Laptops are pretty crude these days. Spinning drives, spinning fans, bulky operating systems originally designed for desktops that were adapted for the laptop instead of purpose-built.
The Palm OS stuff years back really made me wonder, especially when I got an external keyboard for my palm -- could you upscale something like this into a computer? It has more horsepower than my first desktop, the fancier palms could get on the net with wifi. What if you made a bigger screen and stuck the palm guts in that? At the time I figured the problem was cost and performance. Screens are half the price of a laptop so why would anyone want to spend several hundred bucks for a gimped device when they could spend a few more and get a full-featured laptop? But the iPhone had the right idea. Stripped down, customized OS for the phone. Leave the whole desktop OS design behind.
The hardware really has come a long way and basic user needs haven't become that much crazier. Putting an mp3 player in a car used to involve putting a freakin' PC in the car, now you either have an mp3/cd player in the dashboard or a line in for your standalone player. You used to need a pretty beefy machine for the time just to get online and read your mail. Cell phones have enough power for that now. And storage capacity? It's crazy.
There will always be a need for as much crazy power as possible in a portable format but that will be a smaller niche of the market.
Although from a technological point of view it is very interesting, a lot of details missing from the regular videos need to be 'made up' for the reconstruction. I think that's a dangerous move, as the viewer may base its opinion on video footage.
If Barry Hussein Obama isn't a secret muslim, then why come I have this computer animation of him praying on a carpet in the oval office?!?!!?!? The facts make up themselves!
Perhaps I am unusual (I suspect not), but I often chase authors, not genres, and therefore the book market is not one controlled by substitution, and we see that in it's price inelasticity. I do not see how this would be different if we had even a significantly larger number of publishers with smaller pieces of the pie.
Piracy provides the elasticity. I'll give you the old college student/anime example. As a low-income college student, it was worth my time to track down episodes on emule. You had many people doing encodes, variable quality, and it was pretty laborious to find everything and burn CD's. And hard drive capacities were not as insane as today. If a series costs $200, it's worth my time. But when you can get a full season for $20 or $30, depending on the show, who has the time to muck with downloading? Especially as disposable income rises as disposable time decreases, people want to maximize their enjoyment. If there's ten hours a week for goofing off, people want to be watching the show, not trying to watch it.
Publishers still exist largely because of their editorial and "filtering" services. Editorially, they help to ensure that the best possible version of a text makes it to market -- that it is as technically (grammar, spelling, etc) correct and engaging as possible. As for filtering, they are meant to ensure that only works that have a reasonable degree of merit actually make it to market -- this is why people tend to believe printed word over that which they find on the internet, and why for those who create content, being accepted by a publisher for print production is highly valued. Anyone can put whatever crap they like on the internet, but the publishing industry exists to make sure that random crap doesn't flood the actual shelves.
WRONG. The publishers are in it for the money. They are no different from anyone else in this regard. The editors and literary professionals may see their mission as you describe it but if a publisher thinks they can make a buck off a Sarah Palin biography, it'll be ghoswritten and printed faster than you can say "remainder."
I do like your ideal world, though. Publishers are in the printing and book distribution business only because that's a necessary step towards getting paid. But if they can handle most of the distribution electronically, all of those costs go down and the books should be cheaper.
If California wine had to be shipped cross-country by wagon or mule, it would be thousands of dollars a bottle. That sort of shipping is costly and inefficient Shipping by train and truck reduces the cost a great deal. Any winery that tries to charge mule-shipped prices for something that came by train is just trying to scam us.
It's all about setting ridiculous price points. Netflix can blow Blockbuster away with depth of selection and avoiding the cost of physical stores. Renting from blockbuster is I think still $4 a movie. (haven't been in years.) They have dollar dvd kiosks in the grocery store now. Buck a day for a first-run movie. Meanwhile, Microsoft is still charging $4 for the same movies on Xbox. That has to be even cheaper than the kiosk stores and there's far less physical infrastructure compared with Netflix and their shipping facilities. Microsoft prices at what they think they can get away with, not cost plus 30. I think it's too much and thus have never rented from them.
With so many people still using IE, whatever holes there are in firefox and chrome just won't get the same attention from the hackers. That alone makes me not want to use it. Obscurity may not be obscurity but it's also not jumping up and down with a target painted on your chest.
I can forgive television scifi for having bumpy forehead aliens. They have limited budgets, can't afford to go all James Cameron (who still didn't diverge that far from the human form.) I understand that any aliens too alien us humans will not be able to interact with in a significant way. Intelligent clouds of charged gas living inside gas giants are not compelling characters. Self-aware sea slugs floating in the methane seas of some poison world won't be on your ship any time soon. But given that the game isn't limited to using human actors, you'd think that they could be a little more inventive! I mean shit, Star Control had more variety, even though strictly speaking all of their aliens were still impossibly human-friendly, even the ones that were completely inhuman like he Illwrath, Umgah, Spathi, etc. It's strange to think humans have more in common with lobsters and trees than with whatever truly alien thing we encounter out there.
And still record all the games just because I'm doing it without the express written consent of Major League Baseball. I'll have to add the NFL to the roster. I just imagine every time the tapes spin while a game's on the lawyers hiss and fume in their cages.
The shuttle is retiring. There's no stopping that. No more external fuel tanks are being manufactured, the rest of the parts chain is shutting down. When the shuttle is gone, America loses manned access to space. And it appears we can't even manage to cobble together a bloody capsule to put atop a normal rocket. This leaves only Russia with manned space capabilities. (I don't know if the Chinese really have anything they'd consider flight-worthy right now.) The Indians and Japanese have their own programs but I don't see much happening in the near future.
The Constellation program sounded like a real soup sandwich. Canceling it would be a good thing if it paved the way for something done right. But that's not happening. Every shuttle successor program we've ever looked at has ended in cancellation. Obviously, we have the technology to get into space but it looks like we don't have the organizational ability to make that sort of thing happen.
You don't have to be much of a science fiction fan to appreciate the opportunities created by a serious presence in space. Even if we teleoperated everything from the ground, orbital power is a winner. Asteroid mining to prevent the destruction of our own environment down here is a winner. And human history has proven time and time again that opportunities can be opened up by endeavors and scientific discovery that we couldn't even begin to imagine at the outset.
There's so much more we should be doing up there. The shuttle was just farting around in LEO. We should end it to do something better, not end it to abandon a manned presence in space. If we're not going to move forward up there, other nations will. And we will have ceded the high frontier.
College degrees are way overrated. This is coming from someone with multiple degrees from MIT, Harvard, and Oxford.
More specifically, they're supposed to mean something but they don't, not always. Same goes for technical certification. An employer wants to look at these things and know someone with them meets certain standards. Can you be taught? Do you have drive? Are you unlikely to flake out? And it's really tough to measure any of that. And as others have pointed out, it's possible to go through the process, get the degree, and know less than before you came in. But it's the hoops you jump through.
I'm doing some certs now and there's a freshly-minted computer engineering BA in there. He got good marks in uni but came out and can't get a job. Now he's doing certs to make sure he can get into the game. He'll be one of the good ones. But there's other people going through it that just don't have the right mindset for computer work. They might be able to pass the cert if they drill the testkings but they're not really going to be able to apply it in the real world, hence the paper MCSE.
I think what's really telling, though, is how important bullshit is. If you can put on the right attitude, you can bluff your way through a job without having the technical skills. I'm amazed when I read about doctor imposters managing to work for months in the field. I'm not talking someone who made it most of the way through med school and dropped out, I don't mean a guy who graduated but didn't manage to get board certification, I mean someone with very little exposure to medicine who can still bluff and bullshit and get away with it. This guy with the internet degree, shouldn't his lack of qualifications been apparent by how he did his job?
The viability of manned aircraft is a question of technology. By the end of WWII, proximity-fused shells on US Navy ships made convention air attack against them a suicide mission. If the US Navy was forced to fight an identical opponent in '46, air attack would likely have been abandoned. The Japanese resorted to suicide attacks in part because conventional attacks were already suicide, at least a crash dive might let you get a hit. The cruise missile a refinement of the suicide plane concept. The idea of dive-bombing or torpedoing a warship from the air quickly fell out of favor. But that was ok for airplanes since they could carry missiles and engage from beyond the range of return fire. While aircraft did indeed use gravity bombs and later guided bombs against naval targets in the following decades, that was usually in third-world wars or against small patrol ships. Nobody would think of risking that against a proper warship.
The rise of the SAM's made things trickier for land-attack craft. A multi-million dollar jet is risked attacking tanks that are worth maybe $200k. The attrition rate under the 6 Day War was so high it was thought the end of manned combat aircraft had been reached. But subsequent development of Wild Weasel tactics and improved ECM put the SAM's on the defensive. But technology continues to improve. The early missiles were laughable. The F-4 went to Vietnam armed only with missiles and did not achieve an air-to-air kill until the gatling-equipped version arrived. But missile tech is very, very good now. The last gun kill achieved by the Air Force was an A-10 versus a Hind in Gulf War 1.
The question now is one of development cycles. The F-22 program started in '81 and didn't go operational until 2005. Ridiculous! How many SAM generations came during that time? And how much cheaper will those weapons be? The damn B-2's cost a billion bucks a pop and are irreplaceable. We're not cranking up the production lines for any more. And what are they good for, truly? To carry cruise missiles? Why do we need a fancy bomber for that? Why not just load cruise missiles on C-17's and kick them out the back a thousand miles from target? There, now you have cargo-bombers and can buy more aiframes for the same money.
The Poles kept cavalry units up until WWII. They finally were disabused of the idea by Germans with panzers. I think it's going to take a similar catastrophe to move us past the idea of manned combat aircraft.
1. Come up with super tech military program 2. Fund it until it becomes too costly 3. Wait for the other guy to spin up to compete against it 4. Move the bar further out
The story of the F-15, as related to me by an Air Force guy. The Russians come out with a new interceptor, the MiG-25. In reality it's a lead sled, can go really freakin' fast in one direction and fire off some missiles but it has very little flexibility and is not that good of an aircraft. But since we don't have good intel on it, we start guessing as to what it's capabilities would be, making up all sorts of shit. The Air Force freaks out and demands we build a counter and that eventually became the F-15, fully capable of doing everything the Foxbat was supposed to do. Total overkill.
Doublechecked wiki, this story is confirmed there.
Really? I can totally see Apple releasing a new mac mini with this OS because *it just works*. Then putting a premium on future machines with the OSX variant. I think the saddest part is that for a large portion of the population, that's probably best. Would we have such large bot nets if every Joe could only get their stuff from one place? Doesn't even Ubuntu try to mimic this in some respects with its downloader?
I would be very happy if modern operating systems had average and expert user modes. Average mode is what you set for mom. Automatically downloads updates, prevents you from installing stuff not from an approved source, etc. You can try and fake this some with GPO's and the like but it's not quite where I'd like to see it. But if you activate expert mode then boom, you're back to general purpose computer, full access. For something like an iphone, I think jailbreaking should be allowed. All Apple has to say is "While we let you do it, we don't support it. If you have problems, you'll have to use the newsgroups. Our phone support is for n00bs."
These artificial limitations that Apple puts in place are completely unnecessary, and unjustifiable.
Maybe if I use a car analogy, you'd understand it better. These days, virtually every consumer-grade vehicle has a gas tank that can be filled at virtually any gas station. If you want to buy from one station instead of another, you're perfectly free to do so. After all, there's no justifiable reason to put any limitations in place. It's your car, you should be able to fill it up however and wherever you want.
I'll run with your car analogy.
On one hand, you could justify Apple as making a car that your mom can drive. All the futzy-bits are taken away. Put gas in it. Go for scheduled maintenance. Make sure your oil is changed. It just works without needing to know the details. A PC would be more like the old muscle cars grease monkeys would constantly be tinkering with, adjusting the points and timing and always under the hood with a wrench and pliers. Anything that takes away control from a grease monkey would be hateful to them. All the black box stuff on cars today, grease monkeys hate that. But it makes grandma's life easier.
The market would be fine if there was room for tweaking cars and no-tweak cars. Unfortunately the trend is to run with more computers, more specialized tools, and more barriers to entry. An independent mechanic has to spend $20k on diagnostic tools. There's no reason why a common laptop shouldn't be able to plug into the car via USB to read the codes but they charge big bucks because they can. It keeps the little guys out of the business. And there's all manner of specialized tools required to work on the cars rather than designing to do the most work with the least number of tools possible.
I applaud moves that simplify things for one segment of consumers while leaving options open for others. What I don't like is when a move signifies an industry trend that will eventually remove options.
So people put disclaimers in their work stating all characters portrayed are 18 or older. This strikes me as amusing for manga that's obviously set in a high school. It also strikes me as amusing when those disclaimers go on manga with no mature content.
My question is this: what if someone brings out a manga with obviously adult females engaging in flagrante tentacloo and then labels them as 16-yr olds? Do we go by how old they look or how old the artist claims they are?
The Japanese are real pervs and their whole lolicon thing is skeevy to the nth degree. I forget the name of the book but there was one with two cyborg chicks, both of legal age but one insisted on using a cyber-body that looked about 11. Yeah, keep rationalizing it you pervs. But what if someone did the opposite? What if the story has a 12-year old girl who was fatally injured and saved by implanting her mind in an adult cyber-body? And what if the tentacle monster attacked it? Would that be illegal? The body may look adult but the author told you it's a 12-yr old girl in there.
Hell, we could take that back to American cinema. You have a Freaky Friday story, mom and daughter swap bodies. Now assuming mom is divorced and they're both dating, what if they have sex with the boyfriends in the swapped bodies?
I would like to think that everything I said here shows the absurdity of the line of reasoning but I sadly think judges would be scratching their chins in thought.
This entire presentation seems a little disappointing. Really, it looks, acts, and feels like a giant iPod Touch. Whereas the iPhone and iPod really created a need , I don't see that this substantially innovate to make it a must-have. It doesn't seem to improve on anything so substantially that it is an obvious choice. Maybe I need to see a few more videos, but I don't see this pulling serious market share away from Kindle's targeted market segment.
Yes, quite.
Last time I saw a/. commenter speculating about the future of Apple's latest new thing, it read something like this:
Raise your hand if you have iTunes...
Raise your hand if you have a FireWire port...
Raise your hand if you have both...
Raise your hand if you have $400 to spend on a cute Apple device...
There is Apple's market. Pretty slim, eh? I don't see many sales in the future of iPod.
~LoudMusic
I prefer to take the 'wait and see' approach.
Nothing could live up to this hype.
I never played around with iphones when they came out. Got a touch because I was told it makes for a good ebook reader. Bought it with little more to go on than that. Therefore I'm pleasantly amazed at how neat of a gadget it is. If I spent two years reading up about how it will make my old palm pilot look like banging two rocks together I probably would have been a lot less impressed.
Personally, what I wanted to see was an ultra-thin hybrid. The same sort of instant-on and always-available you get with the iphone and touch coupled with the larger screen, bigger battery, more ram, and a keyboard. I would have wanted to see something that folded shut as thin as the Air and you could then rotate the screen around and close it with the keyboard now providing the back of the device.
What's the difference between that and a PC tablet? Same difference between the iphone and windows mobile. Mobile has too much shit running and is trying to be a desktop OS in a phone. The iphone OS was a rethinking and redesign of what a phone OS should be and is thus very friendly to use, not resource intensive and none of the legacy issues of a desktop or laptop OS. We've seen people dicking around with netbook-optimized OS's but haven't seen anything trend-setting hit the market.
What I was hoping we'd see is something that seems as far beyond the current generation of laptops as the current generation is from 90's laptops. My first laptop experience was with 95, shitty dual-scan screen, underpowered and embarrassing. Couldn't even get out of its own way. Modern laptops kick so much ass compared to that but the hardware requirements are a bit insane when you stop and think for a moment. W7 wants 2 gigs just to run at a decent clip?! No, maybe a laptop doesn't need a full-featured desktop OS, or at least not every laptop should have it.
He's not cancelling 'the return to the moon,' he's cancelling Project Constellation. No return to the moon is just one side effect... Constellation was everything. With the Space Shuttles on the verge of retirement, Constellation was NASA's future manned space flight program. This isn't just the moon. And don't think this will be a small delay either. If this goes ahead, and the knowledge and experience is lost, it will take years to recover from. So unless Congress steps in (which isn't unlikely), Obama will be the President that ended America as a space-faring nation.
Ironic, given how much commentators liked to compare him to JFK back in the campaign. Kennedy had foresight.
NASA has been one fuckup after another. None of these shuttle successor programs have been any good and the Ares 1 looked like it was going to be another expensive boondoggle. Dunno what the story was on the Ares V, the heavy lifter. That's getting the axe as well, right?
Imagine what could have been paid for without the criminal misadventures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran. Oh wait, they haven't officially announced Iran yet, right?
I'll probably attract a zillion flames for saying this, but I think this is great. NASA does a great job on uncrewed probes, and that's a mission that can't be carried out by private enterprise. The shuttle and the ISS, however, are pure pork and nationalism; now that the cold war is over, the politicians cover the crewed space program with a thin veneer of scientific research, but the amount of good science that comes out of *crewed* spaceflight is not in reasonable proportion to the cost. We need to get NASA out of the business of doing things that the private sector can do, because otherwise the private sector will never get off the ground in those areas. Suborbital and LEO space tourism are the killer apps for private-sector crewed spaceflight. Let's unleash their energy and creativity to get that going, rather than spending public money on poorly engineered concepts for going back to to the moon.
Explain to me the business case for the internet. Not retroactively. I mean try to explain it to me as a businessman you want to fund it. Why the hell would I want to create an interoperable network that everyone can use? Who pays for it? How do we charge people for it? What do you mean there's not an hourly meter? What are you, some kind of fucking hippie?
Explain to me the business case for the interstate highway system, as a businessman you want to fund it.
Explain to me the business case for running telephone service and electricity out to rural areas where it costs more to service them than I'd ever make back on fees. Explain why I should be using my fat profits from the lucrative city accounts to pay for it. Why the hell should I give a fuck about shitkickers and hillbillies?
The answer to all those things is that there are some things business is good at and there's some things government is good at. Some things you can't get a business to do willingly and you have to make them do it by law or just offer bids and let whoever wants to fill the bid do so.
You never could have convinced private business to setup the internet the way it was. If it was redesigned from scratch, we'd be back to the days of AOL and Compuserve. Because for-profit business isn't about meeting the public good but maximizing revenue.
You can get businesses to handle local utilities by granting a monopoly. The business will agree to a situation that provides a guaranteed profit and no competition by servicing all customers in the area, regardless of how profitable they are. The business agrees to the reduced risk of the monopoly by accepting the reduced profit of serving everybody. And that's usually seen as a win-win.
I'm gratified to see Scaled Composites making progress on the suborbital tourist ship. I'm happy that internet billionaire is having good luck with his unmanned rockets. But the stuff we need to be doing in space, those ideas are too big for mere businesses to wrap their heads around. The stuff we need to be doing, it needs government sponsorship. Now NASA has made a fucking mess of itself and the manned program is pretty embarrassing. But I'm not seeing many good ideas from the defense contractors NASA currently contracts with. I'd be very happy if NASA adopted a DARPA role and started funding start-ups with real potential instead of throwing big bucks down the politically-connected corporate rathole. I want solar power sats. I want a space elevator. I want something with more vision than that stupid Constellation program.
I kept reading "Prisons" instead of Prions and was dumbfounded beyond belief.
I looked away from my screen for a minute imagining the possibilities. Then I looked back, noticed my mistake, and felt like an idiot.
And thats why I'm posting; I'd like to share my idiocy with you.
And I'm thinking "I know hybrid cars are supposed to be good for the environment but aren't they overselling it a bit much? And who makes the Prion anyway, is that Dodge or Toyota?"
I think it's just the perception of value. Even in 2010, there are a lot of people paying certification mills...I mean, training schools...many thousands of dollars for certification classes so they can "break into the lucrative field of IT." Community colleges regularly integrate the A+, Microsoft and Cisco cert classes into their degree programs. Some of those thousands of dollars are still being paid for long after the cert is achieved. People just don't want to feel they're holding worthless paper. In reality though, things change way too fast to declare that someone is "certified for life" on PC hardware. I find that if I take a couple months to focus on some piece of software, I turn around and hardware platforms have completely changed while I wasn't looking. Imagine an A+ cert holder from 1995 put in front of a quad-core machine with SAS drives, a huge video card that's basically a mini-computer, and other interfaces that didn't even exist in 1995.
A doctor takes continuing education credits to keep up with the field but this doesn't mean his undergraduate degree expires. For anyone doing IT, the A+ knowledge will be kept current by being in the field. And for specific newer tech, there are certs to get up to speed on that. The VMware stuff is getting really hot right now, for example. A previous employer paid for A+. The class itself was a very thorough review of the PC from soup to nuts. It would help bring a young amateur up to speed in the field. I'd been doing this for years so it was really just a very thorough review for me. I think the best part about the class is it lets people see if they'd really enjoy the IT field. If you hated the class, you'd really hate doing this for a living. Learning that is worth the price of admission.:)
While I agree, the Comptia certs are typically looked on as entry level certifications. They're a starting board before moving down more useful certification tracks, the best of which do require continuing education. Turning the Comptia certs into a renewing structure seems rather silly. Who would bother renewing them in the midst of the constant cycle of the more advanced certification. Let's look at the initial move by Comptia for what it really is... a grab for money. Comptia should leave the A + Net+ and Sec + alone and push advanced follow up tracks that DO require renewal and continuing education. It'd be a lot easier to earn professional respect for newer specialized certs meeting those conditions than to change the community view (whether good or bad) of the + certs. After all, "certifications" are more often about perspective and appearance than actual education.
More importantly, skills that aren't used don't just rust, they rot. Even if you pass your Microsoft exams, if you're not doing it every day you'll simply forget things.
This is one of the reasons why I think certs don't quite work the way industry wants them to -- you can get the cert and it doesn't mean you know what you're doing and it doesn't mean you retain anything a few years later. But doing like Cisco and making you retake the same frickin' exam after your previous cert expires is not the right answer. I find the exams arbitrary and stupid right from the start. The studying part is useful but the exams themselves, ugh. You can study out of Microsoft's own books and be blindsided on the exams.
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Laptops are pretty crude these days. Spinning drives, spinning fans, bulky operating systems originally designed for desktops that were adapted for the laptop instead of purpose-built.
The Palm OS stuff years back really made me wonder, especially when I got an external keyboard for my palm -- could you upscale something like this into a computer? It has more horsepower than my first desktop, the fancier palms could get on the net with wifi. What if you made a bigger screen and stuck the palm guts in that? At the time I figured the problem was cost and performance. Screens are half the price of a laptop so why would anyone want to spend several hundred bucks for a gimped device when they could spend a few more and get a full-featured laptop? But the iPhone had the right idea. Stripped down, customized OS for the phone. Leave the whole desktop OS design behind.
The hardware really has come a long way and basic user needs haven't become that much crazier. Putting an mp3 player in a car used to involve putting a freakin' PC in the car, now you either have an mp3/cd player in the dashboard or a line in for your standalone player. You used to need a pretty beefy machine for the time just to get online and read your mail. Cell phones have enough power for that now. And storage capacity? It's crazy.
There will always be a need for as much crazy power as possible in a portable format but that will be a smaller niche of the market.
You can spray it? "They called it misted glass!"
Although from a technological point of view it is very interesting, a lot of details missing from the regular videos need to be 'made up' for the reconstruction. I think that's a dangerous move, as the viewer may base its opinion on video footage.
If Barry Hussein Obama isn't a secret muslim, then why come I have this computer animation of him praying on a carpet in the oval office?!?!!?!? The facts make up themselves!
My first thought was that this is totally unnecessary and sensationalist use of technology. My second thought was that CNN is going to love this.
A vapid and useless implementation of technology that is to information what a cheeto is to nutrition. I don't see how this could possibly go right.
Perhaps I am unusual (I suspect not), but I often chase authors, not genres, and therefore the book market is not one controlled by substitution, and we see that in it's price inelasticity. I do not see how this would be different if we had even a significantly larger number of publishers with smaller pieces of the pie.
Piracy provides the elasticity. I'll give you the old college student/anime example. As a low-income college student, it was worth my time to track down episodes on emule. You had many people doing encodes, variable quality, and it was pretty laborious to find everything and burn CD's. And hard drive capacities were not as insane as today. If a series costs $200, it's worth my time. But when you can get a full season for $20 or $30, depending on the show, who has the time to muck with downloading? Especially as disposable income rises as disposable time decreases, people want to maximize their enjoyment. If there's ten hours a week for goofing off, people want to be watching the show, not trying to watch it.
Publishers still exist largely because of their editorial and "filtering" services. Editorially, they help to ensure that the best possible version of a text makes it to market -- that it is as technically (grammar, spelling, etc) correct and engaging as possible. As for filtering, they are meant to ensure that only works that have a reasonable degree of merit actually make it to market -- this is why people tend to believe printed word over that which they find on the internet, and why for those who create content, being accepted by a publisher for print production is highly valued. Anyone can put whatever crap they like on the internet, but the publishing industry exists to make sure that random crap doesn't flood the actual shelves.
WRONG. The publishers are in it for the money. They are no different from anyone else in this regard. The editors and literary professionals may see their mission as you describe it but if a publisher thinks they can make a buck off a Sarah Palin biography, it'll be ghoswritten and printed faster than you can say "remainder."
I do like your ideal world, though. Publishers are in the printing and book distribution business only because that's a necessary step towards getting paid. But if they can handle most of the distribution electronically, all of those costs go down and the books should be cheaper.
If California wine had to be shipped cross-country by wagon or mule, it would be thousands of dollars a bottle. That sort of shipping is costly and inefficient Shipping by train and truck reduces the cost a great deal. Any winery that tries to charge mule-shipped prices for something that came by train is just trying to scam us.
It's all about setting ridiculous price points. Netflix can blow Blockbuster away with depth of selection and avoiding the cost of physical stores. Renting from blockbuster is I think still $4 a movie. (haven't been in years.) They have dollar dvd kiosks in the grocery store now. Buck a day for a first-run movie. Meanwhile, Microsoft is still charging $4 for the same movies on Xbox. That has to be even cheaper than the kiosk stores and there's far less physical infrastructure compared with Netflix and their shipping facilities. Microsoft prices at what they think they can get away with, not cost plus 30. I think it's too much and thus have never rented from them.
riiiight, because they are going to charge $14.99 for an eBook that has a 4 year old discount paperback out..:eyeroll:
Yes, they do. And rolling your eyes like that makes you look like Marty Feldman and not in a good way.
obscurity not security rather
With so many people still using IE, whatever holes there are in firefox and chrome just won't get the same attention from the hackers. That alone makes me not want to use it. Obscurity may not be obscurity but it's also not jumping up and down with a target painted on your chest.
I can forgive television scifi for having bumpy forehead aliens. They have limited budgets, can't afford to go all James Cameron (who still didn't diverge that far from the human form.) I understand that any aliens too alien us humans will not be able to interact with in a significant way. Intelligent clouds of charged gas living inside gas giants are not compelling characters. Self-aware sea slugs floating in the methane seas of some poison world won't be on your ship any time soon. But given that the game isn't limited to using human actors, you'd think that they could be a little more inventive! I mean shit, Star Control had more variety, even though strictly speaking all of their aliens were still impossibly human-friendly, even the ones that were completely inhuman like he Illwrath, Umgah, Spathi, etc. It's strange to think humans have more in common with lobsters and trees than with whatever truly alien thing we encounter out there.
And still record all the games just because I'm doing it without the express written consent of Major League Baseball. I'll have to add the NFL to the roster. I just imagine every time the tapes spin while a game's on the lawyers hiss and fume in their cages.
The shuttle is retiring. There's no stopping that. No more external fuel tanks are being manufactured, the rest of the parts chain is shutting down. When the shuttle is gone, America loses manned access to space. And it appears we can't even manage to cobble together a bloody capsule to put atop a normal rocket. This leaves only Russia with manned space capabilities. (I don't know if the Chinese really have anything they'd consider flight-worthy right now.) The Indians and Japanese have their own programs but I don't see much happening in the near future.
The Constellation program sounded like a real soup sandwich. Canceling it would be a good thing if it paved the way for something done right. But that's not happening. Every shuttle successor program we've ever looked at has ended in cancellation. Obviously, we have the technology to get into space but it looks like we don't have the organizational ability to make that sort of thing happen.
You don't have to be much of a science fiction fan to appreciate the opportunities created by a serious presence in space. Even if we teleoperated everything from the ground, orbital power is a winner. Asteroid mining to prevent the destruction of our own environment down here is a winner. And human history has proven time and time again that opportunities can be opened up by endeavors and scientific discovery that we couldn't even begin to imagine at the outset.
There's so much more we should be doing up there. The shuttle was just farting around in LEO. We should end it to do something better, not end it to abandon a manned presence in space. If we're not going to move forward up there, other nations will. And we will have ceded the high frontier.
College degrees are way overrated. This is coming from someone with multiple degrees from MIT, Harvard, and Oxford.
More specifically, they're supposed to mean something but they don't, not always. Same goes for technical certification. An employer wants to look at these things and know someone with them meets certain standards. Can you be taught? Do you have drive? Are you unlikely to flake out? And it's really tough to measure any of that. And as others have pointed out, it's possible to go through the process, get the degree, and know less than before you came in. But it's the hoops you jump through.
I'm doing some certs now and there's a freshly-minted computer engineering BA in there. He got good marks in uni but came out and can't get a job. Now he's doing certs to make sure he can get into the game. He'll be one of the good ones. But there's other people going through it that just don't have the right mindset for computer work. They might be able to pass the cert if they drill the testkings but they're not really going to be able to apply it in the real world, hence the paper MCSE.
I think what's really telling, though, is how important bullshit is. If you can put on the right attitude, you can bluff your way through a job without having the technical skills. I'm amazed when I read about doctor imposters managing to work for months in the field. I'm not talking someone who made it most of the way through med school and dropped out, I don't mean a guy who graduated but didn't manage to get board certification, I mean someone with very little exposure to medicine who can still bluff and bullshit and get away with it. This guy with the internet degree, shouldn't his lack of qualifications been apparent by how he did his job?
The viability of manned aircraft is a question of technology. By the end of WWII, proximity-fused shells on US Navy ships made convention air attack against them a suicide mission. If the US Navy was forced to fight an identical opponent in '46, air attack would likely have been abandoned. The Japanese resorted to suicide attacks in part because conventional attacks were already suicide, at least a crash dive might let you get a hit. The cruise missile a refinement of the suicide plane concept. The idea of dive-bombing or torpedoing a warship from the air quickly fell out of favor. But that was ok for airplanes since they could carry missiles and engage from beyond the range of return fire. While aircraft did indeed use gravity bombs and later guided bombs against naval targets in the following decades, that was usually in third-world wars or against small patrol ships. Nobody would think of risking that against a proper warship.
The rise of the SAM's made things trickier for land-attack craft. A multi-million dollar jet is risked attacking tanks that are worth maybe $200k. The attrition rate under the 6 Day War was so high it was thought the end of manned combat aircraft had been reached. But subsequent development of Wild Weasel tactics and improved ECM put the SAM's on the defensive. But technology continues to improve. The early missiles were laughable. The F-4 went to Vietnam armed only with missiles and did not achieve an air-to-air kill until the gatling-equipped version arrived. But missile tech is very, very good now. The last gun kill achieved by the Air Force was an A-10 versus a Hind in Gulf War 1.
The question now is one of development cycles. The F-22 program started in '81 and didn't go operational until 2005. Ridiculous! How many SAM generations came during that time? And how much cheaper will those weapons be? The damn B-2's cost a billion bucks a pop and are irreplaceable. We're not cranking up the production lines for any more. And what are they good for, truly? To carry cruise missiles? Why do we need a fancy bomber for that? Why not just load cruise missiles on C-17's and kick them out the back a thousand miles from target? There, now you have cargo-bombers and can buy more aiframes for the same money.
The Poles kept cavalry units up until WWII. They finally were disabused of the idea by Germans with panzers. I think it's going to take a similar catastrophe to move us past the idea of manned combat aircraft.
to keep Russia bankrupt trying to catch up to it.
1. Come up with super tech military program
2. Fund it until it becomes too costly
3. Wait for the other guy to spin up to compete against it
4. Move the bar further out
The story of the F-15, as related to me by an Air Force guy. The Russians come out with a new interceptor, the MiG-25. In reality it's a lead sled, can go really freakin' fast in one direction and fire off some missiles but it has very little flexibility and is not that good of an aircraft. But since we don't have good intel on it, we start guessing as to what it's capabilities would be, making up all sorts of shit. The Air Force freaks out and demands we build a counter and that eventually became the F-15, fully capable of doing everything the Foxbat was supposed to do. Total overkill.
Doublechecked wiki, this story is confirmed there.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mig-25
Really? I can totally see Apple releasing a new mac mini with this OS because *it just works*. Then putting a premium on future machines with the OSX variant. I think the saddest part is that for a large portion of the population, that's probably best. Would we have such large bot nets if every Joe could only get their stuff from one place? Doesn't even Ubuntu try to mimic this in some respects with its downloader?
I would be very happy if modern operating systems had average and expert user modes. Average mode is what you set for mom. Automatically downloads updates, prevents you from installing stuff not from an approved source, etc. You can try and fake this some with GPO's and the like but it's not quite where I'd like to see it. But if you activate expert mode then boom, you're back to general purpose computer, full access. For something like an iphone, I think jailbreaking should be allowed. All Apple has to say is "While we let you do it, we don't support it. If you have problems, you'll have to use the newsgroups. Our phone support is for n00bs."
These artificial limitations that Apple puts in place are completely unnecessary, and unjustifiable.
Maybe if I use a car analogy, you'd understand it better. These days, virtually every consumer-grade vehicle has a gas tank that can be filled at virtually any gas station. If you want to buy from one station instead of another, you're perfectly free to do so. After all, there's no justifiable reason to put any limitations in place. It's your car, you should be able to fill it up however and wherever you want.
I'll run with your car analogy.
On one hand, you could justify Apple as making a car that your mom can drive. All the futzy-bits are taken away. Put gas in it. Go for scheduled maintenance. Make sure your oil is changed. It just works without needing to know the details. A PC would be more like the old muscle cars grease monkeys would constantly be tinkering with, adjusting the points and timing and always under the hood with a wrench and pliers. Anything that takes away control from a grease monkey would be hateful to them. All the black box stuff on cars today, grease monkeys hate that. But it makes grandma's life easier.
The market would be fine if there was room for tweaking cars and no-tweak cars. Unfortunately the trend is to run with more computers, more specialized tools, and more barriers to entry. An independent mechanic has to spend $20k on diagnostic tools. There's no reason why a common laptop shouldn't be able to plug into the car via USB to read the codes but they charge big bucks because they can. It keeps the little guys out of the business. And there's all manner of specialized tools required to work on the cars rather than designing to do the most work with the least number of tools possible.
I applaud moves that simplify things for one segment of consumers while leaving options open for others. What I don't like is when a move signifies an industry trend that will eventually remove options.
So people put disclaimers in their work stating all characters portrayed are 18 or older. This strikes me as amusing for manga that's obviously set in a high school. It also strikes me as amusing when those disclaimers go on manga with no mature content.
My question is this: what if someone brings out a manga with obviously adult females engaging in flagrante tentacloo and then labels them as 16-yr olds? Do we go by how old they look or how old the artist claims they are?
The Japanese are real pervs and their whole lolicon thing is skeevy to the nth degree. I forget the name of the book but there was one with two cyborg chicks, both of legal age but one insisted on using a cyber-body that looked about 11. Yeah, keep rationalizing it you pervs. But what if someone did the opposite? What if the story has a 12-year old girl who was fatally injured and saved by implanting her mind in an adult cyber-body? And what if the tentacle monster attacked it? Would that be illegal? The body may look adult but the author told you it's a 12-yr old girl in there.
Hell, we could take that back to American cinema. You have a Freaky Friday story, mom and daughter swap bodies. Now assuming mom is divorced and they're both dating, what if they have sex with the boyfriends in the swapped bodies?
I would like to think that everything I said here shows the absurdity of the line of reasoning but I sadly think judges would be scratching their chins in thought.
This entire presentation seems a little disappointing. Really, it looks, acts, and feels like a giant iPod Touch. Whereas the iPhone and iPod really created a need , I don't see that this substantially innovate to make it a must-have. It doesn't seem to improve on anything so substantially that it is an obvious choice. Maybe I need to see a few more videos, but I don't see this pulling serious market share away from Kindle's targeted market segment.
Yes, quite.
Last time I saw a /. commenter speculating about the future of Apple's latest new thing, it read something like this:
Raise your hand if you have iTunes ...
Raise your hand if you have a FireWire port ...
Raise your hand if you have both ...
Raise your hand if you have $400 to spend on a cute Apple device ...
There is Apple's market. Pretty slim, eh? I don't see many sales in the future of iPod.
~LoudMusic
I prefer to take the 'wait and see' approach.
Nothing could live up to this hype.
I never played around with iphones when they came out. Got a touch because I was told it makes for a good ebook reader. Bought it with little more to go on than that. Therefore I'm pleasantly amazed at how neat of a gadget it is. If I spent two years reading up about how it will make my old palm pilot look like banging two rocks together I probably would have been a lot less impressed.
Personally, what I wanted to see was an ultra-thin hybrid. The same sort of instant-on and always-available you get with the iphone and touch coupled with the larger screen, bigger battery, more ram, and a keyboard. I would have wanted to see something that folded shut as thin as the Air and you could then rotate the screen around and close it with the keyboard now providing the back of the device.
What's the difference between that and a PC tablet? Same difference between the iphone and windows mobile. Mobile has too much shit running and is trying to be a desktop OS in a phone. The iphone OS was a rethinking and redesign of what a phone OS should be and is thus very friendly to use, not resource intensive and none of the legacy issues of a desktop or laptop OS. We've seen people dicking around with netbook-optimized OS's but haven't seen anything trend-setting hit the market.
What I was hoping we'd see is something that seems as far beyond the current generation of laptops as the current generation is from 90's laptops. My first laptop experience was with 95, shitty dual-scan screen, underpowered and embarrassing. Couldn't even get out of its own way. Modern laptops kick so much ass compared to that but the hardware requirements are a bit insane when you stop and think for a moment. W7 wants 2 gigs just to run at a decent clip?! No, maybe a laptop doesn't need a full-featured desktop OS, or at least not every laptop should have it.
He's not cancelling 'the return to the moon,' he's cancelling Project Constellation. No return to the moon is just one side effect... Constellation was everything. With the Space Shuttles on the verge of retirement, Constellation was NASA's future manned space flight program. This isn't just the moon. And don't think this will be a small delay either. If this goes ahead, and the knowledge and experience is lost, it will take years to recover from. So unless Congress steps in (which isn't unlikely), Obama will be the President that ended America as a space-faring nation.
Ironic, given how much commentators liked to compare him to JFK back in the campaign. Kennedy had foresight.
NASA has been one fuckup after another. None of these shuttle successor programs have been any good and the Ares 1 looked like it was going to be another expensive boondoggle. Dunno what the story was on the Ares V, the heavy lifter. That's getting the axe as well, right?
Imagine what could have been paid for without the criminal misadventures in Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran. Oh wait, they haven't officially announced Iran yet, right?
I'll probably attract a zillion flames for saying this, but I think this is great. NASA does a great job on uncrewed probes, and that's a mission that can't be carried out by private enterprise. The shuttle and the ISS, however, are pure pork and nationalism; now that the cold war is over, the politicians cover the crewed space program with a thin veneer of scientific research, but the amount of good science that comes out of *crewed* spaceflight is not in reasonable proportion to the cost. We need to get NASA out of the business of doing things that the private sector can do, because otherwise the private sector will never get off the ground in those areas. Suborbital and LEO space tourism are the killer apps for private-sector crewed spaceflight. Let's unleash their energy and creativity to get that going, rather than spending public money on poorly engineered concepts for going back to to the moon.
Explain to me the business case for the internet. Not retroactively. I mean try to explain it to me as a businessman you want to fund it. Why the hell would I want to create an interoperable network that everyone can use? Who pays for it? How do we charge people for it? What do you mean there's not an hourly meter? What are you, some kind of fucking hippie?
Explain to me the business case for the interstate highway system, as a businessman you want to fund it.
Explain to me the business case for running telephone service and electricity out to rural areas where it costs more to service them than I'd ever make back on fees. Explain why I should be using my fat profits from the lucrative city accounts to pay for it. Why the hell should I give a fuck about shitkickers and hillbillies?
The answer to all those things is that there are some things business is good at and there's some things government is good at. Some things you can't get a business to do willingly and you have to make them do it by law or just offer bids and let whoever wants to fill the bid do so.
You never could have convinced private business to setup the internet the way it was. If it was redesigned from scratch, we'd be back to the days of AOL and Compuserve. Because for-profit business isn't about meeting the public good but maximizing revenue.
You can get businesses to handle local utilities by granting a monopoly. The business will agree to a situation that provides a guaranteed profit and no competition by servicing all customers in the area, regardless of how profitable they are. The business agrees to the reduced risk of the monopoly by accepting the reduced profit of serving everybody. And that's usually seen as a win-win.
I'm gratified to see Scaled Composites making progress on the suborbital tourist ship. I'm happy that internet billionaire is having good luck with his unmanned rockets. But the stuff we need to be doing in space, those ideas are too big for mere businesses to wrap their heads around. The stuff we need to be doing, it needs government sponsorship. Now NASA has made a fucking mess of itself and the manned program is pretty embarrassing. But I'm not seeing many good ideas from the defense contractors NASA currently contracts with. I'd be very happy if NASA adopted a DARPA role and started funding start-ups with real potential instead of throwing big bucks down the politically-connected corporate rathole. I want solar power sats. I want a space elevator. I want something with more vision than that stupid Constellation program.
I kept reading "Prisons" instead of Prions and was dumbfounded beyond belief.
I looked away from my screen for a minute imagining the possibilities. Then I looked back, noticed my mistake, and felt like an idiot.
And thats why I'm posting; I'd like to share my idiocy with you.
And I'm thinking "I know hybrid cars are supposed to be good for the environment but aren't they overselling it a bit much? And who makes the Prion anyway, is that Dodge or Toyota?"
"Google has found a way to let iPhone owners use Google Voice."
Really? There's a patch for that.
I think it's just the perception of value. Even in 2010, there are a lot of people paying certification mills...I mean, training schools...many thousands of dollars for certification classes so they can "break into the lucrative field of IT." Community colleges regularly integrate the A+, Microsoft and Cisco cert classes into their degree programs. Some of those thousands of dollars are still being paid for long after the cert is achieved. People just don't want to feel they're holding worthless paper. In reality though, things change way too fast to declare that someone is "certified for life" on PC hardware. I find that if I take a couple months to focus on some piece of software, I turn around and hardware platforms have completely changed while I wasn't looking. Imagine an A+ cert holder from 1995 put in front of a quad-core machine with SAS drives, a huge video card that's basically a mini-computer, and other interfaces that didn't even exist in 1995.
A doctor takes continuing education credits to keep up with the field but this doesn't mean his undergraduate degree expires. For anyone doing IT, the A+ knowledge will be kept current by being in the field. And for specific newer tech, there are certs to get up to speed on that. The VMware stuff is getting really hot right now, for example. A previous employer paid for A+. The class itself was a very thorough review of the PC from soup to nuts. It would help bring a young amateur up to speed in the field. I'd been doing this for years so it was really just a very thorough review for me. I think the best part about the class is it lets people see if they'd really enjoy the IT field. If you hated the class, you'd really hate doing this for a living. Learning that is worth the price of admission. :)
While I agree, the Comptia certs are typically looked on as entry level certifications. They're a starting board before moving down more useful certification tracks, the best of which do require continuing education. Turning the Comptia certs into a renewing structure seems rather silly. Who would bother renewing them in the midst of the constant cycle of the more advanced certification. Let's look at the initial move by Comptia for what it really is... a grab for money. Comptia should leave the A + Net+ and Sec + alone and push advanced follow up tracks that DO require renewal and continuing education. It'd be a lot easier to earn professional respect for newer specialized certs meeting those conditions than to change the community view (whether good or bad) of the + certs. After all, "certifications" are more often about perspective and appearance than actual education.
More importantly, skills that aren't used don't just rust, they rot. Even if you pass your Microsoft exams, if you're not doing it every day you'll simply forget things.
This is one of the reasons why I think certs don't quite work the way industry wants them to -- you can get the cert and it doesn't mean you know what you're doing and it doesn't mean you retain anything a few years later. But doing like Cisco and making you retake the same frickin' exam after your previous cert expires is not the right answer. I find the exams arbitrary and stupid right from the start. The studying part is useful but the exams themselves, ugh. You can study out of Microsoft's own books and be blindsided on the exams.