all people are willing to pay.
The same arguement can be made for wages. I have more schooling and training then my buddies that program computers, yet I will probably never make more money. That pretty much blows your arguement out of the water.
In a competitive market the price is always going to settle on what people are willing to pay, given a host of other factors. That's why car mechanic would never charge $500 to change one blot, cause in a competitve market he would lose customers, and be forced to lower his prices to a level that people are willing to pay.
If you look at this in terms of software then you see a problem:
Firstly, market driven prices (what people are willing to pay) are determined by supply and demand. Less supply, higher prices, more demand, higher prices, so on. This works fine when we're talking about tangable items, such as cars, or some skilled service, but not very well for software.
This is because when your supply approaches infinity, your product value drops to nothing because someone, ie linux or bitorrent, can always offer comparable software for less money, ie, free.
This isn't a moral standpoint, I'm not condoning pirating, it's just the reality.
All MS has going for them is percieved market value for their product, and a healthy dose of compelling hardware vendors to preload MS and only MS.
As a side note to some extent life *is* a gimpy little league game where everyone gets a trophy, because as long as you offer something of percieved value, people will pay. Skill / cost to produce / rarity doesn't necessarilly figure into the cost equation because more skill, more expensive materials, etc, doesn't necessarily equate to a product with a greater percieved value.
'But while they are priced like consumer electronics, the machines still aren't even remotely as easy to use, and the trend lines there aren't particularly encouraging.' ...uh.. well one is.. http://www.apple.com/macmini/
...that they are planning on running OSX on a Pentium4 chip aka x86 of some sort.. It may very well be the case that intel will provide a proprietary chip.
Some people made some comments that if you want power and have the money, buy a nice PC for gaming.
Thing is that, I'm not a kid anymore. I don't want to spend $1500 on my main computer just to play games. It's not a question of affording it, it's a question of not *wanting* to spend that much just for gaming. I have tons of ram and hd space. I don't need an upgrade anything else to do anything I want to do on my pc.
I just have better things I been eyeing. Like a digital SLR camera or an ibook.
I was looking at video cards recently and my video card still runs over $200 and it's old school now. A worthwhile upgrade would set me back $400. I jumped ship and bought an XBox and Forza Racing (that game kicks total ass by the way). It cost me $230 canadian. And by the numbers it's more powerful than my PC.
A console is all about the package deal. You plug it in and it works.
Can't say that for PCs.
I'm sold now. I know I'm going to be in line to buy an XBox 360 the day it comes out.
I'm still using w2k as xp is just a bloatware version of 2k.. ie, there's no real functional differences and xp is slower.
I'm sure a lot of people are in the same boat.
Cutting support of an OS works for me back when M$ was releasing new OSs every two years but But they haven't for going on 5 now (see above).. Hmm..
I agree with all that. I use win2k too and it's rock solid, and my system is modded for low noice, ie, low speed fans, fanless video card. Never crashes. Ever.
Win2k is a good product.
Winxp is a bloated pile of shit. No functionality over win2k.
Unfortunately MS has not innovated in going on 5 years now. All this power under my desk and my interface is feeling really clunky and old.
Ubuntu doesn't fair much better in that regard, sorry linux geeks, but as far as interface goes, you guys follow more then you lead. Although I really admire the underlying architechture of linux.
As for the ugly, windows security is a mess. An absolute horror. I'm what you would consider 'tech savvy', and I've been rootkited twice, which is my reward for not keeping my system locked down every single second. For the average person I would imagine it's a nightmare, because an out of the box installation of windows is basically instantly comprimized.
Longhorn will be more of the same. Ugly, bloated, poor interface. It will probably signal the beginning of the end for MS on the desktop.
Vietnam, Ukraine, China, Zimbabwe and Indonesia are poor countries.
United States, New Zealand, Austria, Sweden and the United Kingdom are rich countries.
Figure it out.
..there are a few specialized programs that do exactly what I want the way I want.. foobar, guitarrig, eac, reason.. that I'm just not willing to leave behind.
Other than that, I play the odd game, but my rig's getting out dated again and I'm not sure I'm willing to keep shelling out cash to upgrade. I might just buy an xbox.
However I've played with Ubuntu, and it really *really* makes me wish I had those programs under linux. It's really nice. There's not a heck of a lot that's keeping me on windows.
And for the average person that just needs email, IM and browser, linux looks pretty damn good.
IMO what cinched up the desktop market a few years ago for MS was plug and play. _Every piece of hardware works on windows_. Those of us that remember the day that it wasn't so, remember how huge of a pain in the ass hardware on a pc was; and how totaly insurmountable it was for the average person. If windows didn't expend a huge amount of resources working with hardware vendors to provide plug and play under windows, we might all be using macs right now.
That was always what was holding back linux for years, but it's just not really an issue now.
MS is going to have to pull something major out of it's ass to continue competing in the desktop market.
I have a beef with he article saying that firefox is faster, for me eplorer has always been faster. The article is kind of biased anyway.
Of course they won't because the premise of the million dollar prize is obsurdist. ie, proof of 'supernatural' powers. Supernatural as defined by Webster is something that appears to transend the laws of nature. Of course by its very nature a law can't be 'transended' or violated or it wouldn't be a law.
n ess_theorem ) that the whole idea of science as a means of explaining reality is is about as convincing as saying the moon is made of green cheese or that aliens built the pyramids.
So JREF is banking on the fact that no one can say, psychically predict the color of the next draw of a randomly shuffled deck of cards or dowse for water; but those are really trivial cases.
The JREF website is to me overly enthusiastically skeptical. The current story linked on the front page is a good example titled 'More Kabalah Drivel'. The author makes little effort to seperate the harmless (abeit trendy) spiritual faith from a group of frauds trying to cash in on the popularity.
'THE BUBBLE PEOPLE ARE AMONG US' furthermore is in the voice of a self satisified cynic who probably wouldn't consider that his theory could be just as easily applied to himself as it could be proclaimed 'bubble people'.
Such a rigid belief in the ability of logic and knowedge smacks of the same sort of fanaticism that JREF is trying to avoid. This is because logic and knowedge hit the epistemological wall under such trival circumstances (see Gödel's incompleteness theorem: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%F6del's_incomplete
I hardly think that Randi is offering a million dollars to anyone that has proof of an exotic, unexplicable or bizzare experience, because all one would need to do is say, "I have proof of the existance of aliens" and offer Randi a few hits from the DMT pipe, or "I have proof of the existance of past lives" and offer Randi a hit from the Salvia pipe and the million would be yours.
All Randi has offered is his own false dilemma in which inexplicable phenomena are not possible because they are not statistically provable, even though is a obvious emprical fact that situations sometimes defy rationality.
..competing against product without such. I think reliability of cars is a good example of this. American car companies didn't give a shit about reliability in the '70s and nearly got killed by the Japs.
Consumers are not stupid and don't like to be abused.
There simply is no compelling reason to use a subscription system over openoffice, unless someone threatens you with physical harm.
If they just collected biometrics at the supermarket it would avoid this kind of misunderstanding.
The last vinyl record and vacuum tube makers aren't out of business.
..perhaps won't slow the flow of spam but will let you know who that bastards are that are selling your email in the first place. Buy a domain name then use a different email address of every site that asks for an email.. for example 'amazon_email@yourdomain.com' if you fill in a form at amazon.com.
You'd be suprised at the sites that promise to protect privacy and don't.
..Is about what an .MP3 is worth to me. Seems like another attempt to lend credability to selling DRM'd .MP3s at $1 a pop. Which is just never going to fly with me, ever.
Not that I willingly listen to or buy any music released by RIAA companies anyway.
True but their servers are their property and they're running a business. If they don't want everyone mirroring their results that's their right. Most people *want to* be indexed by google, and if they don't want to, they don't have to be.
Here's a 'proximate cause' for you: Creative accounting. Note that this is based on an internal study. The industry has in fact been making more money the past five years, and lying about it.
Why?
The purpose of pursuing piracy is to gain monopolistic control over *MEDIA* so that only 'the big six' (or is it five now?) can publish music. This will put independent artists out of business, in fact all record companies that aren't universal/warner/bmg/emi/sony. This is because they are trying to madate in law that all media must have digital protection. The protection will be crackable (it always is), but controlled by the RIAA, so they control who publishes.
With the advent of home studios and the digital revolution.. and internet promotion there is less and less need for a bloated recording industry. They know this.
People may pirate eminem but he still sells >10 million copies an album.
it looks like the old nintendo handheld games.. cool!
Check it out:
http://www.retro-trader.com/nintendohand.htm
If you have better things to do then to be calling a 1 800 number over and over then crack out your old modem and get it to dial the number over and over and over and over. Also whoever answers the phone will greeted with a carrier tone :)