Osamu Tezuka (among others, I'm sure) was inspired by/copied from the American/Disney style back in the late 1940s. See Betty Boop for an example of an American cartoon with a similar look. The Japanese style developed independently from there.
(I am an electrical engineer, although I don't work in power transmission)
It's not bullshit. As others have said, it's not 30 watts burned, it's 30 watts transmitted. One way to understand this is to imagine what would happen if you hooked an ideal capacitor up to an AC power line. The alternating current would charge and discharge the capacitor, moving energy back and forth. This is called imaginary power. No energy is lost -- only resistive loads dissipate power. However, the capacitive load isn't free for two reasons:
1. The transmission infrastructure still has to handle the current, which means you need bigger transformers and stuff. 2. The circuit isn't really ideal. Some energy is lost due to resistance in the lines, etc.
Power factor is a way of measuring how much of your power usage is resistive vs. capacitive or inductive. Heavy powers users like industrial facilities are charged for their power factor. Homes are not. The GP's concern is that if the whole country switches over to using CFLs we'll need more grid capacity to handle the difference in power factor.
If Excel 2010 is getting Sparklines, does that mean someone at Microsoft has read Tufte? Could we finally be getting default graphs that don't break every rule of good data graphics? It's probably too much to hope for, but I can dream...
Hey, do you mind if I ask you a tangential question since it seems like you know what you're talking about? A while back I ran across some discussion over whether Jesus was an actual historical figure or a mythical one. There's a Wikipedia article with a summary and a much longer article with some more detailed arguments, for instance. Have you heard of any of this, and if so, do you have an opinion on it? I've been hoping to find another point of view, but most of what I've run across is from Christians who seem more interested in defending their faith than anything else.
I didn't say Win7 was better than OS X. I only said that it's not valid to compare the upgrade price for an OS released a couple years ago to one released eight years ago. In the future, you might want to spend a bit of time actually reading comments before you "falme".
Snow Leopard is an upgrade for an OS version released a year and a half ago. WinXP was released eight years ago. Going from XP to Win7 is like going from OSX 10.0 to Snow Leopard.
This is insightful? In a world where BILLIONS of consumers can rate and review the efficacy and truthfulness of products on the web, government regulation of healing tonics is worthless.
Consumers don't run double-blind placebo-controlled trials. Precious few even know what that means or why it's important. The result of deregulating medical products is a whole lot of snake oil. You can see this on your local store shelves in the form of the unregulated supplement industry. Consumer reviews don't work as well where marketing, cultural factors, and the placebo effect collide.
There are some important tradeoffs between paper and digital media. I'm assuming we're talking about original works here and that e.g. transcribing a newpaper article doesn't count.
* Books aren't just rugged, they're also non-ephemeral in a way that web sites aren't. Much of the efficiency of the internet comes from cheap communication with centralized storage. But this means that whoever controls the storage has the power to change history. You can't change a million books in people's houses but old web pages can be lost or altered much more easily. When I go through my old del.icio.us bookmarks I often find 404s, which never happens on my bookshelf.
* The time and money needed for paper publishing creates an incentive for basic quality control. There are precious few copy-editors working on the net. Spelling, grammar, and basic comprehensibility all suffer as a result.
* Many popular formats on the internet (such as blogs) are inherently chronological. The focus is always on the latest information, and there's little incentive to improve or correct old content. Longer content is released a chapter (or section!) at a time. This is most visible (although less important) in webcomics, where the early art and storytelling can be orders of magnitude worse than the latest material.
* Books have total control over layout and formatting. Web content, which has to be viewed on everything from PCs to cell phones, doesn't. Formats such as PDF are much clumsier to use than HTML. Read Edward Tufte to find out why this is important.
* There is very little long-format content on the internet. A page or two of text is considered "long" for most purposes (in the context of Slashdot, how long is this comment? how long would it be on a printed page?). Several pages is huge, and a couple dozen pages is gargantuan. Meanwhile, even small books for children and short works of nonfiction are usually at least a couple hundred pages long. Short content is convenient (and thus popular), but there are ideas and levels of detail you simply can't reach in a few pages.
There are some exceptions to all of this, but the general trends still drive the way we communicate. And in general, books are longer, more expensive, better edited, and more thought out in advance, while web content is shorter, faster, cheaper, more accessible, more diverse, and lower quality. The net's advantages work better in shorter formats -- it's telling that the first (and most successful) things to be digitized were the letter/memo and the casual conversation, followed later by the want ad and article.
Will web content ever equal books? I don't know. Collections of related blog essays have been pulled from blogs, cleaned up, and published as books (Joel Spolsky's, for instance), which is a start. The Wiki might be a viable format, although I suspect open-content sites will never quite make it. Taking an idea from Fred Brooks, it may be that conceptual integrity is the most important factor in the quality of a written document, and it's hard to achieve that when you have a thousand editors. Good luck talking about it, though, since the net has a giant persecution complex vis-a-vis top-down control of publishing.
Here's an example of where I'm coming from: Recently I decided I don't know enough about biology. I took a class in high school when I was 15 and that's it (I'm 27 now). So I bought what appears to be the standard intro level college textbook (Campbell and Reece) and was blown away. Despite being full of detail, the explanations are clear, and nearly every page has one or more full-color pictures or diagrams. There are many asides that link the topics to everyday life. Each subsection has about as much content as an average blog post. The book is 1,400 pages long. It cost $140 and I consider it worth every penny.
The headline is "Computers Key to Air France Crash", which says that it's about a plane crash, but you can already guess anyway -- when you hear the name of a specific flight in the news, it's almost invariably about a crash.
As to why it's important, plane crashes are rare enough and the investigations technical enough that it seems like suitable Slashdot fodder.
Yeah, it's definitely not a clear-cut issue. Your analogy brings up two of the issues I have with mass piracy:
1. Propagating the protected IP still gives it prestige and popularity, which is still a form of support for the creator company, albeit not as much of one as money.
2. Somebody still has to design/create all this stuff to begin with. It's easy to talk about how evil IP is when it comes to music and software since it's easy for a volunteer/low-paid force to make those. But when it comes to things like hardware development or medical research, where R&D costs can be millions of dollars, it's a different story. You can't publicly fund everything. I wonder if people realize that ending copyright means shutting down ARM (which is entirely IP-based)?
But really, as I've mentioned elsewhere, the thing that interests me the most is that the intellectual justifications for piracy are motivated by the basic desire for free stuff, rather than vice versa. Furthermore, this happens to the point of absurdity -- I've had people seriously try to tell me that The Pirate Bay's main purpose is not piracy, for example. The main implication is that people aren't as rational as they think they are (there's psychological research to support this as well). Case in point: I'm sure many readers are now ready to call me out as a pro-RIAA shill, even though right this very second I'm watching pirated Naruto episodes that I downloaded via BitTorrent.
Also, there's the part where I can't filter out these stories because Slashdot won't put them in a consistent section, which is rather annoying.
None of which has really anything to do with my comment... why is it that every time I post something like this I get ten comments along the lines of "here's why I hate the RIAA/MPAA"? I know why you hate them. I've been on Slashdot for over a decade. I've heard it all before.
Sorry, I guess that doesn't have anything to do with you in particular. As for this:
If your customer base feels entitled, figure out why
I strongly suspect that what's really going on is that people just like free stuff and the more intellectual ones feel the need to justify it more. Few people ever seems to answer my question, which is if you want these companies and their policies destroyed, why is it better to download than to not use their products at all? I'm interested in this more for what it says about human nature than for anything to do with internet media, which I don't care much about anyway.
I'm not saying that the music industry deserves to live or that their business model will work. I'm saying that, of the two ways to not give them money (don't acquire product or acquire it illegally for free) people prefer the latter regardless of whether it's really more in line with their principles or not.
Obviously the idea that nothing good has come from the internet is total nonsense. But I have a hard time disagreeing with this:
people 'feel entitled' to have what they want when they want it, and if they can't get it for free, 'they'll steal it.'
because that's exactly the attitude I hear. Maybe that's just the way things are going to be from now on, but it does bother me that so many people consider not getting a product to be an unacceptable response to terms they don't like. I guess *I* must be getting old...
Interesting about your TV shows. Where are you from?
I don't usually complain about the way I see men portrayed on TV because if I don't watch I don't have to care about it. Women over here (and elsewhere) have a long history of being treated like dumb, subservient, fashion-obsessed inferiors regardless of whether they are or want to be. You have to take context into account. If I actually had a harder time getting recognized or listened to because people treated me like a drunken frat boy by default, you bet your ass I'd be complaining, just as people have complained about the stereotypes of geeks as clueless and socially awkward. But I don't have to deal with that because it's easy for me to turn it off and not be defined by my gender.
Imagine if that were all you ever got, though. Imagine if almost all the men you saw in ads and on TV were portrayed as stupid frat boys sitting on a couch drinking beer and watching sports, and the few who don't are made to take up those hobbies by the end of the show. I would certainly be insulted by the implication that my role in life was totally determined by my gender. When it comes to women, this sort of thing is very pervasive in media (consider the archetype of The Chick, for example).
Think about the "jocks are cool, nerds are losers" stereotype. Nowadays it's (mostly) a joke to us, but there was a time when geeky high school students were regularly assaulted because of this thinking. And actually, men are affected by cultural factors too. In the US, men are six times more likely to go to prison than women.
Funny you should mention that. I'd gotten the impression that UK students didn't like school very much, mainly because almost every time I see a British school in a work of fiction the teachers are portrayed as evil soul-crushing authoritarians. It's nice to know that's not really the case.
Uh. We already have repeated it. Myspace is basically last couple of years' geocities.
I have a theory that all new internet formats (blogs, social networking pages, etc.) ultimately evolve into attempts to recreate Geocities. Geocities is the archetypal version of what happens when everyone has a web presence.
A: It was never all-you-can-eat to begin with. As someone else pointed out above, "unlimited" originally meant unlimited connection time (aka always-on), not unlimited data. This is also technically wrong since your connection time is limited by the number of hours in a month, but it's not really misleading.
B: "All you can eat" works because human stomach capacities are not very large. If a few customers tried to eat a thousand times the average meal, they would most certainly be thrown out. In reality, there is no such thing as an unlimited resource and anyone with half a brain knows it. Also in reality, nobody designs their systems to handle theoretical peak capacity, which you'd think a bunch of IT people would know. Local network bandwidth is always more plentiful than upstream bandwidth.
We'll still have the JSF, so it's not like we won't have *any* advanced fighters. The reality of today's world is that you don't need air superiority fighters to deal with countries that have weak air forces, and those are the only kind we've actually fought in the last 50 years. Unless we're planning for another world war, there isn't much point to having the F-22.
An even better alternative would be to stop invading small countries altogether, but it seems to be an unshakable pastime of ours...
Turks called the city Istanbul before the conquest, and many people still called it Constantinople afterward. See Wikipedia for more. Still, 1453 is a reasonable boundary. I bet the guy meant to say "600 years" but got confused.
15 years ago systems were night and day with the way they are now, and it's only going to get worse. After 10 years you won't be able to find anyone to work on the legacy stuff (unless you buy a proprietary unix system), and there is no guarantee for new parts.
What do you mean it's only going to get worse? The rate at which people upgrade their hardware has been slowing down, not speeding up. You might not be able to find replacement parts in ten years except in bargain bins and eBay, but that's no different from now. As for people, there are plenty of people who remember how to work on Windows 95 and there will be plenty of people in ten years who remember how to work on Windows XP.
Furthermore, your hardware recommendation is complete overkill. The guy is running a *DOS application* on a *486*. Even the cheapest system you can buy today would be at least twenty times faster, and the program and all its fifteen years of data could fit in a 512MB stick of RAM. Why on earth would he need a quad-core server? The program he needs to run is single-tasking! It sounds like he doesn't even have internet access. He doesn't need a new architecture. He probably wouldn't even need a new computer if Windows 95 weren't so flaky to begin with. Unless he's planning a major software upgrade (which it sounds like he isn't) there's just no way that his computational demands are going to grow enough to need what you're suggesting.
I think that has as much (if not more) to do with CounterStrike itself as with actual cheaters. CS is designed to be a frustrating game -- it's very common to be killed instantly from a long distance by someone you can't see, at which point you often have to wait minutes to be able to play again. This encourages players to get angry when they die, and angry, frustrated people say and do stupid things. One of the first things I noticed when I started playing TeamFortress 2 was how much nicer everyone is, and I think the gentler difficulty curve has a lot to do with that.
Slashdot Mirror
Osamu Tezuka (among others, I'm sure) was inspired by/copied from the American/Disney style back in the late 1940s. See Betty Boop for an example of an American cartoon with a similar look. The Japanese style developed independently from there.
(I am an electrical engineer, although I don't work in power transmission)
It's not bullshit. As others have said, it's not 30 watts burned, it's 30 watts transmitted. One way to understand this is to imagine what would happen if you hooked an ideal capacitor up to an AC power line. The alternating current would charge and discharge the capacitor, moving energy back and forth. This is called imaginary power. No energy is lost -- only resistive loads dissipate power. However, the capacitive load isn't free for two reasons:
1. The transmission infrastructure still has to handle the current, which means you need bigger transformers and stuff.
2. The circuit isn't really ideal. Some energy is lost due to resistance in the lines, etc.
Power factor is a way of measuring how much of your power usage is resistive vs. capacitive or inductive. Heavy powers users like industrial facilities are charged for their power factor. Homes are not. The GP's concern is that if the whole country switches over to using CFLs we'll need more grid capacity to handle the difference in power factor.
If Excel 2010 is getting Sparklines, does that mean someone at Microsoft has read Tufte? Could we finally be getting default graphs that don't break every rule of good data graphics? It's probably too much to hope for, but I can dream...
Hey, do you mind if I ask you a tangential question since it seems like you know what you're talking about? A while back I ran across some discussion over whether Jesus was an actual historical figure or a mythical one. There's a Wikipedia article with a summary and a much longer article with some more detailed arguments, for instance. Have you heard of any of this, and if so, do you have an opinion on it? I've been hoping to find another point of view, but most of what I've run across is from Christians who seem more interested in defending their faith than anything else.
I didn't say Win7 was better than OS X. I only said that it's not valid to compare the upgrade price for an OS released a couple years ago to one released eight years ago. In the future, you might want to spend a bit of time actually reading comments before you "falme".
Snow Leopard is an upgrade for an OS version released a year and a half ago. WinXP was released eight years ago. Going from XP to Win7 is like going from OSX 10.0 to Snow Leopard.
This is insightful? In a world where BILLIONS of consumers can rate and review the efficacy and truthfulness of products on the web, government regulation of healing tonics is worthless.
Consumers don't run double-blind placebo-controlled trials. Precious few even know what that means or why it's important. The result of deregulating medical products is a whole lot of snake oil. You can see this on your local store shelves in the form of the unregulated supplement industry. Consumer reviews don't work as well where marketing, cultural factors, and the placebo effect collide.
There are some important tradeoffs between paper and digital media. I'm assuming we're talking about original works here and that e.g. transcribing a newpaper article doesn't count.
* Books aren't just rugged, they're also non-ephemeral in a way that web sites aren't. Much of the efficiency of the internet comes from cheap communication with centralized storage. But this means that whoever controls the storage has the power to change history. You can't change a million books in people's houses but old web pages can be lost or altered much more easily. When I go through my old del.icio.us bookmarks I often find 404s, which never happens on my bookshelf.
* The time and money needed for paper publishing creates an incentive for basic quality control. There are precious few copy-editors working on the net. Spelling, grammar, and basic comprehensibility all suffer as a result.
* Many popular formats on the internet (such as blogs) are inherently chronological. The focus is always on the latest information, and there's little incentive to improve or correct old content. Longer content is released a chapter (or section!) at a time. This is most visible (although less important) in webcomics, where the early art and storytelling can be orders of magnitude worse than the latest material.
* Books have total control over layout and formatting. Web content, which has to be viewed on everything from PCs to cell phones, doesn't. Formats such as PDF are much clumsier to use than HTML. Read Edward Tufte to find out why this is important.
* There is very little long-format content on the internet. A page or two of text is considered "long" for most purposes (in the context of Slashdot, how long is this comment? how long would it be on a printed page?). Several pages is huge, and a couple dozen pages is gargantuan. Meanwhile, even small books for children and short works of nonfiction are usually at least a couple hundred pages long. Short content is convenient (and thus popular), but there are ideas and levels of detail you simply can't reach in a few pages.
There are some exceptions to all of this, but the general trends still drive the way we communicate. And in general, books are longer, more expensive, better edited, and more thought out in advance, while web content is shorter, faster, cheaper, more accessible, more diverse, and lower quality. The net's advantages work better in shorter formats -- it's telling that the first (and most successful) things to be digitized were the letter/memo and the casual conversation, followed later by the want ad and article.
Will web content ever equal books? I don't know. Collections of related blog essays have been pulled from blogs, cleaned up, and published as books (Joel Spolsky's, for instance), which is a start. The Wiki might be a viable format, although I suspect open-content sites will never quite make it. Taking an idea from Fred Brooks, it may be that conceptual integrity is the most important factor in the quality of a written document, and it's hard to achieve that when you have a thousand editors. Good luck talking about it, though, since the net has a giant persecution complex vis-a-vis top-down control of publishing.
Here's an example of where I'm coming from: Recently I decided I don't know enough about biology. I took a class in high school when I was 15 and that's it (I'm 27 now). So I bought what appears to be the standard intro level college textbook (Campbell and Reece) and was blown away. Despite being full of detail, the explanations are clear, and nearly every page has one or more full-color pictures or diagrams. There are many asides that link the topics to everyday life. Each subsection has about as much content as an average blog post. The book is 1,400 pages long. It cost $140 and I consider it worth every penny.
There is nothing like this on the internet. But
The headline is "Computers Key to Air France Crash", which says that it's about a plane crash, but you can already guess anyway -- when you hear the name of a specific flight in the news, it's almost invariably about a crash.
As to why it's important, plane crashes are rare enough and the investigations technical enough that it seems like suitable Slashdot fodder.
Wouldn't it really be the shareholders paying the tax, anyway? That's where most of the dividends go, right?
Steve Ballmer himself (and probably most of MS's shareholders) would never consider moving to Ireland.
Yeah, it's definitely not a clear-cut issue. Your analogy brings up two of the issues I have with mass piracy:
1. Propagating the protected IP still gives it prestige and popularity, which is still a form of support for the creator company, albeit not as much of one as money.
2. Somebody still has to design/create all this stuff to begin with. It's easy to talk about how evil IP is when it comes to music and software since it's easy for a volunteer/low-paid force to make those. But when it comes to things like hardware development or medical research, where R&D costs can be millions of dollars, it's a different story. You can't publicly fund everything. I wonder if people realize that ending copyright means shutting down ARM (which is entirely IP-based)?
But really, as I've mentioned elsewhere, the thing that interests me the most is that the intellectual justifications for piracy are motivated by the basic desire for free stuff, rather than vice versa. Furthermore, this happens to the point of absurdity -- I've had people seriously try to tell me that The Pirate Bay's main purpose is not piracy, for example. The main implication is that people aren't as rational as they think they are (there's psychological research to support this as well). Case in point: I'm sure many readers are now ready to call me out as a pro-RIAA shill, even though right this very second I'm watching pirated Naruto episodes that I downloaded via BitTorrent.
Also, there's the part where I can't filter out these stories because Slashdot won't put them in a consistent section, which is rather annoying.
Thank you! I hereby award you the Adam Haun Prize For Actually Answering The Fucking Question. Your check is in the mail.
None of which has really anything to do with my comment... why is it that every time I post something like this I get ten comments along the lines of "here's why I hate the RIAA/MPAA"? I know why you hate them. I've been on Slashdot for over a decade. I've heard it all before.
Sorry, I guess that doesn't have anything to do with you in particular. As for this:
If your customer base feels entitled, figure out why
I strongly suspect that what's really going on is that people just like free stuff and the more intellectual ones feel the need to justify it more. Few people ever seems to answer my question, which is if you want these companies and their policies destroyed, why is it better to download than to not use their products at all? I'm interested in this more for what it says about human nature than for anything to do with internet media, which I don't care much about anyway.
I'm not saying that the music industry deserves to live or that their business model will work. I'm saying that, of the two ways to not give them money (don't acquire product or acquire it illegally for free) people prefer the latter regardless of whether it's really more in line with their principles or not.
Obviously the idea that nothing good has come from the internet is total nonsense. But I have a hard time disagreeing with this:
because that's exactly the attitude I hear. Maybe that's just the way things are going to be from now on, but it does bother me that so many people consider not getting a product to be an unacceptable response to terms they don't like. I guess *I* must be getting old...
Interesting about your TV shows. Where are you from?
I don't usually complain about the way I see men portrayed on TV because if I don't watch I don't have to care about it. Women over here (and elsewhere) have a long history of being treated like dumb, subservient, fashion-obsessed inferiors regardless of whether they are or want to be. You have to take context into account. If I actually had a harder time getting recognized or listened to because people treated me like a drunken frat boy by default, you bet your ass I'd be complaining, just as people have complained about the stereotypes of geeks as clueless and socially awkward. But I don't have to deal with that because it's easy for me to turn it off and not be defined by my gender.
Imagine if that were all you ever got, though. Imagine if almost all the men you saw in ads and on TV were portrayed as stupid frat boys sitting on a couch drinking beer and watching sports, and the few who don't are made to take up those hobbies by the end of the show. I would certainly be insulted by the implication that my role in life was totally determined by my gender. When it comes to women, this sort of thing is very pervasive in media (consider the archetype of The Chick, for example).
Think about the "jocks are cool, nerds are losers" stereotype. Nowadays it's (mostly) a joke to us, but there was a time when geeky high school students were regularly assaulted because of this thinking. And actually, men are affected by cultural factors too. In the US, men are six times more likely to go to prison than women.
Funny you should mention that. I'd gotten the impression that UK students didn't like school very much, mainly because almost every time I see a British school in a work of fiction the teachers are portrayed as evil soul-crushing authoritarians. It's nice to know that's not really the case.
Uh. We already have repeated it. Myspace is basically last couple of years' geocities.
I have a theory that all new internet formats (blogs, social networking pages, etc.) ultimately evolve into attempts to recreate Geocities. Geocities is the archetypal version of what happens when everyone has a web presence.
A: It was never all-you-can-eat to begin with. As someone else pointed out above, "unlimited" originally meant unlimited connection time (aka always-on), not unlimited data. This is also technically wrong since your connection time is limited by the number of hours in a month, but it's not really misleading.
B: "All you can eat" works because human stomach capacities are not very large. If a few customers tried to eat a thousand times the average meal, they would most certainly be thrown out. In reality, there is no such thing as an unlimited resource and anyone with half a brain knows it. Also in reality, nobody designs their systems to handle theoretical peak capacity, which you'd think a bunch of IT people would know. Local network bandwidth is always more plentiful than upstream bandwidth.
We'll still have the JSF, so it's not like we won't have *any* advanced fighters. The reality of today's world is that you don't need air superiority fighters to deal with countries that have weak air forces, and those are the only kind we've actually fought in the last 50 years. Unless we're planning for another world war, there isn't much point to having the F-22.
An even better alternative would be to stop invading small countries altogether, but it seems to be an unshakable pastime of ours...
Turks called the city Istanbul before the conquest, and many people still called it Constantinople afterward. See Wikipedia for more. Still, 1453 is a reasonable boundary. I bet the guy meant to say "600 years" but got confused.
15 years ago systems were night and day with the way they are now, and it's only going to get worse. After 10 years you won't be able to find anyone to work on the legacy stuff (unless you buy a proprietary unix system), and there is no guarantee for new parts.
What do you mean it's only going to get worse? The rate at which people upgrade their hardware has been slowing down, not speeding up. You might not be able to find replacement parts in ten years except in bargain bins and eBay, but that's no different from now. As for people, there are plenty of people who remember how to work on Windows 95 and there will be plenty of people in ten years who remember how to work on Windows XP.
Furthermore, your hardware recommendation is complete overkill. The guy is running a *DOS application* on a *486*. Even the cheapest system you can buy today would be at least twenty times faster, and the program and all its fifteen years of data could fit in a 512MB stick of RAM. Why on earth would he need a quad-core server? The program he needs to run is single-tasking! It sounds like he doesn't even have internet access. He doesn't need a new architecture. He probably wouldn't even need a new computer if Windows 95 weren't so flaky to begin with. Unless he's planning a major software upgrade (which it sounds like he isn't) there's just no way that his computational demands are going to grow enough to need what you're suggesting.
I think that has as much (if not more) to do with CounterStrike itself as with actual cheaters. CS is designed to be a frustrating game -- it's very common to be killed instantly from a long distance by someone you can't see, at which point you often have to wait minutes to be able to play again. This encourages players to get angry when they die, and angry, frustrated people say and do stupid things. One of the first things I noticed when I started playing TeamFortress 2 was how much nicer everyone is, and I think the gentler difficulty curve has a lot to do with that.