Why do they keep requiring new editions when there are plenty of old ones on the used market?
Because there aren't enough old ones on the market. Some books don't get sold back to the bookstore; some are destroyed, some simply deteriorate through use and abuse. By the last printing of a given edition, the publisher has reduced volume well below that required to provide new books to all course-takers. They do this to account for the used books in circulation -- books for which they get no money. If the average textbook gets resold at least twice, then a book sold for $120 is only bought by a third of the people using it. The publisher gets an average of $40/reader. I have to wonder what would happen if they sold the book for $40 or $60. I'm willing to bet more people would buy new, and keep the book. They may even be able to keep their gratuitous update scheme intact.
In some fields of study, particularly technology, textbooks must be updated to reflect the state of the art. In other fields, though, textbooks vendors publish incompatible new editions on purpose, because otherwise every new book is competing against a used copy of itself. Consider the eighth edition calculus book I had to buy as a sophomore. Why do you need seven revisions to a textbook describing a branch of mathematics that hasn't changed in a couple of centuries? Did it really take that many iterations for the publisher and authors get it right?
The absolute best courses I ever took had no textbook. There may have been a lab manual, but the instructor knew the material well enough that he or she simply presented it on the whiteboard. This also kept attendence (and attentiveness) levels very high.
Hmm. I guess internet access, computers, hard drives or DVD storage space, man-hours, and electricity are all completely free now...
Aside from the labor, all of that stuff is part of the established infrastructure of my ordinary life. May as well factor the cost of the road into the cost of my commute. The only consumable is burnable media -- ten or fifteen cents per disk in China.
As to the man-hours, there aren't that many: I will spend time inserting and removing the disk, clicking a few buttons, but burning a disk (like everything else in my life) happens in the background while read Slashdot.
This is the wrong forum for this sort of hyperbole. In just three kiloeyears we've had more interesting trials, including the trials of Socrates, Jesus of Nazareth, the Gang of Four, O.J. Simpson, Claus von Bulow, Hauptmann, Hinkley, Clinton, SCO, blah blah blah. I also rather think the Nuremburg Trials have this one beat cold.
The black market always influences the prices on the legitimate market. The question has always been about a price point that's high enough to attract risk-takers to the criminal markets.
As an example, consider the cost of cigarettes in Canada in the late 1980s. Tax rates were so amazingly high that ordinary people were willing to buy cigarettes smuggled in from the U.S. -- exact duplicates of the "legal" product, sold at a fraction of the price. The black market became ubiquitous and socially accepted. It undercut the legitimate market so badly that the government had to lower taxes so there would be a legal product left to tax.
Now consider a product like a movie, where the cost of reproduction is absurdly low -- zero, in fact, if you just download the movie from the Internet. DVDs in the U.S. are priced to compete with that, and I do in fact buy DVDs of films I could easily download. In China, movies are burned to DVD then sold for $0.5. Studios, trying to compete with that, hope that a price point of three times the black market rate will attract buyers to their legitimate product, thereby making the production of ripoffs unprofitable.
Hashing is a good way to split data up, but now that it's spread across N nodes, you will have a hell of a time joining it back up again. Your reporting queries are now a nightmare of joins and unions.
Say you have a bunch of products, each sold by a different department of your business. So split your data based on a hash on the department, to keep all of a department's information together. Later, a business decision consolidates two departments, or splits a department, or moves a whole slew of products from one department to another. You now have to address each of these issues.
Not to mention keeping certain tables synchronized across all nodes, such as application-wide lookups.
And also not to mention that you now have N, rather than 1, tasks to perform with each update to the system or the application. Scripting will help this, but if one of your instances gets out of sync, or you succumb to the temptation to customize this one node...
It all gets very ugly very quickly. A number of database products support both clustering and replication. Much of this happens behind the scenes: You set it up when you design the schemas, and the application is none the wiser.
Yeah, this is what I get for browsing at +3 -- I don't see the other smartasses. I'm well aware that they will license this and get very rich doing so. They will have big media companies like Time-Warner, Disney, GE and Viacom helping them. TV content providers will lean on cable and satellite companies to make it part of a "compliance suite" where customer access devices that don't include it won't get a signal at all. With customers locked in and once again forced to watch commercials, TV networks and stations can once again charge advertisers high rates.
Nobody should ever think that TV viewers and radio listeners are a station or network's customers. Advertisers are the customers. We, the audience, are product: Networks provide audience to advertisers, and advertizers pay for this service. The network's goal is not to make us happy. It is to make their customers happy. Making it more difficult to avoid their message will make them very happy indeed.
I don't think solitaire, bejewelled, mahjongg, etc. are worth putting in the same category.
The category is games.
It's not gaming, it's killing time.
Gaming is killing time by playing a game that requires a $300 video card, has an inch-thick manual, a 1-800 number and its own Usenet heirarchy. Gaming is what game-playing becomes when participants take their games so seriously that they are no longer games.
Somewhere there's a BBS, maybe it's called "managedot.com", and there's a bunch of managers on there bitching about how IT Speak is invading the management sphere. They complain about "certificate authorities" and "throughput" and how their network was having "collsions." How instead of printers, they now have queues. That they have to use a "proxy" and "configure their SSL." It's all alien and a waste of time.
All specialized realms have their own jargon. Managers deal with a corporation's resources, and employees are a resource that has to get hired, paid, evaluated and either promoted or fired. "Realignment" doesn't strictly mean "round of layoffs," but managers understand that realignments often result in layoffs. Management speak has its share of euphemisms: Sometimes managers have to do unpleasant things that will affect other people's lives. But for the most part, it is nothing more than a specialized vocabulary for dealing with resource issues.
But don't say "paradigm" if you can avoid it. Or "synergy." Finally, don't hesitate to use your pre-existing specialized vocabulary to bullshit your way through bullshit situations.
The USA has 5% of the world's population but uses 25% of the energy.
The United States uses 23.6% of the world's energy to to produce 28.4% of the world's gross domestic product---it seems that the U.S. is actually rather efficient. (My source for these is the CIA's World Fact Book and a rather large PDF from BP).
It ranks 17th in per capita oil consumption. And it uses less energy per capita than Luxembourg, Iceland, and Candada. Why don't you pick on them for a little while?
As has been pointed out elsewhere, a DB crash at Google means little: somebody's web page doesn't get found, or it gets found in eight seconds instead of two. Hardly a disaster.
The Google search engine runs very simple SQL statements. When it comes to very simple statements, MySQL is blindingly fast. Plus, since it's open source, it's very easy for them to customize it to their rather specific needs. Oracle does not provide this option.
But you can bet your favourite shoes they don't use it for their financials and HR. In those arenas corporate officers go to jail when database transactions go wrong. Multibillion dollar corporations don't entrust that to some homebrewed system. They entrust it to known and trustworthy products from companies with decades of application-specific experience.
Oracle is heavyweight. It handles insanely complex transactions applied to insanely huge datasets distributed over multiple, asymmetrical instances in multiple locations. It handles it correctly, and in the hands of a skilled DBA, it handles it fast. It can be tuned in very subtle ways. It complies with standards. It has its own JVM. It runs on everything from laptops to mainframes whose footprint is measured in acres. It has a "trusted" variant where even the DBA and SA can't snoop on the data. It has replication and failover. It's trustworthy in environments where five seconds of downtime per year is unacceptable.
When you absolutely must not screw up your data and your transactions, it's the product to go to. Yes, many or most managers who invest in Oracle are overbuying. Corporate politics require them to act like their project is that important. And so what? Oracle's a known quantity. The rest of the company runs on Oracle, and if their DBA is out sick, there are two more on every floor of the building.
Just because your GPS says there's a passable road in front of you doesn't mean you should trust it instead of your own eyes. I use a GPS on my motorcycle and sometimes the unit neglects to mention that it's routing me onto a gravel road. Watching events unfold on the screen instead of in front of me has had nearly-tragic results on at least one occasion.
In Alaska, my unit's map was off by 200 feet in some places. It knew where I was, just not where the road was -- It looked like I was going 60 MPH through the woods or water on either side of the road.
The moral of the story is that GPS is a navigational aid, and not a substitute for actual navigation skills. There's more than one sailor who's lost his boat because his GPS told him he was far away from the rocks; it comes as no surprise there are drivers losing their cars for the same reasons.
This may be the smartest thing Microsoft has ever done: Not because of what it means to current products, but because of what it means to future MS operating systems.
The biggest reason for all the bugs, compatibility issues, and bloat in Microsoft's operating systems is backwards compatibility. And I have to admit that they've done a commendable job, given the tens of thousands of Windows applications out there, each with multiple versions. Not a perfect job, but I have a few ten-year-old applications running, unrecompiled, on my XP box at home.
Microsoft wants Vista to be excellent, and to break new ground, but they are hobbled by binary compatibility issues with versions of Windows dating back to the 80386 -- and the 8086 in some cases. Instead of being excellent, Vista has been a nightmare. They can eliminate that nightmare, can dramatically reduce the size and complexity of Vista if they were just willing to jetison backwards binary compatibility. And with Virtual Server, they can do just that.
Imagine: Your company lives or dies by an application written by a long-gone vendor, that runs great under NT 3.1 but crashes everything written since. No problem! Boot up NT under a virtual server and run it there. Got a proprietary database that only runs on Solaris x86? Same answer. Your kid's favorite game originally written for Windows 95? Hell, a computer built in 2007 won't even notice Win95's footprint.
In fact, it probably makes sense for Microsoft to ship Vista with new versions of XP, NT, 95, Win3.1, DOS 5.0, and whatever else floats their boat, each recompiled with exactly one device driver for video, keyboard, mouse, disk, CD and network.
So everybody's legacy system problems are solved by Virtual Server. Meanwhile, Vista itself provides a fast, stable, flexible platform for new applications to be built on, and Microsoft has a maintainable operating system, completely unencumbered by their past mistakes, that they can improve on for years to come.
The head terrorists aren't as stupid as people would like to think.
Okay, some of them are dumb. Remember the WTC attack in the early 1990s, when that guy tried to get the deposit back on the truck he used for the bombing?
On the whole, though I don't think anyone believes they're stupid. Evil and misguided, perhaps, but 9/11 had me in awe of the power and elegance of the attack. It was savage and brilliant. Took years to plan. They're True Believers who train other True Believers to die for their Cause.
keep an eye out for the people who pay down the entire balance of their store credit card
...and then max it back out again at a nearby strip club. If I'm gonna die on Thursday, I'm gonna spend Wednesday night exploring the finer things in life---and tucking $20 bills in their G-strings.
I accede to your main point: 9/11 slipped by us because U.S. intelligence was a great big clusterfuck.
I disagree about Pearl Harbor, though. Yes, we had interdepartmental communication failures, just like 2001. In 1941 we knew Yamamoto was planning an attack somewhere, but we were genuinely stunned at the audacity of hitting Pearl Harbor.
They found anomolies in 40 machines? How many machines were there in total?
More to the point, how many machines were examined? TFA says "at least 40" contained votes which were not cast on (what the machine thought was) Election Day. That "at least" makes me think not all machines were examined: Either 40 of them had errors or 40 was arrived at via a statistical method.
An interesting concept: people voting for Bush either lied or did not respond during exit polls, when someone was looking them in the eye and asking them who they voted for. Truthfully, I'd buy that on the hypothesis of generalized liberal guilt---you're supposed to vote for Kerry, but you voted for Bush anyway.
I've heard it called the "PBS effect." This term comes from the Nielsen ratings. People in certain demographics have a tendency to exaggerate how sophisticated a TV viewer they are: They'd rather be thought of as someone who watches "Nova" than admit they really watched "American Idol." Hell, I was a Neilsen family once and I know I put down more PBS than I actually watched, because I wanted it to look like PBS had more viewers than it did.
Oh, and I lie to pollsters all the damned time. Usually the sort of lies I tell in bars---that I'm rich, well-hung, have a job. That sort of thing. Very few polsters have ever asked me how well I'm hung---I just try to mention it in passing.
The reason it's not widely used is because it's slightly more expensive than using 5% uranium-235, and why use an expensive process when you can use a cheaper one.
I'm not sure the fuel costs are significant. The biggest reason is the plutonium---not because it's icky, but because it's useful in nuclear weapons. Back during the Cold War, the Carter administration declared that the U.S. would build no fast-breeder reactors. The decision came down before TMI, and the reason I kept hearing was that any place in the U.S. that produced plutonium was an obvious target for Soviet ICBMs. With no breeder reactors, there were only a handful of "weapons fuel" facilities here, like the Savannah River Plant and Oak Ridge.
In retrospect this reasoning seems silly: No global nuclear war would last long enough to produce fuel for a second salvo.
France uses breeders all the time, right?
For me the real mystery is why environmentalists aren't crazy about this... I guess they just can't see past the N-word.
What does race have to do with atomic energy? But if you think they have an inanimate carbon rod up their butts about "nuclear", try saying "plutonium" around them. Remember that space probe that went up a few years ago that had puh-puh-plutonium on it?
Slashdot Mirror
Because there aren't enough old ones on the market. Some books don't get sold back to the bookstore; some are destroyed, some simply deteriorate through use and abuse. By the last printing of a given edition, the publisher has reduced volume well below that required to provide new books to all course-takers. They do this to account for the used books in circulation -- books for which they get no money. If the average textbook gets resold at least twice, then a book sold for $120 is only bought by a third of the people using it. The publisher gets an average of $40/reader. I have to wonder what would happen if they sold the book for $40 or $60. I'm willing to bet more people would buy new, and keep the book. They may even be able to keep their gratuitous update scheme intact.
In some fields of study, particularly technology, textbooks must be updated to reflect the state of the art. In other fields, though, textbooks vendors publish incompatible new editions on purpose, because otherwise every new book is competing against a used copy of itself. Consider the eighth edition calculus book I had to buy as a sophomore. Why do you need seven revisions to a textbook describing a branch of mathematics that hasn't changed in a couple of centuries? Did it really take that many iterations for the publisher and authors get it right?
The absolute best courses I ever took had no textbook. There may have been a lab manual, but the instructor knew the material well enough that he or she simply presented it on the whiteboard. This also kept attendence (and attentiveness) levels very high.
Aside from the labor, all of that stuff is part of the established infrastructure of my ordinary life. May as well factor the cost of the road into the cost of my commute. The only consumable is burnable media -- ten or fifteen cents per disk in China.
As to the man-hours, there aren't that many: I will spend time inserting and removing the disk, clicking a few buttons, but burning a disk (like everything else in my life) happens in the background while read Slashdot.
This is the wrong forum for this sort of hyperbole. In just three kiloeyears we've had more interesting trials, including the trials of Socrates, Jesus of Nazareth, the Gang of Four, O.J. Simpson, Claus von Bulow, Hauptmann, Hinkley, Clinton, SCO, blah blah blah. I also rather think the Nuremburg Trials have this one beat cold.
As an example, consider the cost of cigarettes in Canada in the late 1980s. Tax rates were so amazingly high that ordinary people were willing to buy cigarettes smuggled in from the U.S. -- exact duplicates of the "legal" product, sold at a fraction of the price. The black market became ubiquitous and socially accepted. It undercut the legitimate market so badly that the government had to lower taxes so there would be a legal product left to tax.
Now consider a product like a movie, where the cost of reproduction is absurdly low -- zero, in fact, if you just download the movie from the Internet. DVDs in the U.S. are priced to compete with that, and I do in fact buy DVDs of films I could easily download. In China, movies are burned to DVD then sold for $0.5. Studios, trying to compete with that, hope that a price point of three times the black market rate will attract buyers to their legitimate product, thereby making the production of ripoffs unprofitable.
Say you have a bunch of products, each sold by a different department of your business. So split your data based on a hash on the department, to keep all of a department's information together. Later, a business decision consolidates two departments, or splits a department, or moves a whole slew of products from one department to another. You now have to address each of these issues.
Not to mention keeping certain tables synchronized across all nodes, such as application-wide lookups.
And also not to mention that you now have N, rather than 1, tasks to perform with each update to the system or the application. Scripting will help this, but if one of your instances gets out of sync, or you succumb to the temptation to customize this one node...
It all gets very ugly very quickly. A number of database products support both clustering and replication. Much of this happens behind the scenes: You set it up when you design the schemas, and the application is none the wiser.
Nobody should ever think that TV viewers and radio listeners are a station or network's customers. Advertisers are the customers. We, the audience, are product: Networks provide audience to advertisers, and advertizers pay for this service. The network's goal is not to make us happy. It is to make their customers happy. Making it more difficult to avoid their message will make them very happy indeed.
This is the best thing that ever happened ever, and I can't wait to buy me a Sony!
The category is games.
It's not gaming, it's killing time.
Gaming is killing time by playing a game that requires a $300 video card, has an inch-thick manual, a 1-800 number and its own Usenet heirarchy. Gaming is what game-playing becomes when participants take their games so seriously that they are no longer games.
I see you've found the tragic flaw in their idea. If only there were some device that could "wipe" the windshield as you deiced it.
But I also note that since the huge amounts of electricity only need to be delivered for a few seconds, that the power problem may be solved by
The only must have Windows software is fdisk.
So you can get rid of Linux?
All specialized realms have their own jargon. Managers deal with a corporation's resources, and employees are a resource that has to get hired, paid, evaluated and either promoted or fired. "Realignment" doesn't strictly mean "round of layoffs," but managers understand that realignments often result in layoffs. Management speak has its share of euphemisms: Sometimes managers have to do unpleasant things that will affect other people's lives. But for the most part, it is nothing more than a specialized vocabulary for dealing with resource issues.
But don't say "paradigm" if you can avoid it. Or "synergy." Finally, don't hesitate to use your pre-existing specialized vocabulary to bullshit your way through bullshit situations.
The United States uses 23.6% of the world's energy to to produce 28.4% of the world's gross domestic product---it seems that the U.S. is actually rather efficient. (My source for these is the CIA's World Fact Book and a rather large PDF from BP).
It ranks 17th in per capita oil consumption. And it uses less energy per capita than Luxembourg, Iceland, and Candada. Why don't you pick on them for a little while?
The Google search engine runs very simple SQL statements. When it comes to very simple statements, MySQL is blindingly fast. Plus, since it's open source, it's very easy for them to customize it to their rather specific needs. Oracle does not provide this option.
But you can bet your favourite shoes they don't use it for their financials and HR. In those arenas corporate officers go to jail when database transactions go wrong. Multibillion dollar corporations don't entrust that to some homebrewed system. They entrust it to known and trustworthy products from companies with decades of application-specific experience.
Oracle is heavyweight. It handles insanely complex transactions applied to insanely huge datasets distributed over multiple, asymmetrical instances in multiple locations. It handles it correctly, and in the hands of a skilled DBA, it handles it fast. It can be tuned in very subtle ways. It complies with standards. It has its own JVM. It runs on everything from laptops to mainframes whose footprint is measured in acres. It has a "trusted" variant where even the DBA and SA can't snoop on the data. It has replication and failover. It's trustworthy in environments where five seconds of downtime per year is unacceptable.
When you absolutely must not screw up your data and your transactions, it's the product to go to. Yes, many or most managers who invest in Oracle are overbuying. Corporate politics require them to act like their project is that important. And so what? Oracle's a known quantity. The rest of the company runs on Oracle, and if their DBA is out sick, there are two more on every floor of the building.
In Alaska, my unit's map was off by 200 feet in some places. It knew where I was, just not where the road was -- It looked like I was going 60 MPH through the woods or water on either side of the road.
The moral of the story is that GPS is a navigational aid, and not a substitute for actual navigation skills. There's more than one sailor who's lost his boat because his GPS told him he was far away from the rocks; it comes as no surprise there are drivers losing their cars for the same reasons.
Job Title: Tyrant
Description: Don't fuck with the Tyrant.
Job Title: Evil Overlord
Description: Fires you for knocking on his door.
Job Title: Pirate Captain
Description: Arrrr!
Yeah, they've had a substantial number of head-rolling clusterfucks on this one. Just file my post under WIBNI.
The biggest reason for all the bugs, compatibility issues, and bloat in Microsoft's operating systems is backwards compatibility. And I have to admit that they've done a commendable job, given the tens of thousands of Windows applications out there, each with multiple versions. Not a perfect job, but I have a few ten-year-old applications running, unrecompiled, on my XP box at home.
Microsoft wants Vista to be excellent, and to break new ground, but they are hobbled by binary compatibility issues with versions of Windows dating back to the 80386 -- and the 8086 in some cases. Instead of being excellent, Vista has been a nightmare. They can eliminate that nightmare, can dramatically reduce the size and complexity of Vista if they were just willing to jetison backwards binary compatibility. And with Virtual Server, they can do just that.
Imagine: Your company lives or dies by an application written by a long-gone vendor, that runs great under NT 3.1 but crashes everything written since. No problem! Boot up NT under a virtual server and run it there. Got a proprietary database that only runs on Solaris x86? Same answer. Your kid's favorite game originally written for Windows 95? Hell, a computer built in 2007 won't even notice Win95's footprint.
In fact, it probably makes sense for Microsoft to ship Vista with new versions of XP, NT, 95, Win3.1, DOS 5.0, and whatever else floats their boat, each recompiled with exactly one device driver for video, keyboard, mouse, disk, CD and network.
So everybody's legacy system problems are solved by Virtual Server. Meanwhile, Vista itself provides a fast, stable, flexible platform for new applications to be built on, and Microsoft has a maintainable operating system, completely unencumbered by their past mistakes, that they can improve on for years to come.
Okay, some of them are dumb. Remember the WTC attack in the early 1990s, when that guy tried to get the deposit back on the truck he used for the bombing?
On the whole, though I don't think anyone believes they're stupid. Evil and misguided, perhaps, but 9/11 had me in awe of the power and elegance of the attack. It was savage and brilliant. Took years to plan. They're True Believers who train other True Believers to die for their Cause.
...and then max it back out again at a nearby strip club. If I'm gonna die on Thursday, I'm gonna spend Wednesday night exploring the finer things in life---and tucking $20 bills in their G-strings.
They're paid by the year.
Yep. They fired them for being gay.
I accede to your main point: 9/11 slipped by us because U.S. intelligence was a great big clusterfuck.
I disagree about Pearl Harbor, though. Yes, we had interdepartmental communication failures, just like 2001. In 1941 we knew Yamamoto was planning an attack somewhere, but we were genuinely stunned at the audacity of hitting Pearl Harbor.
More to the point, how many machines were examined? TFA says "at least 40" contained votes which were not cast on (what the machine thought was) Election Day. That "at least" makes me think not all machines were examined: Either 40 of them had errors or 40 was arrived at via a statistical method.
I've heard it called the "PBS effect." This term comes from the Nielsen ratings. People in certain demographics have a tendency to exaggerate how sophisticated a TV viewer they are: They'd rather be thought of as someone who watches "Nova" than admit they really watched "American Idol." Hell, I was a Neilsen family once and I know I put down more PBS than I actually watched, because I wanted it to look like PBS had more viewers than it did.
Oh, and I lie to pollsters all the damned time. Usually the sort of lies I tell in bars---that I'm rich, well-hung, have a job. That sort of thing. Very few polsters have ever asked me how well I'm hung---I just try to mention it in passing.
I'm not sure the fuel costs are significant. The biggest reason is the plutonium---not because it's icky, but because it's useful in nuclear weapons. Back during the Cold War, the Carter administration declared that the U.S. would build no fast-breeder reactors. The decision came down before TMI, and the reason I kept hearing was that any place in the U.S. that produced plutonium was an obvious target for Soviet ICBMs. With no breeder reactors, there were only a handful of "weapons fuel" facilities here, like the Savannah River Plant and Oak Ridge.
In retrospect this reasoning seems silly: No global nuclear war would last long enough to produce fuel for a second salvo.
France uses breeders all the time, right?
For me the real mystery is why environmentalists aren't crazy about this ... I guess they just can't see past the N-word.
What does race have to do with atomic energy? But if you think they have an inanimate carbon rod up their butts about "nuclear", try saying "plutonium" around them. Remember that space probe that went up a few years ago that had puh-puh-plutonium on it?