Multi principal OS -gazelle
Google return zero meaningful articles. I'm not inclined to dig into the article what the editor was too lazy to translate in English. It is probably something like multi-threaded anyway...
What you must see is that the initial cost of the first copy is fixed : you have spent that much whatever your sales are. If it cost you $10 millions to produce a game, this cost is there whether you sell 0 copies or 100 millions. Here, we are talking about having 15 times more cash without raising any expense. If I were a stockholder in a company where I would discover that the CEO did not do a simple price-fixing that would multiply the revenues of the company several times, I would sack him. I mean, price-fixing is one of the most elementary task of any business that sells stuff.
So then the answer comes down to: They already know how to set pricing, and they've already done it. They need to cut costs if they want to make the product any cheaper, and cutting costs would make the product less 'cool' in the eyes of the consumer.
The summary says : cut prices down by 50%, you get 3000% of sales increase. That means a 1500% increase in incomes. They are talking about sales through Steam so they have a basically 0$ production cost per unit sold. At 15 times the cash flow, you don't have to cut down on costs, quite the contrary.
I'm not saying it is anyone's fault. Merely pointing out that Hulu isn't really an Internet service. It is an American service. Anything that is online but considers geographical borders to be relevant makes something wrong. Hulu may work for you, but I honestly believe that this is not a good long-term idea.
And still no use found for these things. While it pictured something that must-be-water-we're-pretty-sure-this-time, an orbiter was mapping underground water areas of the *whole goddamn planet* !
NASA's and ESA's orbiters are the real scientific missions on Mars. The rovers are just shiny toys that gave very few useful input. They gave much needed engineering information, right. But if the next one doesn't build or dig anything, it will be a huge taxpayer's money waste.
She addresses that in the interview. She says that she thinks the computer/hackers/computer virus metaphor holds water : with a home genetics lab, you could, with some knowledge and much malice, make a dangerous virus. You can also make bacterias that produce medical drugs, treatments. By having a lot of labs you can have people who can identify strains of virus or bacterias in their water, in their food. She doesn't talk about it clearly but what she is proposing is open-sourcing drugs. What about it ?
The avian flu may be artificially strengthened this year but the neighbor said he downloaded its DNA and prepared vaccins in his kitchen. Said he'll make a hundred of it for the whole building...
Also understand that it is *hard* to create a lethal virus that spreads rapidly. It would take research, tests, and so on. It is like making an AI embedded in a computer virus : potentially disastrous but quite hard. And a risk we are living with, estimating the benefits of a home computer and an internet connection outweights them.
... you should have put your full name in the article. Slashdot is quite sure to be the top google result and the article would have explained everything to your potential future employers.
FTFA :
"Even just to put pieces of DNA together can be a fairly laborious and manual process that's pretty error-prone. So how do we make that process easier? How do we make it so that an undergraduate or a team of undergraduates can go engineer E. coli to smell like wintergreen and banana in just a summer?" Typically, people usually assume that those types of projects are just too hard to do, because the tools we have essentially suck. So synthetic biology is focused on the effort of making biological engineering easier."
"She will be giving a talk entitled Real Hackers Program DNA at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference, March 9-12, in San Jose, California."
In the article she does speak about a team of students who put a gene in E.Coli during a summer holiday. However she is also asked about potential accidents. Her answer looks like what security experts have been saying for years :
"How do we know that the next time around when we have an outbreak of Avian flu, or whatnot, how do we know that the traditional "academic" labs and research institutes around the world are going to be prepared to respond? Maybe we can develop a wider network of people who can work towards engineering biological systems for good. You're creating a larger community of people, that you can tap into to come up with useful things for society."
Imagine that computer virus have to be harvested only by a handful registrated governmental specialists. Would it work better ? The article is pretty interesting, prepare for open source drugs...
And you have a strange definition of "stupidity" which goes something like this: "Not paranoid enough about the interface because it is possible for attachments to deceive the user as to their nature."
Ok, calling it stupidity is a bit exagerated, but it is a flaw in human behavior that is pretty cross-platform and almost impossible to prevent with other means than education : "if you don't understand what a given file is, just don't execute it. And if you don't know the difference between opening and executing file, just don't double-click it."
It still requires a user to save an attachment and execute it. The new thing here is that it saves a file in a format Gnome or KDE recognizes as a script (a launcher file) even without the execution bit set. I am unsure about what it demonstrates.
The "Look! nude pictures of [latest chick seen on a hollywood blockbuster] ! If it doesn't open, save and execute" routine is pretty cross-platform. It relies on the Stupidity 0.99995b RC12 Gold API, and it is here to stay.
Drugs cost a ton to do R&D on. Let's be at least a little sympathetic to the plight of manufacturers trying to gain back their costs involved in bringing you the latest cures.
If a manufacturer tries to get just its R&D costs back, it looks like the drug is expensive.
If a manufacturer tries to get its R&D costs back and tries to make indecent profits, it looks like the drug is expensive.
Internet scares governments more than anything : it shows that an international project with high technical aspects can appear and exist without oversight, out of sheer anarchy. Even worse : it seems that no government or international organization would have been able to manage such a thing. A few organization outgrew out of Internet : IEEE, ICANN, etc... But we know that if one fails, it will be replaced. Online, anarchy works.
Slashdot Mirror
Multi principal OS -gazelle
Google return zero meaningful articles. I'm not inclined to dig into the article what the editor was too lazy to translate in English. It is probably something like multi-threaded anyway...
What you must see is that the initial cost of the first copy is fixed : you have spent that much whatever your sales are. If it cost you $10 millions to produce a game, this cost is there whether you sell 0 copies or 100 millions. Here, we are talking about having 15 times more cash without raising any expense. If I were a stockholder in a company where I would discover that the CEO did not do a simple price-fixing that would multiply the revenues of the company several times, I would sack him. I mean, price-fixing is one of the most elementary task of any business that sells stuff.
The survey was made in flash
So then the answer comes down to: They already know how to set pricing, and they've already done it. They need to cut costs if they want to make the product any cheaper, and cutting costs would make the product less 'cool' in the eyes of the consumer.
The summary says : cut prices down by 50%, you get 3000% of sales increase. That means a 1500% increase in incomes. They are talking about sales through Steam so they have a basically 0$ production cost per unit sold. At 15 times the cash flow, you don't have to cut down on costs, quite the contrary.
Laugh
I'm not saying it is anyone's fault. Merely pointing out that Hulu isn't really an Internet service. It is an American service. Anything that is online but considers geographical borders to be relevant makes something wrong. Hulu may work for you, but I honestly believe that this is not a good long-term idea.
Notwithstanding the fact that people outside US can't watch Hulu streams. I would say I only care for Hulu to die faster as far as I'm concerned
King Kong def, King Kong def,
King Kong def meets Chewbacca def,
They both fight, King Kong wins,
King Kong def, King Kong def...
And still no use found for these things. While it pictured something that must-be-water-we're-pretty-sure-this-time, an orbiter was mapping underground water areas of the *whole goddamn planet* !
NASA's and ESA's orbiters are the real scientific missions on Mars. The rovers are just shiny toys that gave very few useful input. They gave much needed engineering information, right. But if the next one doesn't build or dig anything, it will be a huge taxpayer's money waste.
Duke Nukem 3D was the last blockbuster game made by hacker who knew their ASM code well. Since then, it became an industry...
She addresses that in the interview. She says that she thinks the computer/hackers/computer virus metaphor holds water : with a home genetics lab, you could, with some knowledge and much malice, make a dangerous virus. You can also make bacterias that produce medical drugs, treatments. By having a lot of labs you can have people who can identify strains of virus or bacterias in their water, in their food. She doesn't talk about it clearly but what she is proposing is open-sourcing drugs. What about it ?
The avian flu may be artificially strengthened this year but the neighbor said he downloaded its DNA and prepared vaccins in his kitchen. Said he'll make a hundred of it for the whole building...
Also understand that it is *hard* to create a lethal virus that spreads rapidly. It would take research, tests, and so on. It is like making an AI embedded in a computer virus : potentially disastrous but quite hard. And a risk we are living with, estimating the benefits of a home computer and an internet connection outweights them.
... you should have put your full name in the article. Slashdot is quite sure to be the top google result and the article would have explained everything to your potential future employers.
FTFA :
"Even just to put pieces of DNA together can be a fairly laborious and manual process that's pretty error-prone. So how do we make that process easier? How do we make it so that an undergraduate or a team of undergraduates can go engineer E. coli to smell like wintergreen and banana in just a summer?" Typically, people usually assume that those types of projects are just too hard to do, because the tools we have essentially suck. So synthetic biology is focused on the effort of making biological engineering easier."
"She will be giving a talk entitled Real Hackers Program DNA at O'Reilly's Emerging Technology Conference, March 9-12, in San Jose, California."
In the article she does speak about a team of students who put a gene in E.Coli during a summer holiday. However she is also asked about potential accidents. Her answer looks like what security experts have been saying for years :
"How do we know that the next time around when we have an outbreak of Avian flu, or whatnot, how do we know that the traditional "academic" labs and research institutes around the world are going to be prepared to respond? Maybe we can develop a wider network of people who can work towards engineering biological systems for good. You're creating a larger community of people, that you can tap into to come up with useful things for society."
Imagine that computer virus have to be harvested only by a handful registrated governmental specialists. Would it work better ? The article is pretty interesting, prepare for open source drugs...
A map as a metaphor is, for instance, this. It is when you use a map to represent things that lack proper coordinates but that makes some sense when put on a map : maybe they have a notion of distance between elements, or a number that can be used as coordinates
And you have a strange definition of "stupidity" which goes something like this: "Not paranoid enough about the interface because it is possible for attachments to deceive the user as to their nature."
Ok, calling it stupidity is a bit exagerated, but it is a flaw in human behavior that is pretty cross-platform and almost impossible to prevent with other means than education : "if you don't understand what a given file is, just don't execute it. And if you don't know the difference between opening and executing file, just don't double-click it."
It still requires a user to save an attachment and execute it. The new thing here is that it saves a file in a format Gnome or KDE recognizes as a script (a launcher file) even without the execution bit set. I am unsure about what it demonstrates.
The "Look! nude pictures of [latest chick seen on a hollywood blockbuster] ! If it doesn't open, save and execute" routine is pretty cross-platform. It relies on the Stupidity 0.99995b RC12 Gold API, and it is here to stay.
I would happily forward 4% of the bits that comes into my router to the NY city hall if that can help them balance their budget.
Drugs cost a ton to do R&D on. Let's be at least a little sympathetic to the plight of manufacturers trying to gain back their costs involved in bringing you the latest cures.
If a manufacturer tries to get just its R&D costs back, it looks like the drug is expensive.
If a manufacturer tries to get its R&D costs back and tries to make indecent profits, it looks like the drug is expensive.
How are we supposed to know which case is which ?
Internet scares governments more than anything : it shows that an international project with high technical aspects can appear and exist without oversight, out of sheer anarchy. Even worse : it seems that no government or international organization would have been able to manage such a thing. A few organization outgrew out of Internet : IEEE, ICANN, etc... But we know that if one fails, it will be replaced. Online, anarchy works.
"Hey guys, let's do an OSS protest !"
"Yeah, but where ?"
"I have an idea about it..."
The videos are weird.
I like them.
Everyone knows he is a Cylon anyway...
www.wesnoth.org
It will fly, but you have to leave the laptop out of the bag for security check. Have a nice flight sir...
Now Google will show Slashdot as the first site about them, they must be so happy !