Why does an ipod/phone sync cable go for $1 to $3.99 online but $20 or more in the store? Because if you're going to the store, you probably need the cable now, can't wait. Bend over and take it, bitch. Capitalism. Apologists will say it's a convenience fee for providing the store, helpful employees, etc. This is the same reason why a TV or printer will sell for damn near cost but the cable to connect them to something useful will be $20 to $100. You don't think about buying the cable before the television (unless you've been burned before) and who wants to get the nice and shiny TV home only to wait a few days for delivery?
"European researchers have developed a new approach to artificial intelligence that could let computers to respond to behaviour as well as commands, reacting intelligently to the subtle nuances of human communication. It's no trivial feat - many humans struggle with the challenge on a day-to-day basis"
Computers can do math better than me, read body language better than me, and the bots can play games better than me. Looks like my only remaining advantage is a greater efficiency at turning fluid grains into pee.:(
Oh, I'm sorry. I guess that we can't really thank science for medicine, computers, airplanes, the food on our table. I guess that one murderous programmer working on an open source file system means all of Linux is shit, too. And you know what? I got taken for a ride buying speculative real estate in Florida. I guess this means that you can't make money in real estate, that the whole thing's a rotten idea. Incidentally, I threw out the bath water. Where'd the baby go?
I'll buy that argument once religious whackadoodles promise to renounce their faith because of televangelists and pedo-priests.
It was an eye-opener for me when I realized that television networks are not in the business of putting out quality programming and paying for it with advertising, they're in the business of selling advertising and the programs are the means of attracting enough eyeballs to give that ad time value. "If they can come up with something cheaper than news magazines, comedies and dramas, they'll air it." And sure enough, there's now channels out there specializing in repackaging what are effectively Youtube videos into half hour shows complete with the requisite commercial breaks. You have your police chases, animal attacks, painful stunts, and cute animals. Whatever it takes to keep you fuckers watching until the next commercial break.
So, Facebook's mission isn't to provide a friendly place for friendly people to connect and gee, they just want to make enough money to keep the doors open and break even. I haven't made a thorough exploration of Facebook's business model but it's gotta be something related to selling PI or allowing marketing firms to conduct real world research. I know that stupid farm game gets people to spend real world money on virtual assets. I don't know how much of a rent Facebook charges them for operating on their app.
There's some hacks but nothing that I've seen fully supported by Google yet. It's still considered beta, no integrated update, etc. Is this still correct or can someone more clueful share some love?
Not really. It's just a glorified vomit comet with some spectacular views. The real pioneers in commercial space flight are companies like Space-X who are very close to having launch capacity capable of being man-rated for orbital flight! We probably should cancel the Aries launch system and instead partner with Space-X.
In the meantime, Virgin Galactic or whatever it is called is just a glorified thrill ride that does nothing to advance real commercial space flight.
NASA didn't build the Saturn V as the very first project out the gate. While they had no mission to turn a profit on the venture, they broke the development up into tiny steps to make sure nothing went wrong. Virgin Galactic has to turn a profit. The first system was proof of concept. The second system here is about making money. You do realize that there will be a SpaceShipThree, Four, Five, etc, so long as the business remains profitable?
This is not a zero-sum game. Space-X can compete building unmanned rockets. They're getting pretty good at it. Rutan and crew can concentrate on putting the people up there. SpaceShipOne was not a vomit comet, it was like the Redstone suborbital launch. SpaceShipTwo is the same with paying passengers. Three or Four will probably make the step of getting into a proper orbit.
Too fucking right! Those big money scientists are faking the whole global warming thing so they can rake in the big bucks. I'm on to their game. Where did the glaciers go? Hmm, maybe you should ask the scientists! They were the last ones seen with them. Bet they've got 'em hidden somewhere just waiting to cash in, same place they put the ice caps.
Besides, even if the climate is changing, it's changed in the past! We had the little ice age, little richard, little italy, and we're doing fine now. If it's a natural change, why should it bother us? The saharah used to be grassland and now it's a desert. That's not hurting America none and it was long before we started burning fossil fuels. If global warming is happening and it isn't man-made, then there's absolutely no reason to do anything about it or even study it. And I still maintain that it's a plot by big science to fleece hard-working, god-fearing, reality-tv-watching American men and women.
Bingo. You have just pointed out why capitalism beats socialism. Nine private companies fail, one emerges as the industry leader.
Then the industry leader becomes so large it steamrolls competition while at the same time producing flabby, uninspired software. This bloated behemoth will persist long past when it should have mercifully died in its sleep and it takes ages for incompetence to erode that market lead, to allow competitors back into the marketplace. And when you think it might finally take in that final breath, the capitalists running the thing will successfully lobby the government for a bailout, not even blinking as they suck the government welfare teat. But you can bet they'll look down on poor people who might do the same.
In other words, computers are not a magic bullet. They only work well when you actually invest the time to find out what you need them to do, and then make them do that.
That's what I try to tell people at my place. If an EMP hit tomorrow and we were going to move all our business processes back to paper, we'd still be dealing with the same basic theory of information management. Customer ID number? They existed before computers. Why? You tell me which John Smith we're talking about, we've got ten in the files. Double-entry bookkeeping? We had that long before we had computers. Standardizing the records? You'd be doing that with 3x5's and card files. Last name, first name, middle initial, do it the same for all of them.
You can't automate a broken process. Get the logic working so that you can run it on paper, then we can talk about putting it in a computer. At best all a computer can do with a broken process is fuck it to pieces.
While I'm sure this guy was a real douche nozzle, I'd like to see people who steal real assets go to jail before the people who steal fake assets. International bankers rather than basement dwellers, ok?
Most servers sit there at 3% cpu until something strenuous occurs. You've still got the big fans blowing, drives spinning like mad, and lots of power getting sucked down. I'd like to be able to see these units able to reduce power in low-use times and seamlessly ramp up when demand hits. It bugs me that we leave servers running overnight at full clip simply because we don't want to come in early to turn them on for the early workers, don't trust they'll come back on after a powerdown due to IT voodoo, etc. It really drives me nuts when IT policy says desktops are to remain on overnight for patching at 3am. Waste of power.
In my experience, it is rare for a customer, even with professional IT staff, to properly specify their needs when it comes to technology. Why did Northrop, which presumably has experience in government systems, not design backups?
Consultants never seem to get it right. Granted, the situations I'm familiar with are a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the size of this contract but at that scale the issue is that the contractors and consultants are juggling multiple clients so the needs of any one must be balanced against the needs of all of them. But what really burns me is when they can't even provide decent advice on what should be bread and butter. "We need a backup solution." See, there you go. Many solutions on the market but they should be able to settle on a package they can confidently advise clients will work. But they don't. This astounds me. The consultants are just shooting in the dark, no better informed than the rest of us. You can't blame them for good advice ignored by the customer but for bad advice or no advice at all? Absolutely!
Neuromancer dystopian? Are you serious? When I read that as a kid I would have given anything to live in that world. I still wouldn't mind getting one of their awesome brain-interfaced computers;)
And some people would love to live in Mad Max. Doesn't mean it's not dystopic.
It seems a bit presumtuous to declare a successful multibillionaire is making a fatal mistake, especially seeing as I'm just a multithousandaire. That being said, history is replete with examples of people, organizations, and empires that gained enormous success in a given environment but were unsuited to adapting to changes in that environment.
Murdoch seems to want to turn back the clock, put the toothpaste back in the tube. I don't think this is possible. The Internet is a highly disruptive technology and if it wasn't Google then some other company would be playing the same role.
Of course, just ten years back we had starry-eyed boffins chortling over how the internet meant all brick and mortar retail was dead, nobody would go shopping anymore, etc. They kind of missed the boat on that one. Internet retail is just a very fancy form of mail-order. The internet might kill certain categories of store (used record shops, new record shops, and digital delivery promises to render blockbuster and gamestop obsolete though it's far too early to declare a time of death) but grocery stores aren't going anywhere. Used bookstores will still get foot traffic for the near future and things like the amazon zshop allows those independents to sell nationwide.
I think Murdoch is trying to hold back the incoming tide on this one.
I think the elephant's prehensile trunk would qualify as a counterexample... (Though I won't think that the chances of a Dumbo-style evolution are significant...)
But that developed from the nose.
Take a look at the very word tetrapod. "Tetrapods (Greek tetrapoda, Latin quadruped, "four-footed") are vertebrate animals having four feet, legs or leglike appendages. Amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs/birds, and mammals are all tetrapods, and even the limbless snakes are tetrapods by descent. The earliest tetrapods radiated from the Sarcopterygii, or lobe-finned fish."
I think it's absolutely remarkable how many anatomical elements are preserved across so many species. Makes you wonder what would have come about if more Devonian lines were given a chance to evolve. There was certainly some weird shit swimming around back then.
It amazes me how much hardware and power has to be thrown at the problem to solve it while nature can create a self-organizing machine that only requires material input of raw mice and lasagna. Puts me in mind of this quote:
"If research leads to the development of successful new modeling techniques that can carry out new and better forms of information processing, no one will really care if they do not exactly mimic the functionality of the human brain," concludes Hall. "I honestly doubt you'll find too many people today who are upset that the wings on an aircraft do not flap like those of a bird or that a submarine does not swim exactly like a fish."
It's an interesting way of looking at things. Man's earliest ideas of flying all involved trying to mimic the actions of a bird. And ornithopters remain impractical as passenger vehicles. But new breakthroughs in material sciences and computing are allowing for autonomous bots that fly like birds, bats, bugs, and can swim like snakes and fish. Engineers will point out that the evolved solutions we see in nature are working with the materials at hand, they might not be the best of all solutions. Every flying vertebrate known to science turned forelimbs into wings and flap them. Is it the most efficient way to fly? That's an argument I'll leave to the biologists and engineers but it's certainly the only way those vertebrates were getting into the air! They have to work with the materials at hand. If we ever saw flying horses, the only thing we could be absolutely sure of is that this would not be achieved by sprouting two more limbs from the back. We see evolution taking away limbs but never adding new ones.
'I've had three from young people saying they were contemplating committing suicide. I've had two from women contemplating killing their children and themselves. I had one last week from a person who said, "I'm so scared, my only friend is my little dog. When should I put it to sleep so it won't suffer?" And I don't know how to answer those questions.'"
He should answer "As soon as possible." Put some chlorine in that gene pool. The human herd could do with some culling of the credulous.
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Why does an ipod/phone sync cable go for $1 to $3.99 online but $20 or more in the store? Because if you're going to the store, you probably need the cable now, can't wait. Bend over and take it, bitch. Capitalism. Apologists will say it's a convenience fee for providing the store, helpful employees, etc. This is the same reason why a TV or printer will sell for damn near cost but the cable to connect them to something useful will be $20 to $100. You don't think about buying the cable before the television (unless you've been burned before) and who wants to get the nice and shiny TV home only to wait a few days for delivery?
He who controls the SPICE controls the universe. (Unless it's been open sourced)
He who controls root controls the universe. Then he who controls the SPICE only has the powers he's delegated.
I wonder what the CHOAM will think about this?
Better ask Paul. (see sig)
"European researchers have developed a new approach to artificial intelligence that could let computers to respond to behaviour as well as commands, reacting intelligently to the subtle nuances of human communication. It's no trivial feat - many humans struggle with the challenge on a day-to-day basis"
Computers can do math better than me, read body language better than me, and the bots can play games better than me. Looks like my only remaining advantage is a greater efficiency at turning fluid grains into pee. :(
Oh, I'm sorry. I guess that we can't really thank science for medicine, computers, airplanes, the food on our table. I guess that one murderous programmer working on an open source file system means all of Linux is shit, too. And you know what? I got taken for a ride buying speculative real estate in Florida. I guess this means that you can't make money in real estate, that the whole thing's a rotten idea. Incidentally, I threw out the bath water. Where'd the baby go?
I'll buy that argument once religious whackadoodles promise to renounce their faith because of televangelists and pedo-priests.
Here on Slashdot, we really like our car analogies; it's a long held tradition. However, for your benefit:
Say a pizza company comes up with a plan where you pay $300 per month for as many pizzas as you'd want with unlimited toppings.
Has anyone ever seen this guy and pizzaanalogyguy in the same room?
It was an eye-opener for me when I realized that television networks are not in the business of putting out quality programming and paying for it with advertising, they're in the business of selling advertising and the programs are the means of attracting enough eyeballs to give that ad time value. "If they can come up with something cheaper than news magazines, comedies and dramas, they'll air it." And sure enough, there's now channels out there specializing in repackaging what are effectively Youtube videos into half hour shows complete with the requisite commercial breaks. You have your police chases, animal attacks, painful stunts, and cute animals. Whatever it takes to keep you fuckers watching until the next commercial break.
So, Facebook's mission isn't to provide a friendly place for friendly people to connect and gee, they just want to make enough money to keep the doors open and break even. I haven't made a thorough exploration of Facebook's business model but it's gotta be something related to selling PI or allowing marketing firms to conduct real world research. I know that stupid farm game gets people to spend real world money on virtual assets. I don't know how much of a rent Facebook charges them for operating on their app.
There's some hacks but nothing that I've seen fully supported by Google yet. It's still considered beta, no integrated update, etc. Is this still correct or can someone more clueful share some love?
Chinese app farmers.
Not really. It's just a glorified vomit comet with some spectacular views. The real pioneers in commercial space flight are companies like Space-X who are very close to having launch capacity capable of being man-rated for orbital flight! We probably should cancel the Aries launch system and instead partner with Space-X.
In the meantime, Virgin Galactic or whatever it is called is just a glorified thrill ride that does nothing to advance real commercial space flight.
NASA didn't build the Saturn V as the very first project out the gate. While they had no mission to turn a profit on the venture, they broke the development up into tiny steps to make sure nothing went wrong. Virgin Galactic has to turn a profit. The first system was proof of concept. The second system here is about making money. You do realize that there will be a SpaceShipThree, Four, Five, etc, so long as the business remains profitable?
This is not a zero-sum game. Space-X can compete building unmanned rockets. They're getting pretty good at it. Rutan and crew can concentrate on putting the people up there. SpaceShipOne was not a vomit comet, it was like the Redstone suborbital launch. SpaceShipTwo is the same with paying passengers. Three or Four will probably make the step of getting into a proper orbit.
That means $660.40 per day was being spent keeping these computers powered up. That comes to just over $20 grand a month in electricity costs.
So, yeah... over the course of about four years, the costs could hit over a million dollars.
So many organizations allow computers to remain on overnight so it might have been electricity that would have been wasted anyway.
As with the poster above, I think the porn and misappropriated hardware at home is the sticking point. The SETI at home is just icing on the cake.
Only a school district or the government could have taken 10 years to find a CPU hog running on 5,000 computers.
Said someone posting from what's probably a business. :)
Too fucking right! Those big money scientists are faking the whole global warming thing so they can rake in the big bucks. I'm on to their game. Where did the glaciers go? Hmm, maybe you should ask the scientists! They were the last ones seen with them. Bet they've got 'em hidden somewhere just waiting to cash in, same place they put the ice caps.
Besides, even if the climate is changing, it's changed in the past! We had the little ice age, little richard, little italy, and we're doing fine now. If it's a natural change, why should it bother us? The saharah used to be grassland and now it's a desert. That's not hurting America none and it was long before we started burning fossil fuels. If global warming is happening and it isn't man-made, then there's absolutely no reason to do anything about it or even study it. And I still maintain that it's a plot by big science to fleece hard-working, god-fearing, reality-tv-watching American men and women.
Bingo. You have just pointed out why capitalism beats socialism. Nine private companies fail, one emerges as the industry leader.
Then the industry leader becomes so large it steamrolls competition while at the same time producing flabby, uninspired software. This bloated behemoth will persist long past when it should have mercifully died in its sleep and it takes ages for incompetence to erode that market lead, to allow competitors back into the marketplace. And when you think it might finally take in that final breath, the capitalists running the thing will successfully lobby the government for a bailout, not even blinking as they suck the government welfare teat. But you can bet they'll look down on poor people who might do the same.
In other words, computers are not a magic bullet. They only work well when you actually invest the time to find out what you need them to do, and then make them do that.
That's what I try to tell people at my place. If an EMP hit tomorrow and we were going to move all our business processes back to paper, we'd still be dealing with the same basic theory of information management. Customer ID number? They existed before computers. Why? You tell me which John Smith we're talking about, we've got ten in the files. Double-entry bookkeeping? We had that long before we had computers. Standardizing the records? You'd be doing that with 3x5's and card files. Last name, first name, middle initial, do it the same for all of them.
You can't automate a broken process. Get the logic working so that you can run it on paper, then we can talk about putting it in a computer. At best all a computer can do with a broken process is fuck it to pieces.
While I'm sure this guy was a real douche nozzle, I'd like to see people who steal real assets go to jail before the people who steal fake assets. International bankers rather than basement dwellers, ok?
Most servers sit there at 3% cpu until something strenuous occurs. You've still got the big fans blowing, drives spinning like mad, and lots of power getting sucked down. I'd like to be able to see these units able to reduce power in low-use times and seamlessly ramp up when demand hits. It bugs me that we leave servers running overnight at full clip simply because we don't want to come in early to turn them on for the early workers, don't trust they'll come back on after a powerdown due to IT voodoo, etc. It really drives me nuts when IT policy says desktops are to remain on overnight for patching at 3am. Waste of power.
"Nipples"
Or very small penises.
In my experience, it is rare for a customer, even with professional IT staff, to properly specify their needs when it comes to technology. Why did Northrop, which presumably has experience in government systems, not design backups?
Consultants never seem to get it right. Granted, the situations I'm familiar with are a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the size of this contract but at that scale the issue is that the contractors and consultants are juggling multiple clients so the needs of any one must be balanced against the needs of all of them. But what really burns me is when they can't even provide decent advice on what should be bread and butter. "We need a backup solution." See, there you go. Many solutions on the market but they should be able to settle on a package they can confidently advise clients will work. But they don't. This astounds me. The consultants are just shooting in the dark, no better informed than the rest of us. You can't blame them for good advice ignored by the customer but for bad advice or no advice at all? Absolutely!
I thought "NewHere" had the most obscure gag-based nick. You, PizzaAnalogyGuy, have taken away that crown.
Neuromancer dystopian? Are you serious? ;)
When I read that as a kid I would have given anything to live in that world. I still wouldn't mind getting one of their awesome brain-interfaced computers
And some people would love to live in Mad Max. Doesn't mean it's not dystopic.
It seems a bit presumtuous to declare a successful multibillionaire is making a fatal mistake, especially seeing as I'm just a multithousandaire. That being said, history is replete with examples of people, organizations, and empires that gained enormous success in a given environment but were unsuited to adapting to changes in that environment.
Murdoch seems to want to turn back the clock, put the toothpaste back in the tube. I don't think this is possible. The Internet is a highly disruptive technology and if it wasn't Google then some other company would be playing the same role.
Of course, just ten years back we had starry-eyed boffins chortling over how the internet meant all brick and mortar retail was dead, nobody would go shopping anymore, etc. They kind of missed the boat on that one. Internet retail is just a very fancy form of mail-order. The internet might kill certain categories of store (used record shops, new record shops, and digital delivery promises to render blockbuster and gamestop obsolete though it's far too early to declare a time of death) but grocery stores aren't going anywhere. Used bookstores will still get foot traffic for the near future and things like the amazon zshop allows those independents to sell nationwide.
I think Murdoch is trying to hold back the incoming tide on this one.
I think the elephant's prehensile trunk would qualify as a counterexample... (Though I won't think that the chances of a Dumbo-style evolution are significant...)
But that developed from the nose.
Take a look at the very word tetrapod. "Tetrapods (Greek tetrapoda, Latin quadruped, "four-footed") are vertebrate animals having four feet, legs or leglike appendages. Amphibians, reptiles, dinosaurs/birds, and mammals are all tetrapods, and even the limbless snakes are tetrapods by descent. The earliest tetrapods radiated from the Sarcopterygii, or lobe-finned fish."
I think it's absolutely remarkable how many anatomical elements are preserved across so many species. Makes you wonder what would have come about if more Devonian lines were given a chance to evolve. There was certainly some weird shit swimming around back then.
It amazes me how much hardware and power has to be thrown at the problem to solve it while nature can create a self-organizing machine that only requires material input of raw mice and lasagna. Puts me in mind of this quote:
"If research leads to the development of successful new modeling techniques that can carry out new and better forms of information processing, no one will really care if they do not exactly mimic the functionality of the human brain," concludes Hall. "I honestly doubt you'll find too many people today who are upset that the wings on an aircraft do not flap like those of a bird or that a submarine does not swim exactly like a fish."
It's an interesting way of looking at things. Man's earliest ideas of flying all involved trying to mimic the actions of a bird. And ornithopters remain impractical as passenger vehicles. But new breakthroughs in material sciences and computing are allowing for autonomous bots that fly like birds, bats, bugs, and can swim like snakes and fish. Engineers will point out that the evolved solutions we see in nature are working with the materials at hand, they might not be the best of all solutions. Every flying vertebrate known to science turned forelimbs into wings and flap them. Is it the most efficient way to fly? That's an argument I'll leave to the biologists and engineers but it's certainly the only way those vertebrates were getting into the air! They have to work with the materials at hand. If we ever saw flying horses, the only thing we could be absolutely sure of is that this would not be achieved by sprouting two more limbs from the back. We see evolution taking away limbs but never adding new ones.
'I've had three from young people saying they were contemplating committing suicide. I've had two from women contemplating killing their children and themselves. I had one last week from a person who said, "I'm so scared, my only friend is my little dog. When should I put it to sleep so it won't suffer?" And I don't know how to answer those questions.'"
He should answer "As soon as possible." Put some chlorine in that gene pool. The human herd could do with some culling of the credulous.