It took me about the same amount of time to do as the metric examples. If it takes someone any significant time to work out these examples then they should go back to school and re-learn basic math.
which is the smaller socket - 11/16 or 5/8? What's that, you had to do some math in your head to figure it out? That's why metric is better.
To be fair there's no reason we need to have different divisors for wrenches, we could just express them all as a single number which represent sixteenths of an inch. So those wrenches would be an 11 and a 10.
That's really all the metric system does in the first place. Suppose you have a 1/2 cm wrench and a 2/5 cm wrench. You can simplify it by saying you have a 5 mm and 4 mm wrench, the same as I did above. All you did was change the divisor to a tenth of a centimeter.
In the case you gave it's trivial to make the comparison, double the 5 to 10 and you have the answer. It shouldn't slow you down for even a fraction of a second. Your example really doesn't make a very strong case for switching a whole nation to metric. In fact I'd argue that having to do fraction calculations is a good thing, it sharpens your math skills!;-)
The problem is how to translate things like "click, hold and drag" or "Slide the slider".
With Mac OS X and the trackpad that's handled by doing "tap, tap and drag". It seems to work pretty well so perhaps that's one that should be adopted more widely.
Apple subscription revenue returned to magazines for iPad: 60%
That's actually 30% taken, or 70% returned. Not a bad deal at all when you consider that if you sell a magazine through a brick-and-morter store you'd see less than 50% returned and you still have to handle all the costs of printing, shipping, returned unsold stock, etc.
'In school, intelligence is a measurement,' he said. 'If you have the same answer as everyone else in math or science, you're intelligent.'"
Well.. not really. Schools don't measure intelligence, they measure compliance and effort. If you're intelligent and willing, it's easier to comply with "memorize this crap" and "be able to solve math problems in this form" - but grades are not intended to measure intelligence, nor are they good at doing so.
I believe that was exactly his point. Modern education has defined intelligence as what you know, not how well you can use what you've learned to accomplish a goal. In the current educational system you get top grades for regurgitating the right answers instead of finding new, better ones.
are science candidates washed up at 35 having grown comfy with finance side paychecks?
It's very tough to break into the scientific community when you're not fresh out of college. Usually the best bet is to go back and get another scientific degree and try to springboard off of that but even then it's not easy.
I actually started off as a chemist, worked in industry for about 10 years, and then switched to a non-profit educational provider when the company I was working for went south. I did that for about another 10 years and then tried to get back into chemistry. It proved very tough to get employed because (and I was told this a few times) of the break.
Eventually I went back to school and got a masters in computer science, that's when I got hired by a financial services company. I had even applied to some positions in the chemical industry to do computational chemistry or to support a R&D department. The jobs just aren't there in research any more and even when they are there the pay is pretty low compared to other computer positions, such as in finance. I got picked up relatively quickly by the company I'm now working at and, honestly, it's a much more fun/rewarding job than the ones I had in chemistry R&D.
Graff, money is indeed lovely, but you're not winning any friends with that"some sort of communistic ideal" phrase. It's very ad-hominem.
It's not ad-hominem at all, people actually do think that capitalism is evil and that we should go towards a communistic society. This happens quite a bit in academia where they are more insulated from the economic ebb and flow of the business world.
Inflation largely stems from the fact that no one ever wants less. People want higher salaries even when there have been no changes in the economy. This means that costs go up and so the price of goods goes up. Yeah it's a little more complicated than that but overall that's how it goes.
I'm also far from being a "quant", hell I can barely balance my checkbook! I'm a systems programmer and my main concern is how to efficiently handle large volumes of information, not what that information actually means.
I don't know if what you say is true to yourself, but I must confess that I find it tiresome when people write about karma and moderation in their posts.
I've made a half-dozen posts on this topic and this is the first mention I've made about karma. I was really only talking about it in response to the person who said I wasn't winning friends and influencing people by presenting some concepts from the pro side of the finance industry. My main point was that I didn't care a whit about being popular, I just want to fairly discuss all sides of the issue.
I thought we gave money to people who told us that they would act in our best interests and invest it wisely. I thought they had a fiduciary responsibility to do that.
Even with all that we still need to question them, monitor them, and validate what they are doing with our money. Overall the average joe doesn't do that, he just forks over the cash and waits for the money to roll in. Now you might be an exception to that and if you are then I'm glad to hear it. I just wish more people would act that way instead of reacting in shock when the money goes bye bye.
He didn't actually work in the finance industry -- they took his work and applied it for their own purposes.
I'm not saying he worked in the industry, just that his work applies to the field of finance. This goes to my point that there is interesting work to be done in the finance industry.
At the end, most companies (financial or not) follow money, not ideals.
This is just as true about the companies that the article is staying geeks should be working for instead of the investment firms. It doesn't matter if the industry is about filtering water or investing in other companies, in the end a good deal of them are just about the money.
I've worked in R&D at several companies, from a water filter manufacturer to a coatings manufacturer, and from my experience you have to look long and hard to find any elements of philanthropy in industry. It's almost 100% focused on pure profit.
In fact I've seen more of a drive toward helping people in my current position in the finance industry than I ever have as a research chemist. This is all anecdotal, of course, but my point is that you can't paint an entire industry with a broad brush.
is really not going to win friends and influence people
Oh, is that really what it's all about? Look, it's all well and fine to be a people pleaser but not if you do it at the expense of propagating false information and compromising your morals.
Sure, there's lots of work to be done in preventing abuses in the finance industry but to say that the entire finance industry is solely responsible for the world's economic troubles is disingenuous at best. People gave their money to investment companies and then turned a blind eye to how that money was used in either a show of greed or ignorance. We can't affix the blame to just the investment bankers, we gave them the power by giving them the money and the free reign to do what they wanted with it.
But hey, if I was a karma whore I would just post exactly what the average slashdot libertarian wants to hear rather than openly discuss the whole issue. However, that's not me and I'd rather be true to myself. I'll get modded down for it but slashdot karma is just a number anyways.
Wow that sucks to watch, maybe they could have just typed it up and saved us all 10 minutes of our lives?
What is with people turning something that can be read in 30 seconds into an animation that takes 20 times as much to view? That's like the video blogs that sometimes get linked in a slashdot article. Just give us the text so we can view it and get on with our lives...
Because all the research and cleverness they're doing in the field of Investment Banking isn't about giving loans to research organizations, but about finding clever loopholes that let the banks turn large numbers into even larger numbers in some impenetrable perversion of economics.
Not all the research in the field of investment banking goes into loopholes and dodgy practices. Yes, there have been a few notable examples of such lately but there's still a ton that goes toward real investment that helps industry and our nation.
I'm all for hunting and knocking down the members of the finance industry who create a toxic environment for research and innovation but it's hardly fair to broad-brush the entire industry. It doesn't get into the news (another field which has its fair share of toxic environments) but much of the finance industry is ticking along, providing loans and guarantees that the business community relies upon to get stuff done. Better hardware and software systems will only help the finance sector be more efficient and promote business.
Without investment banking you'd have to rely on individual investment and that can be very tough to find. Few people want to put all their eggs in one basket by investing in just a couple of companies. Investment banking done right allows people with a little spare cash to invest in many companies at once, spreading out the risk. It increases the amount of investment capital available to businesses and accelerates the pace of research. Yes, it also creates a layer between the investor and the business so what we (as a nation and as individual investors) need to do is to pay even more attention to what the money is doing. All too often people are treating investment banking as a "set it and forget it" type of system. Therein lies madness.
Not in one bit. I don't feel guilty and I didn't sell out. I welcomed the chance to try a new career and I was more than happy to work for a large and interesting company.
I've had the chance to work on a lot of systems that I had only heard about in school and I've been able to do some really interesting cutting-edge programming. The people are great, the culture is fun, and yes the money and benefits are nice.
So is it wrong to be happy, to feel like your work is appreciated, to tackle new challenges every week, and to get compensated for your abilities? The horror!
By the way, scientific research can be a grind. Very few people get to be the guy who cures cancer or who invents a new way to power the world cleanly. Most likely you'll be working on squeezing that last 0.1% of performance out of a manufacturing process or some other sort of drudgery. Even as a programmer most of what you'll do to support scientific research will be database administration or client support, maybe you'll be the whipping boy for a research team who wants a new tool to analyze their data. You almost certainly won't be the person coming up with the real innovation, that'll be for the chemists, physicists, and biologists that you work for.
This is a completely ridiculous notion, how do you think the money gets to the "serious research" in the first place? Right, investment banks and the financial services industry! You'd have a far lower amount of research if you can't get money to do that research!
Innovation and efficiency in the financial services industry helps drive money to startups and companies seeking to expand. If the investment banks get some of the top engineering talent then they can build better systems that can be more nimble at identifying tech sectors which could use cash to find these new and exciting projects. Then those companies will be able to hire more engineers to work on the projects.
Besides which, who is to say that there isn't fun and innovative ideas to be explored in the financial services industry? Remember that John Nash (of A Beautiful Mind fame) received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on the Nash Equilibrium. The financial industry does a lot of work in developing new ways to store, access, and analyze data - work that is often highly useful to the scientific community.
By the way, I'm writing this as a chemist who changed careers and became a programmer for the finance industry. I've personally seen some great ideas that would have direct application to many fields of scientific study. Just because many "intellectuals" find the concept of money distasteful and think that the world should follow some sort of communistic ideal, that doesn't invalidate the fact that the concept is a highly useful one. We need money and finance in order to give people incentives to perform and innovate. It would also be pretty cumbersome if we had to barter our services for every single transaction.
The relevant visible parts of MacOS are pretty anti-unix actually.
Erm, no, Mac OS X is quite definitely 100% certified Unix. This has nothing to do with the "visible parts" (you mean the GUI I assume), this is all about the underlying kernel and other subsystems of the OS, as well as some of the userland tools.
If we can even hit 50% PV efficiency, feeding the world for the next century - including any unexpected catastrophic population burst - is almost zero problem.
Of course, photovoltaics are in the neighborhood of 7% - 17% right now so we have a LONG way to go.
Solar cells are a technology still in its infancy and it will be years before it actually outperforms coal for power/pollution. It may never be able to compete with nuclear fission for that ratio.
Overall we are best off building fission plants and spending our R&D money on perfecting fusion technology. That's the real ultimate power source in the system, being able to control nuclear fusion directly instead of needing to collect a fraction of the energy thrown at us by the sun.
Unless this is a deep, deep chamber the possibility of it collapsing when pressurized precludes just plugging up holes and using it.
The plan for this kind of construction usually involves shoring and lining the tube to be sure that there are no weak points or leaks. You'd also build structures inside the tube that are sealable and have redundant safety measures.
A lava tube would would make an excellent first-line of protection but it wouldn't be the only one. It would save a lot of time and money in the construction of a lunar settlement.
This cace is "near the moon's equator". The only places where we could find water are on the poles.
It's not that hard to move the water, especially in a low-g environment such as the moon. A pipeline from the pole to the equator would be about 1,700 miles, definitely possible considering that the longest pipeline on Earth is around 2,500 miles.
You could also have largely autonomous vehicles which shuttle back and forth from both sites on a ballistic trajectory, it would take a relatively low amount of energy. Hell, I'd use something like a space fountain or launch loop because most of the energy of launch could be re-captured when the payload lands.
Natural lava tubes this size are a great find for many reasons:
living quarters will need considerable shielding from:
high-energy particles
pressure differences
temperature swings
micro-meteor impacts
the best first-line of shielding will be the moon's regolith, it's dense and locally-available
excavation takes time and that means a lot of money supporting the crew and equipment doing the digging
you'll have to shield the crew during excavation, which means you need to bring shielding with you
A large, stable lava tube greatly simplifies the entire process and saves a lot of time and money.
I didn't talk to an old girlfriend for a week when she adamantly refused to believe that Johnny Cash covered a song by that "shitty band Nine Inch Nails" and insisted that Trent Reznor's rendition was an inferior copy that ruined the song.
To be fair, Johnny Cash's version of "Hurt" is amazingly better than the original Nine Inch Nails version. Then again Cash was also a much better performer than Reznor.
Slashdot Mirror
1/4" + 3/16"
24" + 6.5'
7/8" + 1/2" - 1/4"
If you know a little VERY simple math these are nearly instant.
4/16 + 3/16 = 7/16
2' + 6.5' = 8.5'
7/8 + 4/8 - 2/8 = 9/8
It took me about the same amount of time to do as the metric examples. If it takes someone any significant time to work out these examples then they should go back to school and re-learn basic math.
KWH - KelvinWattHours... Nice. How many BTUs is that?
You sure you didn't mean kilowatt-hour?
which is the smaller socket - 11/16 or 5/8? What's that, you had to do some math in your head to figure it out? That's why metric is better.
To be fair there's no reason we need to have different divisors for wrenches, we could just express them all as a single number which represent sixteenths of an inch. So those wrenches would be an 11 and a 10.
That's really all the metric system does in the first place. Suppose you have a 1/2 cm wrench and a 2/5 cm wrench. You can simplify it by saying you have a 5 mm and 4 mm wrench, the same as I did above. All you did was change the divisor to a tenth of a centimeter.
In the case you gave it's trivial to make the comparison, double the 5 to 10 and you have the answer. It shouldn't slow you down for even a fraction of a second. Your example really doesn't make a very strong case for switching a whole nation to metric. In fact I'd argue that having to do fraction calculations is a good thing, it sharpens your math skills! ;-)
The problem is how to translate things like "click, hold and drag" or "Slide the slider".
With Mac OS X and the trackpad that's handled by doing "tap, tap and drag". It seems to work pretty well so perhaps that's one that should be adopted more widely.
Apple subscription revenue returned to magazines for iPad: 60%
That's actually 30% taken, or 70% returned. Not a bad deal at all when you consider that if you sell a magazine through a brick-and-morter store you'd see less than 50% returned and you still have to handle all the costs of printing, shipping, returned unsold stock, etc.
'In school, intelligence is a measurement,' he said. 'If you have the same answer as everyone else in math or science, you're intelligent.'"
Well.. not really. Schools don't measure intelligence, they measure compliance and effort. If you're intelligent and willing, it's easier to comply with "memorize this crap" and "be able to solve math problems in this form" - but grades are not intended to measure intelligence, nor are they good at doing so.
I believe that was exactly his point. Modern education has defined intelligence as what you know, not how well you can use what you've learned to accomplish a goal. In the current educational system you get top grades for regurgitating the right answers instead of finding new, better ones.
are science candidates washed up at 35 having grown comfy with finance side paychecks?
It's very tough to break into the scientific community when you're not fresh out of college. Usually the best bet is to go back and get another scientific degree and try to springboard off of that but even then it's not easy.
I actually started off as a chemist, worked in industry for about 10 years, and then switched to a non-profit educational provider when the company I was working for went south. I did that for about another 10 years and then tried to get back into chemistry. It proved very tough to get employed because (and I was told this a few times) of the break.
Eventually I went back to school and got a masters in computer science, that's when I got hired by a financial services company. I had even applied to some positions in the chemical industry to do computational chemistry or to support a R&D department. The jobs just aren't there in research any more and even when they are there the pay is pretty low compared to other computer positions, such as in finance. I got picked up relatively quickly by the company I'm now working at and, honestly, it's a much more fun/rewarding job than the ones I had in chemistry R&D.
Graff, money is indeed lovely, but you're not winning any friends with that"some sort of communistic ideal" phrase. It's very ad-hominem.
It's not ad-hominem at all, people actually do think that capitalism is evil and that we should go towards a communistic society. This happens quite a bit in academia where they are more insulated from the economic ebb and flow of the business world.
Inflation largely stems from the fact that no one ever wants less. People want higher salaries even when there have been no changes in the economy. This means that costs go up and so the price of goods goes up. Yeah it's a little more complicated than that but overall that's how it goes.
I'm also far from being a "quant", hell I can barely balance my checkbook! I'm a systems programmer and my main concern is how to efficiently handle large volumes of information, not what that information actually means.
I don't know if what you say is true to yourself, but I must confess that I find it tiresome when people write about karma and moderation in their posts.
I've made a half-dozen posts on this topic and this is the first mention I've made about karma. I was really only talking about it in response to the person who said I wasn't winning friends and influencing people by presenting some concepts from the pro side of the finance industry. My main point was that I didn't care a whit about being popular, I just want to fairly discuss all sides of the issue.
I thought we gave money to people who told us that they would act in our best interests and invest it wisely. I thought they had a fiduciary responsibility to do that.
Even with all that we still need to question them, monitor them, and validate what they are doing with our money. Overall the average joe doesn't do that, he just forks over the cash and waits for the money to roll in. Now you might be an exception to that and if you are then I'm glad to hear it. I just wish more people would act that way instead of reacting in shock when the money goes bye bye.
He didn't actually work in the finance industry -- they took his work and applied it for their own purposes.
I'm not saying he worked in the industry, just that his work applies to the field of finance. This goes to my point that there is interesting work to be done in the finance industry.
I think he's defensive because people are attacking his career, and making veiled threats about him being "first against the wall".
Shhh, no logic here! This discussion is only for railing "against the man"! ;-)
At the end, most companies (financial or not) follow money, not ideals.
This is just as true about the companies that the article is staying geeks should be working for instead of the investment firms. It doesn't matter if the industry is about filtering water or investing in other companies, in the end a good deal of them are just about the money.
I've worked in R&D at several companies, from a water filter manufacturer to a coatings manufacturer, and from my experience you have to look long and hard to find any elements of philanthropy in industry. It's almost 100% focused on pure profit.
In fact I've seen more of a drive toward helping people in my current position in the finance industry than I ever have as a research chemist. This is all anecdotal, of course, but my point is that you can't paint an entire industry with a broad brush.
Um, they did, and published it in a whole lotta journals. But you didn't read them, did you?
Nope, haven't heard of it at all. Then again I did read about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs in A Theory of Human Motivation and his book Motivation and Personality as well as several other scholarly texts on motivation.
I tried searching for a text version of the presentation and only came up with the animation, do you have a link to a non-multimedia version?
is really not going to win friends and influence people
Oh, is that really what it's all about? Look, it's all well and fine to be a people pleaser but not if you do it at the expense of propagating false information and compromising your morals.
Sure, there's lots of work to be done in preventing abuses in the finance industry but to say that the entire finance industry is solely responsible for the world's economic troubles is disingenuous at best. People gave their money to investment companies and then turned a blind eye to how that money was used in either a show of greed or ignorance. We can't affix the blame to just the investment bankers, we gave them the power by giving them the money and the free reign to do what they wanted with it.
But hey, if I was a karma whore I would just post exactly what the average slashdot libertarian wants to hear rather than openly discuss the whole issue. However, that's not me and I'd rather be true to myself. I'll get modded down for it but slashdot karma is just a number anyways.
I'll add to that this nice drawnimation: RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us
Wow that sucks to watch, maybe they could have just typed it up and saved us all 10 minutes of our lives?
What is with people turning something that can be read in 30 seconds into an animation that takes 20 times as much to view? That's like the video blogs that sometimes get linked in a slashdot article. Just give us the text so we can view it and get on with our lives...
Because all the research and cleverness they're doing in the field of Investment Banking isn't about giving loans to research organizations, but about finding clever loopholes that let the banks turn large numbers into even larger numbers in some impenetrable perversion of economics.
Not all the research in the field of investment banking goes into loopholes and dodgy practices. Yes, there have been a few notable examples of such lately but there's still a ton that goes toward real investment that helps industry and our nation.
I'm all for hunting and knocking down the members of the finance industry who create a toxic environment for research and innovation but it's hardly fair to broad-brush the entire industry. It doesn't get into the news (another field which has its fair share of toxic environments) but much of the finance industry is ticking along, providing loans and guarantees that the business community relies upon to get stuff done. Better hardware and software systems will only help the finance sector be more efficient and promote business.
Without investment banking you'd have to rely on individual investment and that can be very tough to find. Few people want to put all their eggs in one basket by investing in just a couple of companies. Investment banking done right allows people with a little spare cash to invest in many companies at once, spreading out the risk. It increases the amount of investment capital available to businesses and accelerates the pace of research. Yes, it also creates a layer between the investor and the business so what we (as a nation and as individual investors) need to do is to pay even more attention to what the money is doing. All too often people are treating investment banking as a "set it and forget it" type of system. Therein lies madness.
You feel guilty of having sold out
Not in one bit. I don't feel guilty and I didn't sell out. I welcomed the chance to try a new career and I was more than happy to work for a large and interesting company.
I've had the chance to work on a lot of systems that I had only heard about in school and I've been able to do some really interesting cutting-edge programming. The people are great, the culture is fun, and yes the money and benefits are nice.
So is it wrong to be happy, to feel like your work is appreciated, to tackle new challenges every week, and to get compensated for your abilities? The horror!
By the way, scientific research can be a grind. Very few people get to be the guy who cures cancer or who invents a new way to power the world cleanly. Most likely you'll be working on squeezing that last 0.1% of performance out of a manufacturing process or some other sort of drudgery. Even as a programmer most of what you'll do to support scientific research will be database administration or client support, maybe you'll be the whipping boy for a research team who wants a new tool to analyze their data. You almost certainly won't be the person coming up with the real innovation, that'll be for the chemists, physicists, and biologists that you work for.
This is a completely ridiculous notion, how do you think the money gets to the "serious research" in the first place? Right, investment banks and the financial services industry! You'd have a far lower amount of research if you can't get money to do that research!
Innovation and efficiency in the financial services industry helps drive money to startups and companies seeking to expand. If the investment banks get some of the top engineering talent then they can build better systems that can be more nimble at identifying tech sectors which could use cash to find these new and exciting projects. Then those companies will be able to hire more engineers to work on the projects.
Besides which, who is to say that there isn't fun and innovative ideas to be explored in the financial services industry? Remember that John Nash (of A Beautiful Mind fame) received the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on the Nash Equilibrium. The financial industry does a lot of work in developing new ways to store, access, and analyze data - work that is often highly useful to the scientific community.
By the way, I'm writing this as a chemist who changed careers and became a programmer for the finance industry. I've personally seen some great ideas that would have direct application to many fields of scientific study. Just because many "intellectuals" find the concept of money distasteful and think that the world should follow some sort of communistic ideal, that doesn't invalidate the fact that the concept is a highly useful one. We need money and finance in order to give people incentives to perform and innovate. It would also be pretty cumbersome if we had to barter our services for every single transaction.
The PWN to OWN contests. Usually apple hardware is taken down first.
That's totally true, especially since they were the first on the schedule to be attacked...
The relevant visible parts of MacOS are pretty anti-unix actually.
Erm, no, Mac OS X is quite definitely 100% certified Unix. This has nothing to do with the "visible parts" (you mean the GUI I assume), this is all about the underlying kernel and other subsystems of the OS, as well as some of the userland tools.
If we can even hit 50% PV efficiency, feeding the world for the next century - including any unexpected catastrophic population burst - is almost zero problem.
Of course, photovoltaics are in the neighborhood of 7% - 17% right now so we have a LONG way to go.
Solar cells are a technology still in its infancy and it will be years before it actually outperforms coal for power/pollution. It may never be able to compete with nuclear fission for that ratio.
Overall we are best off building fission plants and spending our R&D money on perfecting fusion technology. That's the real ultimate power source in the system, being able to control nuclear fusion directly instead of needing to collect a fraction of the energy thrown at us by the sun.
The fact is that Apple was still happily signing people up for two year contacts with AT&T on brand freaking new iPhone 3Gs until last June.
Wrong : the iPhone 3GS is still supported by the new 4.3 version (see here).
I think the GP was talking about multiple iPhone 3G units (thus the small "s" in "iPhone 3Gs"), not the iPhone 3GS.
Unless this is a deep, deep chamber the possibility of it collapsing when pressurized precludes just plugging up holes and using it.
The plan for this kind of construction usually involves shoring and lining the tube to be sure that there are no weak points or leaks. You'd also build structures inside the tube that are sealable and have redundant safety measures.
A lava tube would would make an excellent first-line of protection but it wouldn't be the only one. It would save a lot of time and money in the construction of a lunar settlement.
This cace is "near the moon's equator". The only places where we could find water are on the poles.
It's not that hard to move the water, especially in a low-g environment such as the moon. A pipeline from the pole to the equator would be about 1,700 miles, definitely possible considering that the longest pipeline on Earth is around 2,500 miles.
You could also have largely autonomous vehicles which shuttle back and forth from both sites on a ballistic trajectory, it would take a relatively low amount of energy. Hell, I'd use something like a space fountain or launch loop because most of the energy of launch could be re-captured when the payload lands.
Natural lava tubes this size are a great find for many reasons:
A large, stable lava tube greatly simplifies the entire process and saves a lot of time and money.
I didn't talk to an old girlfriend for a week when she adamantly refused to believe that Johnny Cash covered a song by that "shitty band Nine Inch Nails" and insisted that Trent Reznor's rendition was an inferior copy that ruined the song.
To be fair, Johnny Cash's version of "Hurt" is amazingly better than the original Nine Inch Nails version. Then again Cash was also a much better performer than Reznor.