Lets examine this argument a little more. If everyone paid for the full bandwidth they get (say a 3Mbps connection), and the ISP had to dedicate this much bandwidth per user, the consumer would have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars a month for their connection. What are the going rates on a dedicated T1, I haven't looked at it lately, but it's not cheap by any means. Building up the infrastructure to fully satisfy the full demand of everyone is a bit ridiculous. The water utilities can't do that, the electric utilities can't do this, the telephone companies could never do this, etc. Imagine if we built roads to the specification that they had to carry the maximum possible number of vehicles in the area at once. We'd have 4 and 6 lane highways running through most every neighborhood. There's a reason that in events requiring an evacuation that roads crawl to a halt. The city and state oversubscribes them, and builds them to accept the average usage pattern, or more often they are built to accept the average peak usage. The same is true of ISPs. They don't build their network to hold the theoretical peak usage, but rather they build them to hold their average peak usage, or a little beyond that (monthly peak usage perhaps). The problem they are facing is that this average peak usage is increasing, however it isn't increasing anywhere near the point of the maximum theoretical peak usage possible.
Forcing networks to support the theoretical peak usage is silly, just as sill as expanding all interstates to 10 lanes in each direction so that traffic can flow more smoothly during evacuations etc. The cost of such plans is just too high compared to the gains we'd have by it. In fact, the cost of not oversubscribing bandwidth would price internet access to the point where most people might have a dialup connection. If you keep up the comparison, imagine if we kept going on this peak theoretical usage, and said that this peak theoretical usage had to work anywhere. Well most internet traffic is fairly local (same city, state, country, etc). What if ISPs were required to have the same bandwidth between chicago and new york as they have between chicago and shanghai. If you consider these massive links, we just wouldn't have anywhere near enough bandwidth.
Remember that this "cherry-picking" of material played on the radio is FAR from being a new phenomena. In fact this used to be the record industries model. They'd play a song on the radio over and over and then consumers would buy the 45 at the store, and listen to it and one other track. Bands also had albums, but often times the albums wouldn't have the single, or just weren't important compared to the singles. Then, after CDs started to dominate, the record industry decided to stop trying to sell singles, and ONLY sell full albums. That way the consumer would be forced to pay the full $15 rather than be able to buy a cheap single. They still kept singles, but added extra b-sides, and charged ridiculous prices ($5-$10), and so they became more of collectors items, before they were basically stopped altogether.
The industry grew used to being able to bully consumer, and now digital music is forcing them to accept that many consumers want to buy singles again. However, this means that their profits are going to be lower. Possibly on the level of what they used to make before they stopped selling singles.
For all of this, this does not mean the death of the album. Bands that want to produce albums still will. Most people who truly appreciate music and don't want to hear the stuff on the radio, or whatever their friends like will likely not have a problem finding albums of songs. However, those people are rarely the huge money makers for the industry (there are exceptions). Most of the money makers are the flavors of the week that they market endlessly, and end up selling millions of CDs. This practice of the industry's will end up being hurt as the sales end up being reduced due to "cherry picking".
Or if you want to do "interesting" jobs, go to grad school and get yourself a PhD. From that you can go work in a number of research labs (academic, government or industry), go on to be a project leader, or become a professor somewhere with your own research lab.
Most of these jobs require a lot of work, but many of these positions give you lots of freedom on what you can do. Of course if your interests lie in re-implementing something a million people have done for you, than this isn't the route for you.
I know my ipod (the old ipod color) lets me play songs on it from itunes on the machine I have it plugged into (although Apple does prevent me from copying songs from my iPod back to a laptop). I don't know if Apple disabled this (I sure hope not, as it doesn't make any sense to do). With this feature I don't have to have all my music on my laptop, and can just plug my ipod into it when I get to lab.
From there I can browse through the songs on my iPod and play them on my laptop without a problem. Is this still possible with newer iPods, or maybe they just disallowed it on the touch?
Uh, I'm pretty sure they can force you to stop distribution of your application if you link against their library and aren't following their restrictions. It would be violating the license, and is just as bad as someone linking GPL code into their proprietary applications.
15. What if an item is marked the wrong price and the clerk catches it before I pay; am I entitled to buy the item at the price marked?
This is a fact-specific question best answered by a court. A store may not knowingly charge or attempt to charge a price higher than the price marked on the item. MCL 445.354. Therefore, the consumer may have a claim if the store will not sell the item at the price marked. However, the consumer may face obstacles convincing a court that the store knowingly charged the higher price when the pricing mistake is not intentional and will result in an obvious windfall to the consumer.
While this doesn't exactly say that the store can change the price, the law basically allows it, in particular when the pricing mistake was unintentional. In particular, this protects stores from swapping tags on items and try and call it the stores mistake. Consumers are not given a right to buy goods at a low price if the store makes a mistake and corrects it before the transaction has completed.
For one thing, few musicians could make enough money to get by today from live performances alone, even the good ones.
Have you talked to any musicians recently? Have you asked any rock bands how they make money or stay in business? Do you have any insight into what you stated in your comments? I highly doubt that altogether.
I probably see 15-20 concerts a year. The majority are in small clubs or bars, and have maybe a couple hundred people there. I will regularly talk to band members, and sometimes discuss the business with them. Touring is their income source, and no, for many of them it isn't much. For many of them in fact they lose money touring, or get lucky and break even. At the end of the day they might hope to make it across the country with the same amount of money as when they left. This is accounting for money at the door, as well as merch sales etc. They often have day jobs, working as bartenders or whatever. They'll do this for a period, then tour. It's a fairly typical situation. They're not touring for the money, they're doing it because they love it.
When it comes to album sales though, that is definitely not where the money comes from. The money just isn't there. The albums aren't selling enough copies, and even if they are the margins are slim. It's expensive to produce a good album, and even without expensive studio time, the bands time costs money, as it's time away from their day jobs. I imagine most band members would be happy if they make $10,000 a year off album sales. It's likely much less than this.
Of course this is for fairly small bands, and they will keep doing it living near the poverty line for a while, but many retire from music by the time they're 35 (its just not sustainable if you want to have a family, etc). Now, the small bands that do make money are the cover bands, but they're a different story altogether.
Then there are the big bands, the "mega tours". I have no doubt that they're all making a mint. When you can sell 20,000 tickets for $50 a pop, and do this 75-100 times a year, you're doing alright. And this money definitely would trump what they'd make off album sales (assuming they only make half the door profits, and no merch money, etc, this is $50 million. ... it would require selling well over 5 million CDs to reach this amount). They're definitely not doing bad off.
You do realize that our base power plants (coal, nuclear, hydro) are producing the same amount of energy 24 hours a day. This is because some of them (hydro) are always producing energy (regardless of whether the power is going to be used), and the other base power stations (nuclear, coal) can't rapidly change how much power they are generating. The amount of time it takes to bring these plants online is days, and so it just can't be shutdown or slowed down to reduce fuel consumption at night. We have additional power sources (natural gas, solar, etc), that provide additional power at peak load, but they are all more expensive to operate (which is why power costs more during peak usage hours at some places). So at the moment, running computers at night really isn't taxing the power system, and the amount of energy being burned isn't really increasing to do it.
This doesn't work for everything. Students who work in research labs would be really annoyed at their machines automatically shutting down. I have a couple linux workstations in my lab that i use, and I have them running 24/7/365, even if I am not using them. I do this because I want to be able to use them whenever I want. And just because they have shared home directories, it does not mean all the machines are the same. Certain applications are only on certain machines, and so I need access to those particular machines. Also , multi-gigabyte files can quickly fill up a home directory (I solved this through the usage of a second NFS server just for my files). Therefore it just becomes easier to let them always run in case I need to access files on them (not to mention when I'm running jobs that takes days to complete).
More importantly, in research labs, you often have students working late at night. I'm regularly working until 2 or 3 am, and so are many others. there's also not a homogeneous network of machines with common administration (there is an administrator, but it is much easier to have us administer our machines ourselves for the most part).
Of course, public labs are a different story. Many of them can be turned off, but I know at least the machines on the engineering campus (the linux/sun workstations) need to always be on as they're part of the condor pool.
One major problem you're missing is that having an extra decoder on the chip (that is used by another core) is not, and cannot be that useful to the other core. The problem is that accessing the other decoder will incur a huge latency penalty (20+ cycles). During those cycles, dependent instructions will generally stall in the main pipeline, and overall throughput could be decreased. Of course the scheduling to choose the other one is also a nightmare.
Comparing it with the construction analogy. if you were building a highway that is 20 miles long, having all your construction vehicles in one spot will significantly slow down each vehicle. Having them spread out could be useful (if they're all doing useful work), but having different vehicles at different intervals doesn't make sense if it requires workers to constantly walk down the highway to get the other vehicle. What does make sense is to have separate work crews operating on different portions of the highway at the same time. This way each portion might have its own functional units (vehicles) that are all somewhat close together. Trying to share them all together doesn't make sense unless one of the functional units is rarely used. This is actually done or could be done on some cores. For example the niagara processor has 8 cores, but only a single FPU. This allows any code that needs it to use it (although at a degraded speed). This makes a lot of sense for codes where it is rarely used (as replicating the fpu 8 times is expensive). Such a thing is also done with CPU cores when it comes to memory requests. There is a shared L2 that has limited bandwidth. As long as only one of the 2 cores is requesting from it at a time things should be okay. Of course, as we get more advanced these tradeoffs will only increase, resulting it what will likely be highly heterogeneous processors.
So I own 100s of cds,and have NEVER had a problem with one ripping. There were the few from Sony a couple years ago that were bad, but even those didn't effect me as I don't use Windows on most of my machine. However your paranoia is HUGE, and mostly unfounded. Do you not drive because you lost trust in roads after someone got killed in an accident? It seems like your paranoia isn't real, but just an excuse to justify your pirating. Especially if you only count a logo on the disc itself, and not logos on the CD case. If the disc is not up to the standards, it will not contain the CD logo ANYWHERE on the packaging. It is simply not allowed. The funny part is I don't think the sony DRMd discs violated the standard. They simply had an audio and a data section contained on the disc, and that has been allowed in the standard for quite some time.
So really, your obsession with the CD logo being on the disc is unfounded, does not protect you at all, but does help justify piracy. Good work!
You are not entirely true. Very few CDs have any DRM on them. A handful of Sony ones had them, and that was about it. However many CDs can no longer have the CD logo on it for other reasons.
For instance, the dualdisc format (CD on one side and DVD on the other) cannot use the CD logo on it, but plays in most CD players The reason is that the CD side of the disc is thinner than the standard specifies. Additionally, I think the CDs are slightly thicker than standard CDs, so they might not play on all slot-loading CD players. However it is highly rare that the CD will actually not play on a CD player, as it's very very close to the standard.
Remember one thing though, there are a fairly limited number of "infrastructure programmer" positions around, whereas embedded systems programming is HUGE. The future of computing (and much of its past) is not in the box that sits on your desk, or the laptop that you carry. The future is embedded devices. Cellphones, cars, ipods, HDTVs, game consoles, media players, planes, controls, smart appliances, everything. The majority of computers are embedded, and this trend is only accelerating.
However many of these devices are starting to resemble more "traditional" computing platforms. They run a full OS, have virtual memory support, FPUs, etc. However one thing they do have in common is that they run on a limited set of hardware, and often have strict memory, performance, and power constraints. The skill set does not really need to include knowing more than basic ASM programming (if you used SPIM in a computer architecture class you should be okay). You need to know the fundamentals of computer architecture, and a class on OS is very important (you must understand some of the different memory models etc).
But, as a CS student, your job is not to know the details. Your job is not to know the languages and the tools, your job is to learn the algorithms, to learn the thought processes, to learn how to design. What tools you know how to use aren't very relevant, and will change over the next couple years anyhow. Being adaptable, and knowing the fundamentals, and having strong problem solving skills is far more important. The rest will come. Any company that won't hire you because you don't know their specific languages and tools is either not looking for a student out of college, or is looking for an IT monkey to write code for them. If they don't want a CS student, beware, as the job is likely quite boring anyhow.
The short version is that each good entry level SP whizz is worth $30-40K to me:)
I hope you mean $30k-$40k more than the regular salary. Because anyone who is good with this stuff deserves more than that. Also, I imagine at the specialty you're looking for people with a ugrad degree are going to be rare. I would think most people fitting this category have at least an MS, and others possibly a PhD. Although of course, I'm not an SP person (I've dabbled some in it because I had to, not because I've wanted to). If you want to change something, I'd imagine you should serious consider looking over schools EE curriculum, and in particular what is taught in the introductory Signals and Systems course. This course is very much designed for pure theory signal processing, and tends to ignore the practical implications of signal processing, and the reasons that it is so useful.
We observe that all CS grads who own an Apple computer fail to impress us, if we continue to bother interviewing CS grads at all, this will be an early question, such is it's predictive power. More than one deluded fool has tried to explain to me how "innovative" a little firm like Apple was, citing how they invented GUIs and portable music players. They view choosing Apple over MS as some political statement of liberty. They flatly refuse to believe me when I tell them about Apple closed architectures (those who can understand what one is), or the way Apple has oppressed developers in ways that MS would never dream of. I don't expect them to agree with me, but I expect their opinions to be better than the BBC.
I'm not sure where you're finding these CS grads who are such idiots about apple. Most of the apple users I know (including myself) know that apple has a stranglehold on hardware and software for the mac, and accept the vertical monopoly because it works for us. In fact I would venture to say that the majority of apple user's I know (who are CS/compE students) bought a Mac because they were Linux users, and got sick of having to mess around with linux to get things working (especially on a laptop). Granted, I might be an exception as I never really hung out with the "average" CS/CE students, and only with the ones who knew what they were doing. I'm sure you see your share of glorified IT students using macs, but IT is not the same as CS, not even remotely close.
And I still don't understand your push on signal processing. You are looking for people making business software for a bank... Most signal processing people are going to be working in embedded devices, as thats where the demand is. Additionally, I don't know many CS programs (if any) that require a signal processing course. I know it is common that all computer engineers take such a course (where they teach them the math, but not the practical usefulness of the algorithms), however CompE has very different requirements than a CS degreee.
I doubt if even 1% of CS grads could write code to turn this BMP into a JPG, or even explain the ideas behind this.
Just to harp on one statement in your comment. This is either an absurdly basic demand to ask of programmers, or an absurdly complex one. On one side, this is as simple as making a function call bmp2jpg(...) or whatever it is with the libraries they are using. The process of doing this is simplistic, and taught to the java mentality of "find the right tool in the shed to do your entire program".
On the other hand the question you are asking could be one so absurdly difficult that it is unlikely you'll find more than a handful of people who just got a BS in CS will know (having a BS in Computer Engineering it is possible they might understand it, and having advanced degrees makes it even more likely). Expecting a CS student to be an expert in signal processing is rather silly. Even if someone was a computer engineer and was actually changing the JPEG code (a process I have done recently), it isn't expected that they understand the entire algorithm. They need to know the basic steps, and how the data flows through the process. They may even need to know the basics of what a DCT does (knowing the math behind it could be useful, but experts have optimized it so using a naive algorithm is idiotic). They should also know how Huffman encoding works, and any student who's taken an algorithms course should be familiar with such ideas. However at a low enough level, they really don't need to understand it. People spend entire careers optimizing something like a DCT, so to most programmers it should be seen as another tool.
The point is that different levels of abstractions exist in different problems, and a good programmer (not necessarily a good CS student) should know what level of abstraction is necessary for the task at hand. Having someone who reinvents the wheel for everything is about as useful as a programmer who only uses canned solutions. It's finding the right mix that is important.
However, one key points of this article is about the fact that CS curriculums spend TOO much time on programming, and too little on theory. A university is not a trade school, and students should learn the important theories and not the tools. However teaching a student when using the wrong tool is highly detrimental. And one thing that was observed is that while Java may make the introductory course easier, it causes problems later on when a student must know some other tool (such as pointers). Not having a good enough foundation can mean that the professor must waste a significant portion of a class teaching student the new tool.
The first problem is that the USA is not a democracy, but a republic isn't the reason we are "spared" the tyranny of the masses. In general, a "Republic" is what most pro-democracy forces want. Almost no one is looking for a pure democracy where everyone votes for everything, and they wish to have a republic formed where elected officials voice the peoples concerns. In my opinion, this is still a democracy of sorts.
What protects the USA (and many other countrys) from the tyranny of the masses is most definitely NOT the elected officials. In fact, given their way they would likely expose the tyranny of the masses, and the tyranny of themselves. The primary protections come from a constitutional government. Under such a system, the government is limited in what they can do. Even in 99% of the population wishes to do something, if it is unconstitutional it can't be done. Of course, the founders provided the ability to change the constition, however this power is severely limited by 2 factors. First 2/3rds of congress must approve it, and I think 3/4s of the states have to ratify it. This firstly requires a lot of time to enact (which prevents bad ideas from quickly passing through without being given appropriate consideration) and is extremely difficult to enact. It is also FAR from being democratic, as a handful of states contain a majority of the US's population, and yet they are all given equal weighting.
Being a constitutional republic is what protects our government.
I think someone should be in handcuffs over this. At least a much more sever punishment. i don't agree that all of Sony should be split up or bankrupted over this, but the people who let this through at the top should have some serious punishments. I know if I installed rootkits on Sony's computers, and then logged remotely into them, and got caught, I'd likely be charged with computer crimes (or whatever the proper term is), and sent to jail for a couple years. Why if a major company does the same thing to millions of people, can they walk away paying a small fee that works out to a few dollars per affected CD. At the bare minimum, the punishment should make a major financial impact. If they can get settlements valuing a song at a couple hundred or thousand dollars per copyright infringement (i know these are unrelated cases, but the ideas are similar), then it's logical that they should be able to pay a couple hundred or thousand dollars per rootkit that they installed. Of course, in the current system this would never happen.
Ever heard of the lesser of two evils? Sometimes there are multiple choices, and maybe even a choice of good honest people you could help put in power. We have helped put in some pretty nasty dictators. If the choice was between a dictator that the soviets controlled, or one the US controlled, it's pretty obvious which one to pick. While there was often a third choice of a "good" leader, those were often off limits. Putting one of them into power might work for a year or two, but the soviets were willing to make sure they didn't stay in power, and we could easily end up in the situation we wanted to avoid.
Many of the worst mistakes and disasters were done by choosing with good intentions, and not realizing the realities of the situations. Sometimes no choice is good, but one has to be made.
first, you're an idiot. If you google for "ipod battery replacement" you'll quickly find a site offering them for sale. On the site they show a video of someone using the tools they provide to open up an ipod, disconnect the battery, put in a new one and close it up. All in under 5 minutes. As for the size issue, I have an older 60GB ipod, and I DO wish it was a third of a cm thinner, or smaller. Plus having a sleek design is nice, not to mention that battery covers are just one more thing to loser or break.
Of course, the fact that this can be done is probably beyond your comprehension.
It's as if the idea of taking a battery out of a case is technology that hasn't been invented yet.
<p>If only a third party would sell kits made to replace iPod battery, and price them reasonably... I mean I can't believe no one would want to jump in on this market. Besides that, this is the consumer electronics business, and in the case of the iPod, size is more important than "upgradability". In reality, how many people even replace their cell phone batteries (assuming they just get a new one every two years). Some people have extras because they use their phone so much that one battery won't last a full day, but those people aren't all that common. The same is true for cameras, where one battery may last a few hours of taking pictures, so some people prefer having a spare. However media players are a different story. How long does your iPods battery have to last? They already last about a day. Are you telling me people need to swap them out in the middle of usage? I doubt that. As for batteries dieing. It is possible, and those people can replace them relatively cheaply. However I doubt many iPod batteries are dead within the first year and a half of ownership. I'd imagine the majority last more than 3 years before they only have half their original capacity. While 3 years may seem short, consider consumer electronics history. How many consumer electronics last 3 years? Commonly used products can and will break, it's the unfortunate truth. And making the products using 3rd world children and the cheapest parts imaginable doesn't help. But the majority of consumers would rather replace their consumer electronics (for newer faster shinier ones) every 3 years than pay a 25% premium on the cost to have a well-built product. Those are the economic realities, deal with it! <br><br> Phil
Respectfully I disagree. The iTunes music store was presented over two years after the iPod was released. ITunes is a result of dominant hardware not a cause of it. Apple used its market share in hardware to strong arm the labels into cooperating and up until recently (read: Amazon music store etc.) they've been able to continue their strong arm tactics because of the hardwares success. The iPod sold well before iTunes, and could easily survive if the itms ceased to exist. How you ask? The iPod would continue to thrive as long as Apple produces desirable hardware. Someone seems to think that the ipod is a good product given the tens of millions or so they will sell this quarter and most of the buys will not purchase much music from itms at all but rip their existing library to it.
The parent made no mention of the iTunes Music store, but rather the iTunes software. There is a big difference, as I would imagine the majority of iTunes users don't use the iTunes music store (and if they do it's not very often). iTunes is the software that fueled the iPods growth plain and simple. It made it easy to organize music, and easy to find it. Plus the interface was simple, and not overly bloated. After people got used to this interface, the idea of using an iPod that seamlessly integrated with iTunes seemed quite appealing. If iTunes did not exist, and did not seamlessly integrate with their iPods, the iPod would NOT be the dominant hardware player. You grossly underestimate how important having a good PC media player, and having a simple way to synchronize your media collection is.
In fact this is one of the reasons the Zune is doing as "poorly" as it is. Had the zune integrated with WMP and Windows MCE it might actually have a fighting chance (Integration with windows MCE, and allowing easy transfer of recorded TV and your music collection would make it an incredible media-center-on-the-go device). The fact that users have to install another media player that looks almost identical to WMP (which many people already use) is just annoying. It just means that they have to launch one more software program. This is a big loss for Microsoft, as there are plenty of people who prefer WMP to iTunes (I'm not one of them).
I don't know about the other 2 sites, but pitchfork.com is one of the most annoying sites ever. It is based on the principle that experimental is always good, independent is always better than commercial, and a band shouldn't be popular (although they're allowed to be HUGE in the underground). Also bands aren't allowed to "sell out" which means making commercials, or doing anything besides releasing CDs and touring to feed their families.
The whole indie vs big label thing is kind of crappy. It's okay to like bands on independent labels, and it's okay to like bands on major labels. Listen to the music you like, and stop judging it based on the company that owns the label. Besides, it's not like every independent label is better than the major ones. Some can be worse and even more money grubbing.
Much like cut scenes, level loads are anathema to enjoyment of game play, and a throwback to the era of the Vic-20 and Commodore 64 - when games were stored on cassette tapes, and memory was measured in kilobytes. So in this era of multi-megabyte and gigabyte memory and fast access storage devices why do we continue to have games that are dominated by the level structure, be they commercial (Portal), independent (Darwinia) and amateur (Angband)?
I think this raises an even more important question.. . In this era of steroid-fueled athleticism, why do our professional sports have quarters, halftimes, or breaks of any kind? They just stop the action. And a 40 second clock to snap a football . . . This is ludicrous, we should get rid of any breaks in the action. If someone scores, we shouldn't have to stop and let the defense back on the field. Half the fun would be watching today's super-athletes over-exert themselves until they break down.
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Lets examine this argument a little more. If everyone paid for the full bandwidth they get (say a 3Mbps connection), and the ISP had to dedicate this much bandwidth per user, the consumer would have to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars a month for their connection. What are the going rates on a dedicated T1, I haven't looked at it lately, but it's not cheap by any means. Building up the infrastructure to fully satisfy the full demand of everyone is a bit ridiculous. The water utilities can't do that, the electric utilities can't do this, the telephone companies could never do this, etc. Imagine if we built roads to the specification that they had to carry the maximum possible number of vehicles in the area at once. We'd have 4 and 6 lane highways running through most every neighborhood. There's a reason that in events requiring an evacuation that roads crawl to a halt. The city and state oversubscribes them, and builds them to accept the average usage pattern, or more often they are built to accept the average peak usage. The same is true of ISPs. They don't build their network to hold the theoretical peak usage, but rather they build them to hold their average peak usage, or a little beyond that (monthly peak usage perhaps). The problem they are facing is that this average peak usage is increasing, however it isn't increasing anywhere near the point of the maximum theoretical peak usage possible.
Forcing networks to support the theoretical peak usage is silly, just as sill as expanding all interstates to 10 lanes in each direction so that traffic can flow more smoothly during evacuations etc. The cost of such plans is just too high compared to the gains we'd have by it. In fact, the cost of not oversubscribing bandwidth would price internet access to the point where most people might have a dialup connection. If you keep up the comparison, imagine if we kept going on this peak theoretical usage, and said that this peak theoretical usage had to work anywhere. Well most internet traffic is fairly local (same city, state, country, etc). What if ISPs were required to have the same bandwidth between chicago and new york as they have between chicago and shanghai. If you consider these massive links, we just wouldn't have anywhere near enough bandwidth.
Phil
Remember that this "cherry-picking" of material played on the radio is FAR from being a new phenomena. In fact this used to be the record industries model. They'd play a song on the radio over and over and then consumers would buy the 45 at the store, and listen to it and one other track. Bands also had albums, but often times the albums wouldn't have the single, or just weren't important compared to the singles. Then, after CDs started to dominate, the record industry decided to stop trying to sell singles, and ONLY sell full albums. That way the consumer would be forced to pay the full $15 rather than be able to buy a cheap single. They still kept singles, but added extra b-sides, and charged ridiculous prices ($5-$10), and so they became more of collectors items, before they were basically stopped altogether.
The industry grew used to being able to bully consumer, and now digital music is forcing them to accept that many consumers want to buy singles again. However, this means that their profits are going to be lower. Possibly on the level of what they used to make before they stopped selling singles.
For all of this, this does not mean the death of the album. Bands that want to produce albums still will. Most people who truly appreciate music and don't want to hear the stuff on the radio, or whatever their friends like will likely not have a problem finding albums of songs. However, those people are rarely the huge money makers for the industry (there are exceptions). Most of the money makers are the flavors of the week that they market endlessly, and end up selling millions of CDs. This practice of the industry's will end up being hurt as the sales end up being reduced due to "cherry picking".
Phil
Or if you want to do "interesting" jobs, go to grad school and get yourself a PhD. From that you can go work in a number of research labs (academic, government or industry), go on to be a project leader, or become a professor somewhere with your own research lab.
Most of these jobs require a lot of work, but many of these positions give you lots of freedom on what you can do. Of course if your interests lie in re-implementing something a million people have done for you, than this isn't the route for you.
Phil
I know my ipod (the old ipod color) lets me play songs on it from itunes on the machine I have it plugged into (although Apple does prevent me from copying songs from my iPod back to a laptop). I don't know if Apple disabled this (I sure hope not, as it doesn't make any sense to do). With this feature I don't have to have all my music on my laptop, and can just plug my ipod into it when I get to lab.
From there I can browse through the songs on my iPod and play them on my laptop without a problem. Is this still possible with newer iPods, or maybe they just disallowed it on the touch?
Phil
Uh, I'm pretty sure they can force you to stop distribution of your application if you link against their library and aren't following their restrictions. It would be violating the license, and is just as bad as someone linking GPL code into their proprietary applications.
Phil
Phil
Have you talked to any musicians recently? Have you asked any rock bands how they make money or stay in business? Do you have any insight into what you stated in your comments? I highly doubt that altogether.
I probably see 15-20 concerts a year. The majority are in small clubs or bars, and have maybe a couple hundred people there. I will regularly talk to band members, and sometimes discuss the business with them. Touring is their income source, and no, for many of them it isn't much. For many of them in fact they lose money touring, or get lucky and break even. At the end of the day they might hope to make it across the country with the same amount of money as when they left. This is accounting for money at the door, as well as merch sales etc. They often have day jobs, working as bartenders or whatever. They'll do this for a period, then tour. It's a fairly typical situation. They're not touring for the money, they're doing it because they love it.
When it comes to album sales though, that is definitely not where the money comes from. The money just isn't there. The albums aren't selling enough copies, and even if they are the margins are slim. It's expensive to produce a good album, and even without expensive studio time, the bands time costs money, as it's time away from their day jobs. I imagine most band members would be happy if they make $10,000 a year off album sales. It's likely much less than this.
Of course this is for fairly small bands, and they will keep doing it living near the poverty line for a while, but many retire from music by the time they're 35 (its just not sustainable if you want to have a family, etc). Now, the small bands that do make money are the cover bands, but they're a different story altogether.
Then there are the big bands, the "mega tours". I have no doubt that they're all making a mint. When you can sell 20,000 tickets for $50 a pop, and do this 75-100 times a year, you're doing alright. And this money definitely would trump what they'd make off album sales (assuming they only make half the door profits, and no merch money, etc, this is $50 million. . .. it would require selling well over 5 million CDs to reach this amount). They're definitely not doing bad off.
Phil
You do realize that our base power plants (coal, nuclear, hydro) are producing the same amount of energy 24 hours a day. This is because some of them (hydro) are always producing energy (regardless of whether the power is going to be used), and the other base power stations (nuclear, coal) can't rapidly change how much power they are generating. The amount of time it takes to bring these plants online is days, and so it just can't be shutdown or slowed down to reduce fuel consumption at night. We have additional power sources (natural gas, solar, etc), that provide additional power at peak load, but they are all more expensive to operate (which is why power costs more during peak usage hours at some places). So at the moment, running computers at night really isn't taxing the power system, and the amount of energy being burned isn't really increasing to do it.
Phil
This doesn't work for everything. Students who work in research labs would be really annoyed at their machines automatically shutting down. I have a couple linux workstations in my lab that i use, and I have them running 24/7/365, even if I am not using them. I do this because I want to be able to use them whenever I want. And just because they have shared home directories, it does not mean all the machines are the same. Certain applications are only on certain machines, and so I need access to those particular machines. Also , multi-gigabyte files can quickly fill up a home directory (I solved this through the usage of a second NFS server just for my files). Therefore it just becomes easier to let them always run in case I need to access files on them (not to mention when I'm running jobs that takes days to complete).
More importantly, in research labs, you often have students working late at night. I'm regularly working until 2 or 3 am, and so are many others. there's also not a homogeneous network of machines with common administration (there is an administrator, but it is much easier to have us administer our machines ourselves for the most part).
Of course, public labs are a different story. Many of them can be turned off, but I know at least the machines on the engineering campus (the linux/sun workstations) need to always be on as they're part of the condor pool.
Phil
One major problem you're missing is that having an extra decoder on the chip (that is used by another core) is not, and cannot be that useful to the other core. The problem is that accessing the other decoder will incur a huge latency penalty (20+ cycles). During those cycles, dependent instructions will generally stall in the main pipeline, and overall throughput could be decreased. Of course the scheduling to choose the other one is also a nightmare.
Comparing it with the construction analogy. if you were building a highway that is 20 miles long, having all your construction vehicles in one spot will significantly slow down each vehicle. Having them spread out could be useful (if they're all doing useful work), but having different vehicles at different intervals doesn't make sense if it requires workers to constantly walk down the highway to get the other vehicle. What does make sense is to have separate work crews operating on different portions of the highway at the same time. This way each portion might have its own functional units (vehicles) that are all somewhat close together. Trying to share them all together doesn't make sense unless one of the functional units is rarely used. This is actually done or could be done on some cores. For example the niagara processor has 8 cores, but only a single FPU. This allows any code that needs it to use it (although at a degraded speed). This makes a lot of sense for codes where it is rarely used (as replicating the fpu 8 times is expensive). Such a thing is also done with CPU cores when it comes to memory requests. There is a shared L2 that has limited bandwidth. As long as only one of the 2 cores is requesting from it at a time things should be okay. Of course, as we get more advanced these tradeoffs will only increase, resulting it what will likely be highly heterogeneous processors.
Phil
sorry, but this is slashdot where the majority of people feel that the DRM on CDs justifies pirating. I've just seen that sort of attitude a lot.
Phil
So I own 100s of cds,and have NEVER had a problem with one ripping. There were the few from Sony a couple years ago that were bad, but even those didn't effect me as I don't use Windows on most of my machine. However your paranoia is HUGE, and mostly unfounded. Do you not drive because you lost trust in roads after someone got killed in an accident? It seems like your paranoia isn't real, but just an excuse to justify your pirating. Especially if you only count a logo on the disc itself, and not logos on the CD case. If the disc is not up to the standards, it will not contain the CD logo ANYWHERE on the packaging. It is simply not allowed. The funny part is I don't think the sony DRMd discs violated the standard. They simply had an audio and a data section contained on the disc, and that has been allowed in the standard for quite some time.
So really, your obsession with the CD logo being on the disc is unfounded, does not protect you at all, but does help justify piracy. Good work!
Phil
You are not entirely true. Very few CDs have any DRM on them. A handful of Sony ones had them, and that was about it. However many CDs can no longer have the CD logo on it for other reasons.
For instance, the dualdisc format (CD on one side and DVD on the other) cannot use the CD logo on it, but plays in most CD players The reason is that the CD side of the disc is thinner than the standard specifies. Additionally, I think the CDs are slightly thicker than standard CDs, so they might not play on all slot-loading CD players. However it is highly rare that the CD will actually not play on a CD player, as it's very very close to the standard.
Phil
Remember one thing though, there are a fairly limited number of "infrastructure programmer" positions around, whereas embedded systems programming is HUGE. The future of computing (and much of its past) is not in the box that sits on your desk, or the laptop that you carry. The future is embedded devices. Cellphones, cars, ipods, HDTVs, game consoles, media players, planes, controls, smart appliances, everything. The majority of computers are embedded, and this trend is only accelerating.
However many of these devices are starting to resemble more "traditional" computing platforms. They run a full OS, have virtual memory support, FPUs, etc. However one thing they do have in common is that they run on a limited set of hardware, and often have strict memory, performance, and power constraints. The skill set does not really need to include knowing more than basic ASM programming (if you used SPIM in a computer architecture class you should be okay). You need to know the fundamentals of computer architecture, and a class on OS is very important (you must understand some of the different memory models etc).
But, as a CS student, your job is not to know the details. Your job is not to know the languages and the tools, your job is to learn the algorithms, to learn the thought processes, to learn how to design. What tools you know how to use aren't very relevant, and will change over the next couple years anyhow. Being adaptable, and knowing the fundamentals, and having strong problem solving skills is far more important. The rest will come. Any company that won't hire you because you don't know their specific languages and tools is either not looking for a student out of college, or is looking for an IT monkey to write code for them. If they don't want a CS student, beware, as the job is likely quite boring anyhow.
Phil
I hope you mean $30k-$40k more than the regular salary. Because anyone who is good with this stuff deserves more than that. Also, I imagine at the specialty you're looking for people with a ugrad degree are going to be rare. I would think most people fitting this category have at least an MS, and others possibly a PhD. Although of course, I'm not an SP person (I've dabbled some in it because I had to, not because I've wanted to). If you want to change something, I'd imagine you should serious consider looking over schools EE curriculum, and in particular what is taught in the introductory Signals and Systems course. This course is very much designed for pure theory signal processing, and tends to ignore the practical implications of signal processing, and the reasons that it is so useful.
Phil
I'm not sure where you're finding these CS grads who are such idiots about apple. Most of the apple users I know (including myself) know that apple has a stranglehold on hardware and software for the mac, and accept the vertical monopoly because it works for us. In fact I would venture to say that the majority of apple user's I know (who are CS/compE students) bought a Mac because they were Linux users, and got sick of having to mess around with linux to get things working (especially on a laptop). Granted, I might be an exception as I never really hung out with the "average" CS/CE students, and only with the ones who knew what they were doing. I'm sure you see your share of glorified IT students using macs, but IT is not the same as CS, not even remotely close.
And I still don't understand your push on signal processing. You are looking for people making business software for a bank... Most signal processing people are going to be working in embedded devices, as thats where the demand is. Additionally, I don't know many CS programs (if any) that require a signal processing course. I know it is common that all computer engineers take such a course (where they teach them the math, but not the practical usefulness of the algorithms), however CompE has very different requirements than a CS degreee.
Phil
Just to harp on one statement in your comment. This is either an absurdly basic demand to ask of programmers, or an absurdly complex one. On one side, this is as simple as making a function call bmp2jpg(...) or whatever it is with the libraries they are using. The process of doing this is simplistic, and taught to the java mentality of "find the right tool in the shed to do your entire program".
On the other hand the question you are asking could be one so absurdly difficult that it is unlikely you'll find more than a handful of people who just got a BS in CS will know (having a BS in Computer Engineering it is possible they might understand it, and having advanced degrees makes it even more likely). Expecting a CS student to be an expert in signal processing is rather silly. Even if someone was a computer engineer and was actually changing the JPEG code (a process I have done recently), it isn't expected that they understand the entire algorithm. They need to know the basic steps, and how the data flows through the process. They may even need to know the basics of what a DCT does (knowing the math behind it could be useful, but experts have optimized it so using a naive algorithm is idiotic). They should also know how Huffman encoding works, and any student who's taken an algorithms course should be familiar with such ideas. However at a low enough level, they really don't need to understand it. People spend entire careers optimizing something like a DCT, so to most programmers it should be seen as another tool.
The point is that different levels of abstractions exist in different problems, and a good programmer (not necessarily a good CS student) should know what level of abstraction is necessary for the task at hand. Having someone who reinvents the wheel for everything is about as useful as a programmer who only uses canned solutions. It's finding the right mix that is important.
However, one key points of this article is about the fact that CS curriculums spend TOO much time on programming, and too little on theory. A university is not a trade school, and students should learn the important theories and not the tools. However teaching a student when using the wrong tool is highly detrimental. And one thing that was observed is that while Java may make the introductory course easier, it causes problems later on when a student must know some other tool (such as pointers). Not having a good enough foundation can mean that the professor must waste a significant portion of a class teaching student the new tool.
Phil
The first problem is that the USA is not a democracy, but a republic isn't the reason we are "spared" the tyranny of the masses. In general, a "Republic" is what most pro-democracy forces want. Almost no one is looking for a pure democracy where everyone votes for everything, and they wish to have a republic formed where elected officials voice the peoples concerns. In my opinion, this is still a democracy of sorts.
What protects the USA (and many other countrys) from the tyranny of the masses is most definitely NOT the elected officials. In fact, given their way they would likely expose the tyranny of the masses, and the tyranny of themselves. The primary protections come from a constitutional government. Under such a system, the government is limited in what they can do. Even in 99% of the population wishes to do something, if it is unconstitutional it can't be done. Of course, the founders provided the ability to change the constition, however this power is severely limited by 2 factors. First 2/3rds of congress must approve it, and I think 3/4s of the states have to ratify it. This firstly requires a lot of time to enact (which prevents bad ideas from quickly passing through without being given appropriate consideration) and is extremely difficult to enact. It is also FAR from being democratic, as a handful of states contain a majority of the US's population, and yet they are all given equal weighting.
Being a constitutional republic is what protects our government.
Phil
I think someone should be in handcuffs over this. At least a much more sever punishment. i don't agree that all of Sony should be split up or bankrupted over this, but the people who let this through at the top should have some serious punishments. I know if I installed rootkits on Sony's computers, and then logged remotely into them, and got caught, I'd likely be charged with computer crimes (or whatever the proper term is), and sent to jail for a couple years. Why if a major company does the same thing to millions of people, can they walk away paying a small fee that works out to a few dollars per affected CD. At the bare minimum, the punishment should make a major financial impact. If they can get settlements valuing a song at a couple hundred or thousand dollars per copyright infringement (i know these are unrelated cases, but the ideas are similar), then it's logical that they should be able to pay a couple hundred or thousand dollars per rootkit that they installed. Of course, in the current system this would never happen.
Phil
Ever heard of the lesser of two evils? Sometimes there are multiple choices, and maybe even a choice of good honest people you could help put in power. We have helped put in some pretty nasty dictators. If the choice was between a dictator that the soviets controlled, or one the US controlled, it's pretty obvious which one to pick. While there was often a third choice of a "good" leader, those were often off limits. Putting one of them into power might work for a year or two, but the soviets were willing to make sure they didn't stay in power, and we could easily end up in the situation we wanted to avoid.
Many of the worst mistakes and disasters were done by choosing with good intentions, and not realizing the realities of the situations. Sometimes no choice is good, but one has to be made.
Phil
first, you're an idiot. If you google for "ipod battery replacement" you'll quickly find a site offering them for sale. On the site they show a video of someone using the tools they provide to open up an ipod, disconnect the battery, put in a new one and close it up. All in under 5 minutes. As for the size issue, I have an older 60GB ipod, and I DO wish it was a third of a cm thinner, or smaller. Plus having a sleek design is nice, not to mention that battery covers are just one more thing to loser or break.
Of course, the fact that this can be done is probably beyond your comprehension.
Phil
<p>If only a third party would sell kits made to replace iPod battery, and price them reasonably... I mean I can't believe no one would want to jump in on this market. Besides that, this is the consumer electronics business, and in the case of the iPod, size is more important than "upgradability". In reality, how many people even replace their cell phone batteries (assuming they just get a new one every two years). Some people have extras because they use their phone so much that one battery won't last a full day, but those people aren't all that common. The same is true for cameras, where one battery may last a few hours of taking pictures, so some people prefer having a spare. However media players are a different story. How long does your iPods battery have to last? They already last about a day. Are you telling me people need to swap them out in the middle of usage? I doubt that. As for batteries dieing. It is possible, and those people can replace them relatively cheaply. However I doubt many iPod batteries are dead within the first year and a half of ownership. I'd imagine the majority last more than 3 years before they only have half their original capacity. While 3 years may seem short, consider consumer electronics history. How many consumer electronics last 3 years? Commonly used products can and will break, it's the unfortunate truth. And making the products using 3rd world children and the cheapest parts imaginable doesn't help. But the majority of consumers would rather replace their consumer electronics (for newer faster shinier ones) every 3 years than pay a 25% premium on the cost to have a well-built product. Those are the economic realities, deal with it!
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Phil
The parent made no mention of the iTunes Music store, but rather the iTunes software. There is a big difference, as I would imagine the majority of iTunes users don't use the iTunes music store (and if they do it's not very often). iTunes is the software that fueled the iPods growth plain and simple. It made it easy to organize music, and easy to find it. Plus the interface was simple, and not overly bloated. After people got used to this interface, the idea of using an iPod that seamlessly integrated with iTunes seemed quite appealing. If iTunes did not exist, and did not seamlessly integrate with their iPods, the iPod would NOT be the dominant hardware player. You grossly underestimate how important having a good PC media player, and having a simple way to synchronize your media collection is.
In fact this is one of the reasons the Zune is doing as "poorly" as it is. Had the zune integrated with WMP and Windows MCE it might actually have a fighting chance (Integration with windows MCE, and allowing easy transfer of recorded TV and your music collection would make it an incredible media-center-on-the-go device). The fact that users have to install another media player that looks almost identical to WMP (which many people already use) is just annoying. It just means that they have to launch one more software program. This is a big loss for Microsoft, as there are plenty of people who prefer WMP to iTunes (I'm not one of them).
Phil
I don't know about the other 2 sites, but pitchfork.com is one of the most annoying sites ever. It is based on the principle that experimental is always good, independent is always better than commercial, and a band shouldn't be popular (although they're allowed to be HUGE in the underground). Also bands aren't allowed to "sell out" which means making commercials, or doing anything besides releasing CDs and touring to feed their families.
The whole indie vs big label thing is kind of crappy. It's okay to like bands on independent labels, and it's okay to like bands on major labels. Listen to the music you like, and stop judging it based on the company that owns the label. Besides, it's not like every independent label is better than the major ones. Some can be worse and even more money grubbing.
Phil
I think this raises an even more important question .. . In this era of steroid-fueled athleticism, why do our professional sports have quarters, halftimes, or breaks of any kind? They just stop the action. And a 40 second clock to snap a football . . . This is ludicrous, we should get rid of any breaks in the action. If someone scores, we shouldn't have to stop and let the defense back on the field. Half the fun would be watching today's super-athletes over-exert themselves until they break down.
Phil