I don't understand people who think this is April Fool's. I mean come on, I think EVERYONE but Gateway has seen this comming. When I first heard about them opening up the stores I rolled my eyes, knowing this day would come. It's like they just couldn't bring themselves to use what was working for their main competitor, Dell. Instead of doing what Dell did, which was to keep operating costs and shelf life to an absolute bare minimum, they go the exact OPPOSITE route and open up a huge chain of stores. Generally, doing the exact opposite of what is working very well for your top competitor is a bad idea...
How does this work? Is the actual fuel cell integrated into the laptop, and you just pop a new fuel container into it? And if you have to keep buying fuel for it, is it going to be any less expensive than recharging a battery?
Valve has specifically stated that they intend to use their Steam system to allow modders to sell subscriptions to their mods. And how would it be a "very small profit". If everyone who had played CS had paid $10 for it, and Valve got $5 of that, they would have easily made a few million. Doesn't sound like a "very small profit" to me.
"Personally I'd rather have the fallback position that if global thermonuclear war were to wipe out our planet, at least life from Earth would continue somewhere."
By the time we have Mars terraformed, I'm sure we'll have a bomb that can at least wipe out our entire solar system, if not our galaxy =P
Why would game companies do that? They're just like any other company... they want to make money. Getting a percentage of what mod makers sell would certainly do that. What's more, they have full control over who they allow to sell their content and not, so if there is ever a conflict of interest, or the company feels the game isn't up to the standards needed for a pay-for game, they can easily dictate whatever terms they choose. However, it is in the interest of the game developers to play fair with mod developers, as mod developers will go to whatever platform offers the best insentives.
Yes, and what have we seen in the last few years? The rise of the independent film, and these films by their nature demand that they be new, fresh, and creative to be successful. They may not be the MOST successful movies, but as a whole these types of movies are a lot more successful than they used to be.
I wouldn't be surprised to see the same thing happen to the video game industry, with mod makers filling the shoes of independent film makers. Of course, the biggest problem here is that while making an independent film is getting easier and less costly every year, making a game is becoming MORE costly and harder every year. That's why mod developers need everything but the content up front. The tools, the engine, etc. And they need a way of selling the game afterwards. That means either having game companies that support modding offering fair compensation for sales of modded games and allowing its creaters to retain ownership of their IP, or having a good opensource engine and set of tools developed.
"The future of the current gaming industry is online gaming and LAN parties."
I disagree. Online gaming will certainly have a big place in the market, but it will never be able to submerge a player into a plot or world the way a single player game can.
"The thing that really bugs me is that he's presenting this stuff like it's really new or unknown."
What makes you say that? I can't think of a single line they said that even vaguely alluded to them possibly being "new or unknown". It's just a DIY type show. Personally, what really bugs me about people like you, is that you get this holier than thou attitude anytime someone tries to teach people stuff you already know. As if YOU were never at the "wannabe script kiddie" level and were just born with this inate hacker knowledge. People have to start somewhere, and a show like this isn't catering to the very small percent of the population who already knows this stuff. It's catering to the average joe, as is any TV show. Get off your high horse man, cause it's gonna hurt when you fall off.
While I feel it may be somewhat useless to point out the obvious to what is most certainly a somewhat delusional individual, I suppose I might as well try. From reading your other posts, I would assume you are speaking of autism. While it is true that this is an "illness" (sort of like hyperactivity) that is overdiagnosed, I think it is going a bit far to claim that "There are huge organizations decrying how horrible it is that we exist at all, that actively claim it'd be better if we died of cancer, because we don't act just like "normal" people." Where are these organizations? If they are so huge, why is it that I have NEVER heard any group claim cancer is a solution to autism?
Now, if you like having the symptoms of autism, that's really great for you. But most people would agree that many of the symptoms of autism are not desireable, such as impairment in social interaction, delay in, or total lack of, the development of spoken language, apparently inflexible adherence to specific, nonfunctional routines or rituals, stereotyped and repetitive motor mannerisms, etc. Furthermore, many of the things you named are not strictly associated with autism. Such as, "more active neuronal structure, greater capacity for memory, drastic reduction in age related decline in cognitive/memorization skills". And "heightened sensory reactions" generally means that many stimuli that normal people are indifferent to are PAINFULL to those with autism. Autism is not associated with any particular IQ, although 3/4ths experience "significant mental retardation". There are, much rarer cases where the individuals have "savant" abilities, or are very intelligent. Unfortunantly, some of them are not able to benifit from these abilities because of the aforementioned symptoms. There may be some people who gain avdantages from the disorder, but science and the public at large would like to see people with only the advantages, and none of the disadvantages of autism.
Anyway, the bottom line is that if you can be happy the way you are, that's all you should care about. There's no need to make up delusions of being oppressed by huge organizations, or to deny that autism in general has no disadvantages. If you are lucky enough to be on the "high functioning" end of the autism spectrum, be thankful, and remember the further you go down the autism spectrum, the more and more those individuals are like what people commonly refer to autism, and the more those people are impaired.
I've been hearing a lot about how IT stinks these days, so I've been thinking about getting a masters in Information Security after I finish my undergrad because it seems to be the hot thing lately. What do you guys think?
I'm a regular user of XP and Redhat Linux 9.0. I use XP a lot more, and I can tell you that I've had a LOT more trouble with Linux than I do XP, simply because Linux has a lot less support than XP does. Sure, it is absolutely true that XP has security problems, but why do people still trash it for crashing? At least for desktop use, I've found it to be every bit as stable as Linux. If you want to try to convince people of one OS's superiority, you should at least stay up to date on the deficiencies of its competitors.
After upgrades I imagine it is over 10 lbs. My dad got this, and seems to be pretty happy with it. When you take into account that a lot of people put their laptop in a bag and roll it around anyway... it isn't so ridiculous. And he really loves having a full sized keyboard and 17 inch screen.
I'm sure that piracy is one reason, but I bet that another is that no one rents PC games, which I suppose is related to the piracy problem. At any rate, I wonder how much rental stores account for game sales.
The laws aren't just to prevent total monopolies, but to prevent a company from getting there through unfair practices in the first place, or from using a total monopoly or near-monopoly in one area to take over another. MS surely crossed this line a while ago, and they continue to do so.
They own 95% of the desktop OS market. By comparison, Standard Oil held 85% of the oil market at their peak. The issue here isn't if you agree with the anti-trust laws themselves, the issue is that they aren't applied consistently.
MS uses their monopoly in that market to gain monopolies in the markets of browsers, word processing, media players... the list goes on. This would be the equivalent of Ford having 95% of the car market, and all the sudden buying up a tire company, and constructing cars so that it was highly advantageous, or down right impossible, to use any other tire.
I think it is kind of an unreasonable complaint as well, but there is another use for browsing with images off. PDAs usually have this option. They are somewhat slow in displaying images, regardless of their connection speed, and the images fill up the screen and make for a lot of scrolling.
Well, since the Second Circuit Court of Appeals decided that a judge can dismiss a juror if there is evidence of them advocating jury nullification, letting the judge know up front saves you the time of getting kicked off the jury latter. If the judge agrees with jury nullification, it shouldn't get you dismissed.
I don't think arguements such as the kind this article presents will ever convince those in the "please think of the children" crowd. The reason may partly be that they don't care about the facts, but I think the stronger, more important reason these arguements don't work is that the main objection this group has with these games isn't that they really think it will turn everyone into killers. That is just FUD. The real reason is that they have a moral objection to violence in games, and that's not something you can fight with facts.
Their perspective is, "How horrible! Why would anyone want to pretend to kill people!!!???". They see these games as being EVIL, and their perception that it is a threat to society is based more on that than anything else. Even if somehow, no murderer had ever played a video game (which would seem statistically impossible), these people would still object to violence in games based on moral and religious grounds.
Well, if you had said "C programmer" then maybe it would make a little more sense. First because C is usually used for applications that need to be fast, and second because it has very few layers between you and the machine, compared to other languages. But you said "programmer", and that could be anyone programming anything with any language.
The entire rest of my post dealt with that, and that seems to have escaped you. While knowing assembly may help you with C, it won't with Java. Even with C, knowing tricks like what you just described is only going to help if that trick is used MANY times throughout the program and that takes a percievable amount of processing time.
The faster computers get, the less "tight" code will matter in general. It doesn't matter if one way is 10 times faster if the program takes.0001 seconds to complete rather than.00001 seconds. There will always be niches where it is important, but only there. It used to be that "tight" code was necessary for EVERY application, but that has become less and less true over the years, and will only continue to do so.
What I think is misleading to those new to programming is to teach them that that niche knowledge is vital to being a good programmer period. Which is exactly what you said when you said, "The difference between mediocre and star programmers is that star programmers understand assembly language, whether or not they use it on a daily basis." That is simply UNTRUE. If you don't have the need to use it on a daily basis, then the program you are writing obviously isn't going to benifit from it.
And lastly, I think trying to introduce someone to programming with the most cryptic and basic of languages is a poor idea. Especially if you are trying to actually interest them in the subject. Honestly, I can't think of a better way of turning people off to the field than to force them to learn programming with Assembly. It's tedious, and the things you can accomplish with assembly in an introductory course are going to be basic and boring.
That's not to say I don't think it is important to teach it in a Computer Science course. A CS program should be about exposing the students to as many aspects of computers as possible, and the low level aspects of the computer are still important. I just think that teaching it in the first class, and telling students that THIS is what really makes a programmer good, is both a bad idea and untrue.
Could someone explain to me the difference between the two? (I've had a database course, so it's OK to get technical) There was that top 10 database article a while back, and while I saw MS SQL in there a few times I NEVER saw MySQL. What is MySQL better than MS SQL at, and vice versa?
"Old School" programmers tend to have this obsession with "tight" code, and very effecient code that Assembly language programming teaches. The problem is that some of them lose sight of reality, and sometimes they become downright elitist. The author of this book certainly falls in this category. He says, "The difference between mediocre and star programmers is that star programmers understand assembly language, whether or not they use it on a daily basis." Bullshit. Since when did what language you know determine how good a programmer you are?
The fact is, MOST of today's programming requirements do not need tight code. Computers have become so fast that even a few million extra operations isn't going to make a percievable difference. That's not to say that there isn't a need for programmers who can program tight code, but the point is that it depends on the application and the platform it will be running on. Programming a huge text editor program like Microsoft Word is going to need good OO code that is easy to follow. You don't want a C hacker trying to squeeze.00000001 seconds out of the spell checker, making the code unfollowable to normal coders in the process, just because he thought it was cool. The fact is, he probably gets a kick out of writing code few others can follow. Maybe that's worth it for applications that need to be very efficient, but for other types of applications it isn't and it is just selfish of a coder to do that to the rest of his team so he can feel superior.
In the end, how "good" a programmer is depends on how useful their code is and how quickly they can produce it. Usefulness isn't determined by efficiency alone, but by its maintainability and reusabiltiy as well. For some applications, assembly will help you, for others, it won't. Knowing assembly certainly gives you more flexibility, but not knowing it doesn't turn you into a "mediocre programmer". Hopefully, knowing it won't turn you into an elitist bastard like the author. It didn't me:)
Yup, same thing here. While I'd love to have believed that my email to them was just so damn moving that it warranted a personal response from the business editor of the BBC, I can't say it is surprising. I'm sure they got many, many responses, and not just from those of the Slashdot crowd. I suppose it is a bit misleading, but it does say "Dear Sir" and so isn't very convincing as a personal reponse.
"Why not just use one big piece of film to expose the entire wafer at once? The problem is focus. As any photographer knows, the bigger the picture the blurrier the image. That's why big-screen TVs don't look so great up close. Chip images need to be ultra sharp, so a blurry "mega mask" wouldn't cut it."
I thought big screen TVs were "blurry" up close because they had fewer pixels per area. Besides... in this case, you wouldn't be making the image bigger, you would just be making a LOT of tiny images at once. Can someone either explain how his explaination makes sense, or what the real reason is?
"Professors don't care. In fact in some cases they are paid to select the more expensive of two options by bookstores who offer them a kickback based on a percentage of the sales. (Just face it, what's standing in the way of a professor including an Amazon.com affiliate URL on the course's website, knowing that at least a few students will by the required book that way?) And, often the professor is the author of the book, so every student in their course equals a textbook royalty coming their way."
I think you are way off here. Maybe my college is different than yours, but in all the classes I have taken at Ga Tech I have yet to have a course where the professor chose a book that they wrote. There was one exception, but that teacher offered his book online for free. I hear professors complain about the high price of books, because most of them don't like to see students gouged anymore than we do. The problem is that there are never enough used books from the last semester to completely forfill the needs of the students of the next, and the professors can't recommend an old version because if a new one is out, the publishers don't make the old one anymore. In my experience, professors care, but it is the publishers who have all the power in the book business, and the only real way a professor can change that is by writing a book for his/her course for free. That takes a lot of time and effort, and few professors have the time for that.
"- Universities often either own the bookstore, or at least own the building that the bookstore operation is renting. Therefore, anything that's good for the bookstore is good for the university."
What's good for the bookstore is the margin they make on textbooks. If the publishers are driving the prices up super high, the margin a bookstore is going to make on a book will be less, because people won't be willing to pay hardly anymore than "wholesale" price. At Ga Tech we have two bookstores. One is owned independently, one by the university (and recently taken over by Barnes and Nobles). The independent one is a few bucks cheaper on average, but the books are still outrageously expensive. Competition tends to drive prices down, and there are other sources like Amazon. But the prices aren't falling, and that's because the price the publishers are selling the books for are artificially high, and there isn't anything the book sellers can do about it. I'm sure they would prefer to have lower priced books as well, so they could make more than a few bucks off of each book they sell.
I am 100% sure that the reason for the high prices of text books is purely the greed of the textbook publishing cartel. Their practices have ironically come to huant them in some areas. If you had read this article a while back, you would have learned about it being cheaper to buy textbooks published by American publishers... overseas. Why you ask? Because the publishers are dumping on overseas markets to drive out local publishers. God only knows what they are doing in this country to stomp out any competition. I'd like to hear the story on that one.
I don't think there is anything wrong with the kind of movies Pixar has made so far, and what's more, they make a lot of economical sense. Pixar's film up until now have kid's flicks, but they are those special form of kid's flicks that have that rare capacity to entertain people of all ages. There's something to be said for that. When you go browsing through the shelves of new releases at your local video rental store, how many of those movies are something you would want your kid to watch? How many of those releases are not only PG, but are something you'd like to see also? Not many.
I think there is a great need in our entertainment industry for creative, intelligent movie making that can entertain people of all ages while restricting themselves to subject matter appropriate for younger audiences. It not only provides something rarely achieved in the movie business, it makes a lot of economical sense for those who CAN achieve it. If people of all ages enjoy their films, their demographic is MUCH larger than if they make an R rated film.
Personally, I think Pixar knows this, and that's why they are so good at what they do. I don't think we're going to see them start doing more "mature" films. I don't think that's why they are unhappy with Disney. Even Pixar's earliest short films had that rare creative quality that anyone could enjoy. I'd be very surprised if they changed directions after so much success in the area they are in now.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand people who think this is April Fool's. I mean come on, I think EVERYONE but Gateway has seen this comming. When I first heard about them opening up the stores I rolled my eyes, knowing this day would come. It's like they just couldn't bring themselves to use what was working for their main competitor, Dell. Instead of doing what Dell did, which was to keep operating costs and shelf life to an absolute bare minimum, they go the exact OPPOSITE route and open up a huge chain of stores. Generally, doing the exact opposite of what is working very well for your top competitor is a bad idea...
How does this work? Is the actual fuel cell integrated into the laptop, and you just pop a new fuel container into it? And if you have to keep buying fuel for it, is it going to be any less expensive than recharging a battery?
Valve has specifically stated that they intend to use their Steam system to allow modders to sell subscriptions to their mods. And how would it be a "very small profit". If everyone who had played CS had paid $10 for it, and Valve got $5 of that, they would have easily made a few million. Doesn't sound like a "very small profit" to me.
By the time we have Mars terraformed, I'm sure we'll have a bomb that can at least wipe out our entire solar system, if not our galaxy =P
Why would game companies do that? They're just like any other company... they want to make money. Getting a percentage of what mod makers sell would certainly do that. What's more, they have full control over who they allow to sell their content and not, so if there is ever a conflict of interest, or the company feels the game isn't up to the standards needed for a pay-for game, they can easily dictate whatever terms they choose. However, it is in the interest of the game developers to play fair with mod developers, as mod developers will go to whatever platform offers the best insentives.
Yes, and what have we seen in the last few years? The rise of the independent film, and these films by their nature demand that they be new, fresh, and creative to be successful. They may not be the MOST successful movies, but as a whole these types of movies are a lot more successful than they used to be. I wouldn't be surprised to see the same thing happen to the video game industry, with mod makers filling the shoes of independent film makers. Of course, the biggest problem here is that while making an independent film is getting easier and less costly every year, making a game is becoming MORE costly and harder every year. That's why mod developers need everything but the content up front. The tools, the engine, etc. And they need a way of selling the game afterwards. That means either having game companies that support modding offering fair compensation for sales of modded games and allowing its creaters to retain ownership of their IP, or having a good opensource engine and set of tools developed.
"The future of the current gaming industry is online gaming and LAN parties." I disagree. Online gaming will certainly have a big place in the market, but it will never be able to submerge a player into a plot or world the way a single player game can.
What makes you say that? I can't think of a single line they said that even vaguely alluded to them possibly being "new or unknown". It's just a DIY type show. Personally, what really bugs me about people like you, is that you get this holier than thou attitude anytime someone tries to teach people stuff you already know. As if YOU were never at the "wannabe script kiddie" level and were just born with this inate hacker knowledge. People have to start somewhere, and a show like this isn't catering to the very small percent of the population who already knows this stuff. It's catering to the average joe, as is any TV show. Get off your high horse man, cause it's gonna hurt when you fall off.
Now, if you like having the symptoms of autism, that's really great for you. But most people would agree that many of the symptoms of autism are not desireable, such as impairment in social interaction, delay in, or total lack of, the development of spoken language, apparently inflexible adherence to specific, nonfunctional routines or rituals, stereotyped and repetitive motor mannerisms, etc. Furthermore, many of the things you named are not strictly associated with autism. Such as, "more active neuronal structure, greater capacity for memory, drastic reduction in age related decline in cognitive/memorization skills". And "heightened sensory reactions" generally means that many stimuli that normal people are indifferent to are PAINFULL to those with autism. Autism is not associated with any particular IQ, although 3/4ths experience "significant mental retardation". There are, much rarer cases where the individuals have "savant" abilities, or are very intelligent. Unfortunantly, some of them are not able to benifit from these abilities because of the aforementioned symptoms. There may be some people who gain avdantages from the disorder, but science and the public at large would like to see people with only the advantages, and none of the disadvantages of autism.
Anyway, the bottom line is that if you can be happy the way you are, that's all you should care about. There's no need to make up delusions of being oppressed by huge organizations, or to deny that autism in general has no disadvantages. If you are lucky enough to be on the "high functioning" end of the autism spectrum, be thankful, and remember the further you go down the autism spectrum, the more and more those individuals are like what people commonly refer to autism, and the more those people are impaired.
I've been hearing a lot about how IT stinks these days, so I've been thinking about getting a masters in Information Security after I finish my undergrad because it seems to be the hot thing lately. What do you guys think?
I'm a regular user of XP and Redhat Linux 9.0. I use XP a lot more, and I can tell you that I've had a LOT more trouble with Linux than I do XP, simply because Linux has a lot less support than XP does. Sure, it is absolutely true that XP has security problems, but why do people still trash it for crashing? At least for desktop use, I've found it to be every bit as stable as Linux. If you want to try to convince people of one OS's superiority, you should at least stay up to date on the deficiencies of its competitors.
here
After upgrades I imagine it is over 10 lbs. My dad got this, and seems to be pretty happy with it. When you take into account that a lot of people put their laptop in a bag and roll it around anyway... it isn't so ridiculous. And he really loves having a full sized keyboard and 17 inch screen.
I'm sure that piracy is one reason, but I bet that another is that no one rents PC games, which I suppose is related to the piracy problem. At any rate, I wonder how much rental stores account for game sales.
The laws aren't just to prevent total monopolies, but to prevent a company from getting there through unfair practices in the first place, or from using a total monopoly or near-monopoly in one area to take over another. MS surely crossed this line a while ago, and they continue to do so. They own 95% of the desktop OS market. By comparison, Standard Oil held 85% of the oil market at their peak. The issue here isn't if you agree with the anti-trust laws themselves, the issue is that they aren't applied consistently. MS uses their monopoly in that market to gain monopolies in the markets of browsers, word processing, media players... the list goes on. This would be the equivalent of Ford having 95% of the car market, and all the sudden buying up a tire company, and constructing cars so that it was highly advantageous, or down right impossible, to use any other tire.
I think it is kind of an unreasonable complaint as well, but there is another use for browsing with images off. PDAs usually have this option. They are somewhat slow in displaying images, regardless of their connection speed, and the images fill up the screen and make for a lot of scrolling.
Well, since the Second Circuit Court of Appeals decided that a judge can dismiss a juror if there is evidence of them advocating jury nullification, letting the judge know up front saves you the time of getting kicked off the jury latter. If the judge agrees with jury nullification, it shouldn't get you dismissed.
Don't worry, I put it on a USB keychain and shoved it up the you know what. Somehow it's very poetic...
I don't think arguements such as the kind this article presents will ever convince those in the "please think of the children" crowd. The reason may partly be that they don't care about the facts, but I think the stronger, more important reason these arguements don't work is that the main objection this group has with these games isn't that they really think it will turn everyone into killers. That is just FUD. The real reason is that they have a moral objection to violence in games, and that's not something you can fight with facts. Their perspective is, "How horrible! Why would anyone want to pretend to kill people!!!???". They see these games as being EVIL, and their perception that it is a threat to society is based more on that than anything else. Even if somehow, no murderer had ever played a video game (which would seem statistically impossible), these people would still object to violence in games based on moral and religious grounds.
The entire rest of my post dealt with that, and that seems to have escaped you. While knowing assembly may help you with C, it won't with Java. Even with C, knowing tricks like what you just described is only going to help if that trick is used MANY times throughout the program and that takes a percievable amount of processing time.
The faster computers get, the less "tight" code will matter in general. It doesn't matter if one way is 10 times faster if the program takes .0001 seconds to complete rather than .00001 seconds. There will always be niches where it is important, but only there. It used to be that "tight" code was necessary for EVERY application, but that has become less and less true over the years, and will only continue to do so.
What I think is misleading to those new to programming is to teach them that that niche knowledge is vital to being a good programmer period. Which is exactly what you said when you said, "The difference between mediocre and star programmers is that star programmers understand assembly language, whether or not they use it on a daily basis." That is simply UNTRUE. If you don't have the need to use it on a daily basis, then the program you are writing obviously isn't going to benifit from it.
And lastly, I think trying to introduce someone to programming with the most cryptic and basic of languages is a poor idea. Especially if you are trying to actually interest them in the subject. Honestly, I can't think of a better way of turning people off to the field than to force them to learn programming with Assembly. It's tedious, and the things you can accomplish with assembly in an introductory course are going to be basic and boring.
That's not to say I don't think it is important to teach it in a Computer Science course. A CS program should be about exposing the students to as many aspects of computers as possible, and the low level aspects of the computer are still important. I just think that teaching it in the first class, and telling students that THIS is what really makes a programmer good, is both a bad idea and untrue.
Could someone explain to me the difference between the two? (I've had a database course, so it's OK to get technical) There was that top 10 database article a while back, and while I saw MS SQL in there a few times I NEVER saw MySQL. What is MySQL better than MS SQL at, and vice versa?
The fact is, MOST of today's programming requirements do not need tight code. Computers have become so fast that even a few million extra operations isn't going to make a percievable difference. That's not to say that there isn't a need for programmers who can program tight code, but the point is that it depends on the application and the platform it will be running on. Programming a huge text editor program like Microsoft Word is going to need good OO code that is easy to follow. You don't want a C hacker trying to squeeze .00000001 seconds out of the spell checker, making the code unfollowable to normal coders in the process, just because he thought it was cool. The fact is, he probably gets a kick out of writing code few others can follow. Maybe that's worth it for applications that need to be very efficient, but for other types of applications it isn't and it is just selfish of a coder to do that to the rest of his team so he can feel superior.
In the end, how "good" a programmer is depends on how useful their code is and how quickly they can produce it. Usefulness isn't determined by efficiency alone, but by its maintainability and reusabiltiy as well. For some applications, assembly will help you, for others, it won't. Knowing assembly certainly gives you more flexibility, but not knowing it doesn't turn you into a "mediocre programmer". Hopefully, knowing it won't turn you into an elitist bastard like the author. It didn't me :)
Yup, same thing here. While I'd love to have believed that my email to them was just so damn moving that it warranted a personal response from the business editor of the BBC, I can't say it is surprising. I'm sure they got many, many responses, and not just from those of the Slashdot crowd. I suppose it is a bit misleading, but it does say "Dear Sir" and so isn't very convincing as a personal reponse.
I thought big screen TVs were "blurry" up close because they had fewer pixels per area. Besides... in this case, you wouldn't be making the image bigger, you would just be making a LOT of tiny images at once. Can someone either explain how his explaination makes sense, or what the real reason is?
I think you are way off here. Maybe my college is different than yours, but in all the classes I have taken at Ga Tech I have yet to have a course where the professor chose a book that they wrote. There was one exception, but that teacher offered his book online for free. I hear professors complain about the high price of books, because most of them don't like to see students gouged anymore than we do. The problem is that there are never enough used books from the last semester to completely forfill the needs of the students of the next, and the professors can't recommend an old version because if a new one is out, the publishers don't make the old one anymore. In my experience, professors care, but it is the publishers who have all the power in the book business, and the only real way a professor can change that is by writing a book for his/her course for free. That takes a lot of time and effort, and few professors have the time for that.
"- Universities often either own the bookstore, or at least own the building that the bookstore operation is renting. Therefore, anything that's good for the bookstore is good for the university."
What's good for the bookstore is the margin they make on textbooks. If the publishers are driving the prices up super high, the margin a bookstore is going to make on a book will be less, because people won't be willing to pay hardly anymore than "wholesale" price. At Ga Tech we have two bookstores. One is owned independently, one by the university (and recently taken over by Barnes and Nobles). The independent one is a few bucks cheaper on average, but the books are still outrageously expensive. Competition tends to drive prices down, and there are other sources like Amazon. But the prices aren't falling, and that's because the price the publishers are selling the books for are artificially high, and there isn't anything the book sellers can do about it. I'm sure they would prefer to have lower priced books as well, so they could make more than a few bucks off of each book they sell.
I am 100% sure that the reason for the high prices of text books is purely the greed of the textbook publishing cartel. Their practices have ironically come to huant them in some areas. If you had read this article a while back, you would have learned about it being cheaper to buy textbooks published by American publishers... overseas. Why you ask? Because the publishers are dumping on overseas markets to drive out local publishers. God only knows what they are doing in this country to stomp out any competition. I'd like to hear the story on that one.
I think there is a great need in our entertainment industry for creative, intelligent movie making that can entertain people of all ages while restricting themselves to subject matter appropriate for younger audiences. It not only provides something rarely achieved in the movie business, it makes a lot of economical sense for those who CAN achieve it. If people of all ages enjoy their films, their demographic is MUCH larger than if they make an R rated film.
Personally, I think Pixar knows this, and that's why they are so good at what they do. I don't think we're going to see them start doing more "mature" films. I don't think that's why they are unhappy with Disney. Even Pixar's earliest short films had that rare creative quality that anyone could enjoy. I'd be very surprised if they changed directions after so much success in the area they are in now.