gp is right...You shouldn't have to look up instructions on how to change a basic setting. It irritates the hell out of me when FF does crap like this. You can add an "Advanced Configuration Options" button that will provide this sort of functionality without forcing the user to remember a piece of command syntax.
BlueParrot is 100% correct; if we reprocessed our nuclear waste it would virtually eliminate our waste storage problems. The final product would be much less radioactive, and degrade much more quickly.
The only reason it's not done is that re-enrichment produces large amounts of bomb-grade material, which could theoretically be stolen and used to make a nuke, as opposed to our normal waste which is pretty much useless.
This is getting to be a poorer and poorer excuse as time goes on, as more and more unstable countries learn to do the bomb thing for themselves. All we're really doing is saddling ourselves with a nasty radioactive waste problem.
1% is pretty good in the real world...Most hardware failure rates for hand held devices are much higher than that.
As far as 99.9% certainty...It's almost impossible to get that good in the real world. What would be your standard for guilt? Eyewitnesses, fingerprints, photos; for the most part they're not 99.9% accurate for identification purposes.
It's an ugly inductive world. You're never going to be 100%
It's an old idea, but there is nothing especially wrong with the idea itself...A stable, powerful computer with a rock solid operating system, supported by the sort of technical support only an old school provider like HP, IBM, or Sun can provide.
If you deal with money, it doesn't seem like a bad idea at all. I mean, keep your financials database on a Windows system? Are you nuts? Keep your finances in MySQL, running on Linux? I don't think so. Oracle on Linux, maybe, but what about the hardware? Going to buy yourself a nice Dell? (pause for laughter)
Buying a sexy mainframe with real hardware support, the kind where they send out a guy who knows what he's doing, 3 minutes after you call, and he's got the new part installed in an hour and a half or your money back...That stuff is priceless if you really really need your system to be reliable. I can definitely see why they're still around.
If they're only doing make work for a salary, then yes, it's wasted. I mean, every business in America could employ hundreds of programmers, if we just made it so you could only use the software created by your own people.
Of course, then they'd all go out of business, and there would be no work for any programmers.
It's a much better idea to put more and more useful code out there. Companies will pick it up, and hire someone to expand and maintain it to their needs. My ability to deploy and extend OSS turned out to be valuable enough to my company that they tasked me with doing more of it, and hired another guy to take over some of my other job responsibilities.
It's hard to swallow a bunch of Republicans calling anyone elses preachers prejudiced...I mean, McCain has completely backed down on his criticisms of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, and it's hard to find more die-hard hate mongers than those jokers, especially in the context of the 9/11 remarks from Obama's preacher that have everyone so het up...They both blamed it on homosexuals, iirc. And they're just the tip of the iceberg...
Come on. Pressuring someone into signing an unfair contract isn't getting screwed in your world? Lot of times these people aren't savvy, and they aren't going in assuming that they're going to regret what they sign for decades to come, they're just stoked at the possibility that they're going to have their shot at stardom.
The record companies hit everyone with the same fees, and rationalize it by saying that a large chunk of the artists they promote don't end up being commercially successful...Again I think that just shows that it's a hugely wasteful industry.
These days the giant media blitz is wasted. I used to be on the receiving end of it, and it would blow you away the crap that they send out "For Promotional Use Only"...We'd throw away piles of CDs at the end of the year, give them to people, use them as target practice, and all that for a media outlet that was reasonably insiginificant. Now multiply that by thousands. There is your overhead.
They should put forth a lot less effort, and instead focus on trying to make the music available...Let the hits discover themselves, and they will. Then you can scale up the sales of a ready-made success without all the gambling.
50% of the cost is overhead? You think that's legitimate? Seriously? You're saying that it costs the music industry three times as much as the whole process of creating a single CD to maintain all the CD making equipment, and pay all the guys to run it. The whole point of that equipment is to drive down the per unit cost, but for those costs they might as well just put together a few thousand computers with CD burners in 'em, because they're getting zero benefit.
The reality of the global economy is that all that shipping and transportation is actually cheaper than it is to just go down to the corner aluminum mine and buy a few ingots...When you get something that was shipped from the other side of the world, they didn't just do that so they could puff up the price and provide welfare for Scandinavian cargo ships: they did it because it's cheaper.
Yea, all the other union members might stage a walk out for you...Or something.
Seriously. Artists negotiate their compensations through contracts hammered out between bloodsucking industry lawyers and equally bloodsucking agents employed by the artists; unions have practically nothing to do with that process. Most musician's unions protect people who give piano lessons, and do instrumental music for TV and movies...That they've snagged a piece of every CD ever sold is pretty crazy.
Re:Overhead, look at cereals in your grocery store
on
Must a CD Cost $15.99?
·
· Score: 1
Well, I'll tell you one thing, there is NO WAY that a store pays almost 4 dollars in retail overhead on a 3 dollar box of cereal that has a volume equal to the space occupied by about 30 cds.
Period.
And grocery stores are dealing with perishable goods! They spoil and the retailer has to eat those costs. Some goods need refrigeration, some need watering, some need to be frozen solid! Contrasted to a CD that would be fine in any of those conditions, but requires none of them.
I'm sorry, I don't buy it. CDs are light, low in volume, and require little maintenance.
Having dealt with both sides, it's a hell of a lot cheaper to put together a good album than it is a good game. The tools you need to put together a good album are cheaper, they don't suffer from the pace of obsolescence that afflicts high tech gear. You need the musicians, you need a sound guy (if you're not doing it yourself) and you need a decent recording space.
In the old days, you had to do that in some big recording studio, but these days there isn't any reason you couldn't do it in a sufficiently padded basement with a laptop running some basic music software.
Now some games, obviously, are cheaper than that...Your 60 dollar figure is pretty much aimed at the console market, where the margins are also quite thin since they have all the expenses above, plus a hefty licensing fee. But the vast majority of developers have huge NRE in terms of equipment, artists, programmers, etc, even on failed games that sell poorly.
In short, it's not an apples to apples comparison. It'd be like complaining when a movie DVD is cheaper than a music CD, without acknowledging the tiny difference the box office returns make in the movie profits.
17 cents per CD...I missed where they contributed anything there...Are they singing backup?
They're certainly not doing ~20% of the work that the retailer is doing, or ~13% of the work the artist is doing...Just irritates me. Artists are getting fricking screwed all the time; why do they even have a union?
Yea, but it only takes 3 guys in a garage with a couple grand worth of gear to put out an album that will sell a million copies, whereas few games will ever sell that many, and all big commercial games require many MANY more people to produce.
The economies of scale are what make it ridiculous.
Seems arbitrary. I notice you stuck up for the union...God forbid they feel the pinch of the industry.
All this tells me is that artists should market aggressively with digital format music, and keep CD sales as a small-time sideline; they could charge 5 bucks plus shipping and handling and make a ~3 bucks a pop.
$0.17 Musicians' unions *Typical $0.80 Packaging/manufacturing $0.82 Publishing royalties *e.g The rights to the song itself $0.80 Retail profit *Poor bastards. No wonder they're going out of business. $0.90 Distribution $1.60 Artists' royalties $1.70 Label profit *Hmmmmmm. $2.40 Marketing/promotion *So why don't 20 year old albums cost any less? $2.91 Label overhead *Upgrade your equipment, jesus. $3.89 Retail overhead *Because if it weren't for music, they'd be selling crack in that space.
Oh yea...No scam here. I'm not sure if it's just the bloated nature of the business or what, but this is a steaming pile of crap from my perspective. It's a fricking dollar seventy to make it and get it to the store, but the "price" is fifteen bucks?
Breaking down the rest, we notice that all the combined "profits" amount to twice the cost of manufacture and distribution, and that the combined "overhead" is equal to more than all the profit, cost, and distribution combined...I imagine that's calcuated on the costs to maintain the machinery, the retail space, etc, that makes all the stuff possible.
The whole thing screams bloated industry to me. Overhead is 50% of the cost? There is something wrong with your model. Fricking newspapers do better than that.
Nice to see the evil of Wal-Mart being turned to a good purpose (subjugating the recording industry). Something nice about the world when two wrongs do make a right. One choice quote: "For the music industry, having such a dominant retailer is like being stuck in a bad marriage." Doesn't that sound like everyone elses relationship with the RIAA?
Nah. Typical hawkish fud. Iran may float on oil, but they import most of their gasoline and are forced to subsidize the cost of it so their citizens can afford to fill up their cars...In short, crude oil isn't much use if you can't refine it, and why the hell would they want to pay a premium to get their own oil back after we refine it for them?
Anyway, there are scarier people out there with nukes already. Anyone who focuses on the middle east is doing it because all that oil is giving them a stiffy.
The curve was applied to those scores, and since the average was obscenely low, a lot of people who should have gotten an obscenely low grade ended up with a C. The testing was automated. If the program worked, you got credit, if it partly worked you got part credit, if there were minor bugs, you had minor points deducted.
I got what I considered to be a low score (58) and I got that score because I'd had another (larger) project due the day before, so I'd turned in the assignment 2 days late, for a 40% grade reduction, and I'd goofed some silly pointer issue and got docked 2 points on top of that.
So yea, the project was C, and C isn't the easiest of languages, but the scores were mediocre for a lot of the projects, way worse than they should have been...I was bitter (in retrospect) because I was taking a brutal course load and still producing 'A' level code, and other people were coasting along with a lax senior-level course load and getting C's for code that wasn't even a good attempt.
Well, considering one of the replies was a guy who did engineering at my school (Rutgers) and says they curved there as well, apparently that was the case...I didn't want to make any statements, because I honestly didn't know.
Not saying it was an easy program...There were more than a dozen sections of CS101 (100+ students in each), and there were only four of the class I was complaining about (~30 students in each), so it's pretty clear they did fail a lot of people. But, imho, the programming wasn't weighted heavily enough.
Had another core class at the same time, the work there was group based, and my group was ranked third out of two sections with two dead weight coders...Me and the other competent guy, we weren't that good, you know? If the two of us were better than 90% of the other 4 man groups, that's a problem.
Meh. Any liberal arts class without a pre-req is pretty much a blow off; the only reason they're out there is to try to expose non-liberal arts majors to culture and females. I took a film class, couldn't be bothered to view half the films, and still got an A. It's no major accomplishment.
Higher-end LA classes can be more challenging, but it really depends on the class and the professor.
Wasn't an engineering class, so the statement does not apply; it's obvious from viewing commercial software that CS isn't held to the same standards as engineering. Still it irked the crap out of me because I ended up scraping a low B due mainly to test scores, while people who couldn't even do trivial code had about the same grades thanks to the greater curve for programming assignments.
Sure, CS isn't all about code, but Principles of Programming Languages pretty much was, and the inability to write the sort of code that can be written in two weeks is a pretty serious issue when you're in a 400 level class.
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gp is right...You shouldn't have to look up instructions on how to change a basic setting. It irritates the hell out of me when FF does crap like this. You can add an "Advanced Configuration Options" button that will provide this sort of functionality without forcing the user to remember a piece of command syntax.
BlueParrot is 100% correct; if we reprocessed our nuclear waste it would virtually eliminate our waste storage problems. The final product would be much less radioactive, and degrade much more quickly.
The only reason it's not done is that re-enrichment produces large amounts of bomb-grade material, which could theoretically be stolen and used to make a nuke, as opposed to our normal waste which is pretty much useless.
This is getting to be a poorer and poorer excuse as time goes on, as more and more unstable countries learn to do the bomb thing for themselves. All we're really doing is saddling ourselves with a nasty radioactive waste problem.
I mean we know how it goes with those Canadians
1% is pretty good in the real world...Most hardware failure rates for hand held devices are much higher than that.
As far as 99.9% certainty...It's almost impossible to get that good in the real world. What would be your standard for guilt? Eyewitnesses, fingerprints, photos; for the most part they're not 99.9% accurate for identification purposes.
It's an ugly inductive world. You're never going to be 100%
It's an old idea, but there is nothing especially wrong with the idea itself...A stable, powerful computer with a rock solid operating system, supported by the sort of technical support only an old school provider like HP, IBM, or Sun can provide.
If you deal with money, it doesn't seem like a bad idea at all. I mean, keep your financials database on a Windows system? Are you nuts? Keep your finances in MySQL, running on Linux? I don't think so. Oracle on Linux, maybe, but what about the hardware? Going to buy yourself a nice Dell? (pause for laughter)
Buying a sexy mainframe with real hardware support, the kind where they send out a guy who knows what he's doing, 3 minutes after you call, and he's got the new part installed in an hour and a half or your money back...That stuff is priceless if you really really need your system to be reliable. I can definitely see why they're still around.
If they're only doing make work for a salary, then yes, it's wasted. I mean, every business in America could employ hundreds of programmers, if we just made it so you could only use the software created by your own people.
Of course, then they'd all go out of business, and there would be no work for any programmers.
It's a much better idea to put more and more useful code out there. Companies will pick it up, and hire someone to expand and maintain it to their needs. My ability to deploy and extend OSS turned out to be valuable enough to my company that they tasked me with doing more of it, and hired another guy to take over some of my other job responsibilities.
It's hard to swallow a bunch of Republicans calling anyone elses preachers prejudiced...I mean, McCain has completely backed down on his criticisms of Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell, and it's hard to find more die-hard hate mongers than those jokers, especially in the context of the 9/11 remarks from Obama's preacher that have everyone so het up...They both blamed it on homosexuals, iirc. And they're just the tip of the iceberg...
Come on. Pressuring someone into signing an unfair contract isn't getting screwed in your world? Lot of times these people aren't savvy, and they aren't going in assuming that they're going to regret what they sign for decades to come, they're just stoked at the possibility that they're going to have their shot at stardom.
The record companies hit everyone with the same fees, and rationalize it by saying that a large chunk of the artists they promote don't end up being commercially successful...Again I think that just shows that it's a hugely wasteful industry.
These days the giant media blitz is wasted. I used to be on the receiving end of it, and it would blow you away the crap that they send out "For Promotional Use Only"...We'd throw away piles of CDs at the end of the year, give them to people, use them as target practice, and all that for a media outlet that was reasonably insiginificant. Now multiply that by thousands. There is your overhead.
They should put forth a lot less effort, and instead focus on trying to make the music available...Let the hits discover themselves, and they will. Then you can scale up the sales of a ready-made success without all the gambling.
Who wouldn't be? He's paying for benefits he'll never receive, and he's got no choice. I'm sure the baggers pension fund appreciates it.
50% of the cost is overhead? You think that's legitimate? Seriously? You're saying that it costs the music industry three times as much as the whole process of creating a single CD to maintain all the CD making equipment, and pay all the guys to run it. The whole point of that equipment is to drive down the per unit cost, but for those costs they might as well just put together a few thousand computers with CD burners in 'em, because they're getting zero benefit.
The reality of the global economy is that all that shipping and transportation is actually cheaper than it is to just go down to the corner aluminum mine and buy a few ingots...When you get something that was shipped from the other side of the world, they didn't just do that so they could puff up the price and provide welfare for Scandinavian cargo ships: they did it because it's cheaper.
That's where they should come from...Not from every single CD sold. How they copped that deal, I'll never know.
Yea, all the other union members might stage a walk out for you...Or something.
Seriously. Artists negotiate their compensations through contracts hammered out between bloodsucking industry lawyers and equally bloodsucking agents employed by the artists; unions have practically nothing to do with that process. Most musician's unions protect people who give piano lessons, and do instrumental music for TV and movies...That they've snagged a piece of every CD ever sold is pretty crazy.
Well, I'll tell you one thing, there is NO WAY that a store pays almost 4 dollars in retail overhead on a 3 dollar box of cereal that has a volume equal to the space occupied by about 30 cds.
Period.
And grocery stores are dealing with perishable goods! They spoil and the retailer has to eat those costs. Some goods need refrigeration, some need watering, some need to be frozen solid! Contrasted to a CD that would be fine in any of those conditions, but requires none of them.
I'm sorry, I don't buy it. CDs are light, low in volume, and require little maintenance.
No, I think they're evil for driving down prices...I just find that I don't mind in this particular case.
Having dealt with both sides, it's a hell of a lot cheaper to put together a good album than it is a good game. The tools you need to put together a good album are cheaper, they don't suffer from the pace of obsolescence that afflicts high tech gear. You need the musicians, you need a sound guy (if you're not doing it yourself) and you need a decent recording space.
In the old days, you had to do that in some big recording studio, but these days there isn't any reason you couldn't do it in a sufficiently padded basement with a laptop running some basic music software.
Now some games, obviously, are cheaper than that...Your 60 dollar figure is pretty much aimed at the console market, where the margins are also quite thin since they have all the expenses above, plus a hefty licensing fee. But the vast majority of developers have huge NRE in terms of equipment, artists, programmers, etc, even on failed games that sell poorly.
In short, it's not an apples to apples comparison. It'd be like complaining when a movie DVD is cheaper than a music CD, without acknowledging the tiny difference the box office returns make in the movie profits.
17 cents per CD...I missed where they contributed anything there...Are they singing backup?
They're certainly not doing ~20% of the work that the retailer is doing, or ~13% of the work the artist is doing...Just irritates me. Artists are getting fricking screwed all the time; why do they even have a union?
Yea, but it only takes 3 guys in a garage with a couple grand worth of gear to put out an album that will sell a million copies, whereas few games will ever sell that many, and all big commercial games require many MANY more people to produce.
The economies of scale are what make it ridiculous.
Seems arbitrary. I notice you stuck up for the union...God forbid they feel the pinch of the industry.
All this tells me is that artists should market aggressively with digital format music, and keep CD sales as a small-time sideline; they could charge 5 bucks plus shipping and handling and make a ~3 bucks a pop.
$0.17 Musicians' unions *Typical
$0.80 Packaging/manufacturing
$0.82 Publishing royalties *e.g The rights to the song itself
$0.80 Retail profit *Poor bastards. No wonder they're going out of business.
$0.90 Distribution
$1.60 Artists' royalties
$1.70 Label profit *Hmmmmmm.
$2.40 Marketing/promotion *So why don't 20 year old albums cost any less?
$2.91 Label overhead *Upgrade your equipment, jesus.
$3.89 Retail overhead *Because if it weren't for music, they'd be selling crack in that space.
Oh yea...No scam here. I'm not sure if it's just the bloated nature of the business or what, but this is a steaming pile of crap from my perspective. It's a fricking dollar seventy to make it and get it to the store, but the "price" is fifteen bucks?
Breaking down the rest, we notice that all the combined "profits" amount to twice the cost of manufacture and distribution, and that the combined "overhead" is equal to more than all the profit, cost, and distribution combined...I imagine that's calcuated on the costs to maintain the machinery, the retail space, etc, that makes all the stuff possible.
The whole thing screams bloated industry to me. Overhead is 50% of the cost? There is something wrong with your model. Fricking newspapers do better than that.
Nice to see the evil of Wal-Mart being turned to a good purpose (subjugating the recording industry). Something nice about the world when two wrongs do make a right. One choice quote: "For the music industry, having such a dominant retailer is like being stuck in a bad marriage." Doesn't that sound like everyone elses relationship with the RIAA?
Nah. Typical hawkish fud. Iran may float on oil, but they import most of their gasoline and are forced to subsidize the cost of it so their citizens can afford to fill up their cars...In short, crude oil isn't much use if you can't refine it, and why the hell would they want to pay a premium to get their own oil back after we refine it for them?
Anyway, there are scarier people out there with nukes already. Anyone who focuses on the middle east is doing it because all that oil is giving them a stiffy.
The curve was applied to those scores, and since the average was obscenely low, a lot of people who should have gotten an obscenely low grade ended up with a C. The testing was automated. If the program worked, you got credit, if it partly worked you got part credit, if there were minor bugs, you had minor points deducted.
I got what I considered to be a low score (58) and I got that score because I'd had another (larger) project due the day before, so I'd turned in the assignment 2 days late, for a 40% grade reduction, and I'd goofed some silly pointer issue and got docked 2 points on top of that.
So yea, the project was C, and C isn't the easiest of languages, but the scores were mediocre for a lot of the projects, way worse than they should have been...I was bitter (in retrospect) because I was taking a brutal course load and still producing 'A' level code, and other people were coasting along with a lax senior-level course load and getting C's for code that wasn't even a good attempt.
Well, considering one of the replies was a guy who did engineering at my school (Rutgers) and says they curved there as well, apparently that was the case...I didn't want to make any statements, because I honestly didn't know.
Not saying it was an easy program...There were more than a dozen sections of CS101 (100+ students in each), and there were only four of the class I was complaining about (~30 students in each), so it's pretty clear they did fail a lot of people. But, imho, the programming wasn't weighted heavily enough.
Had another core class at the same time, the work there was group based, and my group was ranked third out of two sections with two dead weight coders...Me and the other competent guy, we weren't that good, you know? If the two of us were better than 90% of the other 4 man groups, that's a problem.
Meh. Any liberal arts class without a pre-req is pretty much a blow off; the only reason they're out there is to try to expose non-liberal arts majors to culture and females. I took a film class, couldn't be bothered to view half the films, and still got an A. It's no major accomplishment.
Higher-end LA classes can be more challenging, but it really depends on the class and the professor.
Wasn't an engineering class, so the statement does not apply; it's obvious from viewing commercial software that CS isn't held to the same standards as engineering. Still it irked the crap out of me because I ended up scraping a low B due mainly to test scores, while people who couldn't even do trivial code had about the same grades thanks to the greater curve for programming assignments.
Sure, CS isn't all about code, but Principles of Programming Languages pretty much was, and the inability to write the sort of code that can be written in two weeks is a pretty serious issue when you're in a 400 level class.