Actually, there is something on the Macintosh for MacOS 9 (the feature was silently dropped for MacOS X because of security issues) that provides the same sort of functionality as autorun for Windows.
The feature is called "AutoPlay", and was actually added in QuickTime v2 and later to allow developers to burn kiosk disks. The idea was that this would allow developers to burn a CD which automatically starts a kiosk program, web browser or movie when the disk was inserted into the Macintosh.
"AutoPlay" for MacOS 9 can be enabled and disabled by going into Control Panels under the Apple menu, selecting "QuickTime Settings", then in the drop-down menu, select "AutoPlay." The second setting "Enable CD-ROM AutoPlay" is the one you want; uncheck this setting to prevent programs from automatically starting when inserted. (This is from QuickTime v6 for MacOS 9; earlier versions may put this setting somewhere else. YMMV.)
If you wish to burn a disk that automatically starts a program or automatically launches a document when inserted in MacOS 9, in a CD-ROM burner program such as Roxio Toast, when selecting a MacOS volume to burn you have the option of specifying the file to automatically play when the disk is inserted in the same volume selection box. Just select the "AutoStart" checkbox and type in the name of the root-directory file to open or program to start.
I don't know if anyone has noticed this, but at the "dark sky station" stationed at 100,000 feet up, since the station is floating rather than orbiting, there is no issue with zero gravity. Weightlessness is caused by the fact that an object in orbit is "falling" to the earth--and missing. But the "dark sky station" is not in free-fall; it's held aloft via bouyancy, and so workers on the "dark sky station" will experience full gravity. No problems with muscle atrophy.
Furthermore, it's not like poeple haven't flown up to 100,000 feet up in balloons; what becomes technically interesting is building a permanent or semi-permanent station as a balloon at that altitude.
The best part is that the worlds record for the highest skydive is above that altitude. So theoretically in the case of a catestrophic emergency, people could simply get into their skydiving space suits, and jump.
I can't believe this was marked down as a troll. We now have 30 job openings in the Santa Monica office of Symantec that I'm aware of, and we're having a hard time filling the job openings.
Is it that the person who marked this down is more interested in promoting their politics than letting people know that there are job openings? Granted, I was sarcastic, but the need for jobs at Symantec is real: if you have Java experience, go to Symantec's web site and submit your resume.
But I guess if politics is more important than people getting jobs, please--mod this down to -1: Troll.
Yep, there aren't any jobs. They're all being exported overseas. Life sucks. Kerry is right: we're doomed, DOOMED I tell you.
By the way the biggest problem I've seen working for Symantec is that we can't get enough qualified resumes in to fill our job openings.
In no means should you take the fact that we have more job openings than resumes to search through as a sign that the economy is doing well, nor should you take the fact that unemployment right now is at the same levels as they were under Clinton in 1996 as a sign that people actually have jobs.
Because like all the pundants are telling us, we're DOOMED, I tell you! DOOOOOOOOOOOOMED!
The problem is that one can be polite yet still asertive--yet for some reason or another most people only learn that to be assertive they have to be a jerk. And that's why society seems to be turning into a bunch of jerks--because no one knows how to be polite yet assertive anymore.
I try very hard in my normal life to be calm, polite, and friendly, especially when dealing with technical support people who quite honestly aren't the ones at fault.
And now there is a device which will penalize me for being a polite person?
I have to agree. While some sort of traffic avoidance and traffic routing system may help somewhat in Los Angeles (which recently won the dubious award as the most congested city in the United States), there is a desperate need for more highways.
The principle problems in Los Angeles right now are the 405 from the San Fernando Valley to Santa Monica, and the 5 from the San Fernando down through to Orange County. Most traffic congestion through the rest of the city seems to be fed by the fact that people are trying to find the best routes to avoid these two highways--which both share the distinction of being the only major highways (alongside the 101 through Hollywood) which lead from the Los Angeles basin to the San Fernando Valley.
Traffic avoidance systems simply will not work when there are only three major freeways. And mass transit won't work because the problem is not congested streets as much as it is congested freeways: more than once I've experienced getting off a freeway where I was driving 10 miles an hour to a surface street where I speed up to 30 miles an hour. (I would take surface streets all the way to work from Glendale in the eastern part of the valley to Santa Monica, if there wasn't this gigantic moutain range crowned by the Hollywood sign between here and there blocking surface streets.)
Mass transit doesn't work, by the way, because the various municipalities has rendered our bus system effectively only for going from point to point within a city--but going across multiple cities along transportation corridors often involve switching between multiple busses. (The 20 mile drive on the freeway to work typically takes me an hour--on the bus it would take me an hour and a half, minimum. And light rail (and the newly constructed L.A. subway) is a joke here: the placement of the stations and where the tracks run was motivated by politics and not by need, wasting billions while carrying only tens of thousands.)
Spend a couple of billion expanding the 5, 405 and 10 so there aren't any chokepoints before spending money adding satellite navigation systems. Otherwise, what will happen is some little ol' lady from Pasadena will wrap her car around a light pole on the 5, and the only think the satnav system will say in response is "you're fscked: you can't get there from here."
The article asserts that increased productivity costs jobs, so logically we should use inefficient and bloated software that crashes periodically, contains numerous security holes which cost time and money to fix, and is riddled with user interface inefficiencies which make it frustrating and hard to use. That way, productivity drops, and more people are required to do the same job.
I never thought I'd say this, but it sounds like Microsoft has been doing the economy a favor all this time...
Naturally the parameter and boundary of their respective position and magnitude are naturally determinable up to the limits of possible measurement as stated by the general quantum hypothesis and Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, but this indeterminacy in precise value is not a consequence of quantum uncertainty.
Here's the problem I had with this paper. The article makes it sound like there is no instant in time because, in essence, d(thing)/dT doesn't exist given Zeno's paradox.
But tying this into Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is nonesense in that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle doesn't just say "the position and momentium of an object is uncertain at a given point in time", but mathematically states exactly the size of the uncertainty window. That is, it doesn't say "d(thing)/dT doesn't exist", but that there is a window of uncertainty, and gives a way to calculate the size of that uncertainty window.
Now I understand the notion that the uncertainty principle could be used to argue that there are no instances in time; after all, at the quantuum level there is no certainty, so why should very small intervals of time be certain? But to argue that Zeno's paradox suggests there are no instants in time?
It's "Caltech", no intercaps, not "Cal Tech", or "CalTech" or whatever other odd spelling that the press came up with last week because no-one pays attention. "Caltech."
Sorry; it's a relative minor gripe from an ex-Lloydie...
I'm not sure if this is completely off-topic, but I believe memory seems related to a common internal "logic" and "language" of the brain--which makes memory completely unreliable.
For example, a few months ago my wife and I went to England, where we rented a car and drove around. What's odd is that my memories of driving in England includes the signs, the places where we went and the like, my memory of driving and passing other drives places me on the right side of the road--even though I know damned good and well in England you drive on the left.
I believe that's because I'm so used to driving on the right side of the road that my memories of England are related to that experience--that is, in my brain's internal "language", people drive on the right--so I must have driven on the right when I was in England.
It's a strange experience, knowing full well that I'm mis-remembering something fairly recent.
It may be related to your early childhood memories: as those memories are not related to experiences you are having now as an adult, they are being either "misfiled" (under things like feeling there was a God and Goddess in your early life--which were simply your parents), or just completely dropped or made obscured.
A friend of my brother made the following observation, which (I believe) gets to the point of the RIAA's troubles.
"Why should I go out and plunk down $17.99 for a CD, when for $19.99 I can buy a DVD movie?"
With portable DVD movie players dropping in price to the same price range as portable CD players were a few years ago, I'm starting to see something very interesting going on. Instead of seeing some guy behind the counter at the local bookstore listening to his CD collection, I'm now starting to see the same guy watch a movie while sitting behind the counter.
The problem with that is that anybody can form their own company, and have that company survive their death. They just have to give their relatives the responsibility of retaining the copyright, something they would certainly have an interest in doing if that copyright returned anything more than the filing fee in income.
The problem is that with the current behavior of Congress, we're getting a perpetual copyright extension anyways--and it's not just a handful of works getting extended by a handful of greedy relatives (who, if they were really greedy, would be greedy because they are making the works available in print), but every damned thing that has been published since the 1920's or thereabouts.
At least under my solution companies who have an active interest in preserving their copyrights on older works can actively do so--and companies and individuals who do not take an active interest in their works have their copyrights lapse naturally. It strikes me as a better compromise than what is currently happening now--with Disney and others extending copyrights to last from now until Doomsday, effectively eliminating the concept of public domain for all works that are not explicitly placed there.
I appear to have been wrong about the details of local building codes, but you do acknowledge that local authorties do manipulate things to protect the local building industry. Some of these things mean that we won't see certain sorts of potential economies of scale and large scale competition in house building.
Of course local municipalities do what they can to protect the local building industry. There are two reasons, one perhaps a little "protective", and one valid.
The "protective" reason is that it means jobs to the local community. Very few communities like the idea of making it easier to allow jobs to leave a town or city; most communities spend a lot of time figuring out how to get jobs to relocate to their area. That's why most communities have at least a "chamber of commerce" whose rollcall reads like the political "who's who" of that area.
That's also why, by the way, the building industry will happily accept any potential manufacturing economies of scale in the construction of homes. That is, the building industry will happily accept new tools which make framing a house faster (such as power nailers), or which make assembling cabinets faster (such as prefabricated cabinets) or the like: that allows them to assemble the house for less--and pocket the difference in price.
See, the irony in housing price is that in many areas (such as California) houses in a given area tend to be priced by the square foot given it's location, not by the actual construction costs--so long as construction corners were not so cut that the house is uninhabitable. If a new technique comes along to allow a house to be framed for $5,000 instead of $15,000, the $10,000 saved will simply be pocketed by the builder--because houses, priced by the square foot and not by construction costs due to restrictions on construction in most municipalities creating artifical shortages which drive prices up.
The second reason why most municipalities try to protect the local building industry is to protect the local "flavor" of the community. In California, there is a large scale builder (Kaufman and Broad) who has made inroads in large scale home construction. Unfortunately for them, however, most local communities don't like Kaufman and Broad neighborhoods because they tend to look like generic cookie-cutter homes--and those neighborhoods have a hard time attracting buyers.
Most successful local builders tend to have a good feel for their local community, and most municipalities wish to project and preserve that feel. And so they tend to shun anything (such as modular home construction) which would destroy that local feel, such as Kaufman and Broad homes.
Sure, but it's proprietary. People are spending money on IP that may have a free alternative.
What's expensive about a house is not the Intellectual Property of the house design--which goes for about $2/sqft. What's expensive is the cost of construction--which goes for about $80-$100/sqft. And one of the largest factors in that construction cost is the profit margin to the building contractor--which, for a 2000 sqft house, can be anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000--or rather, from $10 to $25/sqft.
Even if you reduce the IP cost of a house to 0, you will not significantly alter the price of the overall house. In fact, given that many architects work in conjunction with the building contractor, the IP cost could easily be absorbed by the building contractor.
In short, building houses is not like building software.
When I used to work for a startup back in 1988, I met the Apple Architectual Design "Evangelist" who, over lunch with a bunch of other people, told me how she invisioned Apple taking over the architectual design industry. Amonst other things, she told me of a future where, due to efficiencies in design and communication, house construction could begin while plans were in plan check at the building departments because the plans needed for construction could be sent over to the job site before the required documentation for plan check could be finalized. What a wonderful world this would be that we could speed up the construction of a house by the two or three weeks a house spends in plan check, by using Macintosh computers to speed up the process so that construction and plan check could happen in parallel!
I asked her what would happen if a set of plans failed plan check.
"Excuse me?"
What would happen if a set of plans failed plan check because a hallway was too narrow? Wouldn't the builders be up shit's creek if the cement foundation they just poured last week had to be jack-hammered up because the hallway nailers and forms were placed wrong, because the hallway was drawn too narrow?
She assured me that architects never made that kind of mistake. I told her that architects made that kind of mistake all the time; my mother (who was a drafter for an architect) had made that very mistake at the start of her career--the architect she worked for didn't catch the mistake either. That's why plans sit in plan check for two to three weeks!
Stupid woman. But it does explain why we see so few Macintosh computers in architectual drafting offices today...
The article reminded me of her because the article cites some similar rather stupid blunders which I would consider "overestimating the architects." My favorite quote:
n their paper "A New Epoch," Larson and two MIT colleagues suggest that mass customization finally allows architects to play a significant role in the design of houses for the mass market. Larson himself knows from experience that house commissions currently come only from "adventurously wealthy" clients. But with a Web-based design system, architects can become involved in the earlier stage of creating design "engines" from which modest-income customers could develop their own permutations. It has a faintly Modernist, and solidly idealistic, ring to it: architects would no longer be designing forms as the expression of technological function but algorithms that produce expressive skins, each offering a variation from the next.
First, let me state that as the child of parents in the building industry (and who made spare money running plans to the city of Fresno for plan check while in High School), I have known quite a few people in the building industry and in the housing industry. So I think I'm speaking from a little bit of experience here.
And let me state flatly that most of the architects I've met couldn't even pronounce the word "algorithm", much less be able to quantify their design skills into one.
Second, let me state that the statement "Larson himself knows from experience that house commissions currently come only from "adventurously wealthy" clients." is misleading. What is expensive in a custom home is not the custom architectual design, which in my neck of the woods runs around $2/sqft (which, for a custom 2500 square foot house would be about $5,000), but the construction costs and the profits made by the building contractor who builds your house. (Most of the guys out there who run building contracts won't even look at your set of plans unless they figure on a $20,000 profit, minimum) The expensive part is not the design, but the construction. And even if altering the design of the house could somehow make the construction costs significantly less, the builder will just attempt to pocket the price difference anyways.
Furthermore, the statement is misleading in that it suggests that architects are not involved in the design of tract housing. The truth is that what makes tract housing awful is that the architect who designs the tract housing generally has few incentives to design good tract homes. Generally a contract for tract housing goes like this: the developer knows he wants to knock off a few hundred homes, and so he approaches the architect and says "give me 8 house designs, around 1600 to 2000 square feet, and make them easy to build." And, like a soup that is prepared without someone tasting the concoction to make adjustments along the way, with most architects you get 8 rather soulless designs, because he's being paid regardless of the quality of the designs, so long as they meet the construction parameters that were set out.
Tract housing is cheap, by the way, not because the construction techniques are any different from custom homes, but because the developer, in building a lot of homes, has more incentives to "turn and churn"--that is, he has more incentive to cut corners, both in the quality of the construction materials, cost of cabinets, appliences, etc., and in reducing his margins, so he can sell the houses as quickly as possible. That's because most developers who build houses and then sell them (as most builders who build "spec houses"--that is, houses built on speculation that it will sell) generally take out a "construction loan", and have to pay the bank interest in that loan for every month the builder holds onto the house. And when the entire profit margin for a spec house can be eaten in interest if the house remains unsold for 15 months, and for a tract house in something like 7 to 8 months, that means the developer is better off selling the house the first month rather than the 5th--and that means keeping costs (including profit margins) down.
None of this has squat to do with architectual design, by the way.
Hopefully the musings of these MIT eggheads will go the way of that Apple Evangelist. Or, at the very least, they'll figure out how the building industry *really* works, so they can at least devote their energy into making things more efficient for the builders--such as, for example, figuring out a faster and cheaper way to build roofs than prefabricated truss systems...
You could always buy a manufactured home. (The term "manufactured home" refers to homes that are designed using CAD, assembled in a factory, and then transported to the site. Oh, and they used to be called "mobile homes" before the term got associated with trailer park trash.) Manufactured homes *are* mass produced, and are relatively inexpensive--and, oddly enough, people only live in them if they cannot afford any better.
Honestly, a lot of prefabrication and labor reducing technologies are slowly making their way into the building industry. From prefabricated trusses to standardized door frames and prefabricated window frames, quite a bit nowadays is being assembled at a factory and shipped on site, rather than being built on site. Even "custom" cabinets are being built in a factory and installed on-site, rather than being built on site. Further, technology is making its way into the toolbelt of most builders to reduce the amount of time needed in construction: air compressor-powered nailers, for example, reduce significantly the time to frame a house.
That a bunch of eggheads want to somehow speed this up--and by changing how houses are designed, rather than how they are constructed for heaven's sake!--strikes me as a loser of a proposition.
Re:Local building codes and restraint of trade
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Open Source Housing
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· Score: 2
Um, two points.
First, most building codes are derived from a set of standard building codes, the Uniform Building Codes (or UBCs, for short), and so really do not vary much from location to location. The only differences between different codes in different regions have to do with local neighborhood variations: setbacks from the property line, maximum hight restrictions, lot coverage, and the like.
Second, most building codes specify acceptable construction minimums, such as the minimum acceptable load-bearing beams to use to support a floor, and the like. It's impossible to create "incompatable" codes for things like load-bearing beams--one locality isn't going to rule out a 4x12 when it calls for a minimum 4x8, for example; at worse, the other locality may want you to use a 4x12 over the 4x8. But you will never fail plan check because you used too large a supporting member, too much insulation, or created an overly energy-efficient building.
So while there are a number of things local municipalities do to protect the local building industry (such as a lack of standards for submitting plans to plan check, or the requirement that plans be locally submitted--which require that at least one guy be local to where the house is being built), screwing with the UBCs is not one of them.
If Disney wants to hang onto "Steamboat Willy" for perpetuity, I say let them. However, they shouldn't recreate copyright law so that the 99% of works which should be allowed to pass into the public domain are kept locked up, dispite not even being able to trace down the copyright holders.
I think we should change copyright law so that all copyrights last for 14 years, with an option by the copyright holder to extend that copyright for an additional 14 years, for a maximum of some really long period of time (say, 280 years or something silly). That way, if an entity is still around who cares about it's copyrights (such as the Disney Corporation), they can simply get an extension to their copyrights for as long as they like, without fscking up the natural expiration of copyrights on the 99% of stuff whose owners are no longer around.
That's the odd thing about the current copyright regime, by the way: it seems to me that a copyright can survive its author, and without an established estate who can oversee the copyright, the use of such copyrighted works without anyone who actually controls those copyrights is impossible. That is, instead of doing what our founding fathers wanted--to allow these works to pass into the public domain for the larger good--these works, being impossible to legally copy, will pass into oblivion.
That's why I believe someone alive and active needs to step up and file for a copyright extension ever 14 years. (And, in the case where someone screws up the filing, give them an automatic 1 year buffer or something to get the paperwork straight, so something doesn't slip into public domain because a request gets lost in the mail.)
... for $85/hour. If they aren't willing to pay $85 an hour, then fsck them. Time is money, and unless someone is compensating me for my time, I have better things to do, like wash my hair or pick my toes.
It amazes me, by the way, the number of imcompetant jerks in the world--both professional and personal--who want it all for free, or who expect that you should go help out for free. Friendship is friendship, but money is money--and I NEVER confuse the two.
"Eyewitness, William Woody, who lived east of Roswell, remembered being outside with his father the night of July 4, 1947, when he saw a brilliant object plunge to the ground. A couple of days later when Woody and his father tried to locate the area of the crash, they were stopped by military personnel, who had cordoned off the area."
And this one:
"The Exxon Valdez hit the reef just before midnight. According to an account later given by William Woody, the head of the National Transportation Safety Board's investigative team, Hazelwood returned to the bridge and tried to save his ship.
"The captain gave a series of right and left rudder," Woody said Wednesday. "We do not know the purpose of these orders.""
So I guess I'm famous or something. Or at least other people using my name are famous--or at least infamous.
That's okay; I won't be filing lawsuits against pornography stars for the use of my last name...:-)
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Actually, there is something on the Macintosh for MacOS 9 (the feature was silently dropped for MacOS X because of security issues) that provides the same sort of functionality as autorun for Windows.
The feature is called "AutoPlay", and was actually added in QuickTime v2 and later to allow developers to burn kiosk disks. The idea was that this would allow developers to burn a CD which automatically starts a kiosk program, web browser or movie when the disk was inserted into the Macintosh.
"AutoPlay" for MacOS 9 can be enabled and disabled by going into Control Panels under the Apple menu, selecting "QuickTime Settings", then in the drop-down menu, select "AutoPlay." The second setting "Enable CD-ROM AutoPlay" is the one you want; uncheck this setting to prevent programs from automatically starting when inserted. (This is from QuickTime v6 for MacOS 9; earlier versions may put this setting somewhere else. YMMV.)
If you wish to burn a disk that automatically starts a program or automatically launches a document when inserted in MacOS 9, in a CD-ROM burner program such as Roxio Toast, when selecting a MacOS volume to burn you have the option of specifying the file to automatically play when the disk is inserted in the same volume selection box. Just select the "AutoStart" checkbox and type in the name of the root-directory file to open or program to start.
For more information, go here.
I don't know if anyone has noticed this, but at the "dark sky station" stationed at 100,000 feet up, since the station is floating rather than orbiting, there is no issue with zero gravity. Weightlessness is caused by the fact that an object in orbit is "falling" to the earth--and missing. But the "dark sky station" is not in free-fall; it's held aloft via bouyancy, and so workers on the "dark sky station" will experience full gravity. No problems with muscle atrophy.
Furthermore, it's not like poeple haven't flown up to 100,000 feet up in balloons; what becomes technically interesting is building a permanent or semi-permanent station as a balloon at that altitude.
The best part is that the worlds record for the highest skydive is above that altitude. So theoretically in the case of a catestrophic emergency, people could simply get into their skydiving space suits, and jump.
You mean besides on South Park?
I can't believe this was marked down as a troll. We now have 30 job openings in the Santa Monica office of Symantec that I'm aware of, and we're having a hard time filling the job openings.
Is it that the person who marked this down is more interested in promoting their politics than letting people know that there are job openings? Granted, I was sarcastic, but the need for jobs at Symantec is real: if you have Java experience, go to Symantec's web site and submit your resume.
But I guess if politics is more important than people getting jobs, please--mod this down to -1: Troll.
Yep, there aren't any jobs. They're all being exported overseas. Life sucks. Kerry is right: we're doomed, DOOMED I tell you.
By the way the biggest problem I've seen working for Symantec is that we can't get enough qualified resumes in to fill our job openings.
In no means should you take the fact that we have more job openings than resumes to search through as a sign that the economy is doing well, nor should you take the fact that unemployment right now is at the same levels as they were under Clinton in 1996 as a sign that people actually have jobs.
Because like all the pundants are telling us, we're DOOMED, I tell you! DOOOOOOOOOOOOMED!
Yeah, but if we do it by taking money away from the military we'll wind up landing a man on Mars in the name of Al Qaeda...
The problem is that one can be polite yet still asertive--yet for some reason or another most people only learn that to be assertive they have to be a jerk. And that's why society seems to be turning into a bunch of jerks--because no one knows how to be polite yet assertive anymore.
I try very hard in my normal life to be calm, polite, and friendly, especially when dealing with technical support people who quite honestly aren't the ones at fault.
And now there is a device which will penalize me for being a polite person?
Fresno, California?
I have to agree. While some sort of traffic avoidance and traffic routing system may help somewhat in Los Angeles (which recently won the dubious award as the most congested city in the United States), there is a desperate need for more highways.
The principle problems in Los Angeles right now are the 405 from the San Fernando Valley to Santa Monica, and the 5 from the San Fernando down through to Orange County. Most traffic congestion through the rest of the city seems to be fed by the fact that people are trying to find the best routes to avoid these two highways--which both share the distinction of being the only major highways (alongside the 101 through Hollywood) which lead from the Los Angeles basin to the San Fernando Valley.
Traffic avoidance systems simply will not work when there are only three major freeways. And mass transit won't work because the problem is not congested streets as much as it is congested freeways: more than once I've experienced getting off a freeway where I was driving 10 miles an hour to a surface street where I speed up to 30 miles an hour. (I would take surface streets all the way to work from Glendale in the eastern part of the valley to Santa Monica, if there wasn't this gigantic moutain range crowned by the Hollywood sign between here and there blocking surface streets.)
Mass transit doesn't work, by the way, because the various municipalities has rendered our bus system effectively only for going from point to point within a city--but going across multiple cities along transportation corridors often involve switching between multiple busses. (The 20 mile drive on the freeway to work typically takes me an hour--on the bus it would take me an hour and a half, minimum. And light rail (and the newly constructed L.A. subway) is a joke here: the placement of the stations and where the tracks run was motivated by politics and not by need, wasting billions while carrying only tens of thousands.)
Spend a couple of billion expanding the 5, 405 and 10 so there aren't any chokepoints before spending money adding satellite navigation systems. Otherwise, what will happen is some little ol' lady from Pasadena will wrap her car around a light pole on the 5, and the only think the satnav system will say in response is "you're fscked: you can't get there from here."
The article asserts that increased productivity costs jobs, so logically we should use inefficient and bloated software that crashes periodically, contains numerous security holes which cost time and money to fix, and is riddled with user interface inefficiencies which make it frustrating and hard to use. That way, productivity drops, and more people are required to do the same job.
I never thought I'd say this, but it sounds like Microsoft has been doing the economy a favor all this time...
Microsoft is all about openness and cooperation. Just open your wallet and cooperate with M$, and all will be fine.
But tying this into Heisenberg's uncertainty principle is nonesense in that Heisenberg's uncertainty principle doesn't just say "the position and momentium of an object is uncertain at a given point in time", but mathematically states exactly the size of the uncertainty window. That is, it doesn't say "d(thing)/dT doesn't exist", but that there is a window of uncertainty, and gives a way to calculate the size of that uncertainty window.
Now I understand the notion that the uncertainty principle could be used to argue that there are no instances in time; after all, at the quantuum level there is no certainty, so why should very small intervals of time be certain? But to argue that Zeno's paradox suggests there are no instants in time?
Not the same thing.
It's "Caltech", no intercaps, not "Cal Tech", or "CalTech" or whatever other odd spelling that the press came up with last week because no-one pays attention. "Caltech."
Sorry; it's a relative minor gripe from an ex-Lloydie...
I'm not sure if this is completely off-topic, but I believe memory seems related to a common internal "logic" and "language" of the brain--which makes memory completely unreliable.
For example, a few months ago my wife and I went to England, where we rented a car and drove around. What's odd is that my memories of driving in England includes the signs, the places where we went and the like, my memory of driving and passing other drives places me on the right side of the road--even though I know damned good and well in England you drive on the left.
I believe that's because I'm so used to driving on the right side of the road that my memories of England are related to that experience--that is, in my brain's internal "language", people drive on the right--so I must have driven on the right when I was in England.
It's a strange experience, knowing full well that I'm mis-remembering something fairly recent.
It may be related to your early childhood memories: as those memories are not related to experiences you are having now as an adult, they are being either "misfiled" (under things like feeling there was a God and Goddess in your early life--which were simply your parents), or just completely dropped or made obscured.
Just my two cents on this...
A friend of my brother made the following observation, which (I believe) gets to the point of the RIAA's troubles.
"Why should I go out and plunk down $17.99 for a CD, when for $19.99 I can buy a DVD movie?"
With portable DVD movie players dropping in price to the same price range as portable CD players were a few years ago, I'm starting to see something very interesting going on. Instead of seeing some guy behind the counter at the local bookstore listening to his CD collection, I'm now starting to see the same guy watch a movie while sitting behind the counter.
The problem with that is that anybody can form their own company, and have that company survive their death. They just have to give their relatives the responsibility of retaining the copyright, something they would certainly have an interest in doing if that copyright returned anything more than the filing fee in income.
The problem is that with the current behavior of Congress, we're getting a perpetual copyright extension anyways--and it's not just a handful of works getting extended by a handful of greedy relatives (who, if they were really greedy, would be greedy because they are making the works available in print), but every damned thing that has been published since the 1920's or thereabouts.
At least under my solution companies who have an active interest in preserving their copyrights on older works can actively do so--and companies and individuals who do not take an active interest in their works have their copyrights lapse naturally. It strikes me as a better compromise than what is currently happening now--with Disney and others extending copyrights to last from now until Doomsday, effectively eliminating the concept of public domain for all works that are not explicitly placed there.
I appear to have been wrong about the details of local building codes, but you do acknowledge that local authorties do manipulate things to protect the local building industry. Some of these things mean that we won't see certain sorts of potential economies of scale and large scale competition in house building.
Of course local municipalities do what they can to protect the local building industry. There are two reasons, one perhaps a little "protective", and one valid.
The "protective" reason is that it means jobs to the local community. Very few communities like the idea of making it easier to allow jobs to leave a town or city; most communities spend a lot of time figuring out how to get jobs to relocate to their area. That's why most communities have at least a "chamber of commerce" whose rollcall reads like the political "who's who" of that area.
That's also why, by the way, the building industry will happily accept any potential manufacturing economies of scale in the construction of homes. That is, the building industry will happily accept new tools which make framing a house faster (such as power nailers), or which make assembling cabinets faster (such as prefabricated cabinets) or the like: that allows them to assemble the house for less--and pocket the difference in price.
See, the irony in housing price is that in many areas (such as California) houses in a given area tend to be priced by the square foot given it's location, not by the actual construction costs--so long as construction corners were not so cut that the house is uninhabitable. If a new technique comes along to allow a house to be framed for $5,000 instead of $15,000, the $10,000 saved will simply be pocketed by the builder--because houses, priced by the square foot and not by construction costs due to restrictions on construction in most municipalities creating artifical shortages which drive prices up.
The second reason why most municipalities try to protect the local building industry is to protect the local "flavor" of the community. In California, there is a large scale builder (Kaufman and Broad) who has made inroads in large scale home construction. Unfortunately for them, however, most local communities don't like Kaufman and Broad neighborhoods because they tend to look like generic cookie-cutter homes--and those neighborhoods have a hard time attracting buyers.
Most successful local builders tend to have a good feel for their local community, and most municipalities wish to project and preserve that feel. And so they tend to shun anything (such as modular home construction) which would destroy that local feel, such as Kaufman and Broad homes.
Sure, but it's proprietary. People are spending money on IP that may have a free alternative.
What's expensive about a house is not the Intellectual Property of the house design--which goes for about $2/sqft. What's expensive is the cost of construction--which goes for about $80-$100/sqft. And one of the largest factors in that construction cost is the profit margin to the building contractor--which, for a 2000 sqft house, can be anywhere from $20,000 to $50,000--or rather, from $10 to $25/sqft.
Even if you reduce the IP cost of a house to 0, you will not significantly alter the price of the overall house. In fact, given that many architects work in conjunction with the building contractor, the IP cost could easily be absorbed by the building contractor.
In short, building houses is not like building software.
When I used to work for a startup back in 1988, I met the Apple Architectual Design "Evangelist" who, over lunch with a bunch of other people, told me how she invisioned Apple taking over the architectual design industry. Amonst other things, she told me of a future where, due to efficiencies in design and communication, house construction could begin while plans were in plan check at the building departments because the plans needed for construction could be sent over to the job site before the required documentation for plan check could be finalized. What a wonderful world this would be that we could speed up the construction of a house by the two or three weeks a house spends in plan check, by using Macintosh computers to speed up the process so that construction and plan check could happen in parallel!
I asked her what would happen if a set of plans failed plan check.
"Excuse me?"
What would happen if a set of plans failed plan check because a hallway was too narrow? Wouldn't the builders be up shit's creek if the cement foundation they just poured last week had to be jack-hammered up because the hallway nailers and forms were placed wrong, because the hallway was drawn too narrow?
She assured me that architects never made that kind of mistake. I told her that architects made that kind of mistake all the time; my mother (who was a drafter for an architect) had made that very mistake at the start of her career--the architect she worked for didn't catch the mistake either. That's why plans sit in plan check for two to three weeks!
Stupid woman. But it does explain why we see so few Macintosh computers in architectual drafting offices today...
The article reminded me of her because the article cites some similar rather stupid blunders which I would consider "overestimating the architects." My favorite quote:
n their paper "A New Epoch," Larson and two MIT colleagues suggest that mass customization finally allows architects to play a significant role in the design of houses for the mass market. Larson himself knows from experience that house commissions currently come only from "adventurously wealthy" clients. But with a Web-based design system, architects can become involved in the earlier stage of creating design "engines" from which modest-income customers could develop their own permutations. It has a faintly Modernist, and solidly idealistic, ring to it: architects would no longer be designing forms as the expression of technological function but algorithms that produce expressive skins, each offering a variation from the next.
First, let me state that as the child of parents in the building industry (and who made spare money running plans to the city of Fresno for plan check while in High School), I have known quite a few people in the building industry and in the housing industry. So I think I'm speaking from a little bit of experience here.
And let me state flatly that most of the architects I've met couldn't even pronounce the word "algorithm", much less be able to quantify their design skills into one.
Second, let me state that the statement "Larson himself knows from experience that house commissions currently come only from "adventurously wealthy" clients." is misleading. What is expensive in a custom home is not the custom architectual design, which in my neck of the woods runs around $2/sqft (which, for a custom 2500 square foot house would be about $5,000), but the construction costs and the profits made by the building contractor who builds your house. (Most of the guys out there who run building contracts won't even look at your set of plans unless they figure on a $20,000 profit, minimum) The expensive part is not the design, but the construction. And even if altering the design of the house could somehow make the construction costs significantly less, the builder will just attempt to pocket the price difference anyways.
Furthermore, the statement is misleading in that it suggests that architects are not involved in the design of tract housing. The truth is that what makes tract housing awful is that the architect who designs the tract housing generally has few incentives to design good tract homes. Generally a contract for tract housing goes like this: the developer knows he wants to knock off a few hundred homes, and so he approaches the architect and says "give me 8 house designs, around 1600 to 2000 square feet, and make them easy to build." And, like a soup that is prepared without someone tasting the concoction to make adjustments along the way, with most architects you get 8 rather soulless designs, because he's being paid regardless of the quality of the designs, so long as they meet the construction parameters that were set out.
Tract housing is cheap, by the way, not because the construction techniques are any different from custom homes, but because the developer, in building a lot of homes, has more incentives to "turn and churn"--that is, he has more incentive to cut corners, both in the quality of the construction materials, cost of cabinets, appliences, etc., and in reducing his margins, so he can sell the houses as quickly as possible. That's because most developers who build houses and then sell them (as most builders who build "spec houses"--that is, houses built on speculation that it will sell) generally take out a "construction loan", and have to pay the bank interest in that loan for every month the builder holds onto the house. And when the entire profit margin for a spec house can be eaten in interest if the house remains unsold for 15 months, and for a tract house in something like 7 to 8 months, that means the developer is better off selling the house the first month rather than the 5th--and that means keeping costs (including profit margins) down.
None of this has squat to do with architectual design, by the way.
Hopefully the musings of these MIT eggheads will go the way of that Apple Evangelist. Or, at the very least, they'll figure out how the building industry *really* works, so they can at least devote their energy into making things more efficient for the builders--such as, for example, figuring out a faster and cheaper way to build roofs than prefabricated truss systems...
You could always buy a manufactured home. (The term "manufactured home" refers to homes that are designed using CAD, assembled in a factory, and then transported to the site. Oh, and they used to be called "mobile homes" before the term got associated with trailer park trash.) Manufactured homes *are* mass produced, and are relatively inexpensive--and, oddly enough, people only live in them if they cannot afford any better.
Honestly, a lot of prefabrication and labor reducing technologies are slowly making their way into the building industry. From prefabricated trusses to standardized door frames and prefabricated window frames, quite a bit nowadays is being assembled at a factory and shipped on site, rather than being built on site. Even "custom" cabinets are being built in a factory and installed on-site, rather than being built on site. Further, technology is making its way into the toolbelt of most builders to reduce the amount of time needed in construction: air compressor-powered nailers, for example, reduce significantly the time to frame a house.
That a bunch of eggheads want to somehow speed this up--and by changing how houses are designed, rather than how they are constructed for heaven's sake!--strikes me as a loser of a proposition.
Um, two points.
First, most building codes are derived from a set of standard building codes, the Uniform Building Codes (or UBCs, for short), and so really do not vary much from location to location. The only differences between different codes in different regions have to do with local neighborhood variations: setbacks from the property line, maximum hight restrictions, lot coverage, and the like.
Second, most building codes specify acceptable construction minimums, such as the minimum acceptable load-bearing beams to use to support a floor, and the like. It's impossible to create "incompatable" codes for things like load-bearing beams--one locality isn't going to rule out a 4x12 when it calls for a minimum 4x8, for example; at worse, the other locality may want you to use a 4x12 over the 4x8. But you will never fail plan check because you used too large a supporting member, too much insulation, or created an overly energy-efficient building.
So while there are a number of things local municipalities do to protect the local building industry (such as a lack of standards for submitting plans to plan check, or the requirement that plans be locally submitted--which require that at least one guy be local to where the house is being built), screwing with the UBCs is not one of them.
If Disney wants to hang onto "Steamboat Willy" for perpetuity, I say let them. However, they shouldn't recreate copyright law so that the 99% of works which should be allowed to pass into the public domain are kept locked up, dispite not even being able to trace down the copyright holders.
I think we should change copyright law so that all copyrights last for 14 years, with an option by the copyright holder to extend that copyright for an additional 14 years, for a maximum of some really long period of time (say, 280 years or something silly). That way, if an entity is still around who cares about it's copyrights (such as the Disney Corporation), they can simply get an extension to their copyrights for as long as they like, without fscking up the natural expiration of copyrights on the 99% of stuff whose owners are no longer around.
That's the odd thing about the current copyright regime, by the way: it seems to me that a copyright can survive its author, and without an established estate who can oversee the copyright, the use of such copyrighted works without anyone who actually controls those copyrights is impossible. That is, instead of doing what our founding fathers wanted--to allow these works to pass into the public domain for the larger good--these works, being impossible to legally copy, will pass into oblivion.
That's why I believe someone alive and active needs to step up and file for a copyright extension ever 14 years. (And, in the case where someone screws up the filing, give them an automatic 1 year buffer or something to get the paperwork straight, so something doesn't slip into public domain because a request gets lost in the mail.)
... for $85/hour. If they aren't willing to pay $85 an hour, then fsck them. Time is money, and unless someone is compensating me for my time, I have better things to do, like wash my hair or pick my toes.
It amazes me, by the way, the number of imcompetant jerks in the world--both professional and personal--who want it all for free, or who expect that you should go help out for free. Friendship is friendship, but money is money--and I NEVER confuse the two.
Could be worse.
:-)
Search for "William Woody" reveals this tidbit:
"Eyewitness, William Woody, who lived east of Roswell, remembered being outside with his father the night of July 4, 1947, when he saw a brilliant object plunge to the ground. A couple of days later when Woody and his father tried to locate the area of the crash, they were stopped by military personnel, who had cordoned off the area."
And this one:
"The Exxon Valdez hit the reef just before midnight. According to an account later given by William Woody, the head of the National Transportation Safety Board's investigative team, Hazelwood returned to the bridge and tried to save his ship.
"The captain gave a series of right and left rudder," Woody said Wednesday. "We do not know the purpose of these orders.""
So I guess I'm famous or something. Or at least other people using my name are famous--or at least infamous.
That's okay; I won't be filing lawsuits against pornography stars for the use of my last name...