Don't forget that some companies already do this. It's possible to get local telephone (both landline and wireless), long-distance, cable/satellite, and broadband all from the same company.
I started getting suspicious when they asked me to go to the nearest plasma donation center to pay my monthly subscription fee.
I don't know about edible, but I do like this idea; for most fruit, you could embed the tag in the skin, for example.
Most fruit and veggies I buy already have those little stickers on them. It would just be a matter of making a sticky RFID tag that was cheap enough to stick on every piece of fruit, and of course having the infrastructure to track them both during the distribution process, and optionally at home using your RFID-enabled fridge, pantry, banana hook, etc.
Oil is not just a power source. If all the cars, generators, and everything else ran on fairy dust, we'd STILL need plenty of oil around. Oil is also used extensively as a lubricant, and a source material for most of the plastics we use today, as well as many composites.
Now, I'm not saying that we need to use fossil oil for all these purposes, but it happens that fossil oil is by far the best source material for most of these applications. It doesn't require as much refinement compared to other sources of hydrocarbons, like plant or animal oil. So, if you want to cut down on fossil oil usage, not only will you have to do extensive research on hydrogen (or some other material) as a power source, but also on low-cost methods for making alternative lubricants, plastics, etc. that don't depend on fossil oil.
Thanks for making up my mind for me. I'd rather evaluate the merits of receiving telephone solicitations and make the decision to sign up on a do-not-call list myself, and I'm sure there are millions of others who agree.
And just so you know, some people LIKE to receive telemarketing calls, credit card offers, etc. Maybe they're lonely. Maybe they need toilet paper. It doesn't matter. If you sign me up for something that I didn't ask for, you are violating my privacy just as much as the guy who calls me in the middle of dinner.
I looked through the article (and some other articles linked in the sidebar) but couldn't find any hard numbers showing that other countries are actually spending more.
Now, while I don't have a large compendium of current statistical data at my disposal, I do have quite a bit of anecdotal evidence gleaned from my position as a manager of international sales, where I spend a lot of time visiting foreign companies talking to their executives. As far as I can tell R&D budgets worldwide are being cut in the last couple of years, especially in Asia where the economy has been hit harder than most other places. Let's face it: in tough times every company looks to increase their short-term profitability, and usually that comes at the expense of programs that don't have an immediate bottom line (say, over the next year) written in black. R&D programs are high on that list. While R&D might spark a product line or reduction in cost, companies won't usually start seeing profits from most successful R&D programs for several years.
Even in my small, agile company an investment in R&D dollars usually won't pay off for at least 1.5-2 years, and that's only because we already have a baseline product to structure our development and marketing around. When we were starting from scratch, it took about 3-4 years of development before we started breaking even on those R&D dollars we put in initially.
Sega already does this...errr did this until they stopped making consoles, that is. You can still sometimes find "Typing of the Dead" machines when you go to arcades in Japan, although there used to be more dreamcast-based cabinets a few years ago.
Some of the richest people in the world started out without knowing anybody (think of the Sam Waltons and Bill Gates of the world).
Both of them used their family connections to get their start. Sam Walton borrowed $20,000 in 1945 (equivalent to $200k in today's dollars) from his father-in-law to purchase his first retail store. Bill also came from a wealthy family; his grandfather was vice president of a national bank. Also, his mother was on the boards of many charitable organizations alongside many industry execs, which is how he was able to get meetings with IBM executives (the Altair software helped, but wasn't the sole reason) despite his relative obscurity at the time.
One of the reasons that linux was chosen was due to source code accessbility. As you can imagine, when you have 50,000 units deployed using FCS and something breaks, you need to be able to sit down and fix the problem on the spot if at all possible.
I don't see how this is different from movie grosses, which are measured in terms of total box office receipts of which the studio only gets a portion. The whole point of my example is to use the same unit of measure as the movie industry. So, if you'd like to say that Rockstar only gets $250 million gross, please go ahead and calculate how much each studio makes off of a film (good luck) so we can keep the comparison consistent.
The $50 you spend in the store doesn't translate to another $50 in the pockets of the company. I'd be surprised if they were getting more than 25% ($12) a copy. That puts the numbers more in the range of $100 million gross in three months.
I'm familiar with the subject to know other costs exist. Just so you know, gross traditionally means "revenue before before costs are taken out".
Unfortunately, these numbers are the same for the movie business. That $10 you spent for a ticket at the theatre is maybe $2.50 to the producers of the film. However, there are far more revenue streams for movies. Foreign + video/dvd alone triple revenues, without even beginning on PPV or licensing to the networks. Add in merchandising and the other major revenue streams and it starts to add up.
While I'll give you the fact that video/DVD sales are additional revenue streams that movie makers can count on (at least for movies that make over $30 million nowadays), foreign sales, licensing, and merchandising all exist for games. In fact, game tie-in merchandising is becoming even more popular given the success of stuff like Pokemon and Yu-gi-oh, but even years ago you could find Link (from Zelda) and Mario figures in stores. Some of the more popular and marketable games (like Tomb Raider) even pull in movie and video sales revenue as well.
GTA:VC is still selling for $50 on store shelves, which means that Take Two has probably grossed at least $400 million (using conservative numbers) on this title in three months.
Few movies ever rake in that kind of cash, and let's face it: the movie market has been saturated for 50 years while the gaming market is still growing rapidly. When you think about it, it makes sense. Games are much more interactive (with the possible exception of pr0n, I guess) and typically deliver a lot more "bang for the buck". I can spend $6-$10 to own a 2-hour movie, or I can spend $20-$50 to play a 20-60 hour game.
Games also traditionally cost less to produce, meaning MUCH higher net profits for the publisher.
Frankly, I'm amazed that EVERY company in the movie business doesn't also produce games, as there's a lot of overlap between the two media. Sure, a lot of big-budget films (usually targetted at kids) end up with movie tie-in games, but I mean why not take some of the stories that are pitched and spend the money on making a game *instead of* a movie? It's going to be the same-or-lower risk, and potentially much greater profits.
What's new is that the've developed some faster way to write the disc.
CDs and DVDs are mass-produced using injection molding. What happens is a bunch of plastic rosin is melted to the correct temperature, then injected into a VERY precise mold that contains the data that's supposed to be on the disc. The plastic then cools very quickly and the disc solifies holding that information. For writable and re-writable optical media, the process is pretty much the same, only the mold doesn't have any tiny grooves in it (well, none that are there by design). From what I understand the process used for the discs in question is sorta like using a partially-etched mold. So, some of the mold contains information, and the rest of it is still blank.
The manufacturing process for optical media is one of the reasons DVDs should in theory be more expensive than CDs. Because DVDs require a MUCH higher level of precision in both the molds and the plastic required (roughly an order of magnitude) the defect rate for DVDs is still quite high, something like 20%-30% IIRC. The defect rate for CDs is much, much lower...something like 0.01%. So, less wasted plastic and production time, and many more facitilies for doing the production (which means greater competition, and lower production costs) should mean lower prices, but thanks to the RIAA we have price-fixing which usually means it's cheaper to buy a DVD than a CD, even though it's completely counter-intuitive.
He goes on to say that some companies will assign Java and C++ programmers tasks that take them weeks but could be done by Perl or Python programmers in a few hours.
I would love to hear an example of this. Off the top of my head I can't think of anything that takes weeks or programming in Java or C++ that you can do in Perl or Python in a few hours. Of course, I'm not fluent in Python really (ENFORCED formatted whitespace in a modern programming language???? What was he thinking?) but I am in Java, C++, and Perl, and although I will usually lean on perl to do my text processing I know from experience that I can do the same tasks in Java or C++ (especially given the now-ubiquitous regexp libraries) with only a little more effort, usually related to the extra work required setting up user interface and file I/O in the other languages.
Re:I don't think it's in danger
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The unmanned missions and real science are suffering for lack of funding due to the space shuttles exorbitant cost (it never met its' original goal of cheap spaceflight).
That's because it was the first iteration of a reusable launch vehicle, and was designed about 30 years ago, when engineers had to work with materials and technology that meant heavier equipment and less efficient fuel, which in turn impacts the bottom line rather significantly. Even today there is doubt that current materials and fuel technology can meet the design requirements necessary for SSTO (Single Stage To Orbit) but in the meantime interim designs have been considered.
It was clear even in the late 80's that in order to improve cost and efficiency, a new design would be necessary. Hence, we got the X-33 program (which was cancelled due to budget overruns at Lockheed) along with the generic "2nd gen RLV" and "3rd gen RLV" programs at NASA (which have had their funding cut several times, most recently a few months ago when the Bush administration thought it would be wiser to spend most of the budget (which was being cut to begin with, especially considering inflation) on trying to maintain a 30 year old shuttle fleet for another twenty years rather than invest some of that money in a more reliable, cheaper solution.
I'm not saying any of that would have prevented the current shuttle disaster (well...MAYBE if the X33 program had continued despite the cost overruns, but not likely) but I am saying that this will continue to happen at a greater pace until we finally suck it up and commit to a complete redesign of the reusable launch vehicle program, or bring down the cost of ELVs so much that it's cheaper to build a completely new vehicle from scratch every time.
The server keeps this huge database. When you want recommendations (downloaded every 15 min? or something) your program asks what the database recommends for someone who listened to (the set of songs you listened to). You're not giving away an email, no personal info, just an anonymous username (created automatically, or something. There is alot of 'or something's here)
I mostly agree with you, but who says the profiling has to be personalized at all? Take, for example, the way IMDB does recommendations. It combines user-supplied recommendations with a Bayesian network that correlates the movies together based on a number of characteristics (e.g. genre, rank, director, actors, etc.). I think it works pretty well, and you're also welcom to read the reviews of anything it recommends to form your own opinion before investing your time or money.
I'm so sick of this "it's only less if your time is worth nothing" garbage. For some, it might work, but when you spend hours on slashdot, I can't give you any credit to that statement.
Maybe *you* spend hours on slashdot. I spend a few minutes every day...roughly the same amount of time I use to take a dump (thank you, wireless internet!).
OTOH, when scientifc research is published that allows chemical or biological weapons to be produced, there isn't anything joe consumer can do to protect himself because he saw the publication.
Unless he takes the time to learn all the little ins and outs of their computers and software, there's not much Joe Consumer can do about security flaws, either. It's up to the industry to cooperatively create and release a solution to the problem, which Joe then uses to fix his computer. Likewise, if there's no disclosure of the scientific research, the scientific and medical community is going to have a tough time coming up with a vaccine/policy/whatever to counterract whatever biological weapon the terrorsists come up with.
I don't believe that nondisclosure of the research is going to prevent terrorsists from obtaining the information. After all, look at the anthrax attack that occurred after 9/11. The particular variant that was used reportedely was from a strain that was stored in a highly secure facility, where only a handful of people had access. What's to prevent terrorists from buying information on the black market, kidnapping the researchers (or better yet, their families), or stealing it from the appropriate places where the research is being done? Not much that I can tell.
other than this is just further proof of the lenghts corporations will go to in order to make more money. Theft, lies, deceit, are all perfectly acceptable business practices these days, especially in east Asia.
Where have you been? This kind of practice originated in East Asia. Try reading Sun Tsu's The Art of War sometime. Modern corporations are just using age-old practices to fight economic wars.
What, do you close the CD every time you burn??? A CD-R holds the equivalent of ~450 floppy disks. If the data is less than would fit on a floppy anyway, just keep burning new sessions. I've done this for YEARS and it works much better and faster than a floppy IMHO.
Whoever says a floppy is faster than a CD-ROM needs to actually do a performance comparison, or at least read the documentation avaliable all over the net. Even a 1x CD-R is faster than a floppy.
[quote]Yes, the floppy drive is obsolete, however - it's not ready to give up the ghost yet simply because there is no replacement for it yet. (Boot disk when the system fails, transferring files to and from work/college). [/quote]
Ever heard of a CD-R or CD-RW? I haven't had a floppy drive on my laptop for about 4 years. If I have to copy something to another machine, I burn it to a CD. CD-R media is cheaper than floppy disks, and holds 500-600 times the amount of data. Given that CD burners are also very cheap now (I've actually seen them go for FREE with manufacturer rebates), that the transfer speed and access times are much faster than a floppy, and that most systems can be configured via the BIOS to boot from the CD-ROM (I carry around a 3.5 inch boot CD that contains repair proggies for both windows and linux, as well as a couple of games since there was so much extra space), I can't think of a good reason to use floppies anymore.
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Don't forget that some companies already do this. It's possible to get local telephone (both landline and wireless), long-distance, cable/satellite, and broadband all from the same company.
I started getting suspicious when they asked me to go to the nearest plasma donation center to pay my monthly subscription fee.
Not if it is factual information, as supported by the classic supreme court decision of Feist Publishing vs. Rural Telephone Service Company, which held that facutal information cannot be copyrighted.
Most fruit and veggies I buy already have those little stickers on them. It would just be a matter of making a sticky RFID tag that was cheap enough to stick on every piece of fruit, and of course having the infrastructure to track them both during the distribution process, and optionally at home using your RFID-enabled fridge, pantry, banana hook, etc.
Yet again we see the fruits of science fiction come to life.
Oil is not just a power source. If all the cars, generators, and everything else ran on fairy dust, we'd STILL need plenty of oil around. Oil is also used extensively as a lubricant, and a source material for most of the plastics we use today, as well as many composites.
Now, I'm not saying that we need to use fossil oil for all these purposes, but it happens that fossil oil is by far the best source material for most of these applications. It doesn't require as much refinement compared to other sources of hydrocarbons, like plant or animal oil. So, if you want to cut down on fossil oil usage, not only will you have to do extensive research on hydrogen (or some other material) as a power source, but also on low-cost methods for making alternative lubricants, plastics, etc. that don't depend on fossil oil.
Thanks for making up my mind for me. I'd rather evaluate the merits of receiving telephone solicitations and make the decision to sign up on a do-not-call list myself, and I'm sure there are millions of others who agree.
And just so you know, some people LIKE to receive telemarketing calls, credit card offers, etc. Maybe they're lonely. Maybe they need toilet paper. It doesn't matter. If you sign me up for something that I didn't ask for, you are violating my privacy just as much as the guy who calls me in the middle of dinner.
I looked through the article (and some other articles linked in the sidebar) but couldn't find any hard numbers showing that other countries are actually spending more.
Now, while I don't have a large compendium of current statistical data at my disposal, I do have quite a bit of anecdotal evidence gleaned from my position as a manager of international sales, where I spend a lot of time visiting foreign companies talking to their executives. As far as I can tell R&D budgets worldwide are being cut in the last couple of years, especially in Asia where the economy has been hit harder than most other places. Let's face it: in tough times every company looks to increase their short-term profitability, and usually that comes at the expense of programs that don't have an immediate bottom line (say, over the next year) written in black. R&D programs are high on that list. While R&D might spark a product line or reduction in cost, companies won't usually start seeing profits from most successful R&D programs for several years.
Even in my small, agile company an investment in R&D dollars usually won't pay off for at least 1.5-2 years, and that's only because we already have a baseline product to structure our development and marketing around. When we were starting from scratch, it took about 3-4 years of development before we started breaking even on those R&D dollars we put in initially.
Sega already does this...errr did this until they stopped making consoles, that is. You can still sometimes find "Typing of the Dead" machines when you go to arcades in Japan, although there used to be more dreamcast-based cabinets a few years ago.
Both of them used their family connections to get their start. Sam Walton borrowed $20,000 in 1945 (equivalent to $200k in today's dollars) from his father-in-law to purchase his first retail store. Bill also came from a wealthy family; his grandfather was vice president of a national bank. Also, his mother was on the boards of many charitable organizations alongside many industry execs, which is how he was able to get meetings with IBM executives (the Altair software helped, but wasn't the sole reason) despite his relative obscurity at the time.
One of the reasons that linux was chosen was due to source code accessbility. As you can imagine, when you have 50,000 units deployed using FCS and something breaks, you need to be able to sit down and fix the problem on the spot if at all possible.
I don't see how this is different from movie grosses, which are measured in terms of total box office receipts of which the studio only gets a portion. The whole point of my example is to use the same unit of measure as the movie industry. So, if you'd like to say that Rockstar only gets $250 million gross, please go ahead and calculate how much each studio makes off of a film (good luck) so we can keep the comparison consistent.
I'm familiar with the subject to know other costs exist. Just so you know, gross traditionally means "revenue before before costs are taken out".
While I'll give you the fact that video/DVD sales are additional revenue streams that movie makers can count on (at least for movies that make over $30 million nowadays), foreign sales, licensing, and merchandising all exist for games. In fact, game tie-in merchandising is becoming even more popular given the success of stuff like Pokemon and Yu-gi-oh, but even years ago you could find Link (from Zelda) and Mario figures in stores. Some of the more popular and marketable games (like Tomb Raider) even pull in movie and video sales revenue as well.
News at 11.
GTA:VC is still selling for $50 on store shelves, which means that Take Two has probably grossed at least $400 million (using conservative numbers) on this title in three months.
Few movies ever rake in that kind of cash, and let's face it: the movie market has been saturated for 50 years while the gaming market is still growing rapidly. When you think about it, it makes sense. Games are much more interactive (with the possible exception of pr0n, I guess) and typically deliver a lot more "bang for the buck". I can spend $6-$10 to own a 2-hour movie, or I can spend $20-$50 to play a 20-60 hour game.
Games also traditionally cost less to produce, meaning MUCH higher net profits for the publisher.
Frankly, I'm amazed that EVERY company in the movie business doesn't also produce games, as there's a lot of overlap between the two media. Sure, a lot of big-budget films (usually targetted at kids) end up with movie tie-in games, but I mean why not take some of the stories that are pitched and spend the money on making a game *instead of* a movie? It's going to be the same-or-lower risk, and potentially much greater profits.
CDs and DVDs are mass-produced using injection molding. What happens is a bunch of plastic rosin is melted to the correct temperature, then injected into a VERY precise mold that contains the data that's supposed to be on the disc. The plastic then cools very quickly and the disc solifies holding that information. For writable and re-writable optical media, the process is pretty much the same, only the mold doesn't have any tiny grooves in it (well, none that are there by design). From what I understand the process used for the discs in question is sorta like using a partially-etched mold. So, some of the mold contains information, and the rest of it is still blank.
The manufacturing process for optical media is one of the reasons DVDs should in theory be more expensive than CDs. Because DVDs require a MUCH higher level of precision in both the molds and the plastic required (roughly an order of magnitude) the defect rate for DVDs is still quite high, something like 20%-30% IIRC. The defect rate for CDs is much, much lower...something like 0.01%. So, less wasted plastic and production time, and many more facitilies for doing the production (which means greater competition, and lower production costs) should mean lower prices, but thanks to the RIAA we have price-fixing which usually means it's cheaper to buy a DVD than a CD, even though it's completely counter-intuitive.
I would love to hear an example of this. Off the top of my head I can't think of anything that takes weeks or programming in Java or C++ that you can do in Perl or Python in a few hours. Of course, I'm not fluent in Python really (ENFORCED formatted whitespace in a modern programming language???? What was he thinking?) but I am in Java, C++, and Perl, and although I will usually lean on perl to do my text processing I know from experience that I can do the same tasks in Java or C++ (especially given the now-ubiquitous regexp libraries) with only a little more effort, usually related to the extra work required setting up user interface and file I/O in the other languages.
That's because it was the first iteration of a reusable launch vehicle, and was designed about 30 years ago, when engineers had to work with materials and technology that meant heavier equipment and less efficient fuel, which in turn impacts the bottom line rather significantly. Even today there is doubt that current materials and fuel technology can meet the design requirements necessary for SSTO (Single Stage To Orbit) but in the meantime interim designs have been considered.
It was clear even in the late 80's that in order to improve cost and efficiency, a new design would be necessary. Hence, we got the X-33 program (which was cancelled due to budget overruns at Lockheed) along with the generic "2nd gen RLV" and "3rd gen RLV" programs at NASA (which have had their funding cut several times, most recently a few months ago when the Bush administration thought it would be wiser to spend most of the budget (which was being cut to begin with, especially considering inflation) on trying to maintain a 30 year old shuttle fleet for another twenty years rather than invest some of that money in a more reliable, cheaper solution.
I'm not saying any of that would have prevented the current shuttle disaster (well...MAYBE if the X33 program had continued despite the cost overruns, but not likely) but I am saying that this will continue to happen at a greater pace until we finally suck it up and commit to a complete redesign of the reusable launch vehicle program, or bring down the cost of ELVs so much that it's cheaper to build a completely new vehicle from scratch every time.
You're right. To anyone living outside the US it's non-existent. That's EVEN BETTER.
I mostly agree with you, but who says the profiling has to be personalized at all? Take, for example, the way IMDB does recommendations. It combines user-supplied recommendations with a Bayesian network that correlates the movies together based on a number of characteristics (e.g. genre, rank, director, actors, etc.). I think it works pretty well, and you're also welcom to read the reviews of anything it recommends to form your own opinion before investing your time or money.
Maybe *you* spend hours on slashdot. I spend a few minutes every day...roughly the same amount of time I use to take a dump (thank you, wireless internet!).
Unless he takes the time to learn all the little ins and outs of their computers and software, there's not much Joe Consumer can do about security flaws, either. It's up to the industry to cooperatively create and release a solution to the problem, which Joe then uses to fix his computer. Likewise, if there's no disclosure of the scientific research, the scientific and medical community is going to have a tough time coming up with a vaccine/policy/whatever to counterract whatever biological weapon the terrorsists come up with.
I don't believe that nondisclosure of the research is going to prevent terrorsists from obtaining the information. After all, look at the anthrax attack that occurred after 9/11. The particular variant that was used reportedely was from a strain that was stored in a highly secure facility, where only a handful of people had access. What's to prevent terrorists from buying information on the black market, kidnapping the researchers (or better yet, their families), or stealing it from the appropriate places where the research is being done? Not much that I can tell.
Where have you been? This kind of practice originated in East Asia. Try reading Sun Tsu's The Art of War sometime. Modern corporations are just using age-old practices to fight economic wars.
You're paying too much for your CDs. It's common to find deals of 50 packs of CDs for $5, sometimes even better deals come along.
What, do you close the CD every time you burn???
A CD-R holds the equivalent of ~450 floppy disks. If the data is less than would fit on a floppy anyway, just keep burning new sessions. I've done this for YEARS and it works much better and faster than a floppy IMHO.
Whoever says a floppy is faster than a CD-ROM needs to actually do a performance comparison, or at least read the documentation avaliable all over the net. Even a 1x CD-R is faster than a floppy.
[quote]Yes, the floppy drive is obsolete, however - it's not ready to give up the ghost yet simply because there is no replacement for it yet. (Boot disk when the system fails, transferring files to and from work/college).
[/quote]
Ever heard of a CD-R or CD-RW? I haven't had a floppy drive on my laptop for about 4 years. If I have to copy something to another machine, I burn it to a CD. CD-R media is cheaper than floppy disks, and holds 500-600 times the amount of data. Given that CD burners are also very cheap now (I've actually seen them go for FREE with manufacturer rebates), that the transfer speed and access times are much faster than a floppy, and that most systems can be configured via the BIOS to boot from the CD-ROM (I carry around a 3.5 inch boot CD that contains repair proggies for both windows and linux, as well as a couple of games since there was so much extra space), I can't think of a good reason to use floppies anymore.