Since Fahrenheit degrees are half the size of Celsius degrees, it'd be Celsius that forced the need for smaller increments than full degrees before Fahrenheit did.
As a cross-platform UI standard that allows a mix of server-side and client-side code for server-hosted apps that nonetheless can run on high-latency links, Ajaxy HTML with the HTML5 extensions doesn't seem terrible. It certainly has much better performance than doing something equivalent in X11 over ssh, for example.
What? Nobody needs to be more accurate than 1C for day-to-day casual usage.
Have you noticed that all recent European HVAC systems use half-degrees as the standard control increment? Sounds like someone wants a degree of approximately Fahrenheit size as the base unit.
A single degree Celsius is qualitatively a bit too big, to the point where most European climate-control systems with digital displays have to resort to using half-degrees as the base control unit.
Apple is not really in the business of selling functional computers to "make 'real stuff'" that you don't have to think about. They in large part really are selling the computer itself, and want you to focus on the computer, not just on what you're going to do with it. That's why they put such a huge effort into style and branding; the metallic laptop style was not introduced because it made it easier to make real stuff with them.
The Xbox360 is actually quite profitable though, so unless their console entries tank starting ASAP, they're ahead of the game being both in the market and owning the results. Last I saw xbox360 was pulling in about $200m/year in profits.
Honestly $5b-$10b per reactor doesn't seem terrible to me, really. The federal government has been consistently spending $5-10b per year on renewable-energy subsidies, so if that money would buy us one fission plant per year, that seems like a better use of it.
The Microsoft example doesn't seem like a very good one for why companies shouldn't go outside their core competencies. Their forays into hardware are profitable on the whole, and have served a useful role in expanding their software as well; the foray into gaming with the Xbox and Xbox360 in particular has turned out to be a pretty good idea.
One interesting feature of the competition is that.NET and JVM are also looking to make themselves more friendly to dynamic languages, so it's not a totally stationary target. The most promising seems to be the proposal to add an "invokedynamic" bytecode to the JVM, which would allow a bunch of stuff dynamic languages do to be handled by the JVM (instead of them having to build their own dispatch mechanisms on top of it).
I'm skeptical also, and I'm a big fan of indie games (that and retro games are almost exclusively what I play), and am acquainted with a number of developers. The number one biggest problem for an indie developer is getting noticed at all. Most people will not know you exist, and if they vaguely know you exist, will not remember to check back to see you released a game.
From that perspective, if your game is good enough to be betting pirated, you might actually benefit. It's hard to say what the net effect is, but there's been a bit more study of it done in music, and it seems small/underground/indie musicians come out ahead from piracy relatively often, compared to the big-studio types, because they get some publicity out of it which leads to additional sales (while the big-name kinds don't need the publicity, so just lose sales).
Seems like they might almost agree with you, since their most recent game is $14, so getting closer to that price point.
As far as demos, they do actually have free demos for all their games; that's one thing I think Chronic Logic does right versus a lot of other indie game publishers.
(Perhaps I'm sounding like a shill here, but I spent a good portion of my youth hooked on Bridge Builder, despite the relatively small size of the game.)
Haha yeah, I should've explained that better; the linked post has more detailed numbers. They made a more numerically accurate $81,176 on those 4,500 direct sales, after credit-card/paypal fees. The additional income was $16,000 from the IGF prize money, $6,200 from other sites that resold the game and gave a cut, and $17,500 from small retail publishers who licensed the game to sell in Europe and Asia brick&mortar.
A few indie game studios have been forthcoming with data, although as he points out not a lot apart from the real blockbusters or bankrupt ones. One I'm familiar with, though, Chronic Logic, has released some numbers.
One of their more high-profile games was the platformer Gish, since it won the 2005 IGF grand prize (an indie-game award); it sold 4,500 copies at $20 apiece, netting about $121,000 after expenses. Slightly under half of those were in the first year out, a bit over a quarter the second year, and the rest trailing in in subsequent years. The puzzle game Triptych (2002), sold 1,000 copies at $15 apiece, netting about $25,000 after expenses. Again about half were in the first year out, but sales straggled in more slowly but consistently after that, with about 15% of the total in each of the following 3 years.
I haven't been able to find sales stats for probably their best-known game, Bridge Builder, though; pointers would be interesting.
According to my old university's post-graduation report, the average salary of a liberal arts grad is $40k, and there are plenty of majors above that. Political science is $51k, international relations is $48k, even majoring in Human Resources nets you $44k.
Forgive me if I have zero belief that there is any "patriotic concern" among companies. They want cheaper labor than they can get now; that's their sole motivation.
There are other aspects to the asymmetry, though, such as Intel's problematic antitrust position. If they're seen as using their patents to attempt to clear the market of their only major competitor, those patents may be seized from them.
Depends on what you mean by "valuable", I suppose. If the only thing your company needs done is high-level software development of large, complex systems, then sure. But I've never seen a company that didn't have at least a few ad-hoc custom messes sitting around somewhere, also, often needing urgent tending to at just the wrong times.
What about sub-Saharan Africa? It seems famines there where lots of poor people starve aren't that uncommon. And yet birth rates are actually higher than in the west.
Does the current system make that any less likely, though? I agree that your points are a potential problem, but they don't seem to be any less of a potential problem for laissez-faire capitalism. The only way I can see it would is if you posit that people would have fewer children if they have to pay for them (versus some basic minimum living standards being universally provided), but I'm not sure that's true; if anything poor people seem to have more children, rather than fewer, even in countries where there's no social safety net or welfare system to speak of.
Most quirky developers don't defecate in the lobby or egregiously insult coworkers. They just have poor social skills, may have poor hygiene, may perform poorly on teams, and so on. In those (by far more common) cases, I've almost never seen a situation where the company would be better off without that person in some capacity. Usually it just requires moving them off some team project to a big one-person project that's been festering on the TODO list.
It's actually pretty hard to find really good coders, so I'd say unless they actually are so terrible in other ways that it's screwing everything else up, if it were my company, I'd try to find somewhere to put them that plays to what they're good at while minimizing any potential friction.
It seems like there's a bit of a natural monopoly on last-mile pipes, though. To minimize digging up of streets, we really don't want 15 cable companies running entirely separate networks to houses, but instead want one line. Sort of how power lines and water pipes are done, too.
I'm fairly pro-market, but it's easy to ruin things with simple dogma. A lot of business needs to be able to assume basic things are working to operate. If you spend all your time wrangling about sewer hookups for to your office and your power company is an unregulated free-market utility that can choose not to do business with you if you upset their TOS, you spend all your time on overhead and little time on business. The internet these days is basically a utility: if you want it to spur other economic development, businesses and entrepreneurs need to be able to assume it'll be there as a boring, reliable transit method that they don't have to spend more time worrying about. This is basically incompatible with the infrastructure operators, especially in areas where they're local monopolies or oligopolies, trying to maximize profit.
More generally, and to simplify a bit there are two ways of operating in a market economy. One, you can produce a product or service that you think people will willingly pay money for, and then offer it for purchase in the marketplace. Two, you can attempt to gain control over some aspect of the marketplace itself, putting yourself in a position where you can skim some of the money off as it goes by, because people have no choice but to deal with you. The first is the good side of capitalism: entrepreneurs and individual freedom. The second is the bad side: monopolists, market manipulation, and so on.
I highly doubt that the way colleges advertise themselves can have such a profound effect on them in such a short time period. If you ask me, it's a combination of parenting, TV, and [high-] school that does this to them.
It probably doesn't help that many people do actually seem to get rich doing "mainly JavaScript and PHP", and often in their 20s. I don't know a lot of wealthy people, but all the wealthy people I know made their money throwing together websites, working for social networking firms on AJAXy stuff, or otherwise doing what amounts to a cool hack that was in the right place at the right time.
I agree, but I do find "filter[ing] by people who are 'good at using documentation'" is also useful. And not just documentation, but being able to google for your issue and sort through a Usenet/forum/etc. post of someone who had a similar issue and solve it that way. Doesn't solve everything, but the people who can't do that are at an instant knowledge disadvantage, which they'd have to be very good at reinventing the wheel to make up.
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Since Fahrenheit degrees are half the size of Celsius degrees, it'd be Celsius that forced the need for smaller increments than full degrees before Fahrenheit did.
Not to my knowledge---I've never seen half-degrees on a U.S. HVAC system. I was actually pretty surprised the first time I saw it in Greece.
As a cross-platform UI standard that allows a mix of server-side and client-side code for server-hosted apps that nonetheless can run on high-latency links, Ajaxy HTML with the HTML5 extensions doesn't seem terrible. It certainly has much better performance than doing something equivalent in X11 over ssh, for example.
What? Nobody needs to be more accurate than 1C for day-to-day casual usage.
Have you noticed that all recent European HVAC systems use half-degrees as the standard control increment? Sounds like someone wants a degree of approximately Fahrenheit size as the base unit.
A single degree Celsius is qualitatively a bit too big, to the point where most European climate-control systems with digital displays have to resort to using half-degrees as the base control unit.
Apple is not really in the business of selling functional computers to "make 'real stuff'" that you don't have to think about. They in large part really are selling the computer itself, and want you to focus on the computer, not just on what you're going to do with it. That's why they put such a huge effort into style and branding; the metallic laptop style was not introduced because it made it easier to make real stuff with them.
The Xbox360 is actually quite profitable though, so unless their console entries tank starting ASAP, they're ahead of the game being both in the market and owning the results. Last I saw xbox360 was pulling in about $200m/year in profits.
Honestly $5b-$10b per reactor doesn't seem terrible to me, really. The federal government has been consistently spending $5-10b per year on renewable-energy subsidies, so if that money would buy us one fission plant per year, that seems like a better use of it.
The Microsoft example doesn't seem like a very good one for why companies shouldn't go outside their core competencies. Their forays into hardware are profitable on the whole, and have served a useful role in expanding their software as well; the foray into gaming with the Xbox and Xbox360 in particular has turned out to be a pretty good idea.
One interesting feature of the competition is that .NET and JVM are also looking to make themselves more friendly to dynamic languages, so it's not a totally stationary target. The most promising seems to be the proposal to add an "invokedynamic" bytecode to the JVM, which would allow a bunch of stuff dynamic languages do to be handled by the JVM (instead of them having to build their own dispatch mechanisms on top of it).
Oh, I forgot the other, rather important reason I'm a fan besides Bridge Builder: all their games are available for Linux.
I'm skeptical also, and I'm a big fan of indie games (that and retro games are almost exclusively what I play), and am acquainted with a number of developers. The number one biggest problem for an indie developer is getting noticed at all. Most people will not know you exist, and if they vaguely know you exist, will not remember to check back to see you released a game.
From that perspective, if your game is good enough to be betting pirated, you might actually benefit. It's hard to say what the net effect is, but there's been a bit more study of it done in music, and it seems small/underground/indie musicians come out ahead from piracy relatively often, compared to the big-studio types, because they get some publicity out of it which leads to additional sales (while the big-name kinds don't need the publicity, so just lose sales).
Seems like they might almost agree with you, since their most recent game is $14, so getting closer to that price point.
As far as demos, they do actually have free demos for all their games; that's one thing I think Chronic Logic does right versus a lot of other indie game publishers.
(Perhaps I'm sounding like a shill here, but I spent a good portion of my youth hooked on Bridge Builder, despite the relatively small size of the game.)
Haha yeah, I should've explained that better; the linked post has more detailed numbers. They made a more numerically accurate $81,176 on those 4,500 direct sales, after credit-card/paypal fees. The additional income was $16,000 from the IGF prize money, $6,200 from other sites that resold the game and gave a cut, and $17,500 from small retail publishers who licensed the game to sell in Europe and Asia brick&mortar.
A few indie game studios have been forthcoming with data, although as he points out not a lot apart from the real blockbusters or bankrupt ones. One I'm familiar with, though, Chronic Logic, has released some numbers.
One of their more high-profile games was the platformer Gish, since it won the 2005 IGF grand prize (an indie-game award); it sold 4,500 copies at $20 apiece, netting about $121,000 after expenses. Slightly under half of those were in the first year out, a bit over a quarter the second year, and the rest trailing in in subsequent years. The puzzle game Triptych (2002), sold 1,000 copies at $15 apiece, netting about $25,000 after expenses. Again about half were in the first year out, but sales straggled in more slowly but consistently after that, with about 15% of the total in each of the following 3 years.
I haven't been able to find sales stats for probably their best-known game, Bridge Builder, though; pointers would be interesting.
According to my old university's post-graduation report, the average salary of a liberal arts grad is $40k, and there are plenty of majors above that. Political science is $51k, international relations is $48k, even majoring in Human Resources nets you $44k.
Forgive me if I have zero belief that there is any "patriotic concern" among companies. They want cheaper labor than they can get now; that's their sole motivation.
There are other aspects to the asymmetry, though, such as Intel's problematic antitrust position. If they're seen as using their patents to attempt to clear the market of their only major competitor, those patents may be seized from them.
Depends on what you mean by "valuable", I suppose. If the only thing your company needs done is high-level software development of large, complex systems, then sure. But I've never seen a company that didn't have at least a few ad-hoc custom messes sitting around somewhere, also, often needing urgent tending to at just the wrong times.
What about sub-Saharan Africa? It seems famines there where lots of poor people starve aren't that uncommon. And yet birth rates are actually higher than in the west.
Does the current system make that any less likely, though? I agree that your points are a potential problem, but they don't seem to be any less of a potential problem for laissez-faire capitalism. The only way I can see it would is if you posit that people would have fewer children if they have to pay for them (versus some basic minimum living standards being universally provided), but I'm not sure that's true; if anything poor people seem to have more children, rather than fewer, even in countries where there's no social safety net or welfare system to speak of.
Most quirky developers don't defecate in the lobby or egregiously insult coworkers. They just have poor social skills, may have poor hygiene, may perform poorly on teams, and so on. In those (by far more common) cases, I've almost never seen a situation where the company would be better off without that person in some capacity. Usually it just requires moving them off some team project to a big one-person project that's been festering on the TODO list.
It's actually pretty hard to find really good coders, so I'd say unless they actually are so terrible in other ways that it's screwing everything else up, if it were my company, I'd try to find somewhere to put them that plays to what they're good at while minimizing any potential friction.
It seems like there's a bit of a natural monopoly on last-mile pipes, though. To minimize digging up of streets, we really don't want 15 cable companies running entirely separate networks to houses, but instead want one line. Sort of how power lines and water pipes are done, too.
I'm fairly pro-market, but it's easy to ruin things with simple dogma. A lot of business needs to be able to assume basic things are working to operate. If you spend all your time wrangling about sewer hookups for to your office and your power company is an unregulated free-market utility that can choose not to do business with you if you upset their TOS, you spend all your time on overhead and little time on business. The internet these days is basically a utility: if you want it to spur other economic development, businesses and entrepreneurs need to be able to assume it'll be there as a boring, reliable transit method that they don't have to spend more time worrying about. This is basically incompatible with the infrastructure operators, especially in areas where they're local monopolies or oligopolies, trying to maximize profit.
More generally, and to simplify a bit there are two ways of operating in a market economy. One, you can produce a product or service that you think people will willingly pay money for, and then offer it for purchase in the marketplace. Two, you can attempt to gain control over some aspect of the marketplace itself, putting yourself in a position where you can skim some of the money off as it goes by, because people have no choice but to deal with you. The first is the good side of capitalism: entrepreneurs and individual freedom. The second is the bad side: monopolists, market manipulation, and so on.
It probably doesn't help that many people do actually seem to get rich doing "mainly JavaScript and PHP", and often in their 20s. I don't know a lot of wealthy people, but all the wealthy people I know made their money throwing together websites, working for social networking firms on AJAXy stuff, or otherwise doing what amounts to a cool hack that was in the right place at the right time.
I agree, but I do find "filter[ing] by people who are 'good at using documentation'" is also useful. And not just documentation, but being able to google for your issue and sort through a Usenet/forum/etc. post of someone who had a similar issue and solve it that way. Doesn't solve everything, but the people who can't do that are at an instant knowledge disadvantage, which they'd have to be very good at reinventing the wheel to make up.