Even back then, most folks had the attention span of a fruit fly - I'd bet on JFK getting killed as the main impetus, all dressed up as 'legacy'. It's the only explanation that actually makes sense.
After all, it's not as if the fact that NASA continued pushing for a pre-1970 "in this decade..." landing (in spite of Johnson and Nixon's penchant for farting around with Vietnam) just for the hell of it...
And sibling is right - it's pretty refreshing to see something unabashedly honest (and totally relevant) on/. once in awhile.
Try this one on, then: If we stay here with thumbs firmly planted in our asses? In 50-100 years, we'll start having to fight wars over dwindling resources - oil, food, gas, certain metals...
It would be a hell of a lot cheaper to spend the resources in getting humans (and more importantly, energy production) into space now, than it will cost to try and do the same thing while simultaneously trying to fight off, say, China.
So (honest question): What's the diff between actual average joes working a living (As portrayed by the adverts, the show, etc), and actors only pretending to be average joes? One of the two more likely belongs on TruTV than a channel that bills itself as an actual documentary channel.
I understand that these guys are still crabbing for a living, but at some point, it seems that their primary job stopped involving the crabs, and began involving the cameras. Once you play up to the camera, it stops being a documentary and becomes a drama.
True - I usually avoid the main Discovery Channel, and hang around in the smaller ones - Science, History International, etc. So far, these channels are a hell of a lot more interested in things like science, history, and etc. Discovery itself is only interested in, well, eyeballs.
It doesn't have to be gold or gems... what if it were Titanium, or some other mundane material that, while plentiful off-Earth, is fairly rare here? Hell, Helium-3 comes to mind right off the bat.
Did you ever consider that living in an environment like space would actually require human beings to better manage resources, and be far more ecologically-mindful?
You do realize that it's not exactly The Garden of Eden up there, right?
Depends on how they're counting the installs - notice that they ask in the survey about their "primary" OS... so dual-boots would likely translate to "Windows", since they'd use that on their non-mac computers for the majority of their actual schoolwork (read: Office docs, especially those ending in *.docx, *.xlsx, and such).
I've previously worked at Intel, and got to watch the headcount slaughters of 2007 and early 2008... (hint: that ~80k headcount used to be ~115k). Fortunately on my end, I got to watch it from afar... my friends got to see it up close and personal.
After seeing their own peers get laid off and either sent to the Pool (if lucky) or straight to unemployment (if not)? The survivors were too busy trying to justify their continued employment (most still are, though I suspect that's eased up by now), and most of the folks I knew then and now have their shit wired extra tight when it comes to work.
Also, think about this- you wouldn't want to lose a $75-$100+k/yr job over a $20 movie, would you? Most sane people (even us IT types) can do that sort of math in pretty short order. Besides, you can get better network speeds @ home anyway.:(
...you mean like the ones they, err, ripped off?;)
Comeuppance is gonna be real fun to watch happen... Pity that in the end, some really stupid anti-liberty precedent may come of it (I'm hoping not considering that this particular case is simple plagiarism, but given this crowd, I'm not holding out much hope for sanity...)
First off, creative works are not anywhere near the same thing as installing a circuit breaker panel, or setting a broken leg.
A creative work is made purely for aesthetics, with no objective (or utilitarian) purpose whatsoever.
Now here's the trick - if you're making a creative work just to make money, then you've introduced marketing into your work, altering it out of necessity in order to appeal to the customer.
Now mind, this is not necessarily going to ruin the work - but in the vast majority of cases, the output ends up as crap. A smaller percentage comes out as iffy or okay, but nothing memorable. a very rare few can manage to overcome such an imposition and come up with something ultimately successful. It gets even worse when the whole thing is managed and packaged from start to finish (see also the typical manufactured pop star).
"The issue here is whether piracy has killed a work. Stick to the issue."
That's the problem - the issue is poorly defined at best, and IMHO irrelevant to what would define the ultimate success or failure of a creative work.
I'll pass on discussing the relative merits of being a fan of Ms. Gaga, to get to something you mentioned:
And how the heck do you propose to judge her music dispassionately? Counting the number of chords per second or something?
I guess I was imprecise. What I meant was this: If you just heard the song; without the marketing, the media-pumping, or even a picture of her. Or even better, if you heard the song played 50 years in the future, without ever hearing of her beforehand.
A case in point: I collect (half-assedly, I admit) old 78 RPM records to test on an old 1947 Trav-Ler record player and radio that I rebuilt (finding the tubes was the most challenging part). I have stuff that was "pressed" in 1918 (this is pre-vinyl, so they were made the hard way back then). The non-successful musicians' records are drop-easy to find - Goodwill's clearance warehouse occasionally has bins of them... and in spite of excellent quality materials (and a new needle), the music is, well, awful. Little wonder I can buy them at roughly $0.25 per pound. OTOH, finding something from a successful musician (e.g. Glenn Miller) means having to hunt the records down, and sometimes paying a lot more for a mint-quality record than one would for a modern CD of the same musician's work.
To that end, what do you think a Lady Gaga CD will go for in (roughly) 2070, do you think? More importantly, how widely do you think her songs would be played by then? Would anyone still alive then even know or care who she was? That my friend is the big metric of success or failure concerning creative works.
When I first read the title, I thought that kdawson (I know, I know) was asking if a creative work failed in the sense that no one accepted it, it was not disseminated, etc. Then TFS says "financial" failure.
Problem is, the question (in any aspect) is too one-dimensional. Paul Gauguin was a financial failure, as were most painters who weren't sponsored by some aristocrat or other. Yet one would hardly call his (or their) works "failures" in most aspects of the term. Meanwhile, even in just the one aspect - money - well? Today, just try and buy an original Gauguin and say it's a failure. I dare you.
Even with recent/modern creative endeavors, the question is stupid. If you're creating a work of (art, music, or similar) just for the money, that creation is almost guaranteed to suck. See also the products of Britney Spears (...remember her? no worries if you don't), "Lady Gaga", or whatever manufactured 'star' of the moment you care to name. Viewed dispassionately and apart from the personality, the music quite frankly sucks ass. If we shift to works of writing, you can almost always tell at which point a writer loses his/her passion for the craft, and instead just does it for the money - the quality drops accordingly. Visual art? Heh - I'll pick on The Simpsons... about five years ago, it was glaringly obvious that Matt was just doing it for the paycheck.
But anyway, long story short - IMHO, the only way a work succeeds or fails is in the metric of how widely accepted it is, and in how long it remains in the public consciousness. The successes become treasures that never die in spite of passing centuries, the failures are forgotten in less than a decade no matter how widely marketed.
My main colleague today is considered no less important than anyone else in my shop - she's had no children, is highly passionate about IT, and is AFAIK not in any hurry to bail out of the field. I'd put her brain up against the majority of the lot in this site, and easily bet on her to win. She works like us, takes the job just as seriously as we do, works the same crazy hours, and is paid just like us. I joke about her being like a sister to me, but in my case I say it with respect (one of my real sisters runs a web hosting company, another runs a trauma room as a charge nurse, another... well, you get the idea - I grew up around strong-minded women. Sue me.)
I once worked with a different woman as a colleague when I was working in academia, and the differences are, well... damn. This particular woman thought it was cool to work in IT, and she taught it at the collegiate level. OTOH, when she and I were both facing layoffs, I jumped back out into the industry, while she became a 'Programs Assistant' (read: paper-pushing bureaucrat that does nada with IT). Little wonder - in my estimation, she was barely competent, and relied more on her MCSE (and MCT, etc) than on experience to assert authority. She was a back-biting passive-aggressive political animal more suited to a conference room than a server room. I doubt that she would've lasted a month in the real world.
Funny thing is, TFA actually was the first time I even sat down and thought about that comparison. And they say Slashdot is worthless...:)
In 1998, Galaxy IV blew out, which controlled commercial communications for a metric assload of services (including my former employer's dealership communications network, FordStar). I (and every other remote admin) got a $50 bounty per dish that we hurriedly re-pointed to a different satellite. Cleaned the whole thing up across the global network (four continents) in less than three weeks.
I'm fairly sure that cable TV, which has more sats on tap and relatively less dishes to re-position (and nobody has to crawl on top of a zillion roofs with a wrench and a compass in hand), could likely recover in very short order - probably hours.
That said, there's always the danger of a chain reaction (after all, there's a LOT of satellites in geosync orbit) - if not at this time, then certainly in the coming future, as the numbers continue to increase.
I wasn't aware that Penn State's board had exonerated Mann (this was recent - as earlier this month). Looking further into it, the NSF Office of the Inspector General is doing (not 'has done', is doing) a meta-investigation of this (which is in and of itself unusual. Before you say it - mind you that the NSF currently doesn't answer to an administration which could be accused of being pre-disposed against Mann).
This means overall, I doubt that he's free and clear just yet. Until that point, my assertion stands.
Well, for what it's worth, Michael Mann and a few others contribute regularly to the arguably political website known as Real Climate, a website which isn't exactly known to allow dissenting views.
By their own words, the site was organized to provide immediate spin/response (you pick) to media stories on the subject of AGW... much like any other environmental organization does for topics that relate to their own specific causes... organizations that most folks do not hesitate to label as political in nature.
Slashdot Mirror
...because it's really hard to dock with an asteroid coming at you with a velocity of 25,000 km/h?
What's to be careful about? He's right.
Even back then, most folks had the attention span of a fruit fly - I'd bet on JFK getting killed as the main impetus, all dressed up as 'legacy'. It's the only explanation that actually makes sense.
After all, it's not as if the fact that NASA continued pushing for a pre-1970 "in this decade..." landing (in spite of Johnson and Nixon's penchant for farting around with Vietnam) just for the hell of it...
And sibling is right - it's pretty refreshing to see something unabashedly honest (and totally relevant) on /. once in awhile.
Try this one on, then: If we stay here with thumbs firmly planted in our asses? In 50-100 years, we'll start having to fight wars over dwindling resources - oil, food, gas, certain metals...
It would be a hell of a lot cheaper to spend the resources in getting humans (and more importantly, energy production) into space now, than it will cost to try and do the same thing while simultaneously trying to fight off, say, China.
So (honest question): What's the diff between actual average joes working a living (As portrayed by the adverts, the show, etc), and actors only pretending to be average joes? One of the two more likely belongs on TruTV than a channel that bills itself as an actual documentary channel.
I understand that these guys are still crabbing for a living, but at some point, it seems that their primary job stopped involving the crabs, and began involving the cameras. Once you play up to the camera, it stops being a documentary and becomes a drama.
True - I usually avoid the main Discovery Channel, and hang around in the smaller ones - Science, History International, etc. So far, these channels are a hell of a lot more interested in things like science, history, and etc. Discovery itself is only interested in, well, eyeballs.
Not unless there's Martian seagulls present.
(You have to have lived in Utah to get it... sorry).
It doesn't have to be gold or gems... what if it were Titanium, or some other mundane material that, while plentiful off-Earth, is fairly rare here? Hell, Helium-3 comes to mind right off the bat.
So tell us what you did today to help "clean up".
And that would matter why exactly?
A more important question: Why not?
You totally missed the Marvin Martian reference...
Damn kids.
Did you ever consider that living in an environment like space would actually require human beings to better manage resources, and be far more ecologically-mindful?
You do realize that it's not exactly The Garden of Eden up there, right?
... so what need is this filling?
I suspect that, at least as far as San Francisco goes, it may be cheaper to rent a spot to anchor a ship than it is to rent anything on dry land...
Also, given the area, it's likely easier to ride out an earthquake on a reasonably large ship than to try and do it on shore...
Wouldn't it be easier to just watch them adapt?
I'm sure the majority of COBOL and FORTRAN programmers back in the '70s and '80s are still alive today, after all...
Depends on how they're counting the installs - notice that they ask in the survey about their "primary" OS... so dual-boots would likely translate to "Windows", since they'd use that on their non-mac computers for the majority of their actual schoolwork (read: Office docs, especially those ending in *.docx, *.xlsx, and such).
I assume he means "firewalls" by "FW". Seriously, you can't even bother to spell out "firewall" in a presentation?
Nope - and there's a reason for it: Shellshock.
I've previously worked at Intel, and got to watch the headcount slaughters of 2007 and early 2008... (hint: that ~80k headcount used to be ~115k). Fortunately on my end, I got to watch it from afar... my friends got to see it up close and personal.
After seeing their own peers get laid off and either sent to the Pool (if lucky) or straight to unemployment (if not)? The survivors were too busy trying to justify their continued employment (most still are, though I suspect that's eased up by now), and most of the folks I knew then and now have their shit wired extra tight when it comes to work.
Also, think about this- you wouldn't want to lose a $75-$100+k/yr job over a $20 movie, would you? Most sane people (even us IT types) can do that sort of math in pretty short order. Besides, you can get better network speeds @ home anyway. :(
...you mean like the ones they, err, ripped off? ;)
Comeuppance is gonna be real fun to watch happen... Pity that in the end, some really stupid anti-liberty precedent may come of it (I'm hoping not considering that this particular case is simple plagiarism, but given this crowd, I'm not holding out much hope for sanity...)
First off, creative works are not anywhere near the same thing as installing a circuit breaker panel, or setting a broken leg.
A creative work is made purely for aesthetics, with no objective (or utilitarian) purpose whatsoever.
Now here's the trick - if you're making a creative work just to make money, then you've introduced marketing into your work, altering it out of necessity in order to appeal to the customer.
Now mind, this is not necessarily going to ruin the work - but in the vast majority of cases, the output ends up as crap. A smaller percentage comes out as iffy or okay, but nothing memorable. a very rare few can manage to overcome such an imposition and come up with something ultimately successful. It gets even worse when the whole thing is managed and packaged from start to finish (see also the typical manufactured pop star).
"The issue here is whether piracy has killed a work. Stick to the issue."
That's the problem - the issue is poorly defined at best, and IMHO irrelevant to what would define the ultimate success or failure of a creative work.
I agree - there is that. If you want something to out-last you, you have to let people know it exists.
I'll pass on discussing the relative merits of being a fan of Ms. Gaga, to get to something you mentioned:
And how the heck do you propose to judge her music dispassionately? Counting the number of chords per second or something?
I guess I was imprecise. What I meant was this: If you just heard the song; without the marketing, the media-pumping, or even a picture of her. Or even better, if you heard the song played 50 years in the future, without ever hearing of her beforehand.
A case in point: I collect (half-assedly, I admit) old 78 RPM records to test on an old 1947 Trav-Ler record player and radio that I rebuilt (finding the tubes was the most challenging part). I have stuff that was "pressed" in 1918 (this is pre-vinyl, so they were made the hard way back then). The non-successful musicians' records are drop-easy to find - Goodwill's clearance warehouse occasionally has bins of them... and in spite of excellent quality materials (and a new needle), the music is, well, awful. Little wonder I can buy them at roughly $0.25 per pound. OTOH, finding something from a successful musician (e.g. Glenn Miller) means having to hunt the records down, and sometimes paying a lot more for a mint-quality record than one would for a modern CD of the same musician's work.
To that end, what do you think a Lady Gaga CD will go for in (roughly) 2070, do you think? More importantly, how widely do you think her songs would be played by then? Would anyone still alive then even know or care who she was? That my friend is the big metric of success or failure concerning creative works.
When I first read the title, I thought that kdawson (I know, I know) was asking if a creative work failed in the sense that no one accepted it, it was not disseminated, etc. Then TFS says "financial" failure.
Problem is, the question (in any aspect) is too one-dimensional. Paul Gauguin was a financial failure, as were most painters who weren't sponsored by some aristocrat or other. Yet one would hardly call his (or their) works "failures" in most aspects of the term. Meanwhile, even in just the one aspect - money - well? Today, just try and buy an original Gauguin and say it's a failure. I dare you.
Even with recent/modern creative endeavors, the question is stupid. If you're creating a work of (art, music, or similar) just for the money, that creation is almost guaranteed to suck. See also the products of Britney Spears (...remember her? no worries if you don't), "Lady Gaga", or whatever manufactured 'star' of the moment you care to name. Viewed dispassionately and apart from the personality, the music quite frankly sucks ass. If we shift to works of writing, you can almost always tell at which point a writer loses his/her passion for the craft, and instead just does it for the money - the quality drops accordingly. Visual art? Heh - I'll pick on The Simpsons... about five years ago, it was glaringly obvious that Matt was just doing it for the paycheck.
But anyway, long story short - IMHO, the only way a work succeeds or fails is in the metric of how widely accepted it is, and in how long it remains in the public consciousness. The successes become treasures that never die in spite of passing centuries, the failures are forgotten in less than a decade no matter how widely marketed.
Seriously, that was an awesome post.
My main colleague today is considered no less important than anyone else in my shop - she's had no children, is highly passionate about IT, and is AFAIK not in any hurry to bail out of the field. I'd put her brain up against the majority of the lot in this site, and easily bet on her to win. She works like us, takes the job just as seriously as we do, works the same crazy hours, and is paid just like us. I joke about her being like a sister to me, but in my case I say it with respect (one of my real sisters runs a web hosting company, another runs a trauma room as a charge nurse, another... well, you get the idea - I grew up around strong-minded women. Sue me.)
I once worked with a different woman as a colleague when I was working in academia, and the differences are, well... damn. This particular woman thought it was cool to work in IT, and she taught it at the collegiate level. OTOH, when she and I were both facing layoffs, I jumped back out into the industry, while she became a 'Programs Assistant' (read: paper-pushing bureaucrat that does nada with IT). Little wonder - in my estimation, she was barely competent, and relied more on her MCSE (and MCT, etc) than on experience to assert authority. She was a back-biting passive-aggressive political animal more suited to a conference room than a server room. I doubt that she would've lasted a month in the real world.
Funny thing is, TFA actually was the first time I even sat down and thought about that comparison. And they say Slashdot is worthless... :)
In 1998, Galaxy IV blew out, which controlled commercial communications for a metric assload of services (including my former employer's dealership communications network, FordStar). I (and every other remote admin) got a $50 bounty per dish that we hurriedly re-pointed to a different satellite. Cleaned the whole thing up across the global network (four continents) in less than three weeks.
I'm fairly sure that cable TV, which has more sats on tap and relatively less dishes to re-position (and nobody has to crawl on top of a zillion roofs with a wrench and a compass in hand), could likely recover in very short order - probably hours.
That said, there's always the danger of a chain reaction (after all, there's a LOT of satellites in geosync orbit) - if not at this time, then certainly in the coming future, as the numbers continue to increase.
I wasn't aware that Penn State's board had exonerated Mann (this was recent - as earlier this month). Looking further into it, the NSF Office of the Inspector General is doing (not 'has done', is doing) a meta-investigation of this (which is in and of itself unusual. Before you say it - mind you that the NSF currently doesn't answer to an administration which could be accused of being pre-disposed against Mann).
This means overall, I doubt that he's free and clear just yet. Until that point, my assertion stands.
Well, for what it's worth, Michael Mann and a few others contribute regularly to the arguably political website known as Real Climate, a website which isn't exactly known to allow dissenting views.
By their own words, the site was organized to provide immediate spin/response (you pick) to media stories on the subject of AGW... much like any other environmental organization does for topics that relate to their own specific causes... organizations that most folks do not hesitate to label as political in nature.