Movie DVDs cost almost the same to make as music CDs, yet on DVDs you get $50-100 million budget projects, content of more length and much higher quality AND you can buy them for similar or lower prices, rent them cheaply and conviently, and they're not subject to so much competition from transfer over the net and copying on home computers.
So there really is no relation between costs of creation and media prices.
Movies, due their quality, pricing, and availability are almost competitive with piracy. CDs are a laughing stock, dependent only on total monopoly control over vast distribition channels - the same cartel owns 95% of all music sold, plus radio, tv, magazines, music shops and more, and on corrupt government support.
At the moment we have 4 main formats of computer used by average Joe - desktop, laptop, pda and cell phone. each of those currently uses different methods of doing the same tasks, and require data syncing, learning curve, upgrade cycle and so on. before long, thanks to maturing wireless communication, multi-platform integration and so on, those computers are going to start sharing common resources like storage, ports and devices, and eventually processing resources and power supplies
The latest iPAQs etc are almost laptops. they have the CPU speed and RAM to run XP, they have wifi, primitive graphics cards, they are starting to put in HDs instead of flash mem, and flash memory filesystems are getting there too. You can get bluetooth keyboards and mice for them too.
Before the release of longhorn, PDAs will be ready to run Linux or Win CE level OSs for use stand alone, and Win XP level OSs under x86 emulation for use in laptop cradles , thin clients, desktop docking stations, car systems etc.
You can expand this concept further than long range transport and ambulance work.
If the ramp-up/down time for this technology is fast enough and the experience not too unpleasent, it could revoloutionise our lifestyles, particularly for transport. Most people endure dull, dangerous and unpleasant transport on a regular basis. Imagine using this technology on that? No-one would fly awake any more, long distance rail travel would become competitive again, commutable distances could be extended dramatically.
My neighbour pirated my parking space. That guy pirated my seat on the train. All it means is 'they've got my toys, mummy'.
In the UK, we have big posters at cinemas which declare 'Piracy funds Terrorism'. Which is beautiful, since its 100% true, and depends completely on people misunderstanding it.
That only makes sense from an economic point of view. People don't think adverts = micropayents, they think advert = free, and will consume as a result.
Why will the content be better when people pay for it? people vote with their feet now not their wallets but they still vote.
besides i like the idea of pepsi not having my cc details and more just so I can read/.
we shouldn't complain. it won't be long before they give up all pretence at providing a service, and just take all the seats, lights and other nonessentials out, and double the fares.
Having been doing that line for last 2 years, and working with others who've been doing it much longer, I can tell you that your experience is very accurate. Even when you know in detail which services are the best and worst, you cannot be sure enough of getting a seat to bring your laptop, even when travelling 45mins+delays each way.
So this service is worthless for maybe 60-70% of commuters straight off. And how many of that last 30% have laptops? 1 in 10? Now how many are going to spring for WiMax cards and huge fees? give it a over generous 1 in 10 of those. Now you're down to 0.3% of passengers who might be interested. Thats maybe a couple of people per train max who might be interested.
At least there won't be much competition for the bandwidth - anyone who uses it will have to themselves!
That's interesting actually, since the only browser unlikely to be misrepresenting itself is therefore IE, and the only browser likely to used by force is also IE - so therefore IE represents at most just 18.9%, and likely less, and is partly used by those who would rather not.
So, on slashdot, we can say that IE has effectively lost the race.
That would only work until the next bridge, a lot of the bridges on the london-brighton line have less than a foot of clearance... better learn to duck fast.
There is a financial incentive to get new trains, just not _good_ new trains. Which is why the Southern/Thameslink area has a large number of the ultra cheap cattletruck 5 across electrostar trains, the ones that are almost worse than the 60s slam doors. The incentive is this: electric doors don't open once the driver hits the button. So instead of requiring inadequate platform staff that abuse the passengers, you can have no platform staff at all - a big cost saving.
Sorry you're living in a cave... I'm currently capped at 1mb up/7.5 mb down
Or the rest of the world? france, s korea, scandavia and parts of the US have speeds like this, but not all of us do.
In England, the fastest home user broadband for sale is 4mb/sec down, 0.5mb/sec up. Most are 512k - 1mb down, 256k up. My dad has a cap of 750mb... that's his monthly usage allowance for his DSL...
my bad; not specific. I meant IT budget, being hardware and software. From what I understand from my friend in the IT department of a large school, that is approximately how their budget is spent. The budget for staff is allocated above them, but I would image that equals or exceeds their budget for equipment. I'm on London, England, though, not Indianapolis; things may be different there.
I agree with you that the teaching is at fault; word processing could equally be taught on a number of packages, but isn't.
It's the old "No-one ever got fired for buying IBM" mindset (except now it's Microsoft).
Better to waste millions/billions of taxpayer money on indoctrinating our children than go out on a limb, even for better education. Of course, windows admins are cheap and 'linux is hard' (meaning I have wasted countless hours on windows, i'm not doing it again), becuase of the culture of windows... which the school is recreating in a vicious circle.
One day, perhaps the FLOSS community can break the circle of 'nothing but microsoft, because there is nothing but microsoft', but until then, you've not got a hope.
We have a million miles to go before we can stop teaching applications and start teaching skills.
You ask a school teacher why 40% of their budget is spent on microsoft products, and the only answer is: "That's what the industry uses, we'd be failing our kids if we taught them anything else". Hence our kids come out knowing MS Word, not word processing, MS Excel, not spreadsheets, and so on, and those kids will be buying MS software for life.
The comparisons are easy: Imagine a school that taught how to use BIC biro, not how to write, a school that taught B&Q tools, not woodwork, how to use Nike sports gear...... and so on. You can think of a million examples.
Re:Complex task vs. low wages
on
Camel-Riding Robots
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
You're quite right - I have no idea about costing real world robots, but I think that is a market issue.
I think it will require radical changes in the way we design and think about things, but its proven possible to achieve - ATMs and other vending machines and printing are some of the more successful ones that I can think of.
In most cases I think that it is the flexability of humans that wins out - most of the situations you mentioned, the task varies too much to be automated properly yet - e.g. street sweepers have to navigate obscure obstacles and deal with a multitude of subtly different targets.
But, for example, how about robots to prepare fast food? It's a straight forward repetative task which a machine can be designed for - non-trivial perhaps, but well within todays technology.
Humans require various costs above their salary, even subtle things such as increased work space, which may be valuable. I think it is already feasible for, say, McDonalds in ultra busy areas (such as Oxford Street, London).
The way you pay for robots is very different too. Robots require a huge up front design cost, a noticable investment to buy, and a smaller amount to run - varying quality of design probably affects maintainence costs the most.
There are various subtle improvements that robots can bring to mundane tasks too, such as the ability to work much longer hours, or at off-peak hours, attention to detail, consistant performance, improved speed and power in some roles, and so on.
This is exactly a prime use for robots, assuming I don't mistunderstand the social aspects involved.
What surprises me is that a relatively complex task in an area where human wages are fairly low should justify the replacement of humans by robots, and yet in countries where wages are sky high, human workers are doing much simpler tasks.
The fact that is appears as surreal as a python sketch obviously shows up my lack of knowledge of other cultures.
I can see that actually. Although nobody watches TV while fetching things from their fridge, plenty of people spend a significant amount of time in their kitchen, and your fridge is basically just a large flat unused surface, which is the point of fridge magnets. Why strew inactive media like shopping lists on the surface when you have 'consumer programming' instead?
At an average office (not mine, i work in central London), I would guess 30-35 is about right here. Perhaps 95% of cars have a inline 4 engine between 1 and 2 litres, diesels are reasonably common, SUVs and minivans (we call them 4x4s and people carriers) are pretty rare for commuters, probably rarer than sports or luxury cars.
Most common vehicles are the Ford Focus/VW Golf&Jetta size cars.
Of course the school runs are a very different story, the jams outside schools are probably down to around 10-15mpg, as they are 60-70% SUVs and minivans, doing stop-start journeys.
We do have a whole class of vehicles here which are pretty rare in the US I think, what you refer to as 'sub-compacts' I think - tiny hatchbacks and kiacars (although we don't have kiacar regulations) such as the Ford Fiesta and Citreon Saxo. They are probably the most common after Focus-size cars, and the cheapest, some as little as $10k USD
From the UK, the fuel price on my local forecourt this morning was £0.85 per litre, which is $6.02 per US gallon.
And we have virtually NO alternative fuel cars in this country - probably less per head than the US, Land of the (almost) Free fuel.
Switching to alt-fuel vehicles needs three things: Good infrastructure (every gas station), price incentives, and time.
And you can boost fuel prices a long way before there is a real price incentive, since alt-fuel vehicles are more expensive and usually inferior in some ways (things like cargo capacity etc).
will the OS creators have to start making their software secure?
All commercial operating systems are written to the point where the security is just good enough to sell the product and no further.
When operating systems are tied to the product or the vendor has a monopoly on their market then the point of 'just good enough' is reached long before the end user can regard the product as secure.
I predict: Software security will only become worse as consumor adoption of future devices hostile environments such as the internet increases. Within 10 years, end users will be comfortable with performing routine software maintainence on a myriad of devices they currently consider reliable over the life of the product. This will include: all communications products; vehicles; home automation and security; entertainment systems; electrical white goods and diy tools.
When the dominant multi-purpose operating system can be regarded as usuably secure out of the box for the life time of the product, then I'll reconsider.
Everyones motivated by money, and any org. can potentially fail to support their software. The key difference is, a very small company can afford a fix/mod OSS software, but who can afford to get a multiple-billion turnover company such as Microsoft to even listen, let alone do anything?
Say you find a showstopper in Apache httpd: You can wait and hope, hire your own coder, or contract someone else's coding shop. Any of those are viable, depending on the nature of the problem.
Now say you find an identical showstopper in MS IIS: you can wait and hope... or find a new webserver.
you would shortly have SEDO (search engine de-optimizer) specialists who charge you to sic their botnets on your competition... no thanks.
No... grandparent said "submit for human review", worst they could do would be waste googles time, since 'the competition' would have to merit google's wrath before takedown occured.
So, SEDO cannot hit Pfizer, only 'Honest Joe's V1Agr@, home of the trillion backlinks', which is hardly a useful no.1 result.
Slashdot Mirror
Also...
Movie DVDs cost almost the same to make as music CDs, yet on DVDs you get $50-100 million budget projects, content of more length and much higher quality AND you can buy them for similar or lower prices, rent them cheaply and conviently, and they're not subject to so much competition from transfer over the net and copying on home computers.
So there really is no relation between costs of creation and media prices.
Movies, due their quality, pricing, and availability are almost competitive with piracy. CDs are a laughing stock, dependent only on total monopoly control over vast distribition channels - the same cartel owns 95% of all music sold, plus radio, tv, magazines, music shops and more, and on corrupt government support.
At the moment we have 4 main formats of computer used by average Joe - desktop, laptop, pda and cell phone. each of those currently uses different methods of doing the same tasks, and require data syncing, learning curve, upgrade cycle and so on. before long, thanks to maturing wireless communication, multi-platform integration and so on, those computers are going to start sharing common resources like storage, ports and devices, and eventually processing resources and power supplies
The latest iPAQs etc are almost laptops. they have the CPU speed and RAM to run XP, they have wifi, primitive graphics cards, they are starting to put in HDs instead of flash mem, and flash memory filesystems are getting there too. You can get bluetooth keyboards and mice for them too.
Before the release of longhorn, PDAs will be ready to run Linux or Win CE level OSs for use stand alone, and Win XP level OSs under x86 emulation for use in laptop cradles , thin clients, desktop docking stations, car systems etc.
And as with Christianity, you're guaranteed to get a lot more out than you put in. In the long run anyway.
Also, open sourcing your code is fitting with almost any religion, as well as moral codes that a great many people and societies respect.
As I understand it, open source contributors would also meet approval from Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs and Buddhists, for example.
You can expand this concept further than long range transport and ambulance work.
If the ramp-up/down time for this technology is fast enough and the experience not too unpleasent, it could revoloutionise our lifestyles, particularly for transport. Most people endure dull, dangerous and unpleasant transport on a regular basis. Imagine using this technology on that? No-one would fly awake any more, long distance rail travel would become competitive again, commutable distances could be extended dramatically.
Piracy = buzzword = whatever you want it to mean.
My neighbour pirated my parking space. That guy pirated my seat on the train. All it means is 'they've got my toys, mummy'.
In the UK, we have big posters at cinemas which declare 'Piracy funds Terrorism'. Which is beautiful, since its 100% true, and depends completely on people misunderstanding it.
That only makes sense from an economic point of view. People don't think adverts = micropayents, they think advert = free, and will consume as a result.
/.
Why will the content be better when people pay for it? people vote with their feet now not their wallets but they still vote.
besides i like the idea of pepsi not having my cc details and more just so I can read
we shouldn't complain. it won't be long before they give up all pretence at providing a service, and just take all the seats, lights and other nonessentials out, and double the fares.
but you'll still be able to pay for wifi.
Having been doing that line for last 2 years, and working with others who've been doing it much longer, I can tell you that your experience is very accurate. Even when you know in detail which services are the best and worst, you cannot be sure enough of getting a seat to bring your laptop, even when travelling 45mins+delays each way.
So this service is worthless for maybe 60-70% of commuters straight off. And how many of that last 30% have laptops? 1 in 10? Now how many are going to spring for WiMax cards and huge fees? give it a over generous 1 in 10 of those. Now you're down to 0.3% of passengers who might be interested. Thats maybe a couple of people per train max who might be interested.
At least there won't be much competition for the bandwidth - anyone who uses it will have to themselves!
That's interesting actually, since the only browser unlikely to be misrepresenting itself is therefore IE, and the only browser likely to used by force is also IE - so therefore IE represents at most just 18.9%, and likely less, and is partly used by those who would rather not.
So, on slashdot, we can say that IE has effectively lost the race.
That would only work until the next bridge, a lot of the bridges on the london-brighton line have less than a foot of clearance... better learn to duck fast.
There is a financial incentive to get new trains, just not _good_ new trains. Which is why the Southern/Thameslink area has a large number of the ultra cheap cattletruck 5 across electrostar trains, the ones that are almost worse than the 60s slam doors. The incentive is this: electric doors don't open once the driver hits the button. So instead of requiring inadequate platform staff that abuse the passengers, you can have no platform staff at all - a big cost saving.
Sorry you're living in a cave ... I'm currently capped at 1mb up/7.5 mb down
Or the rest of the world? france, s korea, scandavia and parts of the US have speeds like this, but not all of us do.
In England, the fastest home user broadband for sale is 4mb/sec down, 0.5mb/sec up. Most are 512k - 1mb down, 256k up. My dad has a cap of 750mb... that's his monthly usage allowance for his DSL...
my bad; not specific. I meant IT budget, being hardware and software. From what I understand from my friend in the IT department of a large school, that is approximately how their budget is spent. The budget for staff is allocated above them, but I would image that equals or exceeds their budget for equipment. I'm on London, England, though, not Indianapolis; things may be different there.
I agree with you that the teaching is at fault; word processing could equally be taught on a number of packages, but isn't.
It's the old "No-one ever got fired for buying IBM" mindset (except now it's Microsoft).
Better to waste millions/billions of taxpayer money on indoctrinating our children than go out on a limb, even for better education. Of course, windows admins are cheap and 'linux is hard' (meaning I have wasted countless hours on windows, i'm not doing it again), becuase of the culture of windows... which the school is recreating in a vicious circle.
One day, perhaps the FLOSS community can break the circle of 'nothing but microsoft, because there is nothing but microsoft', but until then, you've not got a hope.
We have a million miles to go before we can stop teaching applications and start teaching skills.
... and so on. You can think of a million examples.
You ask a school teacher why 40% of their budget is spent on microsoft products, and the only answer is: "That's what the industry uses, we'd be failing our kids if we taught them anything else". Hence our kids come out knowing MS Word, not word processing, MS Excel, not spreadsheets, and so on, and those kids will be buying MS software for life.
The comparisons are easy: Imagine a school that taught how to use BIC biro, not how to write, a school that taught B&Q tools, not woodwork, how to use Nike sports gear...
You're quite right - I have no idea about costing real world robots, but I think that is a market issue.
I think it will require radical changes in the way we design and think about things, but its proven possible to achieve - ATMs and other vending machines and printing are some of the more successful ones that I can think of.
In most cases I think that it is the flexability of humans that wins out - most of the situations you mentioned, the task varies too much to be automated properly yet - e.g. street sweepers have to navigate obscure obstacles and deal with a multitude of subtly different targets.
But, for example, how about robots to prepare fast food? It's a straight forward repetative task which a machine can be designed for - non-trivial perhaps, but well within todays technology.
Humans require various costs above their salary, even subtle things such as increased work space, which may be valuable. I think it is already feasible for, say, McDonalds in ultra busy areas (such as Oxford Street, London).
The way you pay for robots is very different too. Robots require a huge up front design cost, a noticable investment to buy, and a smaller amount to run - varying quality of design probably affects maintainence costs the most.
There are various subtle improvements that robots can bring to mundane tasks too, such as the ability to work much longer hours, or at off-peak hours, attention to detail, consistant performance, improved speed and power in some roles, and so on.
This is exactly a prime use for robots, assuming I don't mistunderstand the social aspects involved.
What surprises me is that a relatively complex task in an area where human wages are fairly low should justify the replacement of humans by robots, and yet in countries where wages are sky high, human workers are doing much simpler tasks.
The fact that is appears as surreal as a python sketch obviously shows up my lack of knowledge of other cultures.
I can see that actually. Although nobody watches TV while fetching things from their fridge, plenty of people spend a significant amount of time in their kitchen, and your fridge is basically just a large flat unused surface, which is the point of fridge magnets. Why strew inactive media like shopping lists on the surface when you have 'consumer programming' instead?
At an average office (not mine, i work in central London), I would guess 30-35 is about right here. Perhaps 95% of cars have a inline 4 engine between 1 and 2 litres, diesels are reasonably common, SUVs and minivans (we call them 4x4s and people carriers) are pretty rare for commuters, probably rarer than sports or luxury cars.
Most common vehicles are the Ford Focus/VW Golf&Jetta size cars.
Of course the school runs are a very different story, the jams outside schools are probably down to around 10-15mpg, as they are 60-70% SUVs and minivans, doing stop-start journeys.
We do have a whole class of vehicles here which are pretty rare in the US I think, what you refer to as 'sub-compacts' I think - tiny hatchbacks and kiacars (although we don't have kiacar regulations) such as the Ford Fiesta and Citreon Saxo. They are probably the most common after Focus-size cars, and the cheapest, some as little as $10k USD
From the UK, the fuel price on my local forecourt this morning was £0.85 per litre, which is $6.02 per US gallon.
And we have virtually NO alternative fuel cars in this country - probably less per head than the US, Land of the (almost) Free fuel.
Switching to alt-fuel vehicles needs three things: Good infrastructure (every gas station), price incentives, and time.
And you can boost fuel prices a long way before there is a real price incentive, since alt-fuel vehicles are more expensive and usually inferior in some ways (things like cargo capacity etc).
will the OS creators have to start making their software secure?
All commercial operating systems are written to the point where the security is just good enough to sell the product and no further.
When operating systems are tied to the product or the vendor has a monopoly on their market then the point of 'just good enough' is reached long before the end user can regard the product as secure.
I predict: Software security will only become worse as consumor adoption of future devices hostile environments such as the internet increases. Within 10 years, end users will be comfortable with performing routine software maintainence on a myriad of devices they currently consider reliable over the life of the product. This will include: all communications products; vehicles; home automation and security; entertainment systems; electrical white goods and diy tools.
When the dominant multi-purpose operating system can be regarded as usuably secure out of the box for the life time of the product, then I'll reconsider.
Everyones motivated by money, and any org. can potentially fail to support their software. The key difference is, a very small company can afford a fix/mod OSS software, but who can afford to get a multiple-billion turnover company such as Microsoft to even listen, let alone do anything?
Say you find a showstopper in Apache httpd: You can wait and hope, hire your own coder, or contract someone else's coding shop. Any of those are viable, depending on the nature of the problem.
Now say you find an identical showstopper in MS IIS: you can wait and hope... or find a new webserver.
Guess which works out cheaper?
Worse than that, I happened to check it at 1336MB, and then took a screenshot of it at 1337MB. Man this places gets to you after a while
Then you got to the bit that says
"...Promiscuous modes of operation are an abomination, exceeded only by
multicast..."
and thought maybe there was some truth in it?
you would shortly have SEDO (search engine de-optimizer) specialists who charge you to sic their botnets on your competition... no thanks.
No... grandparent said "submit for human review", worst they could do would be waste googles time, since 'the competition' would have to merit google's wrath before takedown occured.
So, SEDO cannot hit Pfizer, only 'Honest Joe's V1Agr@, home of the trillion backlinks', which is hardly a useful no.1 result.
I was using google to search the php.net documentation the other day and the google ad read 'lonely and single? try our dating service...'.
I thought that was a clever ad purchase or a really clever algorithm