It sounds to me like the Amazon business model could make it profitable to add a different sort of middleman -- who'll pick up some of the extra work a publisher normally would, for a fee of course.
Publishers also tend to publish only what they believe will be profitable.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for instance, was only published because the publisher thought it so brilliant they considered it a "duty to humanity" to publish it in a very small run. It ended up wildly successful, and is considered a modern classic.
But, how many similarly great books were never published because the publisher didn't think he could make a buck?
I welcome amazon allowing more avenues to publishing. Although it does decrease the signal to noise ratio a bit, it's also allowed me to find some real gems I wouldn't otherwise have been able to read.
It was modded up because it points out something REALLY nice about new e-book readers.
A lot of classic books are wonderful and you can bet your ass that if people have been reading a book over and over for hundreds of years, it's pretty damned good. Books like The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, etc.
The great thing is you can download these for free. And if you don't like it, no money is lost.
Compare this to the newest NY Times bestseller. It'll cost in excess of $10 even on kindle. And, a quarter way through the book you might just decide "Eh, it's not worth it."
Now that's not to say there aren't some great modern books you should be reading. But, as someone who spends literally thousands a year on reading material, I can see how someone might find it tempting to save money via Project Gutenberg titles.
Well the OP isn't suggesting extending his life. He's suggesting going into suspended animation so he can go see what the future looks like, and if we manage to survive as a society.
If you decide to go get frozen for a thousand years, you're putting an awful lot of trust in the people maintaining your equipment. I remember a story some years back that one of these cryogenic places went bankrupt, and they thawed and buried the bodies.
You face a similar risk if you decide to "time travel" in this manner, and frankly given how volatile the world can be, there's a big chance you'll be forcibly thawed early
Well I would define "snarky" as comments made by someone trying to be a curmudgeon, and a wise ass.
Checking the dictionary, I see I'm right (although they use a bit different phrasing: 1: crotchety, snappish 2: sarcastic, impertinent, or irreverent in tone or manner )
Are you telling me you were NOT being sarcastic, and you really believe the results of this research will be zombies?
While you're being a bit snarky, actually the sterile nature of the fluid will be quite important. We already have staph infections running around hospitals; you might indeed have a situation where people die because they get "bad fluid" much the same way in the early days of HIV you got people who were infected because there was not adequate screening.
In R I just type mydata - read.table("./foo", header=TRUE, sep=",")
What about messing around with models? Python you're either executing your script over and over again, or you're using it in interactive mode, and it gets a bit messy.
I use R because it seems easiest to me. If you can make my life easier with Python, I'm all ears...
Believe it or not, most statisticians are not programming wizards.
Most stats guys use R, matlab, mathematica, or something similar. Even if it takes days to run a program that would take 20 minutes in C. Sort of like how the business guys will use VBA when they need anything, because that's what they know.
Languages like R are used because they are accessible. And once they reach a critical mass, everyone learns them in a field.
Residual standard error: 163.7 on 1581663 degrees of freedom
(137 observations deleted due to missingness) Multiple R-squared: 5.397e-07, Adjusted R-squared: -4.518e-06 F-statistic: 0.1067 on 8 and 1581663 DF, p-value: 0.999
This is why I am not planning on upgrading photoshop again, ever.
Adobe's problem is their software is mostly feature complete. I mean, what else could they possibly add to photoshop to make me want to upgrade? Sure things like puppet warp and content aware fill are cool, but they're kind of gimmicky and don't really justify the cost of an upgrade.
What products are you actually doing tech support for?
If I buy the newest Civ game for $50 there's more than enough profit margin for me to take up 10 minutes of your time. And quite a few other things I want tech support for are much more profitable
For instance, I spend literally thousands of dollars a year on books. I buy only kindle books because I live in vietnam, and forget about finding anything in English (I miss second hand book stores, they were so much kinder to my wallet). Costs are quite low for ebooks so I suspect most of that is profit.
When my kindle screen froze up and stopped responding after only a year, you can bet I sure as hell thought I deserved to talk to a person. (To Amazon's credit, I spoke to a person immediately, and 5 minutes later my replacement was being shipped).
Maybe you could argue that for a $0.99 app there's not enough profit for tech support. But remember, any issue I have probably effects multiple people, and it's in the developers best interest to fix any bugs we might find.
The problem is you as tech support are not differentiating between people with legitimate problems, and people who are lazy.
If someone calls up and asks you to read them the manual, you should be able to tell them to go screw, because I'm waiting in the queue with a genuine issue.
Surprisingly, no one. The guy who made the "joke" argued he made a joke akin to "if you're that dumb you should go jump off a bridge." The new guy (who did have enough common sense to not jump off the bridge) claimed he was just doing what he was told.
As far as the XL pipeline, you bring up a point, maybe this report came out on purpose [of course bought and paid for by the ole trusty oil/gas industry] in order to try and bluff the Administration into building this idiotic pipeline.
:: begin conspiracy theory::
The first step of rehab is removing the addictive substance (in a controlled manner in the case of those things that kill you if you go cold turkey). Let's tell the world that all the oil has disappeared to aliens, and for future energy needs we MUST stop depending on dead dinosaur fuel.
In the last shop I worked with, on April Fool's day, when a new guy asked for a database command he was told "DROP DATABASE *;" thinking no one could be that stupid.
Except he was. Fortunately April Fool's day that year was a friday and IT had the weekend to fix the mess
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds to me like the Amazon business model could make it profitable to add a different sort of middleman -- who'll pick up some of the extra work a publisher normally would, for a fee of course.
Publishers also tend to publish only what they believe will be profitable.
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for instance, was only published because the publisher thought it so brilliant they considered it a "duty to humanity" to publish it in a very small run. It ended up wildly successful, and is considered a modern classic.
But, how many similarly great books were never published because the publisher didn't think he could make a buck?
I welcome amazon allowing more avenues to publishing. Although it does decrease the signal to noise ratio a bit, it's also allowed me to find some real gems I wouldn't otherwise have been able to read.
It was modded up because it points out something REALLY nice about new e-book readers.
A lot of classic books are wonderful and you can bet your ass that if people have been reading a book over and over for hundreds of years, it's pretty damned good. Books like The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, etc.
The great thing is you can download these for free. And if you don't like it, no money is lost.
Compare this to the newest NY Times bestseller. It'll cost in excess of $10 even on kindle. And, a quarter way through the book you might just decide "Eh, it's not worth it."
Now that's not to say there aren't some great modern books you should be reading. But, as someone who spends literally thousands a year on reading material, I can see how someone might find it tempting to save money via Project Gutenberg titles.
Well the OP isn't suggesting extending his life. He's suggesting going into suspended animation so he can go see what the future looks like, and if we manage to survive as a society.
If you decide to go get frozen for a thousand years, you're putting an awful lot of trust in the people maintaining your equipment. I remember a story some years back that one of these cryogenic places went bankrupt, and they thawed and buried the bodies.
You face a similar risk if you decide to "time travel" in this manner, and frankly given how volatile the world can be, there's a big chance you'll be forcibly thawed early
So you're saying all those sci fi books lied to me? :(
Well I would define "snarky" as comments made by someone trying to be a curmudgeon, and a wise ass.
Checking the dictionary, I see I'm right (although they use a bit different phrasing: 1: crotchety, snappish
2: sarcastic, impertinent, or irreverent in tone or manner )
Are you telling me you were NOT being sarcastic, and you really believe the results of this research will be zombies?
Or the word does not mean what you think it means. Or perhaps what you wrote comes across differently then what you intended :P
Traveling at a significant fraction of the speed of light will do the same thing and is possible without said annihilation :P
While you're being a bit snarky, actually the sterile nature of the fluid will be quite important. We already have staph infections running around hospitals; you might indeed have a situation where people die because they get "bad fluid" much the same way in the early days of HIV you got people who were infected because there was not adequate screening.
You'd be better off getting on a space ship going the speed of light for a year.
No need to become a popsicle, and your life will not be dependent on people remembering to pay the electric bill before your thaw date
OK. How about loading of data?
In R I just type mydata - read.table("./foo", header=TRUE, sep=",")
What about messing around with models? Python you're either executing your script over and over again, or you're using it in interactive mode, and it gets a bit messy.
I use R because it seems easiest to me. If you can make my life easier with Python, I'm all ears...
What would you recommend?
Believe it or not, most statisticians are not programming wizards.
Most stats guys use R, matlab, mathematica, or something similar. Even if it takes days to run a program that would take 20 minutes in C. Sort of like how the business guys will use VBA when they need anything, because that's what they know.
Languages like R are used because they are accessible. And once they reach a critical mass, everyone learns them in a field.
Sort of like how Fortran just won't die.
You're just getting a plot. I'm talking about output that looks like this:
Call:
lm(formula = new_day_return ~ prior_day_return + rsi_under_10 +
rsi_under_20 + rsi_under_30 + rsi_over_70 + rsi_over_80 +
rsi_over_90 + fourteen_day_rsi, data = mydata5)
Residuals:
Min 1Q Median 3Q Max
-100 -1 0 1 205700
Coefficients:
Estimate Std. Error t value Pr(>|t|)
(Intercept) -9.845e+01 3.742e+02 -0.263 0.792
prior_day_return -4.143e-04 3.434e-03 -0.121 0.904
rsi_under_10 -1.916e-01 3.798e+00 -0.050 0.960
rsi_under_20 2.195e-02 1.447e+00 0.015 0.988
rsi_under_30 -2.291e-01 6.915e-01 -0.331 0.740
rsi_over_70 -2.364e-01 3.348e-01 -0.706 0.480
rsi_over_80 5.135e-03 4.820e-01 0.011 0.991
rsi_over_90 7.162e-03 8.650e-01 0.008 0.993
fourteen_day_rsi 4.193e-04 3.434e-03 0.122 0.903
Residual standard error: 163.7 on 1581663 degrees of freedom
(137 observations deleted due to missingness)
Multiple R-squared: 5.397e-07, Adjusted R-squared: -4.518e-06
F-statistic: 0.1067 on 8 and 1581663 DF, p-value: 0.999
Using three lines of code I can do a regression in R and get the output, including loading the data.
Python? Fuhgeddaboutit. Can do, but with a lot more code.
Of course, if you're looking to do stuff you'd expect of a normal scripting language, R falls flat on its face.
The solution? R + Python. They talk to each other quite nicely, and you can get the best of both worlds.
Still don't care. Unless you can make buffalo wings from it. ::drools:: mmmm...giant buffalo wings...
...stuff that matters?
You obviously don't play enough Civilization. You can win the game much earlier if you go for the world conquest win instead of the science win.
Duh.
Uh huh.
But it's not the case.
Microsoft isn't overtaking Apple in this niche.
This is why I am not planning on upgrading photoshop again, ever.
Adobe's problem is their software is mostly feature complete. I mean, what else could they possibly add to photoshop to make me want to upgrade? Sure things like puppet warp and content aware fill are cool, but they're kind of gimmicky and don't really justify the cost of an upgrade.
What products are you actually doing tech support for?
If I buy the newest Civ game for $50 there's more than enough profit margin for me to take up 10 minutes of your time. And quite a few other things I want tech support for are much more profitable
For instance, I spend literally thousands of dollars a year on books. I buy only kindle books because I live in vietnam, and forget about finding anything in English (I miss second hand book stores, they were so much kinder to my wallet). Costs are quite low for ebooks so I suspect most of that is profit.
When my kindle screen froze up and stopped responding after only a year, you can bet I sure as hell thought I deserved to talk to a person. (To Amazon's credit, I spoke to a person immediately, and 5 minutes later my replacement was being shipped).
Maybe you could argue that for a $0.99 app there's not enough profit for tech support. But remember, any issue I have probably effects multiple people, and it's in the developers best interest to fix any bugs we might find.
The problem is you as tech support are not differentiating between people with legitimate problems, and people who are lazy.
If someone calls up and asks you to read them the manual, you should be able to tell them to go screw, because I'm waiting in the queue with a genuine issue.
Surprisingly, no one. The guy who made the "joke" argued he made a joke akin to "if you're that dumb you should go jump off a bridge." The new guy (who did have enough common sense to not jump off the bridge) claimed he was just doing what he was told.
As far as the XL pipeline, you bring up a point, maybe this report came out on purpose [of course bought and paid for by the ole trusty oil/gas industry] in order to try and bluff the Administration into building this idiotic pipeline.
:: begin conspiracy theory ::
The first step of rehab is removing the addictive substance (in a controlled manner in the case of those things that kill you if you go cold turkey). Let's tell the world that all the oil has disappeared to aliens, and for future energy needs we MUST stop depending on dead dinosaur fuel.
In the last shop I worked with, on April Fool's day, when a new guy asked for a database command he was told "DROP DATABASE *;" thinking no one could be that stupid.
Except he was. Fortunately April Fool's day that year was a friday and IT had the weekend to fix the mess