5) they're strategic realists. they're small organizations that only have so much reach. lacking the resources to take on their largest opponents, they hit more vulnerable targets.
HD is not the quantum leap in quality and features that DVD was over VHS.
If there were a single format, and a lot of industry cooperation, they could force DVDs out of the marketplace, but that's not going to happen. People have purchased a lot of DVDs over the past 8 years or so, I don't think consumers are going to be too happy about upgrading their collections just yet.
Generally when happy people are offered awards for achievement in their field of endevour, they accept them.
He might be merely atypical, but when he says that talking about mathematics is painful, and he rejects honest praise (this isn't really a Bob Dylan screw-you-i'm-not-the-voice-of-any-generation type thing), that does sort of indicate that he might be a bit troubled.
I myself have some mental health issues, and taking praise and feeling pride in accomplishments are issues that I have, though not to this degree.
"Really if you don't like Weird Al then you must have been unloved as a child."
I dunno, the songs are universally less interesting than the originals, and his voice is grating. They're usually good for laughs the first listen through, but I can't imagine owning an album.
If you don't have any background in formal mathematics, I doubt you'd understand the homework assignments for upper-level mathematics coursework at a ho-hum state school. Mathematics is as much learning a language as it is learning a science, so you're no more dumb for not understanding his assignments than you are for not understanding an assignment in a class on Sanskrit.
That said, Undergraduate mathematics (algebra, analysis, some degree of differential equations, topology, a handful of other topics of interest) isn't that different from school to school. Even at "leet" (ugh) schools, mathematics is a common major for many students who do not intend to become mathematicians. Law schools like it, a lot of science types take it as a second major, and for indecisive students it's a bit more job friendly than History (though probably less useful, you're more likely to have to write at a job than prove Stoke's theorem). So while the coursework may be abstract, there's sort of a ceiling on the difficulty of major requirements, even at top schools, there's a limit to how much headache students with non-academic ambitions are going to want to endure. His grad students, on the other hand, are, I'm sure, worked to the bone.
I think the traps are more just about letting us exercise geek humor, which just means quoting something geeks recognize.
Giving slashdot some credit, I think people are generally aware that microsoft looks at a product (even a competing product) with millions of dedicated users and can see that if they break compatibility, it'll mean egg on their face.
This is what generally pisses me off about pseudoscience. It's not the idea that amateurs can find things that the real scientific community has overlooked, but it's the arrogant assumption that there's NOTHING in the scientific literature worth studying and you should just strike out on your own as if it were 1790.
I don't mean you shouldn't open your mouth before getting your physics PHD, but working through 6 Easy Pieces. A lot of very intelligent people have worked on these problems before you have, and if you ignore what they have done, then you're scientific motivation is clearly more about your own ego than a legitimate desire to better understand the world.
If we're going on the assumption that *any* software is patentable (I don't believe this, but the courts do, so that's where we are) then web software in particular is problematic. Where does software design end and business plan begin? Friendster seems as close as web software gets to the 19th century idea of "by twiddling this pressure valve my mill is 80% more efficient" patent. There might be precedents, obviously other sites have allowed users to make connections with other users before, but the main idea of having those connections and a profile be the PRIMARY feature of the site does strike me as innovative. In early 2003 if you were in a community that latched onto friendster (I was hanging around with a bunch of New York City collegiate hipsters) it definitely had the feel of something brand new.
Of course it also illustrates the problem with software patents. Friendster had a good idea and a brief monopoly by being first, but they ignored feature requests, failed to upgrade their servers as demand increased, and dropped the ball in a number of other ways. They lost their market share fair and square to newer and better sites -- their users mostly moved to facebook, and a newer younger market took up myspace -- had they had an enforceable patent at the time, this competition wouldn't have occured. I think it's hard to take an objective stance and say that a patent would have helped the market here.
It probably was possible for dust to block a connection, but the real problem there was that the receiving connector was a bit too wide for the cartridge. "Blowing on it" really just amounted to taking it out and trying a new connection.
Someone needs to explain this to me. Why do office suites need these features? For what are they used? I've never worked in a big office that actually uses the macro and scripting features of productivity software.
Can intra-office communication not be done via RTF? Why do we need document formats that rival PDF and layout-software fileformats in complexity?
It seems like you could avoid all of this using a smaller array of utilities and custom scripts for office productivity, it just strikes me as impossible to create a scriptable, monolithic, document engine that won't have some sort of security hole on some platform. It seems like a cluster of smaller, more agile tools is the way to go.
So does this mean I'm going to need to be in administrator mode to run free software?
Since just about everyone runs one or two pieces of free software (Windows isn't capable of very much out of the box) doesn't this mean that *everyone* will still be running in administrator mode?
In many modern consumer economies, however, the top 10 only appeal to a minority group though. American Idol may be the most popular show of the decade, but still many more people who watch TV don't watch it than do.
The fat head (or whatever the opposite of the long tail is -- if that catches on, I'm claiming credit) might be the most lucrative market segment, but if you only cater to it, you're still cutting out the majority of consumers.
This is exactly the problem with traditional cinema distribution these days; it's unable to cater to the long tail. I expect that once digital movie distribution really kicks in, movie theaters will be small rooms where parties can, in advance, request a showing of whatever they want.
It's a semantic question. Neither you, any scientific instrument, nor any signal whatsoever can travel fast enough to reach the (expanding border) might as well be a crystal sphere keeping the waters of creation out.
You clearly have yet to be locked out of the basic utility of some media you've rightfully purchased. DRM is no boogeyman, it's already getting in peoples way, and there are bills in congress right now that would vastly decrease the ability to use a computer as a general purpose reprogrammable machine, rather than a fancy DVD player / console.
I don't think you make a very good analogy really. DRM is the invasion of rights, where as government policy in response to terrorism is the invasion of rights. The GPL, very unlike acts of congress, doesn't take rights away from anyone without their consent. People who create software are free to use whatever (legally valid) license they wish. The GPL won't come down like a hammer upon all free software users; anyone unhappy with the situation is free to branch from a GPL2 licensed version.
Business runs free software, and if it becomes impossible to run linux on DRM'd hardware, hardware producers will resist forcing DRM on their customers. On the other hand, if 95% of people out there are able to run their business just fine on DRM'd hardware then we will be saddled with DRM, and amateurs and hackers everywhere will suffer.
There are multi-billion dollar interests that stand to gain a lot from DRM, so to deny that it's a danger is to be willfully ignorant of the way or society functions. As Linux (frequently running on arrays of consumer hardware) now also support multi-billion dollar interests, keeping free software on the other side of the DRM divide will mean there is an equally powerful group of interests resisting DRM.
I think SP 2 of XP is Microsofts biggest problem right now.
It works fine. I think a lot of the Vista re-designs and such have been to address the problem of "why would any volume license customers upgrade?" They've been having this problem with office since '97 (hence the dinosaur ads)
It's a larger problem in closed source software : eventually if you are successful, you dominate the market with a pretty functional product, and suddenly you're your own biggest competitor. There are a number of techniques to deal with it. Breaking compatibility is a classic (cough - Apple). Arbitrarily rearranging your interface (cough - Adobe) to force training headaches on your customers is another. Microsoft has generally had the benefit of a very fast moving target platform - generic x86 hardware - to make OS upgrades really needed. But computers are more similar to themselves 5 years ago than they ever have been, and XP is a flexible enough system that its unlikely that major changes around the corner will render it suddenly unusable.
Sure Vista will sell - nearly every new PC that is sold sells a copy of Windows, and in the long run, offices will probably have to upgrade - MS can offer cheaper service contracts or whatever. But the real question here isn't if Vista will generate sales, its if it will sell the slow but noticable drift toward Apple (just look at those laptop numbers) in the end-user market and Linux in the corporate market, and if it will have enough hard-to-reproduce features to prevent someone (google, IBM, some "anyone but microsoft" coilition) from releasing an actually functional-for-dummies desktop linux.
One wonders what MS would be looking like if Dell etc. weren't bribed into not offering OS-less PCs. Shouldn't I be able to use the XP license I had on my old machine on the new one I buy?
The IBM PC was the first open platform, whether IBM wanted it to be or not. Had Apple's model of home computing taken off, the computer world would be a world of incompatible little feifdoms (think the 80s with Amigas, Ataris, Colecos, etc. etc. etc.) cheap interchangeable hardware from multiple vendors ultimately allowed Linux to happen.
Of course, NONE of that would be possible in today's patent environment.
What century is Star Trek set in? The 25th? (Deep Space 9 was the only series I liked at all, but I've been told I haven't seen the "right" episodes of TNG)
Given what computers were like just 50 years ago, I don't think conversational fluency in spoken language (and notice that nobody in Star Trek ever mumbles) is too far fetched to imagine in several hundred years. It's not like they've solved Go or anything else actually impossible.
Guns are already very deadly, and the history of real warfare has always had offensive technology outpacing defensive technology (the times where that has not been the case have been grotesquely terrible for soldiers -- mideval seiges and the trenches of the first world war) modern weaponry is SO effective in fact that warfare has become more deadly for civilians than for soldiers (a nightmare result of airplane bombs and missiles that hasn't been much commented on)
It's hard to believe that in the future weapons won't be more effective than they are now. A $1000 rifle can kill a person wearing the worlds best body armor at 500 yards. In the future, will computer-guided laser weaponry or whatnot be LESS effective?
Sci fi presents a "realistic" setting in which the magic comes from technology, and the best sci fi changes only a fixed number of elements about the real world and then carefully analyzes the effects in order to comment on our society. Sci fi hasn't had a heroic tone since shortly after the atom bomb fell (another problem, once my character has tons of power and money, why doesn't he just nuke the enemy city?)
It's also hard to come up with a non-BS way for a character to get 30% more powerful every "level." Magic lets you get away with a lot of narratively confusing game mechanics. Technology invites more skepticism.
This is a subset of the greater video games as art question. Sci fi is puts a harsh mirror up to the real world, but video games aren't about realism or moral ambiguity, they're about fun interactive worlds.
This would be true if the American electorate were even voting their own self-interest, or if our politicians really had to work for our votes. In such a responsive system, a democracy really could spill its treasury back into 51% of the voters' pockets.
What's actually happening is a massive amount of the treasury is being doled out in favors to huge well-connected private interests. This is far more grossly anti-competitive than any regulation (which apply in equally across an entire industry) ever could dream of being. A smaller (though still large) amount of the treasury is used for welfare bread and circuses programs. The last hole in the system, the press, was closed during the media mergers of the early 1980s. The interplay of private interest and our public representatives is virtually unreported on.
Slashdot Mirror
5) they're strategic realists. they're small organizations that only have so much reach. lacking the resources to take on their largest opponents, they hit more vulnerable targets.
HD is not the quantum leap in quality and features that DVD was over VHS.
If there were a single format, and a lot of industry cooperation, they could force DVDs out of the marketplace, but that's not going to happen. People have purchased a lot of DVDs over the past 8 years or so, I don't think consumers are going to be too happy about upgrading their collections just yet.
OK, I'm going to dispute this nobody on slashdot has a girlfriend thing.
We live in the most geek-friendly dating culture this world has ever seen.
Repeat after me people: "Oh you know what, I've got the DVDs, do you want to come over and watch it some time?"
It doesn't matter if you don't have the damn DVDs, you go out and buy them the next day.
Generally when happy people are offered awards for achievement in their field of endevour, they accept them.
He might be merely atypical, but when he says that talking about mathematics is painful, and he rejects honest praise (this isn't really a Bob Dylan screw-you-i'm-not-the-voice-of-any-generation type thing), that does sort of indicate that he might be a bit troubled.
I myself have some mental health issues, and taking praise and feeling pride in accomplishments are issues that I have, though not to this degree.
"Really if you don't like Weird Al then you must have been unloved as a child."
I dunno, the songs are universally less interesting than the originals, and his voice is grating. They're usually good for laughs the first listen through, but I can't imagine owning an album.
typos aside,
If you don't have any background in formal mathematics, I doubt you'd understand the homework assignments for upper-level mathematics coursework at a ho-hum state school. Mathematics is as much learning a language as it is learning a science, so you're no more dumb for not understanding his assignments than you are for not understanding an assignment in a class on Sanskrit.
That said, Undergraduate mathematics (algebra, analysis, some degree of differential equations, topology, a handful of other topics of interest) isn't that different from school to school. Even at "leet" (ugh) schools, mathematics is a common major for many students who do not intend to become mathematicians. Law schools like it, a lot of science types take it as a second major, and for indecisive students it's a bit more job friendly than History (though probably less useful, you're more likely to have to write at a job than prove Stoke's theorem). So while the coursework may be abstract, there's sort of a ceiling on the difficulty of major requirements, even at top schools, there's a limit to how much headache students with non-academic ambitions are going to want to endure. His grad students, on the other hand, are, I'm sure, worked to the bone.
Mathematics tends to be a bit better gender-integrated than, for instance, physics or computer scientists.
I had a pretty hot abstract algebra prof. once.
It's unfortunate that many truly brilliant people suffer from mental illness. I hope that one way or another that guy is able to find happiness.
I think the traps are more just about letting us exercise geek humor, which just means quoting something geeks recognize.
Giving slashdot some credit, I think people are generally aware that microsoft looks at a product (even a competing product) with millions of dedicated users and can see that if they break compatibility, it'll mean egg on their face.
This is what generally pisses me off about pseudoscience. It's not the idea that amateurs can find things that the real scientific community has overlooked, but it's the arrogant assumption that there's NOTHING in the scientific literature worth studying and you should just strike out on your own as if it were 1790.
I don't mean you shouldn't open your mouth before getting your physics PHD, but working through 6 Easy Pieces. A lot of very intelligent people have worked on these problems before you have, and if you ignore what they have done, then you're scientific motivation is clearly more about your own ego than a legitimate desire to better understand the world.
This is an interesting software patent case.
If we're going on the assumption that *any* software is patentable (I don't believe this, but the courts do, so that's where we are) then web software in particular is problematic. Where does software design end and business plan begin? Friendster seems as close as web software gets to the 19th century idea of "by twiddling this pressure valve my mill is 80% more efficient" patent. There might be precedents, obviously other sites have allowed users to make connections with other users before, but the main idea of having those connections and a profile be the PRIMARY feature of the site does strike me as innovative. In early 2003 if you were in a community that latched onto friendster (I was hanging around with a bunch of New York City collegiate hipsters) it definitely had the feel of something brand new.
Of course it also illustrates the problem with software patents. Friendster had a good idea and a brief monopoly by being first, but they ignored feature requests, failed to upgrade their servers as demand increased, and dropped the ball in a number of other ways. They lost their market share fair and square to newer and better sites -- their users mostly moved to facebook, and a newer younger market took up myspace -- had they had an enforceable patent at the time, this competition wouldn't have occured. I think it's hard to take an objective stance and say that a patent would have helped the market here.
*cough*
Burning hydrogen:
H2 + 02 => H20
Splitting water:
H20 => H2 + 02
(obviously unbalanced)
you're not going to be gaining energy by running in circles.
It probably was possible for dust to block a connection, but the real problem there was that the receiving connector was a bit too wide for the cartridge. "Blowing on it" really just amounted to taking it out and trying a new connection.
Someone needs to explain this to me. Why do office suites need these features? For what are they used? I've never worked in a big office that actually uses the macro and scripting features of productivity software.
Can intra-office communication not be done via RTF? Why do we need document formats that rival PDF and layout-software fileformats in complexity?
It seems like you could avoid all of this using a smaller array of utilities and custom scripts for office productivity, it just strikes me as impossible to create a scriptable, monolithic, document engine that won't have some sort of security hole on some platform. It seems like a cluster of smaller, more agile tools is the way to go.
So does this mean I'm going to need to be in administrator mode to run free software?
Since just about everyone runs one or two pieces of free software (Windows isn't capable of very much out of the box) doesn't this mean that *everyone* will still be running in administrator mode?
In many modern consumer economies, however, the top 10 only appeal to a minority group though. American Idol may be the most popular show of the decade, but still many more people who watch TV don't watch it than do.
The fat head (or whatever the opposite of the long tail is -- if that catches on, I'm claiming credit) might be the most lucrative market segment, but if you only cater to it, you're still cutting out the majority of consumers.
This is exactly the problem with traditional cinema distribution these days; it's unable to cater to the long tail. I expect that once digital movie distribution really kicks in, movie theaters will be small rooms where parties can, in advance, request a showing of whatever they want.
It's a semantic question. Neither you, any scientific instrument, nor any signal whatsoever can travel fast enough to reach the (expanding border) might as well be a crystal sphere keeping the waters of creation out.
You clearly have yet to be locked out of the basic utility of some media you've rightfully purchased. DRM is no boogeyman, it's already getting in peoples way, and there are bills in congress right now that would vastly decrease the ability to use a computer as a general purpose reprogrammable machine, rather than a fancy DVD player / console.
I don't think you make a very good analogy really. DRM is the invasion of rights, where as government policy in response to terrorism is the invasion of rights. The GPL, very unlike acts of congress, doesn't take rights away from anyone without their consent. People who create software are free to use whatever (legally valid) license they wish. The GPL won't come down like a hammer upon all free software users; anyone unhappy with the situation is free to branch from a GPL2 licensed version.
Business runs free software, and if it becomes impossible to run linux on DRM'd hardware, hardware producers will resist forcing DRM on their customers. On the other hand, if 95% of people out there are able to run their business just fine on DRM'd hardware then we will be saddled with DRM, and amateurs and hackers everywhere will suffer.
There are multi-billion dollar interests that stand to gain a lot from DRM, so to deny that it's a danger is to be willfully ignorant of the way or society functions. As Linux (frequently running on arrays of consumer hardware) now also support multi-billion dollar interests, keeping free software on the other side of the DRM divide will mean there is an equally powerful group of interests resisting DRM.
I think SP 2 of XP is Microsofts biggest problem right now.
It works fine. I think a lot of the Vista re-designs and such have been to address the problem of "why would any volume license customers upgrade?" They've been having this problem with office since '97 (hence the dinosaur ads)
It's a larger problem in closed source software : eventually if you are successful, you dominate the market with a pretty functional product, and suddenly you're your own biggest competitor. There are a number of techniques to deal with it. Breaking compatibility is a classic (cough - Apple). Arbitrarily rearranging your interface (cough - Adobe) to force training headaches on your customers is another. Microsoft has generally had the benefit of a very fast moving target platform - generic x86 hardware - to make OS upgrades really needed. But computers are more similar to themselves 5 years ago than they ever have been, and XP is a flexible enough system that its unlikely that major changes around the corner will render it suddenly unusable.
Sure Vista will sell - nearly every new PC that is sold sells a copy of Windows, and in the long run, offices will probably have to upgrade - MS can offer cheaper service contracts or whatever. But the real question here isn't if Vista will generate sales, its if it will sell the slow but noticable drift toward Apple (just look at those laptop numbers) in the end-user market and Linux in the corporate market, and if it will have enough hard-to-reproduce features to prevent someone (google, IBM, some "anyone but microsoft" coilition) from releasing an actually functional-for-dummies desktop linux.
One wonders what MS would be looking like if Dell etc. weren't bribed into not offering OS-less PCs. Shouldn't I be able to use the XP license I had on my old machine on the new one I buy?
The IBM PC was the first open platform, whether IBM wanted it to be or not. Had Apple's model of home computing taken off, the computer world would be a world of incompatible little feifdoms (think the 80s with Amigas, Ataris, Colecos, etc. etc. etc.) cheap interchangeable hardware from multiple vendors ultimately allowed Linux to happen.
Of course, NONE of that would be possible in today's patent environment.
What century is Star Trek set in? The 25th? (Deep Space 9 was the only series I liked at all, but I've been told I haven't seen the "right" episodes of TNG)
Given what computers were like just 50 years ago, I don't think conversational fluency in spoken language (and notice that nobody in Star Trek ever mumbles) is too far fetched to imagine in several hundred years. It's not like they've solved Go or anything else actually impossible.
Guns are already very deadly, and the history of real warfare has always had offensive technology outpacing defensive technology (the times where that has not been the case have been grotesquely terrible for soldiers -- mideval seiges and the trenches of the first world war) modern weaponry is SO effective in fact that warfare has become more deadly for civilians than for soldiers (a nightmare result of airplane bombs and missiles that hasn't been much commented on)
It's hard to believe that in the future weapons won't be more effective than they are now. A $1000 rifle can kill a person wearing the worlds best body armor at 500 yards. In the future, will computer-guided laser weaponry or whatnot be LESS effective?
Sci fi presents a "realistic" setting in which the magic comes from technology, and the best sci fi changes only a fixed number of elements about the real world and then carefully analyzes the effects in order to comment on our society. Sci fi hasn't had a heroic tone since shortly after the atom bomb fell (another problem, once my character has tons of power and money, why doesn't he just nuke the enemy city?)
It's also hard to come up with a non-BS way for a character to get 30% more powerful every "level." Magic lets you get away with a lot of narratively confusing game mechanics. Technology invites more skepticism.
This is a subset of the greater video games as art question. Sci fi is puts a harsh mirror up to the real world, but video games aren't about realism or moral ambiguity, they're about fun interactive worlds.
Seeing as I had gone for the long shot and picked "July 2006" on Lance Bass, this could really be my month!
This would be true if the American electorate were even voting their own self-interest, or if our politicians really had to work for our votes. In such a responsive system, a democracy really could spill its treasury back into 51% of the voters' pockets.
What's actually happening is a massive amount of the treasury is being doled out in favors to huge well-connected private interests. This is far more grossly anti-competitive than any regulation (which apply in equally across an entire industry) ever could dream of being. A smaller (though still large) amount of the treasury is used for welfare bread and circuses programs. The last hole in the system, the press, was closed during the media mergers of the early 1980s. The interplay of private interest and our public representatives is virtually unreported on.
This issue has gone from internet time to legal time. There aren't any updates.
Only newstravaganza tabloid-trials have daily updates. Real legal cases frequently take years, and people generally try to be tight-lipped about them.