dude, that childproof shit doesn't work. Most kids I know, four and up, can get into "childproof packaging". They can read, after all. Most childproof caps and such have instructions on the cap as to how to open.
lol. I can imagine a 5 year old feeling insulted by the childproof seal and opening it on spite. lol.
Agreed. I made the point in a previous post. it's not rational to point at one modality as the culprit but decry the same tactic when others point at gaming as the culprit.
it's a way more complex issue that goes to the core of how we raise children in this country.
Dude, your brain is actively hard wiring until well into adolescence. It may well be possible that there are irreversible effects from early childhood game play. The question to me isn't so much as to whether there is a liklihood, as opposed to... how likely is it that there are NOT neurochemical changes in response to early childhood game play?
Senior citizen brains actively rewire when they learn something new. Takes longer, but it still happens. How does a child's brain respond, when he/she does not have a concrete sense of self to place disparate images in perspective?
I'm just playing devil's advocate. But I hear many arguments in one direction and not enough in the other.
"I've played video games forever and I turned out fine."
If I said that I've used drugs forever and I turned out fine, that wouldn't be impetus for you to think it OK for your children to use them. Sure there are loads of adult drug users, a good number functional. That doesn't obviate the point that there is significant potential injurious effect.
Being rewarded for virtual killing - THERE CAN BE LITTLE GOOD to come from that for a child that is not well-adjusted. Only bad.
Many smokers live long healthy lives. 150,000 die young every year. That's why we tell kids not to smoke.
AGAIN, there can be little good to come from giving a child who is not well-adjusted rewards (by winning a game; online accolades, etc) for playing a game where the goal is to kill. The best case scenario is that it doesn't affect him, which is unlikely.
I'm a gamer, just for reference. We can get down on X-Box Live, if you want - Splinter Cell is my shit. My nephew does not go near it though. He's actually, kinda chubby... when he comes over I take him for a jog in Prospect Park, or we play Sonic Heroes or one of the other shitty games he digs.
To aruge that kids aren't influenced by what they see and do is kind of absurd.
there are both sides to this. just because you as a parent pay attention to the games your child plays doesn't mean your neighbor does. your kid and theirs happen to be friends, and he has every game on earth. your kid will be playing that game.
that's what it meant to be a kid, you wanted to do the very thing your parents said you were too young to do.
which is to say that... this isn't a problem where you can point a finger in one direction and solve it.
Re: NC-17 movies. it's not that you don't let your kids go to NC-17 movies, it's that the movie theater won't let them in. In other words, the point that I'm trying to make is that raising children is inherently social, not isolationist. So when something goes wrong, you can point at a number of places in the pipeline and find fault.
I'm really lucky, because my 9 year old nephew only likes (what I find) boring RPGs where you walk around and talk and level up all day. I play games sometimes, and I like the violent ones. I'd be lying if I said they didn't change me, that I don't feel like I have a better understanding of how to kill, because I do.
maybe in a future world, like next year, all consoles will be thin clients... all games will be server side, and biometrics will determine what tier of games are available to you and/or your kids.
I think you bring up an interesting point? How do youy distribute via BT and generate revenue if you're the license holder?
Do you lock the torrent file and make it available only after payment is rendered? Mask and/or lock torrent files so we don't know who the seed(s) is/are? Subscription service with regular interval torrents released into the wild?
How would a content provider distribute over BT for revenue? Anybody?
i didn't read the article, but I can imagine the idea being:
a. the stability of product X impedes future sales of evolutionary product Y down the line because of insufficient innovation to spur demand for product Y.
That's been the issue with the computing industry, PCs reached a critical mass... certain technologies matured together and the industry figured out what most people would use their computers for. games, communications, media, internet. A ten year old machine can, with some modification, do all of the basic things the average consumer wants to do. relatively stable OS, stable and durable hardware, and there is no need for upgrades. Computers aren't cool like an Ipod, so there is no social pressure to upgrade.
Probably a more apropos analogy would be - the longevity of old products impede the sales of newer ones the same way that healthy people who live longer tend to to have lower birth rates, impeding the production of new people (see: Japan, Germany, et al).
In this instance, the general population doesn't differentiate between a new machine and its bundled OS. So as far as Microsoft is concerned, a new computer purchase is a new purchase of a windows OS.
So I can see how the argument is made that stable products deter revenue down the line, but I can also seethe counter argument. I'm not a logician though, or whatever a skilled logic person would be called.
that's really interesting point you make. a lot of my friends work in financial services, and their laptops all run win2k professional. I thought it odd when somebody would boot up and i'd see the win 2k screen as opposed to xp professional. but different friends, different companies, different hardware vendors, all running win2k.
You bring up a really interesting point about this being a Lifetime survey.
Media in general is consumed and purchased disproportionately by women. Games are the exception, but women are catching up there too, although they tend to like non-combative games more.
I freelance in media, mostly film, but some television. I've done some work for the Viacom empire, and I can tell you that programming for most television is preferentially geared to reflect that heterosexual women and gay men tend to overconsume television programming (viacom is actually preparing a channel devoted to gays). It's no surprise that women have a greater grasp of PVRs, since they are doing all the watching.
Interestingly enough, Japanese men have this unholy obsession with little girls, really young, like 12-15. Schoolgirls. Psychologists thought that this was some kind of mass pedophilia movement, but after some research, it turns out to be something else. Japanese men are overworked, 80-90 hour weeks. They do not consume much media on average in a country where 4 hours each day are devoted to watching TV. So, what happens is that these men are culturally behind the times... they actually have no idea what's going on in their own country, in their own civilization. The working man has become the butt of a collective joke... they all wear the same suits, have no style or sense of individuality. They've effectively been emasculated by their women peers. The men respond by reacting to the women who still respond to their masculinity, namely by using their money to influence underage girls. Ironically enough, it's all because working Japanese men don't consume enough media and are hopelessly "out of touch."
This is completely unrelated, but history, literature, and allegory all convey this same story. The man who swears his allegiance to a woman is emasculated for the world. Samson and Delilah, etc. Bill Gates, not the same since getting married. Paul Allen? Still hardcore. *shrugs*
Average guy gets girlfriend and infrequent head, loses utter control over his PVR and becomes intimately acquainted with "Desperate Housewives" storylines. *shrugs*
Dude, I liked the Hulk too. Actually, parts of it.
some people discuss the notion of comic book movies taking themselves too seriously. It's because comic books take themselves seriously. that's the whole point. Comic books are smart and brooding, but with pictures. Some of the smartest fiction I've read came from comic books.
There was something austere about the film. It was minimalist but very violent. And Nick Nolte was downright creepy in his quiet menace. He was the most terrifying thing in the movie to me, because while it's difficult to imagine a monster like the Hulk really existing, a monster like the man Nolte played in the film can really exist, and I reckon, does actually exist in the world. That's just scary, and I dig it.
dude, thematically and storywise, AI was Spielberg's movie. I'm a huge Kubrick fan; and it's almost an insult to attribute AI to the Kubrick body of work.
No insult to Spielberg and his fans, but Kubrick is a completely different caliber of director.
Prevalent in most recent Spielberg films is the father/son paradigm from the perspective of the son, usually a little boy. Minority Report, War of the Worlds, AI, etc. The theme predominates.
Kubrick is more a "thinking" director, critical, analytical, and Spielberg is "feeling".... more emotive. It's why Spielberg's films have been by far more successful financially. That and the fact that Kubrick was an overly-indulgent editor. Appealing to emotion is a wider net to cast than an appeal to intellect.
I don't disagree with you on the intelligence of their staff. That's exactly my point. Their staff is strong enough to not be interested in reinventing the wheel. They assess the marketplace, and incorporate smart work with cash. That's an immensely smart thing to do. I for one, am not a person who bashes this practice as one that stifles creativity. I think it boosts innovation because small companies can look to big companies as end of the line consumers even if they haven't figured out a way to bring their product to market successfully. Let's face it, a lot of small software are great little tools that are not supported in the consumer marketplace. Smart companies like MSFT and Google and others incorporate them into already existing offerings at no additional or marginal cost to the consumer.
My point is that many look at Google and MSFT as diametrically opposed corporate entities. I contend that they use similar, if not identical, strategies to expand their business.
The point of the article and ensuing discussion is that none of these ideas and extensions to the core business have yet to yield any significant results to the bottom line. That is potentially injurious to Google as a public company, and to the tech sector it now tentpoles.
I'm actually confused as to what you disagree with me on.
google doesn't sell software dude. they give it away for free. thus they don't really compete with MSFT. Also, because they don't do formal releases, instead opting for "soft" releases forever in beta, they obfuscate issues about the quality of any product other than search.
also, they engage in all of the practices that MSFT does: they find small companies with interesting pieces of software, determine how value can be added to search and then buy those companies out. It's exactly what MSFT did.
In regards to innovating, for the most part, they don't even innovate. Their one true innovation is the excellence in search, but for the most part, they enter niche markets where software companies are trying to eek cash out of products, buy them out and release the shit server side for free. Always in beta, and always for free.
Or like GMAIL, offer more for less. Here's a gig of space. Make it seem exclusive even though it's not. Better targeted ads and a group to experiment on endlessly. I often know the content of my emails by looking at the ads before I read them.
And your point about not mattering re: short term and long term investors... is that a joke? Page, Brin, and Schmidt together own about 10 billion worth of stock in a company with an 80 billion market cap. They probably don't even get called on when they raise their hands at the board meetings. You better believe that they care about quarterly earnings, especially if MSN and Yahoo start actively undercutting Google's only consistent source of revenue, which they both can afford to do.
Re: the importance of the chef. LOLOLOLOL... ummm, I don't know, dude.
exactly. it is ambiguous because google itself is uncertain about the long term implications of many of its pieces of software. It all has to connect to search; so it seems like they are building the infrastructure for even more detailed and specific search, all to deliver more ads.
as far as google is concerned... more bits of software, more eyes. More eyes means more ads.
you are right though. making money is the issue.
it should be interesting to note that Brin, Page, and Schmidt have cashed out a significant percentage of their stock - I think about 20% percent each. What they understand is that the speculation for potential is what is going to drive the stock price and keep investors happy.
The downside? there is no downside. Not happy about gmail? fine, as it's technically still in beta. and it's free.
the issue about illegal traffic is it's difficult to determine how many downloaders would have been legitimate consumers. the RIAA's inability to accurately determine the size of the black market means they can't actually tell you how much money they're losing or how much they stand to gain.
what is apparent to me is that record labels have endeavored to make it harder for the casual downloader of illegal music. the traditional p2p networks (emule, kazaa, etc) are damn near useless now because record labels seed them with decoy files. You can find obscure works, classical works, etc. But trying to find any current main label music on those networks is a frustrating task.
Now bit torrent is another matter. There's music all over the torrents, and all current shit is always highly seeded and downloaded.
Your point is a salient one. This is propoganda. All the cool kids are buying music - so should you. *cue trendy kids doing something trendy with an IPOD lookalike device in the trendy ad*
The other thing I'd be interested in knowing is how many artists are selling their music directly to the end user. What's that market like? I'd have to imagine that the decentralization of the music industry would be as worrisome as illegal downloads.
I can imagine that when a TIVO like utility for broadcast and satellite radio becomes common that another hissy fit from the record labels will ensue.
it's interesting you pointed that out. The shuttles themselves don't catastrophically fail.
the platforms themselves are arcanely designed. I'm not an engineer, but my casual knowledge of the science leads me to believe that there are simpler and more cost effective ways of getting astronauts to orbit and delivering payloads, etc. 24,000+ unique tiles in your heat shield cannot be a good thing. The other thing I'm perturbed by is the lack of a redundant heat shield layer (although there might be and I'm just not aware of it). Does anyone know if each tile has its own sensor with temperature tolerance? Can't they just RFID that now - place an RFID sensor in the core of each tile and record the highest temperature attained and change every one that passes a critical value?
Or to be critically redundant, shouldn't they change every tile after EVERY LAUNCH?
It's the arcane complexity of the platform that is ultimately the space shuttle's shortcoming. It wasn't designed to scale well nor to be an evolutionary trunk to advanced space flight design.
Anybody ever play EMPIRE EARTH? In Deathmatch mode, you can defeat an opposing country in two ways: destroy all capitals, buildings, and military units... or you can build three WONDERS and defend them for a thousand years. IMO the space shuttle was designed to be a wonder, an indisputable artifact of US superiority designed with the cold war in mind.
It's the platform itself that is old. It's an arcane design for an analog world. It's like apples and oranges, trying to maintain that. The platform has outlived the meager slice of usefulness it had.
not necessarily true. Mcdonald's has had a $1 menu in Harlem since I was a kid. $2.14 would get you a double cheeseburger and fries. I know because I ate that all through high school. White Castle's damn near gave those burgers away. 6 burgers - 2 bucks... and that was in the mid 90s.
all of these fast food places scale their prices for the communities they serve.
you could probably produce a cheaper meal, but you'd still have to buy ingredients in sufficient quantity to produce per meal savings.
then we'd have to agree upon what qualifies as a healthy meal. If we're talking ramen noodles or something like that, then it can probably be done.
new york city has the summer lunch program. any kid can go to a public school and get a free lunch in the summer. it was burdensome on my mom in the summer as she had to feed us three times a day instead of one. so we ate at school the whole summer. it was a good program too, because if I correctly recall, they continued it even after summer school ended. It would be late summer and all the really poor kids would stream into the empty lunchroom around lunchtime, and they'd feed us.
agreed completely. its why i made a point of noting that we'd steal chips from the store. that qualified as food for us.
i can give you an example of a meal. we might split a big bag of potato chips and get these things that we called "quarter waters" - these little plastic jugs of flavored sugar water with artificial flavor. Two kids could eat for $1.50-$2.00.
another poster made a point of discussing the rise of obesity in poor neighborhoods.
An interesting study has been done on obesity in New York City. The upper east side is the leanest place in the city (also the richest, per capita). Harlem is the fattest. The border is east 96th street. The rates of obesity and associated degenerative disease quadruple when you CROSS THE STREET. Much of it is due to availability of foods or lack thereof.
i didn't state that i had cable (you can't string cable into welfare hotels), merely that there was deep cable penetration in Harlem at the time and continues to be.
and getting a computer was a sacrifice my mom made because I had some technical aptitude. In exchange, there were some times when there was no food. This is very true.
I agree that urban poverty and rural poverty are two different things.
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I agree with you that we're spoiled.
But perspective is a bitch. As a kid, you don't create the conditions, you deal with them. And as a kid, I remember distinctly going hungry.
In regards to crackheads, my best friend's mom was an actual crackhead. Mine was an illegal immigrant, so she couldn't work for much of my childhood... or worked sparingly. We'd both be hungry and we'd steal Utz brand potato chips from the bodega on the corner often on a summer night to get through to the next day. hypoglycemic headaches are a bitch when you're a kid. I remember them clearly.
In Harlem now, I can imagine that there are kids like me and my friend... just dealing with conditions that are placed upon them.
I'm apologize for the above. It wasn't meant to be offensive.
I've never been convicted of anything, but I did do a couple of weeks on Rikers here in New York when I was 19 cause my family couldn't make bail after an arrest. I was in PC, but it was communicated to me how crazy it was to be in gen pop.
Again, apologies.
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not so anymore. not in the united states. the very nature of poverty has changed fundamentally.
I grew up in a welfare hotel in Harlem, here in New York. In the 90s, as a teen, I had a computer. So did a good number of my friends. Granted, most of us were in an accelerated academic program, so most of my friends were geeks, but we for the most part had computer systems.
Kids now in my old neighborhood definitely have computers, and penetration is significant as computers are cheap. Local community leaders have impressed on the population the importance of computer literacy and parents have followed suit. And Harlem is as poor as a lot of places in this country.
More importantly, having a computer and an internet connection is immediate distraction from poverty. When I was a kid, and to this day, cable penetration was very high, especially given that we had the second lowest per capita income in the city. It's the same reason drugs flourish in poor communities. When you're poor, you pay a premium for distraction. Computers these days are a relatively cheap distraction.
and so you understand, I remember times when my computer was new and our refrigerator was empty. I can imagine it not being different now for some kids in Harlem and other poor places in the country.
it's a vexing issue in the US. Voters tend to for the most part, be out of touch with the masses. How ironic is that?
First off, I think that we're at the point in the US where we have to determine exactly what we mean by incarceration. Is it punitive or rehabilitative? My understanding of the philosphical precepts behind American incarceration (please correct if I'm wrong) is that one enters into an implied contract as a citizen to respect the rights of fellow citizens. Breaking that contract is cause for removal from society in order to PROTECT THE RIGHTS of your fellow citizens, not to punish you, the perpetrator. My thinking is that it was designed as a social quarantine.
That said, non-violent offenders should in no way be considered and/or put together with those who are violent. It's simply absurd. An example of absurd sentencing laws are the Rockefeller drug laws in New York state that carry strict sentencing requirements for offenders, most of whom tend to be non-violent.
I can imagine in a fully productive society, similarly minded criminals are grouped together and rehabilitated in a manner that allows them to build some revenue to fall back on upon release.
In regards to the benign nature of virus deploymnet, I think that contingency here, as always, is tantamount. Some code that infects medical machines in a hospital could lead to countless deaths, as is code that scrambles the routing of automated NYC subway trains. It's the difference between being stopped for a DUI and running a couple of guys over after a bender. DUI guys get to enjoy the numerous pleasures of walking/public transportation for the next couple of years (no license), and the hit and run guy gets to wash curtains upstate under the watchful eye of Tiny, his short-tempered, amply muscled roomie.
Slashdot Mirror
dude, that childproof shit doesn't work. Most kids I know, four and up, can get into "childproof packaging". They can read, after all. Most childproof caps and such have instructions on the cap as to how to open.
lol. I can imagine a 5 year old feeling insulted by the childproof seal and opening it on spite. lol.
Agreed. I made the point in a previous post. it's not rational to point at one modality as the culprit but decry the same tactic when others point at gaming as the culprit.
it's a way more complex issue that goes to the core of how we raise children in this country.
Dude, your brain is actively hard wiring until well into adolescence. It may well be possible that there are irreversible effects from early childhood game play. The question to me isn't so much as to whether there is a liklihood, as opposed to... how likely is it that there are NOT neurochemical changes in response to early childhood game play?
Senior citizen brains actively rewire when they learn something new. Takes longer, but it still happens. How does a child's brain respond, when he/she does not have a concrete sense of self to place disparate images in perspective?
I'm just playing devil's advocate. But I hear many arguments in one direction and not enough in the other.
This is faulty logic though.
"I've played video games forever and I turned out fine."
If I said that I've used drugs forever and I turned out fine, that wouldn't be impetus for you to think it OK for your children to use them. Sure there are loads of adult drug users, a good number functional. That doesn't obviate the point that there is significant potential injurious effect.
Being rewarded for virtual killing - THERE CAN BE LITTLE GOOD to come from that for a child that is not well-adjusted. Only bad.
Many smokers live long healthy lives. 150,000 die young every year. That's why we tell kids not to smoke.
AGAIN, there can be little good to come from giving a child who is not well-adjusted rewards (by winning a game; online accolades, etc) for playing a game where the goal is to kill. The best case scenario is that it doesn't affect him, which is unlikely.
I'm a gamer, just for reference. We can get down on X-Box Live, if you want - Splinter Cell is my shit. My nephew does not go near it though. He's actually, kinda chubby... when he comes over I take him for a jog in Prospect Park, or we play Sonic Heroes or one of the other shitty games he digs.
To aruge that kids aren't influenced by what they see and do is kind of absurd.
there are both sides to this. just because you as a parent pay attention to the games your child plays doesn't mean your neighbor does. your kid and theirs happen to be friends, and he has every game on earth. your kid will be playing that game.
that's what it meant to be a kid, you wanted to do the very thing your parents said you were too young to do.
which is to say that... this isn't a problem where you can point a finger in one direction and solve it.
Re: NC-17 movies. it's not that you don't let your kids go to NC-17 movies, it's that the movie theater won't let them in. In other words, the point that I'm trying to make is that raising children is inherently social, not isolationist. So when something goes wrong, you can point at a number of places in the pipeline and find fault.
I'm really lucky, because my 9 year old nephew only likes (what I find) boring RPGs where you walk around and talk and level up all day. I play games sometimes, and I like the violent ones. I'd be lying if I said they didn't change me, that I don't feel like I have a better understanding of how to kill, because I do.
maybe in a future world, like next year, all consoles will be thin clients... all games will be server side, and biometrics will determine what tier of games are available to you and/or your kids.
I think you bring up an interesting point? How do youy distribute via BT and generate revenue if you're the license holder?
Do you lock the torrent file and make it available only after payment is rendered? Mask and/or lock torrent files so we don't know who the seed(s) is/are? Subscription service with regular interval torrents released into the wild?
How would a content provider distribute over BT for revenue? Anybody?
i didn't read the article, but I can imagine the idea being:
a. the stability of product X impedes future sales of evolutionary product Y down the line because of insufficient innovation to spur demand for product Y.
That's been the issue with the computing industry, PCs reached a critical mass... certain technologies matured together and the industry figured out what most people would use their computers for. games, communications, media, internet. A ten year old machine can, with some modification, do all of the basic things the average consumer wants to do. relatively stable OS, stable and durable hardware, and there is no need for upgrades. Computers aren't cool like an Ipod, so there is no social pressure to upgrade.
Probably a more apropos analogy would be - the longevity of old products impede the sales of newer ones the same way that healthy people who live longer tend to to have lower birth rates, impeding the production of new people (see: Japan, Germany, et al).
In this instance, the general population doesn't differentiate between a new machine and its bundled OS. So as far as Microsoft is concerned, a new computer purchase is a new purchase of a windows OS.
So I can see how the argument is made that stable products deter revenue down the line, but I can also seethe counter argument. I'm not a logician though, or whatever a skilled logic person would be called.
that's really interesting point you make. a lot of my friends work in financial services, and their laptops all run win2k professional. I thought it odd when somebody would boot up and i'd see the win 2k screen as opposed to xp professional. but different friends, different companies, different hardware vendors, all running win2k.
"Marriage is like a cage; one sees the birds outside desperate to get in, and those inside desperate to get out." -- Montaigne
minutes after I post a rambling entry, the above is the slashdot quote. i'm impressed.
You bring up a really interesting point about this being a Lifetime survey.
Media in general is consumed and purchased disproportionately by women. Games are the exception, but women are catching up there too, although they tend to like non-combative games more.
I freelance in media, mostly film, but some television. I've done some work for the Viacom empire, and I can tell you that programming for most television is preferentially geared to reflect that heterosexual women and gay men tend to overconsume television programming (viacom is actually preparing a channel devoted to gays). It's no surprise that women have a greater grasp of PVRs, since they are doing all the watching.
Interestingly enough, Japanese men have this unholy obsession with little girls, really young, like 12-15. Schoolgirls. Psychologists thought that this was some kind of mass pedophilia movement, but after some research, it turns out to be something else. Japanese men are overworked, 80-90 hour weeks. They do not consume much media on average in a country where 4 hours each day are devoted to watching TV. So, what happens is that these men are culturally behind the times... they actually have no idea what's going on in their own country, in their own civilization. The working man has become the butt of a collective joke... they all wear the same suits, have no style or sense of individuality. They've effectively been emasculated by their women peers. The men respond by reacting to the women who still respond to their masculinity, namely by using their money to influence underage girls. Ironically enough, it's all because working Japanese men don't consume enough media and are hopelessly "out of touch."
This is completely unrelated, but history, literature, and allegory all convey this same story. The man who swears his allegiance to a woman is emasculated for the world. Samson and Delilah, etc. Bill Gates, not the same since getting married. Paul Allen? Still hardcore. *shrugs*
Average guy gets girlfriend and infrequent head, loses utter control over his PVR and becomes intimately acquainted with "Desperate Housewives" storylines. *shrugs*
Dude, I liked the Hulk too. Actually, parts of it.
some people discuss the notion of comic book movies taking themselves too seriously. It's because comic books take themselves seriously. that's the whole point. Comic books are smart and brooding, but with pictures. Some of the smartest fiction I've read came from comic books.
There was something austere about the film. It was minimalist but very violent. And Nick Nolte was downright creepy in his quiet menace. He was the most terrifying thing in the movie to me, because while it's difficult to imagine a monster like the Hulk really existing, a monster like the man Nolte played in the film can really exist, and I reckon, does actually exist in the world. That's just scary, and I dig it.
Good flick, that Hulk.
Fantastic Four sucked.
dude, thematically and storywise, AI was Spielberg's movie. I'm a huge Kubrick fan; and it's almost an insult to attribute AI to the Kubrick body of work.
No insult to Spielberg and his fans, but Kubrick is a completely different caliber of director.
Prevalent in most recent Spielberg films is the father/son paradigm from the perspective of the son, usually a little boy. Minority Report, War of the Worlds, AI, etc. The theme predominates.
Kubrick is more a "thinking" director, critical, analytical, and Spielberg is "feeling".... more emotive. It's why Spielberg's films have been by far more successful financially. That and the fact that Kubrick was an overly-indulgent editor. Appealing to emotion is a wider net to cast than an appeal to intellect.
I don't disagree with you on the intelligence of their staff. That's exactly my point. Their staff is strong enough to not be interested in reinventing the wheel. They assess the marketplace, and incorporate smart work with cash. That's an immensely smart thing to do. I for one, am not a person who bashes this practice as one that stifles creativity. I think it boosts innovation because small companies can look to big companies as end of the line consumers even if they haven't figured out a way to bring their product to market successfully. Let's face it, a lot of small software are great little tools that are not supported in the consumer marketplace. Smart companies like MSFT and Google and others incorporate them into already existing offerings at no additional or marginal cost to the consumer.
My point is that many look at Google and MSFT as diametrically opposed corporate entities. I contend that they use similar, if not identical, strategies to expand their business.
The point of the article and ensuing discussion is that none of these ideas and extensions to the core business have yet to yield any significant results to the bottom line. That is potentially injurious to Google as a public company, and to the tech sector it now tentpoles.
I'm actually confused as to what you disagree with me on.
google doesn't sell software dude. they give it away for free. thus they don't really compete with MSFT. Also, because they don't do formal releases, instead opting for "soft" releases forever in beta, they obfuscate issues about the quality of any product other than search.
also, they engage in all of the practices that MSFT does: they find small companies with interesting pieces of software, determine how value can be added to search and then buy those companies out. It's exactly what MSFT did.
In regards to innovating, for the most part, they don't even innovate. Their one true innovation is the excellence in search, but for the most part, they enter niche markets where software companies are trying to eek cash out of products, buy them out and release the shit server side for free. Always in beta, and always for free.
Or like GMAIL, offer more for less. Here's a gig of space. Make it seem exclusive even though it's not. Better targeted ads and a group to experiment on endlessly. I often know the content of my emails by looking at the ads before I read them.
And your point about not mattering re: short term and long term investors... is that a joke? Page, Brin, and Schmidt together own about 10 billion worth of stock in a company with an 80 billion market cap. They probably don't even get called on when they raise their hands at the board meetings. You better believe that they care about quarterly earnings, especially if MSN and Yahoo start actively undercutting Google's only consistent source of revenue, which they both can afford to do.
Re: the importance of the chef. LOLOLOLOL... ummm, I don't know, dude.
exactly. it is ambiguous because google itself is uncertain about the long term implications of many of its pieces of software. It all has to connect to search; so it seems like they are building the infrastructure for even more detailed and specific search, all to deliver more ads.
as far as google is concerned... more bits of software, more eyes. More eyes means more ads.
you are right though. making money is the issue.
it should be interesting to note that Brin, Page, and Schmidt have cashed out a significant percentage of their stock - I think about 20% percent each. What they understand is that the speculation for potential is what is going to drive the stock price and keep investors happy.
The downside? there is no downside. Not happy about gmail? fine, as it's technically still in beta. and it's free.
the issue about illegal traffic is it's difficult to determine how many downloaders would have been legitimate consumers. the RIAA's inability to accurately determine the size of the black market means they can't actually tell you how much money they're losing or how much they stand to gain.
what is apparent to me is that record labels have endeavored to make it harder for the casual downloader of illegal music. the traditional p2p networks (emule, kazaa, etc) are damn near useless now because record labels seed them with decoy files. You can find obscure works, classical works, etc. But trying to find any current main label music on those networks is a frustrating task.
Now bit torrent is another matter. There's music all over the torrents, and all current shit is always highly seeded and downloaded.
Your point is a salient one. This is propoganda. All the cool kids are buying music - so should you. *cue trendy kids doing something trendy with an IPOD lookalike device in the trendy ad*
The other thing I'd be interested in knowing is how many artists are selling their music directly to the end user. What's that market like? I'd have to imagine that the decentralization of the music industry would be as worrisome as illegal downloads.
I can imagine that when a TIVO like utility for broadcast and satellite radio becomes common that another hissy fit from the record labels will ensue.
it's interesting you pointed that out. The shuttles themselves don't catastrophically fail.
the platforms themselves are arcanely designed. I'm not an engineer, but my casual knowledge of the science leads me to believe that there are simpler and more cost effective ways of getting astronauts to orbit and delivering payloads, etc. 24,000+ unique tiles in your heat shield cannot be a good thing. The other thing I'm perturbed by is the lack of a redundant heat shield layer (although there might be and I'm just not aware of it). Does anyone know if each tile has its own sensor with temperature tolerance? Can't they just RFID that now - place an RFID sensor in the core of each tile and record the highest temperature attained and change every one that passes a critical value?
Or to be critically redundant, shouldn't they change every tile after EVERY LAUNCH?
It's the arcane complexity of the platform that is ultimately the space shuttle's shortcoming. It wasn't designed to scale well nor to be an evolutionary trunk to advanced space flight design.
Anybody ever play EMPIRE EARTH? In Deathmatch mode, you can defeat an opposing country in two ways: destroy all capitals, buildings, and military units... or you can build three WONDERS and defend them for a thousand years. IMO the space shuttle was designed to be a wonder, an indisputable artifact of US superiority designed with the cold war in mind.
It's the platform itself that is old. It's an arcane design for an analog world. It's like apples and oranges, trying to maintain that. The platform has outlived the meager slice of usefulness it had.
not necessarily true. Mcdonald's has had a $1 menu in Harlem since I was a kid. $2.14 would get you a double cheeseburger and fries. I know because I ate that all through high school. White Castle's damn near gave those burgers away. 6 burgers - 2 bucks... and that was in the mid 90s.
all of these fast food places scale their prices for the communities they serve.
you could probably produce a cheaper meal, but you'd still have to buy ingredients in sufficient quantity to produce per meal savings.
then we'd have to agree upon what qualifies as a healthy meal. If we're talking ramen noodles or something like that, then it can probably be done.
I had flashbacks from your post.
new york city has the summer lunch program. any kid can go to a public school and get a free lunch in the summer. it was burdensome on my mom in the summer as she had to feed us three times a day instead of one. so we ate at school the whole summer. it was a good program too, because if I correctly recall, they continued it even after summer school ended. It would be late summer and all the really poor kids would stream into the empty lunchroom around lunchtime, and they'd feed us.
agreed completely. its why i made a point of noting that we'd steal chips from the store. that qualified as food for us.
i can give you an example of a meal. we might split a big bag of potato chips and get these things that we called "quarter waters" - these little plastic jugs of flavored sugar water with artificial flavor. Two kids could eat for $1.50-$2.00.
another poster made a point of discussing the rise of obesity in poor neighborhoods.
An interesting study has been done on obesity in New York City. The upper east side is the leanest place in the city (also the richest, per capita). Harlem is the fattest. The border is east 96th street. The rates of obesity and associated degenerative disease quadruple when you CROSS THE STREET. Much of it is due to availability of foods or lack thereof.
i didn't state that i had cable (you can't string cable into welfare hotels), merely that there was deep cable penetration in Harlem at the time and continues to be.
and getting a computer was a sacrifice my mom made because I had some technical aptitude. In exchange, there were some times when there was no food. This is very true.
I agree that urban poverty and rural poverty are two different things.
I agree with you that we're spoiled.
But perspective is a bitch. As a kid, you don't create the conditions, you deal with them. And as a kid, I remember distinctly going hungry.
In regards to crackheads, my best friend's mom was an actual crackhead. Mine was an illegal immigrant, so she couldn't work for much of my childhood... or worked sparingly. We'd both be hungry and we'd steal Utz brand potato chips from the bodega on the corner often on a summer night to get through to the next day. hypoglycemic headaches are a bitch when you're a kid. I remember them clearly.
In Harlem now, I can imagine that there are kids like me and my friend... just dealing with conditions that are placed upon them.
I'm apologize for the above. It wasn't meant to be offensive.
I've never been convicted of anything, but I did do a couple of weeks on Rikers here in New York when I was 19 cause my family couldn't make bail after an arrest. I was in PC, but it was communicated to me how crazy it was to be in gen pop.
Again, apologies.
not so anymore. not in the united states. the very nature of poverty has changed fundamentally.
I grew up in a welfare hotel in Harlem, here in New York. In the 90s, as a teen, I had a computer. So did a good number of my friends. Granted, most of us were in an accelerated academic program, so most of my friends were geeks, but we for the most part had computer systems.
Kids now in my old neighborhood definitely have computers, and penetration is significant as computers are cheap. Local community leaders have impressed on the population the importance of computer literacy and parents have followed suit.
And Harlem is as poor as a lot of places in this country.
More importantly, having a computer and an internet connection is immediate distraction from poverty. When I was a kid, and to this day, cable penetration was very high, especially given that we had the second lowest per capita income in the city. It's the same reason drugs flourish in poor communities. When you're poor, you pay a premium for distraction. Computers these days are a relatively cheap distraction.
and so you understand, I remember times when my computer was new and our refrigerator was empty. I can imagine it not being different now for some kids in Harlem and other poor places in the country.
i agree with you.
it's a vexing issue in the US. Voters tend to for the most part, be out of touch with the masses. How ironic is that?
First off, I think that we're at the point in the US where we have to determine exactly what we mean by incarceration. Is it punitive or rehabilitative? My understanding of the philosphical precepts behind American incarceration (please correct if I'm wrong) is that one enters into an implied contract as a citizen to respect the rights of fellow citizens. Breaking that contract is cause for removal from society in order to PROTECT THE RIGHTS of your fellow citizens, not to punish you, the perpetrator. My thinking is that it was designed as a social quarantine.
That said, non-violent offenders should in no way be considered and/or put together with those who are violent. It's simply absurd. An example of absurd sentencing laws are the Rockefeller drug laws in New York state that carry strict sentencing requirements for offenders, most of whom tend to be non-violent.
I can imagine in a fully productive society, similarly minded criminals are grouped together and rehabilitated in a manner that allows them to build some revenue to fall back on upon release.
In regards to the benign nature of virus deploymnet, I think that contingency here, as always, is tantamount. Some code that infects medical machines in a hospital could lead to countless deaths, as is code that scrambles the routing of automated NYC subway trains. It's the difference between being stopped for a DUI and running a couple of guys over after a bender. DUI guys get to enjoy the numerous pleasures of walking/public transportation for the next couple of years (no license), and the hit and run guy gets to wash curtains upstate under the watchful eye of Tiny, his short-tempered, amply muscled roomie.