I see the Space Shuttle land with a parachute every few weeks! What is the big deal with this! How is this news, for nerds or anybody else?
If you're trying to be funny, you blew it. If not, you didn't read the article - the BRS/CAPS 'chute is deployed in flight to bail the pilot & passengers' butts out of a situation that would otherwise leave them with rather poor odds of survival. And this is incredibly good news for those of us nerds who fly. In-flight structural damage is very rare but does happen, and this is the first tool that gives pilots an option other than prayer when a midair or whatever leaves the plane unflyable.
a cashier at Staples bent my ear through the entire transaction about how I really should buy an extended warranty ($14.95) for my new shredder ($40, on sale). I finally interrupted the streaming sales pitch to draw her attention to the words lifetime warranty in large type on the side of the box. She didn't bat an eye, just smoothly shifed gears to note how it was such a hassle to get service from the factory, and they make you pay the shipping both ways which is so inconvenient, and at that point I grabbed bag & receipt and expedited my exit.
Some other random notes re one of my favorite pet peeves - thanx to the poster for bringing this up:)
It's been many years since I've received the hard sell for car rental CDW, et al; I'm either lucky, or the sales droids have figured out that AmExautomatically covers CDW. The last time I rented, the sales "agent" did try to sell me the fillup service, $4.99 per gallon to spare me the gross inconvenience of filling up down the street from the airport. Assuming I brought it back empty, that tank of gas would have cost more than the rental itself.
I came by the aforementioned car in an interesting way. Needed to book a weekend trip DTW --> BWI on two days notice. Best nonstop round-trip coach fare for two people: $1900 thru CheapTickets. Same website, same airline, same flights, plus a car: $560 (of which $90-odd was assorted surcharges). With fare structures like this, how the fsck can the airlines even know whether they make/lose money!? (Btw, lesson learned from this trip: don't book flights less than two weeks in advance unless you enjoy being "randomly" searched, repeatedly.)
Dish Network's first lame attempt at a PVR carried a $10/month charge to use the PVR features. No added features beyond what was built into the box; you paid the $10 solely for the privilege of using the hardware you'd just laid out $600 for. Dish sold maybe a half-dozen of these, unsurprisingly, and the newer/better (and Linux-based!) PVR boxen carry no surcharge.
Cruises & vacation package ads: Decent price prominently displayed, and beside it in 3-point type: "+ $80", or similar 75% markup. You can't not pay the markup; imho obscuring the actual price this way is damn near fraud.
ATM fees, and bank surcharges in general: Don't get me going on these.
Don't know if people outside metro Detroit see these: Car commercials featuring buy/lease prices unattainable by mere mortals. "We'll lease you a brand new fully-equipped (mumble)(mumble) for only $199/month with zero down. ..IF you're already leasing a car from us, AND you're an employee of the manufacturer, AND you won't be moving out of the area anytime soon (seriously), AND you have better credit than God. IOW, the CEO of GeneralDaimlerFord gets this price; you don't. Not so very long ago, TV ads gave the average price quoted by metro area dealers for all sales. Did the law change while I wasn't looking?
DDB (who should be modded up for working Linux into an otherwise-irrelevant topic.:) )
We got outsourced and offshored, and it's been such a disaster that we haven't had to lay anyone off. Productivity is down (even with a nominal 50% staff increase with the offshore group), clients are screaming because IT can't deliver a non-trivial project anywhere near on-time/in-budget anymore, budget for luxuries like maintenance & enhancement of existing code & infrastructure, training, and the like, has vanished, now considered "non-billable overhead".
Morale is abysmal, as you might expect, and even with the economy in the dumper we're losing an average of four people per month, mostly senior-level people who have relatively little trouble finding other work. As with your situation, Those Who Remain are seeing workload and stress levels mushrooming due to reduced staff and increased client grief.
Meanwhile, sr. management on both sides is tickled because their bottom lines have improved, blissfully unconcerned over the ongoing brain drain and deterioration of mission-critical systems that will give them shark-sized bites in the ass within the next few months. Yours truly has no intention of being around when that happens.
DDB (one of the six - whoops, five - sr. developers left onsite)
When the big name business schools changed over from teaching business from looking 5, 10, and 20 years into the future and started concentrating on quarterly income it was a sad day.
I wonder whether that teaching is cause or effect. Company officers can't look past next quarter's earnings anymore, because (1) program trading makes it routine for a company to lose 20% of its value overnight if its earnings aren't up to analysts' expectations, and (2) stockholders now routinely sue when (1) happens.
I fully understand how the dot-bombers' get-mine-and-get-out philosophy came about. And you're right; it's sad.
I was brought in to architect and deploy an ecommerce system. Did I have a staff? No. Could I contract out any of the development? No. It was like this - here's ONE server (running NT I might add), now go build us a system.
Count your blessings. You had the chance to build your system from the ground up, (apparently) free of micromanagement, arbitrary requirements and deadlines, and office politicians screaming about the "non-standard"; i.e., "non-Microsoft", platform. Opportunities like that are, imho, very rare & worth the extra effort.
a demand-driven, quasi-auction model? Posted songs start out at a dime a download, split 50-50 between artist and host. As the download count builds, the song's increasing "karma" (or whatever the capitalist equivalent is) automagically jacks up the download price. The most popular songs eventually hit some reasonable ceiling, maybe US$1/song. Artists retain all rights to their work. Host acts as a broker and promoter; the latter being undertaken at the host's discretion.
At first view, I don't see any losers. Host gets revenue, and the incentive, resources, and market research needed to promote bands to increase that revenue. Artists get exposure, income, and their shot at wealth & fame if the desire & ability are there. Fans get the music they want for reasonable cost, incentive to check out new artists (less expensive, and perhaps assisted by an Amazon-ish recommendation engine), and the freedom to enjoy the music where/whenever they please.
I hope they're paying attention to aerodynamics. The beast looks like the cross-section of a wing, which would make the stats more like "50mph water / 160mph land / 161mph air (2000 rpm tumble)."
I mean jeez, most people actually think mp3's and CDs burned from them sound good enough!!!
Which is fine, because this attitude is precisely why every copy protection scheme RIAA comes up with will ultimately fail.
Play a "locked" CD, SACD, or whatever, in a standard player. Pipe the analog output - take it off the speaker leads via matching xformers if you have to - into a high-quality sound card. Equalize the result, and burn a CD, or encode an MP3 or ogg.
Will its quality equal the original? No. Will the quality be acceptable to your average MP3 listener? Almost certainly. Will the DRManiacs be able to come up with a watermarking scheme that can survive this process without ruining the sound? Highly unlikely.
Earth to RIAA: Your nefarious schemes will succeed only if people care more about fidelity than convenience or price. Take a look at Rio and iPod sales figures before you proceed.
... is an open source (preferably) suite that I can run on my PC at home, where I can decide the access controls, and have complete control privacy policy.
A friend and I researched & gamed this extensively several months ago. Boiled down to essentials, we ID'd two fundamental problems with the concept of a profiling / authentication system distributed to this level; i.e., a net-attached server in everyone's home: (1) Critical security components run on these home servers and whatever mobile devices may communicate with them, and this hardware must be considered unsecured. An attacker that can get physical access to the box once owns the profiles of the owner and all trusted associates, and is set up to remotely hack perhaps hundreds more. A chain of six compromised servers yields Kevin Bacon's profile. (2) A useful profile requires multiple and multi-dimensional levels of trust; i.e. access privileges. You don't want e-mail acquaintances to view your address book or credit card info; you don't want girlfriends Ann, Betty, and Clara to view your entire appointment calendar or pr0n search preferences. (Well, maybe Betty.:) ) The kicker is that, to be useful, such a privilege set must be intelligently set and maintained./. readers could handle this. I doubt my PC-literate mom could though, much less someone who has a hard time coping with their VCR. Further, s'kiddies and spammers and the sleazier website operators have come up with an amazing number of ways to trick people into yielding access and personal information. We can assume the same level of ingenuity in re profile privileges.
Sum of topic: Assuming a home server with combination-locked steel case and KVM, automatic software security updates pushed from trusted sources, and cutting-edge AI to help manage access privs, we estimated at best three-nines integrity for a knowledgeable user proactively managing the box & associated devices, and about 95% for a PC-literate user with no specific technical skills. At worst, against an expert attacker willing to do some B&E to gain access to the box (*cough*FBI*cough*), the numbers fall by an order of magnitude.
None of which is nearly good enough for widespread use. We're now looking at hybrid solutions that offload the critical security management to trusted third parties.
Not so very long ago, there were hundreds of ISPs and dotcoms trying to work essentially this same business model, with wired instead of wireless access. Per the Free Internet Access Guide, exactly two of any significance (Netzero and address.com) are left. Most failed before ad revenues tanked. You might find it instructive to study those failures and successes (such as they are), and try to figure out what they did wrong that you can do right.
A couple of random thoughts to, perhaps, get you started:
While wandering the park, mall, whatever, I rarely get the urge to park on the nearest bench and run EverQuest for an hour. I do, however, get hungry, thirsty, interested in movie times, and such. How about supplementing / enhancing the ad banner with one-click access to lists of restaurants, coffee shops, theaters etc., preferably sorted by distance with walking / driving directions? Yes, this would require GPS or other sophistication. But wireless net alone, esp. with forced ad banners, won't seduce me into frequenting your coverage (and advertisers') area. Tools I can use to make my wanderings more rewarding, will...even if they're really ads masquerading as something useful.
If there's any chance at all of having that grand-mal-inducing "WINNER!" banner locked into one's browser, your effort is doomed to failure. Trust me on this.:)
We should be out there constructing packet sniffers from hell. Ultra-sophisticated, AI-packed, near-sentient cyberarchfiends at home on 8192-node Beowolf clusters, capable of effortlessly sifting terabit net backbones for exactly what a snooper's little heart might desire, in context and auto-correlated with ATM usage, air travel activity, credit card records, you name it.
All open-sourced, of course, so every organization with a Need To Know from the East Podunk police to the IRS to the UN to the Mafia to your middle-school counselor can deploy this wonderful technology to get the information they need to Do Their Jobs and Defend This Great Nation Of Ours, whichever one that happens to be.
We should advocate laws to make it easier for them to plug in and monitor what they want, when they want. We should volunteer to help set up these monster snooping machines, and train the people who'll use them!
We should do all this because it might bring a bit closer the day when one of those rat bastards misreads an email address or such, sending an anti-terrorist SWAT team to smash down the door of someone's grandparents, whereby Grandpa, who thinks it's drug dealers or something, grabs his 12-gauge and is instantly shot dead by the jackboots, with Grandma catching a stray round in the gut but living just long enough to get the horrific tale out to the press, TV, Matt Drudge, and Oprah, triggering a firestorm of outrage and controversy that finally pounds into the head of each and every Internet user the ugly truth that someone REALLY IS watching their every move on the net, and finally causes developers, politicians, and the public in general to get a fscking clue and make strong encryption simple and ubiquitous, and pass/repeal some laws encouraging same while giving net messages the same protection as snail-mail messages, so we can all have at least a modicum of privacy in our lives once again.
Lucifer's Hammer is an offshoot/expansion/whatever of the asteroid impact scene in Footfall. According to N&P in a making-of article (source escapes me, but I think was an old Analog,) they were pitching the story outline for Footfall, and the editor wrote back, "Forget about alien invasion. Write about asteroid impact." The rest, as they say, is history.
Why would a company prefer to spend $15,000 on a project instead of $5,000.
1: In the corporate world, money == status == power == penis size == etc. To get the big budget that brings status et al, you have to have big, expensive projects. 1a: Many organizations, esp. government, budget on the basis of current expenditure with no carryover; i.e., if you don't spend all of your budget this year, you lose what's left and it'll be cut next year. 2: Fortune 1K MIS execs are almost invariably gutless wonders who gladly spend money as necessary to avoid even the slightest perceived risk (note the emphasis) - the nobody-was-ever-fired-for-buying-(fill-in-the-blan k) syndrome. 3: Politics and ego. It's amazing to witness the lengths to which some people will go to ram their solution down a company's throat, because it's their solution and, by god, they know what's best! (Which, of course, is almost never the case.)
All of the above trump efficiency, even when a company is on the brink of chapter 11. In my humble, cynical opinion, one of the most effective ways to climb the corporate ladder is to spend ever-growing amounts of money while making sure the board knows you really care about controlling costs.
4: The all-too-common price == quality fallacy. I paid $260 for this miracle weight-loss formula, so it has to work, right? 5: Unstated business-driven factors. In the above-quoted situation, there may have been a hard deadline that made it prudent to drop the extra $10K on a firm they've worked with before, to gain confidence of getting the project in on time. (It'd be rather silly to issue a RFP without mentioning such a thing, but you know what I mean.)
DDB (currently wrestling with a new time-reporting system that makes its lame predecessor look like a work of art.)
What if Sony finds out that you listen to Neil Diamond's greatest hits 10 times a day? What are they going to do, haul you into a dungeon and torture you?
Moot point. If you listen to Neil Diamond's greatest hits 10 times a day, you are impervious to torture.
Do people really think that if you pay a measly 18 bucks for a DVD that you own the unlimited usage rights to a $50million movie?
Within the bounds of personal use, YES! The media moguls' belief that their interests trump rights of property and contract dating back to the bloody Magna Carta does not mean those rights no longer exist. When I hand Best Buy $18 and receive a DVD in return, that disc - including the bit patterns pressed into it - is mine to copy (so long as I don't distribute the copies - theft by any reasonable definition,) reformat, edit, rip, play in reverse, or destroy, as pleases me. If the MPAA has a problem with this, it can remedy that in the same manner as does every vendor outside the entertainment industry: with a contract, signed by all interested parties at time of purchase, containing those mutually agreed upon limitations on use that exceed the standards set by common law. Which I may sign, or (more likely) laugh and walk out of the store. The concept of software, be it computer program or video or whatever, being fundamentally different from any other property is pure fiction created by the Disneys and Microsofts of the world to rationalize their quest for ever-increasing revenue in exchange for ever-decreasing value.
Do you remember how much movies used to cost before DVD? A LOT MORE THAN THEY DO NOW. Why? The advertisements you say you don't want but buy anyway.
"Why?" Because they quickly discovered that nobody would buy movies at $90 a pop, which is what they cost in the early days of home video, and that lots of people would buy them when the price fell to that of a few overnight rentals. As for ads "keeping the cost down", I strongly doubt you will find any significant difference in the price of an ad-saturated/forced disc vs. one with no or isolated trailers.
Because of #1 and #2 you are in a really tough spot because you are too cheap and/or lazy to really do anything but whine.
Speak for yourself, please. I buy, or do not buy, as pleases me...and the quantity and/or obnoxiousness of advertising frequently enters into that decision, as the manager - and about two dozen customers within earshot - of the local Lowes theater found out a couple weeks ago. I got passes for another show, and coincidentally, or perhaps not, that movie didn't have 15 minutes of soft drink and minivan ads preceding it. (I don't mind trailers, in moderation, as they're usually at least nominally entertaining. But that tolerance is also my decision.)
All that being said, I do agree with you that this crap persists and expands solely because people continue to pay for it, and I often have a hard time understanding why they continue to pay for it. Eventually Disneysoft-Warner will go too far even for Joe Average Consumer, and perhaps that'll bring some kind of sane balance to the whole mess. In the meantime I'll keep my own counsel, buy DVDs now and then, and reserve the absolute right to deploy countermeasures as necessary to deal with the more obnoxious & invasive crap the would-be media gods try to lay on me. Blues.
...am I alone in being not all that impressed with IMAX? At typical movie viewing distances (variable from first 5 rows for a LOTR to last 5 for a "ya-ya sisterhood"), IMAX images appear distorted at the edges (because of the flat screen, maybe), and the 24 fps jerkiness is obvious and motion-sickness-inducing. Before IMAX becomes common in theaters (which imho must happen eventually - see last post), I hope they upgrade the spec to at least a 2-D curved screen projected at 60-70 fps. Of course at that point the film reels would be generating measurable tidal forces, but that'll just be more incentive for theaters to go digital.
The movie oligopoly should take a close look at this, and IMAX technology in general, as a treatment for their VCR/PVR/P2P-phobia. Give the public an experience they can't duplicate at home, and they'll keep buying tickets.
I'm at least as concerned about the increasingly restrictive TOS/AUPs being imposed by the big providers as they continue to push out the smaller players and jack up rates. I'm using Speakeasy at present - not the cheapest by any means, but they offer non-biz customers static IPs and allow them to run servers (within reason.) Given the recent court decision re line sharing, I'm wondering how long it'll be before SBC Ameritech pulls the plug on Speakeasy, then informs me that I'll have to shell out $199/mo for a biz account to keep my local web/mail/FTP/etc online.
As far as stabilizing, and eventually reducing, prices goes, imho the best long-term approach is a dose of [oxymoron]intelligent legislation[/oxymoron] to foster competition from the tier-one providers on down, and, just as important, to officially define ISPs as common carriers whose responsibility for and control over the net connection ends at your doorstep. Your telephone company no longer dictates the number and type of devices connected to your line; if your ISP treated you the same way, we'd see an explosion of innovation in home automation, etc. in short order. This innovation would spur demand, which would temporarily drive up prices, but at the same time would spur investment and competition to meet that demand, driving down prices in the long run.
DDB
(not necessarily as oppposed to RW; I've no experience with it.)
1: Build times and object sizes can go up. Way up. Often to unacceptable levels when using compilers that aren't adroit with templates, a la early HP-UX aC++.
2: Many STL classes are difficult to derive from.
3: Syntax can become convoluted when using complex structures, e.g. nested maps.
4: STL containers tend to do a lot of small memory allocations, with concomitant potential performance and fragmentation issues. (Mitigating factor: you can plug in your own allocation code.)
5: There are no virtualized containers (in the Standard, anyway,) which can lead to a lot of memory being expended on data which might be better held in a temp file.
With the exception of [1] these are relatively minor concerns; I use STL daily, and wouldn't willingly do without.
...they bolster my confidence that true AI will be achieved before long.
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he says it is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
- Arthur C. Clarke
"Fox probably thought, 'Since widescreen at 480 is good enough for the millions who watch DVDs, why spend a lot more to please the few purists?'"
As much as I hate to admit it, from a purely business standpoint the network executives are probably being most prudent in not commencing with the conversion at this point.
Uh huh. That quote's on a par with billg's infamous "640K is enough for anybody." If you build it, they will come.
If they can afford it, that is. The reason that I, and I suspect a very, very large number of other people, haven't gone HD is that I simply can't justify blowing $3K on a bloody teevee set, regardless of how good the picture is. Get the price down even to 10-15% above a good analog set, and the coolness factor will be enough to make me think about it. As long as I have a mortgage, though, no amount of cool is going to command a 300%-plus premium.
The auto-industry analogy isn't quite valid, btw. HDTV has an immediate, tangible benefit over analog. What few alternative vehicle technologies that are on the road offer shorter range and/or lesser power and/or less room and/or lesser fuel availability than IC vehicles. My decision-to-buy reasoning is very similar though. Am I willing to pay a significant premium to drive an eco-friendlier car? Sure. In the real world, will my primary vehicle be something that can barely carry four people 80 miles over glass-smooth roads, have me constantly looking for electric/hydrogen/E-85 sources to refuel, and costing twice as much as a good SUV? Absolutely not. Get the cost down and performance up to where Joe Average Motorist can see it as even reasonably practical, and the car co's will build it and people will buy it.
DDB (who's been tinkering with a design for an alt-fuel gas turbine/electric hybrid Wrangler for a few months)
Re:Why porn today sucks, and what to do about it
on
I STILL Want My HDTV
·
· Score: 1
>Porn today sucks.
Not nearly enough. But I think that was your point.;)
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And this is incredibly good news for those of us nerds who fly. In-flight structural damage is very rare but does happen, and this is the first tool that gives pilots an option other than prayer when a midair or whatever leaves the plane unflyable.
DDB (PP ASEL since 8/02)
DDB
Some other random notes re one of my favorite pet peeves - thanx to the poster for bringing this up :)
(Btw, lesson learned from this trip: don't book flights less than two weeks in advance unless you enjoy being "randomly" searched, repeatedly.)
DDB (who should be modded up for working Linux into an otherwise-irrelevant topic. :) )
Morale is abysmal, as you might expect, and even with the economy in the dumper we're losing an average of four people per month, mostly senior-level people who have relatively little trouble finding other work. As with your situation, Those Who Remain are seeing workload and stress levels mushrooming due to reduced staff and increased client grief.
Meanwhile, sr. management on both sides is tickled because their bottom lines have improved, blissfully unconcerned over the ongoing brain drain and deterioration of mission-critical systems that will give them shark-sized bites in the ass within the next few months. Yours truly has no intention of being around when that happens.
DDB (one of the six - whoops, five - sr. developers left onsite)
I wonder whether that teaching is cause or effect. Company officers can't look past next quarter's earnings anymore, because (1) program trading makes it routine for a company to lose 20% of its value overnight if its earnings aren't up to analysts' expectations, and (2) stockholders now routinely sue when (1) happens.
I fully understand how the dot-bombers' get-mine-and-get-out philosophy came about. And you're right; it's sad.
At first view, I don't see any losers. Host gets revenue, and the incentive, resources, and market research needed to promote bands to increase that revenue. Artists get exposure, income, and their shot at wealth & fame if the desire & ability are there. Fans get the music they want for reasonable cost, incentive to check out new artists (less expensive, and perhaps assisted by an Amazon-ish recommendation engine), and the freedom to enjoy the music where/whenever they please.
[shrug] FWIW, WMMV, and all that.
DDB
Which is fine, because this attitude is precisely why every copy protection scheme RIAA comes up with will ultimately fail.
Play a "locked" CD, SACD, or whatever, in a standard player. Pipe the analog output - take it off the speaker leads via matching xformers if you have to - into a high-quality sound card. Equalize the result, and burn a CD, or encode an MP3 or ogg.
Will its quality equal the original? No.
Will the quality be acceptable to your average MP3 listener? Almost certainly.
Will the DRManiacs be able to come up with a watermarking scheme that can survive this process without ruining the sound? Highly unlikely.
Earth to RIAA: Your nefarious schemes will succeed only if people care more about fidelity than convenience or price. Take a look at Rio and iPod sales figures before you proceed.
DDB
(1) Critical security components run on these home servers and whatever mobile devices may communicate with them, and this hardware must be considered unsecured. An attacker that can get physical access to the box once owns the profiles of the owner and all trusted associates, and is set up to remotely hack perhaps hundreds more. A chain of six compromised servers yields Kevin Bacon's profile.
(2) A useful profile requires multiple and multi-dimensional levels of trust; i.e. access privileges. You don't want e-mail acquaintances to view your address book or credit card info; you don't want girlfriends Ann, Betty, and Clara to view your entire appointment calendar or pr0n search preferences. (Well, maybe Betty.
Sum of topic: Assuming a home server with combination-locked steel case and KVM, automatic software security updates pushed from trusted sources, and cutting-edge AI to help manage access privs, we estimated at best three-nines integrity for a knowledgeable user proactively managing the box & associated devices, and about 95% for a PC-literate user with no specific technical skills. At worst, against an expert attacker willing to do some B&E to gain access to the box (*cough*FBI*cough*), the numbers fall by an order of magnitude.
None of which is nearly good enough for widespread use. We're now looking at hybrid solutions that offload the critical security management to trusted third parties.
DDB
A couple of random thoughts to, perhaps, get you started:
DDB (Park! Bench! Get it!? Never mind.)
We should be out there constructing packet sniffers from hell. Ultra-sophisticated, AI-packed, near-sentient cyberarchfiends at home on 8192-node Beowolf clusters, capable of effortlessly sifting terabit net backbones for exactly what a snooper's little heart might desire, in context and auto-correlated with ATM usage, air travel activity, credit card records, you name it.
All open-sourced, of course, so every organization with a Need To Know from the East Podunk police to the IRS to the UN to the Mafia to your middle-school counselor can deploy this wonderful technology to get the information they need to Do Their Jobs and Defend This Great Nation Of Ours, whichever one that happens to be.
We should advocate laws to make it easier for them to plug in and monitor what they want, when they want. We should volunteer to help set up these monster snooping machines, and train the people who'll use them!
We should do all this because it might bring a bit closer the day when one of those rat bastards misreads an email address or such, sending an anti-terrorist SWAT team to smash down the door of someone's grandparents, whereby Grandpa, who thinks it's drug dealers or something, grabs his 12-gauge and is instantly shot dead by the jackboots, with Grandma catching a stray round in the gut but living just long enough to get the horrific tale out to the press, TV, Matt Drudge, and Oprah, triggering a firestorm of outrage and controversy that finally pounds into the head of each and every Internet user the ugly truth that someone REALLY IS watching their every move on the net, and finally causes developers, politicians, and the public in general to get a fscking clue and make strong encryption simple and ubiquitous, and pass/repeal some laws encouraging same while giving net messages the same protection as snail-mail messages, so we can all have at least a modicum of privacy in our lives once again.
DDB
Lucifer's Hammer is an offshoot/expansion/whatever of the asteroid impact scene in Footfall. According to N&P in a making-of article (source escapes me, but I think was an old Analog,) they were pitching the story outline for Footfall, and the editor wrote back, "Forget about alien invasion. Write about asteroid impact."
The rest, as they say, is history.
1: In the corporate world, money == status == power == penis size == etc. To get the big budget that brings status et al, you have to have big, expensive projects.n k) syndrome.
1a: Many organizations, esp. government, budget on the basis of current expenditure with no carryover; i.e., if you don't spend all of your budget this year, you lose what's left and it'll be cut next year.
2: Fortune 1K MIS execs are almost invariably gutless wonders who gladly spend money as necessary to avoid even the slightest perceived risk (note the emphasis) - the nobody-was-ever-fired-for-buying-(fill-in-the-bla
3: Politics and ego. It's amazing to witness the lengths to which some people will go to ram their solution down a company's throat, because it's their solution and, by god, they know what's best! (Which, of course, is almost never the case.)
All of the above trump efficiency, even when a company is on the brink of chapter 11. In my humble, cynical opinion, one of the most effective ways to climb the corporate ladder is to spend ever-growing amounts of money while making sure the board knows you really care about controlling costs.
4: The all-too-common price == quality fallacy. I paid $260 for this miracle weight-loss formula, so it has to work, right?
5: Unstated business-driven factors. In the above-quoted situation, there may have been a hard deadline that made it prudent to drop the extra $10K on a firm they've worked with before, to gain confidence of getting the project in on time. (It'd be rather silly to issue a RFP without mentioning such a thing, but you know what I mean.)
DDB (currently wrestling with a new time-reporting system that makes its lame predecessor look like a work of art.)
[keys dictionary] Oh yeah, training. Don't get much of that here.
DDB
DDB
The concept of software, be it computer program or video or whatever, being fundamentally different from any other property is pure fiction created by the Disneys and Microsofts of the world to rationalize their quest for ever-increasing revenue in exchange for ever-decreasing value. "Why?" Because they quickly discovered that nobody would buy movies at $90 a pop, which is what they cost in the early days of home video, and that lots of people would buy them when the price fell to that of a few overnight rentals. As for ads "keeping the cost down", I strongly doubt you will find any significant difference in the price of an ad-saturated/forced disc vs. one with no or isolated trailers. Speak for yourself, please. I buy, or do not buy, as pleases me...and the quantity and/or obnoxiousness of advertising frequently enters into that decision, as the manager - and about two dozen customers within earshot - of the local Lowes theater found out a couple weeks ago. I got passes for another show, and coincidentally, or perhaps not, that movie didn't have 15 minutes of soft drink and minivan ads preceding it. (I don't mind trailers, in moderation, as they're usually at least nominally entertaining. But that tolerance is also my decision.)
All that being said, I do agree with you that this crap persists and expands solely because people continue to pay for it, and I often have a hard time understanding why they continue to pay for it. Eventually Disneysoft-Warner will go too far even for Joe Average Consumer, and perhaps that'll bring some kind of sane balance to the whole mess. In the meantime I'll keep my own counsel, buy DVDs now and then, and reserve the absolute right to deploy countermeasures as necessary to deal with the more obnoxious & invasive crap the would-be media gods try to lay on me. Blues.
DDB
Of course at that point the film reels would be generating measurable tidal forces, but that'll just be more incentive for theaters to go digital.
DDB (who still thinks Space Station 3D rocks.)
The movie oligopoly should take a close look at this, and IMAX technology in general, as a treatment for their VCR/PVR/P2P-phobia. Give the public an experience they can't duplicate at home, and they'll keep buying tickets.
As far as stabilizing, and eventually reducing, prices goes, imho the best long-term approach is a dose of [oxymoron]intelligent legislation[/oxymoron] to foster competition from the tier-one providers on down, and, just as important, to officially define ISPs as common carriers whose responsibility for and control over the net connection ends at your doorstep. Your telephone company no longer dictates the number and type of devices connected to your line; if your ISP treated you the same way, we'd see an explosion of innovation in home automation, etc. in short order. This innovation would spur demand, which would temporarily drive up prices, but at the same time would spur investment and competition to meet that demand, driving down prices in the long run. DDB
1: Build times and object sizes can go up. Way up. Often to unacceptable levels when using compilers that aren't adroit with templates, a la early HP-UX aC++.
2: Many STL classes are difficult to derive from.
3: Syntax can become convoluted when using complex structures, e.g. nested maps.
4: STL containers tend to do a lot of small memory allocations, with concomitant potential performance and fragmentation issues. (Mitigating factor: you can plug in your own allocation code.)
5: There are no virtualized containers (in the Standard, anyway,) which can lead to a lot of memory being expended on data which might be better held in a temp file.
With the exception of [1] these are relatively minor concerns; I use STL daily, and wouldn't willingly do without.
ddb
"When a distinguished but elderly scientist says that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he says it is impossible, he is very probably wrong."
- Arthur C. Clarke
As much as I hate to admit it, from a purely business standpoint the network executives are probably being most prudent in not commencing with the conversion at this point.
Uh huh. That quote's on a par with billg's infamous "640K is enough for anybody." If you build it, they will come.
If they can afford it, that is. The reason that I, and I suspect a very, very large number of other people, haven't gone HD is that I simply can't justify blowing $3K on a bloody teevee set, regardless of how good the picture is. Get the price down even to 10-15% above a good analog set, and the coolness factor will be enough to make me think about it. As long as I have a mortgage, though, no amount of cool is going to command a 300%-plus premium.
The auto-industry analogy isn't quite valid, btw. HDTV has an immediate, tangible benefit over analog. What few alternative vehicle technologies that are on the road offer shorter range and/or lesser power and/or less room and/or lesser fuel availability than IC vehicles. My decision-to-buy reasoning is very similar though. Am I willing to pay a significant premium to drive an eco-friendlier car? Sure. In the real world, will my primary vehicle be something that can barely carry four people 80 miles over glass-smooth roads, have me constantly looking for electric/hydrogen/E-85 sources to refuel, and costing twice as much as a good SUV? Absolutely not. Get the cost down and performance up to where Joe Average Motorist can see it as even reasonably practical, and the car co's will build it and people will buy it.
DDB (who's been tinkering with a design for an alt-fuel gas turbine/electric hybrid Wrangler for a few months)
Not nearly enough. But I think that was your point. ;)