Uhm, no, the time to pour money into battery research was about two centuries years ago. Do you know who invented the battery? This guy. Look at how old he is. Were he alive today, our batteries would be instantly recognizable to him. For all their new oxides and ions, the simple truth is that batteries are the same expensive, bulky, heavy, short-lived, inefficient and environmentally unfriendly means energy portability they always were. Spend your research money on fuel cells, an affordable hydrogen distribution network, whatever--just please stop beating the dead horse that is battery power.
I am surprised at the number of people offering up the predictable "Dude, fuckim'" response. Maybe it's because I'm an economist and not a computer scientist, but I see considerable opportunity for you to gain from this situation without really burning any bridges. The fact that your boss is so demanding suggests your skills and business-specific knowledge are of considerable value to the company--well in excess of what you are being paid, since if not he would simply hire someone else at the going rate. You are in a very strong position to dictate terms. Counteroffer his "subsidized rates" nonsense with a quote for 3-4 times what you make on an hourly, pro-rata basis. Clearly, they already know you've got them by the balls, and my hunch is it would still make good economic sense to pony up. If he balks, you are released from further obligation.
In my estimation, this approach will lead to less recrimination than if you simply left them hanging. Their response clearly illustrates that you are undercompensated, and coming in with a high demand is really no more than a request that you be valued fairly. They know this, and will blame themselves, not you, if things fall through.
Well, yeah, but... I nearly all cases, the thing separating a brilliant idea from an everyday one is that somebody is already competently implementing the everyday one:) Personally, I look at Google's faith in being able to sell advertising with a clean, fast, no-frills interface as a stroke of brilliance, not mere competence. This was a decision made circa 1998, mind you, back when Organic and Razorfish reigned supreme and everybody was looking for ways to make the web look like a glorified TV set.
Wait, how is costing half as much not a "benefit"? Apple is never going to dominate until they can either a) eliminate the "Apple tax" or b) convince people who can already work a computer reasonably well that it's worth paying twice the price for prettier fonts & icons. And I'm betting on a).
Even better is what some smartass posted 12 years later in response to the original www thread:
Tim,
I have to say that this "world wide web" thing sounds like a ridiculous concept. I can't imagine it will take off. Next thing you'll tell us is that people can do commerce through the "web" or
even browse pornography! I would never invest in it. I am going to put my money in something with real potential, namely a floppy disk that can hold 1.8 megabytes. This should be able to hold all the data you could possibly want to carry around with you, for decades to come.
Uhh, I can. Right now I'm running Azureus, a Java/SWT-based P2P app, with one torrent downloading and none uploading. It takes up 50m of physical mem. and 60 megs of virtual mem. Emule, which is written in C++, takes about half that with 10 or 15 shares running. At it's way more responsive too. Java 5 is nicer, but it's untrue that there is no difference between Java and native apps. Have you run StarOffice recently?
Anyone who knows anything about social psychology is apt to have a very low opinion of it:) Whatever norms have evolved out BitTorrent usage are products of conscious design decisions made by Bram Cohen. In particular, BT employs a very rudimentary game-theoretic model to ration upload bandwidth. Basically what makes it so much better than other P2P apps is that the no-leeching constraint is enforced at the software level. Still, you are right that the largest BT communities (SuprNova et al.) still rely heavily of altruism in the form of seeders. For this reason alone I am highly suspicious of the network's long-term feasibility. There is simply no benefit to me for seeding, even though it has positive externalities in the form of the continued existence of the network. As soon as the masses get ahold of it (the latest round of lawsuits should help), things will go to the dogs.
No, this is the best application of Flash I have seen. And while I was unaware that bashing a webpage was now part of counter-culture (along with, you know, black nail polish,) I agree with parent poster that there was nothing in that silly webrochure that couldn't have been just as well-presented using good ol' HTML and perhaps a dash of CSS. And a lot easier for disabled people to access, too. Oh that's right, they don't use cameras. (?)
Actually, the space industry is subject so considerable economies of scale. Burt Rutan spent ~$20 million in R&D for SpaceShipOne. If you think of his product as "rides into outer space", it certainly ain't gonna cost him another 20 mil. produce another. That was the whole point of the X-Prize: build something reusable that was cheap to fly. Hence, the average price of rides declines with every new one that gets completed: textbook definition of increasing returns to scale.
I guess you could argue that NASA, because of its porky nature and idiot bureaucracy, realizes a lot less returns to scale than it should. But the fact remains that the (hundreds of) billions they've spent in R&D over the past four decades has made it much cheaper for them to do the things they do. Everybody loves to bag on NASA, fine, but don't forget they are freaking parsecs ahead of the nearest US competitor. Literally--they're the only ones to send stuff outside the solar system, visit other planets, hell, even putting someone is orbit is their sole domain and will be for a long time to come. No way in hell a private firm could accomplish even one of those on their own? Why: initial costs several orders of magnitude higher than any quantity of funding they could rustle up.
It can be shown mathematically that a single, monopolistic producer actually generates higher surplus than would a competitive market with increasing to scale. Thus the term "natural monopoly". Think pharmaceuticals, microprocessors, cars--anything that takes of a lot or R&D--or infrastructure, in the case of phone/electrical/sewage/cable TV services--will tend towards monopolization. Space exploration, I'm sorry to admit, fits right with those, which is why this (pardon the pun) nebulous idea many have of a vibrant, competitive market for space travel has always seemed like a quixotic load of economic bollux to me:) Maybe it shouldn't be government run, but one key player is going to dominate this industry for a long time to come. If I could buy stock in NASA I would.
This case, when finally decided, will be equivalent to the Betamax case 20 years ago which ensured that VCRs were legal.
Only if they decide for the defendants. If BetaMax had come down in favor of all the studios, media companies and fat-cat moguls that were against it, it would merely have been yet another chapter in the long, sad and ceaseless history of our government siding with its purchasers. Think about it: the only reason we still remember and talk about the BetaMax decision today is because it was anomalous. The fact that it revolutionized home entertainment and the way we think about IP seems is but a product of that anomaly.
There are literally hundreds of fascinating, exciting ideas that get buried every year by our three sellout branches of government. Things that would have radically altered the status quo--things we'd be talking about twenty years later.
Attributing attributes? You been out of the States too long. And I said "living" abroad, not "traveling." In my experience, people who up and leave the US generally do so because they're fed up with it. As in, not bible-clutching homophobes whose idea of nirvana involves lots of white people, a swimming pool filled with Skoal, and the entire product line of the Ford Motor Company (sans the metrosexual stuff.) It must take a lot to spurn the Greatest Nation in the History of Civilization, no?
Most people in Europe seem to espouse the "hate the sin, not the sinner" ideology when it comes to Americans. I never had a negative reaction because I was an American when I was in Spain, and this was all throughout 2003 when such sentiments were at an all-time high. Even on the day we invaded Iraq, when I was at Les Falles in Valencia with of a group of 40 or 50 (very obviously) Americans, and nobody said a word. Granted this could have a lot to do with the fact that I was even more pissed at my country than they were, and made no effort to hide it.
In general, if you are living abroad you are very much selected-for in terms of being more enlightened and worldwise (read: liberal) than Joe Redstate. Estimates on how many Americans even hold a passport are all over the place, but suffice it to say it's a teeny fraction of the overall population. Those who do, in my experience, tend to be--politically--very skewed away from mainstream America and are a lot more in line with European/Asian/Latin American/everywhere else values.
Uhh,::ahem::... (raises hand) I don't use iTunes. Maybe I will in the future, although that'sdoubtful. Basically when I got my iPod last month, I filled it up with the many thousands of MP3s I've downloaded over the years and never listened to. (I download MP3s compulsively and I probably listen to about 1/10th of what I download.) Canciones aleatorias/random shuffle has been a fun and enlightening experience, indeed.
Maybe it's just because I'm in college, but no one else I know uses iTunes either. And I go to Berkeley, where judging just by a stroll through campus, we have a higher iPod:student ratio than maybe any other school in America. Like probably 1/3 or something.
Slashdot Mirror
Funny, I couldn't discern any actual product amidst all that vapor :)
Uhm, no, the time to pour money into battery research was about two centuries years ago. Do you know who invented the battery? This guy. Look at how old he is. Were he alive today, our batteries would be instantly recognizable to him. For all their new oxides and ions, the simple truth is that batteries are the same expensive, bulky, heavy, short-lived, inefficient and environmentally unfriendly means energy portability they always were. Spend your research money on fuel cells, an affordable hydrogen distribution network, whatever--just please stop beating the dead horse that is battery power.
He's apparently trying to align himself with the 'best brands' in each market.
Riiight, that must be what led him to endorse Buick. Not the 8-figure contract.
Just google the guy, 411 his address, and OJ him.
I am surprised at the number of people offering up the predictable "Dude, fuckim'" response. Maybe it's because I'm an economist and not a computer scientist, but I see considerable opportunity for you to gain from this situation without really burning any bridges. The fact that your boss is so demanding suggests your skills and business-specific knowledge are of considerable value to the company--well in excess of what you are being paid, since if not he would simply hire someone else at the going rate. You are in a very strong position to dictate terms. Counteroffer his "subsidized rates" nonsense with a quote for 3-4 times what you make on an hourly, pro-rata basis. Clearly, they already know you've got them by the balls, and my hunch is it would still make good economic sense to pony up. If he balks, you are released from further obligation.
In my estimation, this approach will lead to less recrimination than if you simply left them hanging. Their response clearly illustrates that you are undercompensated, and coming in with a high demand is really no more than a request that you be valued fairly. They know this, and will blame themselves, not you, if things fall through.
Wow. You are quite possibly the most thickheaded person I have ever seen post here. No mean feat, that--congratulations.
Well, yeah, but... I nearly all cases, the thing separating a brilliant idea from an everyday one is that somebody is already competently implementing the everyday one :) Personally, I look at Google's faith in being able to sell advertising with a clean, fast, no-frills interface as a stroke of brilliance, not mere competence. This was a decision made circa 1998, mind you, back when Organic and Razorfish reigned supreme and everybody was looking for ways to make the web look like a glorified TV set.
And I'd rather use a well-designed accounting package than have to deal with pointers to objects. :)
Wait, how is costing half as much not a "benefit"? Apple is never going to dominate until they can either a) eliminate the "Apple tax" or b) convince people who can already work a computer reasonably well that it's worth paying twice the price for prettier fonts & icons. And I'm betting on a).
The porn finds you, silly. Honestly, how long have you been on this "Internet" thing? A day? ;)
I'd double whatever you're willing to pay to see the average Slashdot reader in a room for 5 minutes with somebody who robs houses for a living.
Don't even pretend, twiggy.
The book is set in 1994, IIRC.
Uhh, I can. Right now I'm running Azureus, a Java/SWT-based P2P app, with one torrent downloading and none uploading. It takes up 50m of physical mem. and 60 megs of virtual mem. Emule, which is written in C++, takes about half that with 10 or 15 shares running. At it's way more responsive too. Java 5 is nicer, but it's untrue that there is no difference between Java and native apps. Have you run StarOffice recently?
Anyone who knows anything about social psychology is apt to have a very low opinion of it :) Whatever norms have evolved out BitTorrent usage are products of conscious design decisions made by Bram Cohen. In particular, BT employs a very rudimentary game-theoretic model to ration upload bandwidth. Basically what makes it so much better than other P2P apps is that the no-leeching constraint is enforced at the software level. Still, you are right that the largest BT communities (SuprNova et al.) still rely heavily of altruism in the form of seeders. For this reason alone I am highly suspicious of the network's long-term feasibility. There is simply no benefit to me for seeding, even though it has positive externalities in the form of the continued existence of the network. As soon as the masses get ahold of it (the latest round of lawsuits should help), things will go to the dogs.
Mmm, yes, sad. I can feel myself getting a little misty even as I type this.
In other news, mass murderer Osama Bin Laden released a new tape today, confirming he is alive and and kicking and intent upon more mass murdering; x people got blown up in Iraq today, where x is a real number between 10 and 300; The Sudanese are starving; and N. Korea and Iran will probably have a shitload of nukes by the end of the decade.
Goddamn those bastards at Nvidia for needlessly adding to the world's sadness.
No, this is the best application of Flash I have seen. And while I was unaware that bashing a webpage was now part of counter-culture (along with, you know, black nail polish,) I agree with parent poster that there was nothing in that silly webrochure that couldn't have been just as well-presented using good ol' HTML and perhaps a dash of CSS. And a lot easier for disabled people to access, too. Oh that's right, they don't use cameras. (?)
Economies of scale.
:) Maybe it shouldn't be government run, but one key player is going to dominate this industry for a long time to come. If I could buy stock in NASA I would.
Actually, the space industry is subject so considerable economies of scale. Burt Rutan spent ~$20 million in R&D for SpaceShipOne. If you think of his product as "rides into outer space", it certainly ain't gonna cost him another 20 mil. produce another. That was the whole point of the X-Prize: build something reusable that was cheap to fly. Hence, the average price of rides declines with every new one that gets completed: textbook definition of increasing returns to scale.
I guess you could argue that NASA, because of its porky nature and idiot bureaucracy, realizes a lot less returns to scale than it should. But the fact remains that the (hundreds of) billions they've spent in R&D over the past four decades has made it much cheaper for them to do the things they do. Everybody loves to bag on NASA, fine, but don't forget they are freaking parsecs ahead of the nearest US competitor. Literally--they're the only ones to send stuff outside the solar system, visit other planets, hell, even putting someone is orbit is their sole domain and will be for a long time to come. No way in hell a private firm could accomplish even one of those on their own? Why: initial costs several orders of magnitude higher than any quantity of funding they could rustle up.
It can be shown mathematically that a single, monopolistic producer actually generates higher surplus than would a competitive market with increasing to scale. Thus the term "natural monopoly". Think pharmaceuticals, microprocessors, cars--anything that takes of a lot or R&D--or infrastructure, in the case of phone/electrical/sewage/cable TV services--will tend towards monopolization. Space exploration, I'm sorry to admit, fits right with those, which is why this (pardon the pun) nebulous idea many have of a vibrant, competitive market for space travel has always seemed like a quixotic load of economic bollux to me
This case, when finally decided, will be equivalent to the Betamax case 20 years ago which ensured that VCRs were legal.
Only if they decide for the defendants. If BetaMax had come down in favor of all the studios, media companies and fat-cat moguls that were against it, it would merely have been yet another chapter in the long, sad and ceaseless history of our government siding with its purchasers. Think about it: the only reason we still remember and talk about the BetaMax decision today is because it was anomalous. The fact that it revolutionized home entertainment and the way we think about IP seems is but a product of that anomaly.
There are literally hundreds of fascinating, exciting ideas that get buried every year by our three sellout branches of government. Things that would have radically altered the status quo--things we'd be talking about twenty years later.
Attributing attributes? You been out of the States too long. And I said "living" abroad, not "traveling." In my experience, people who up and leave the US generally do so because they're fed up with it. As in, not bible-clutching homophobes whose idea of nirvana involves lots of white people, a swimming pool filled with Skoal, and the entire product line of the Ford Motor Company (sans the metrosexual stuff.) It must take a lot to spurn the Greatest Nation in the History of Civilization, no?
Most people in Europe seem to espouse the "hate the sin, not the sinner" ideology when it comes to Americans. I never had a negative reaction because I was an American when I was in Spain, and this was all throughout 2003 when such sentiments were at an all-time high. Even on the day we invaded Iraq, when I was at Les Falles in Valencia with of a group of 40 or 50 (very obviously) Americans, and nobody said a word. Granted this could have a lot to do with the fact that I was even more pissed at my country than they were, and made no effort to hide it.
In general, if you are living abroad you are very much selected-for in terms of being more enlightened and worldwise (read: liberal) than Joe Redstate. Estimates on how many Americans even hold a passport are all over the place, but suffice it to say it's a teeny fraction of the overall population. Those who do, in my experience, tend to be--politically--very skewed away from mainstream America and are a lot more in line with European/Asian/Latin American/everywhere else values.
Oh, hi, welcome to /. You must be new here.
And with that I'd like to again suggest a new /. modification criterion, "-4 No sense of humor whatsoever".
I think that's the first time I've ever heard "OpenOffice" and "fast" used in the same sentence.
Uhh, ::ahem::... (raises hand) I don't use iTunes. Maybe I will in the future, although that's doubtful. Basically when I got my iPod last month, I filled it up with the many thousands of MP3s I've downloaded over the years and never listened to. (I download MP3s compulsively and I probably listen to about 1/10th of what I download.) Canciones aleatorias/random shuffle has been a fun and enlightening experience, indeed.
Maybe it's just because I'm in college, but no one else I know uses iTunes either. And I go to Berkeley, where judging just by a stroll through campus, we have a higher iPod:student ratio than maybe any other school in America. Like probably 1/3 or something.