The reason Google is on top is NOT because of the best search engine technology. It was because Google presents a non-tyrannical alternative. Gates can't see that though, because he's too wedded to his tyrannies...
It's a ridiculous idea, but if it were to happen, it has the following implications:
- Cost of software would have to go WAY up. Time to produce would increase significantly as well. Developers would take longer to produce software so more developers were needed or less software would be produced. MORE DEVELOPER JOBS. Better job security.
- Increase in cost of software would cause more in-house development in order to save money, where there is no external liability as the software is not sold in the independent marketplace, only used internally. Thus, the security constraints would be less as a company isn't going to sue itself for the insecure software it chose to use. More in-house development projects. MORE DEVELOPER JOBS. Better job security.
...and there's no unions to blame. So, rather than addressing the need for (and expense of) solid security requirements, standards and certification, let's blame the developers for not implementing features the client and/or management for the most part hasn't bothered to even mention, much less specify or budget for. As if developers should be expected to be perfectly prescient. And as if developers even have the power to enforce such security standards on the products they work on.
It's morons with responsibility-dodging attitudes like this that has given us the impotent swiss cheese of bolt-on security that we have now.
The "education system" is another convenient scapegoat. The "education system" in the U.S. at least, tends more and more to teach only what industry wants it to teach-- and industry hasn't been asking for security until very recently. But, the education system is a particularly popular scapegoat...
Just when you thought they couldn't be any worse, the current administration shows they are still fully capable of collossal errors in judgement and complete ignorance of the facts. Buffoonery on parade, Schmidt's just the baton twirler for today...
...to their suite that are unsupported by the open format. That's what they did to IE, Java, C#, etc.-- there's no reason to think the office file format will be any different...
I wish they'd spend more time making a worthwhile GUI on Linux. I still use console/svgalib, as KDE/Gnome/X quite simply, sucks. Why these guys are so incessant in preserving "remote desktop" capabilities in a baseline GUI is beyond me. I hate "remote desktop"/"PC Anywhere"/"X Windows" performance. It sucks. Even if we all had guaranteed 100GB network performance, it'd suck compared to a direct frame-buffer based GUI. If I could run OS X on my existing PC hardware, I'd dump Linux for it in a minute. At that point I could forgo any need to dual-boot Windows-- the reason I dual-boot Windows now is NOT for application compatibility-- it's for PERFORMANCE. As long as graphics under GUI performance on the SAME hardware in Windows is so much better than Linux, Linux will remain just a second-class overdeveloped too-many-cooks dependency hell nightmare that only significantly differs from Windows in that it doesn't perform as well and you don't have to pay for it...
Yeah, and I know this is way incendiary-- but thick heads are resistant to reality...
-- You lose your push, when you beat around the bush. -- Don Van Vliet
It's quite simple, really. Say for example, you are a company with a 200M promotion budget. If you spend 40M on 5 bands, you can afford to a) produce and promote some videos, b) saturate the channels with ads & videos, etc. c) payola the crap out of the radio stations, d) pay to get them into some TV appearances and soundtracks of feature films. The resultant overexposure generates gobs of sales and the projects take off. On the other hand, if you spend that 200M as 5M on 40 bands, you can barely afford to pay for anything, they don't get much exposure and consequently, nothing takes off. You've spread the money too thin.
The quality of the music is not as critical as the quality of the marketing, which takes lots of money. You don't want to be wasting those gobs of money on bands the success of which you are unsure of-- the money is being spent to help guarantee success. Also, note that most new bands are young and naive, and are easy to fool into working for peanuts, which is why they rarely get much of the take, and why long term contracts are so popular with the corporations-- it locks them in before they've had the opportunity to wise up.
I don't WANT to organize the world's information..
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Bill Gates Speaks Out
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· Score: 2, Funny
It's too much work, even with better tools, I've got things I'd rather be doing. While I may not trust Google to do it the way I'd like, what they end up with will be more than I have interest in doing by myself...
And just what does Gates mean by "tools to organize"-- I doubt he means web-spider programs that will generate your own search engine database-- would it not likely mean that the tools would access a Microsoft database (that they apparently, haven't even bothered to organize) and you could then organize your links into Microsoft's data? Yeah, that sounds better than what Google's doing:-)...
I keep a postit on my monitor with a bunch of nonsense words that don't mean anything. I figure anyone trying to hack in will waste an enormous amount of time trying to figure out what they unlock...
Besides the obvious that have aready been mentioned multiple times, there is no end to the list of "what's wrong" with movie theaters...
Number one on my list, is they have not kept up with the increase in the DIVERSITY of TASTE of the viewing public. They target a couple of relatively narrow categories, those which they appear to believe cover significant market segments (and probably do, but there's a lot more of them now than there used to be), to the exclusion of all others. I look up what's playing in my neighborhood, and find at lest 150 screens to go sit in front of within a reasonable distance, but find that all 150 screens are showing the same 12 movies, virtually none of which I'm interested in seeing. So while in fact I do have 150 screens to choose from, I only have 12 movies to choose from. It wouldn't matter to me if I see "Skeleton Key" in theater A or theater B or theater C or theater D, all within close distance, if I wanted to see "Skeleton Key" at all! But they're trying to amortize their ad budgets, preferring "blockbusters" to diversity. Get a clue guys, the "blockbuster" concept is a complete anachronism in an extremely diverse marketplace. The music industry could stand to figure that out as well and get over the "good old days" of the supergroup.
Frankly, I prefer OLD movies, and actually WOULD like to see them on a big screen. There's one theater near me that will do that, a neat REALLY OLD classic theater but that has one of the worst sound systems I've ever heard-- the reverberations in the theater make the experience awful. Plus, whoever picks their selection of old movies needs their head examined-- they really suck. It needs someone who knows the old films well enough to actually seek out those known to be particularly enhanced by the large screen projection and be able to get them! Unfortunately, it's probably getting harder and harder if not impossible to get good prints of old films on demand, they have to find some restoration society or something because they aren't likely to get much help with that from the studios...
Last time I saw an ad on TV for a movie I actually wanted to see, I looked for it in my neighborhood. Come to find out it was only playing one place anywhere in a radius of about 150 miles, and that was 50 miles away-- yet they spent big bucks advertising the movie to get me there. I'm sorry, those big ad bucks weren't enough to get me to drive 50 miles to see it, despite the fact that I was willing to go somewhat out of my way for that particular movie-- they just made it TOO HARD (the movie was Howl's Moving Castle, BTW). Consequently, it's obvious that the movie index sites are only useful for people who want to go to the theater to see ANY movie, not to see a particular movie. They have to face it, there's just fewer and fewer people willing to do that. And if they can't find a way to fix it, film theaters may just go the way of the drive-ins. At least in drive-ins you had SOME privacy, and wouldn't have to listen to cell phones and the like if drive-ins still exited. The big problem with drive-ins was they couldn't keep you from bringing in your own snacks (oh, that's not a problem for ME, it's only a problem for THEM. That's customer-centric for you).
Bob Moog proved that the term "honorable businessman" is not an oxymoron, at least not in his case.
Bob had the occasion to visit Raymond Scott in his studio, and see one of Scott's secret inventions-- the sequencer. Scott unfortunately, was very protective of his ideas-- so much so that he undoubtedly took many of them to his grave. Scott didn't want his secret invention to get out-- though apparently needed some confirmation from someone qualified to appreciate it, else why would Bob be seeing it in the first place?
Consequently, the Moog Synthesizers did not have sequencers until the competition came up with them and started beating Moog up in the marketplace, so finally Scott let Bob off the hook and allowed Bob to manufacture sequencers for his synthesizers. Bob probably could have just stolen the idea, though in fact it's likely he would have arrived at it independently, but because Bob was honorable, he didn't use the sequencer concept without Scott's OK.
Just one of a wide variety of great stories. They don't make them like that anymore...
I got to meet Bob briefly in L.A. at the unveiling of the Fairlight CMI in the 1970s (or was it early '80s, I forget)-- he was involved in some of the PR of the instrument. It was a small group, and Bob gave a nice talk on music technologies. Great guy...
The Moog VCF is still being emulated (along with most of his other components) in digital "virtual analog" synthesizers today. I had a chance to pick up a classic Moog modular setup in the '70s for about $500. I still kick myself for passing it up. (big darn thing though, I had an Arp 2600 at the time (still have) and preferred the convenience of it, but while the 2600 has increased in value, not nearly as much as an original Moog modular-- plus the coolness factor now of a big 1/4" jack patched synth would now be pretty hard to beat)...
Not sure how hard that would be (don't know the OS X kernel), but if they could do that even if just to the extent that a few minor mods were required, a lot of the drivers would be available, and they wouldn't actually have to support them. Plus, flaky drivers in a Unix environment aren't as bad as flaky drivers in Windows, as they won't take the whole system down quite so often-- Unixes are a little more insulated from individual wayward programs than Windows is and the implementations are cleaner (no 16-bit THUNKs to worry about:-)...
Yeah, the hardware support is the killer, and why they won't do it. Where would all the drivers for all the obsolete hardware out there come from? Just getting it to boot on most 3-year old systems would mean having to write tens of thousands of drivers. Not gonna happen.
You have to realize, that if Apple does nothing, Microsoft and Linux are going to be battling it out over the next generation of desktops running on ultracheap commodity hardware. Apple has a unique opportunity here to jump in and really make some inroads into that marketplace, perhaps even to become the major player. They have a mature, solid and easy to use product that would be way ahead of either Microsoft or Linux in their own marketplace, if it could run on that same commodity hardware.
Plus, Apple's hardware has never been their strong point-- early Macs for example, were minimalist hardware, doing everything in software that the competition was doing in hardware. Their "hardware" innovations have been mostly cosmetics-- "toaster computers," "color coordinated computers," etc. Software has always been their business, certainly enhanced by the fact that their expensive "Sharper Image" dongle hardware had huge margins-- but those margins have been dwindling as commodity hardware gets cheaper and cheaper and they have to follow suit to an extent or the price difference gets so large they start losing out too much because of it. Now, they're butting up against the fact that they can't make the hardware themselves anywhere near as cheap as the competitive marketplace is getting it for, so even a 20% margin isn't enough to cover it-- they're experiencing a squeeze that they have to find a solution for, and at the same time there's this new opportunity, see, as Windows is now aged to the point that it's time for a quantum jump into a new product-- a perfect time for Apple to jump in and grab a serious piece of the action. Plus, Linux is whittling on it as well, and can prove to be somewhat of an ally in several ways-- it's another "unix," a source of drivers and other compatible code, etc...
I use Linux a lot now, but if I could get OS-X that would run on my generic '86 boxes, I'd probably move in that direction for the desktop, as Apple's is light years ahead of that KDE/GNOME and dependency hell crap IMHO (I run Linux, but primarily in console mode). Instead of dual-booting to Windows I'd dual boot to OS-X and would probably end up spending more time in OS-X than Linux in the long run...
I miss the old MP3.com. Originally, it was THE major player in LEGAL free music distribution. Now they've gone pay, and the other free distribution sites either have too, or have diversified too much, or are too small, or whatever to build up the kind of momentum that MP3.com had before it became mismanaged by fools that didn't understand the artists role in their success-- preferring to see the artist as customer rather than collaborator.. IUMA too has dried up, and while there are dozens of smaller sites now, the idea of a centralized catalogue of legal free music has pretty much gone...
Read the book, you will understand where the other side is coming from. It is not a religious issue for everybody but a strictly philosophical and scientific one. The reason people are so angry against ID is because religious people have hijacked a perfectly legitimate scientific challenge to evolution.
No, ID is a transparent attempt to resurrect the failed Watchmaker argument. There are several immediately obvious problems with ID:
- "irreducability" suggests that the only way a structure can exist is by being "built up" from something less complex. In fact, structures can also exist through the reduction of other structures via the loss of characteristics. For example, the construction of an arch often involves a scaffolding, which after the arch is constructed is removed. The resultant arch, it could be argued, is irreducibly complex as you can't take one brick away and have a viable structure. However, removing one brick is not the only way to incrementally backtrack the construction of the structure, and in fact has no connection to how the structure was actually constructed. Further it is concievable that a "natural" arch could arise from a rock avalanche falling on a mound of dirt that is later eroded away-- no defying of physics is required.
- There's also a tacit assumption that the "intelligence" in "intelligent design" is necessarily self-aware. Intelligence can be defined as the accumulation and application of information. Certainly DNA has that capability, yet is not self-aware. It has the ability to accumulate modifications and "learn" from mistakes, without self-awareness. Consequently, the term "intelligent design" is a misnomer, as evolution itself can be said to be a) a design process and b) intelligent. The true difference between evolution as an intelligent design process and ID, is one characteristic the ID proponents always leave out of their arguments-- self awareness. Show me an ID proponent who will admit that the I in ID doesn't require self-awareness, then I'll show you someone who's theory doesn't contradict evolution. The real skeleton hiding in the ID camp is the belief that "intelligence must be self-aware." It is that skeleton that reveals the religious nature of ID.
- As has already been stated, evolution is an explanation for many many known facts in biology, genetics, geology and I'm sure several other sciences I'm too tired to think of at the moment. While like any scientific explanation, it doesn't answer every possible question that can be posed, any replacement for it will have to explain notably more. Evolution however, is as close to a unified theory in these areas than we've seen by a long shot, and mainstream scientists are well aware of that-- that is why ID proponents must take their argument to the high schools where the less science literate can be buffooned into the bogus "fair play" argument that ID should have equal time. An argument in reality no different from an argument that Jesus should have "equal time" with Einstein in science classes. Dress it up in more PC language and sell it to the science-ignorant and there you have it...
Yes, the RIAA is very vocal about people ripping them off, but by saying nothing in regards to the institutionalized theft from the public and independent artists that is payola, their completely corrupt nature is revealed.
The RIAA cockroaches have developed payola to a fine art and it has continued unabated since the original case in the '50s. They'll never reach the "hearts and minds" of the public regarding digital media until they clean up their own house regarding the rampant PIRACY of the airwaves that is going on...
Marketeers often forget that the user actually has some say in the process as well. Just as services like Paypal allow you to mask your credit data from a vendor, eventually anonymous buying services will provide the ability to mask your identity completely. Imagine a service, say, BuyMaster.com, combined with a new AnonyShip service from UPS or FedEx where you can purchase through them and all the vendor site knows about the purchase is it was placed through BuyMaster and then must turn the product over to FedEx with only an ID number. Only BuyMaster knows who bought it and only FedEx knows where it's being sent. The vendor is completely disconnected from his market data-- the majority of purchases being placed by a single entity from his perspective. Now providing you can trust buymaster and the shipper this sounds like a valuable service-- at the very least the customer limits the propagation of his data. The customer could at his option, enable the ability to reveal certain aspects of his demographic in order to improve services, such as age, gender, interests, etc., but completely at the customer's discretion.
Marketeers have to get over characterizing customers as consumers. There's a difference. Really, what does it say about a company that views their buyers in that way? Do they provide a customer-friendly service, or are they simply tossing their products into a brightly painted swill bucket and opening the gate to the hog pen? If companies can't remember the adage, the customer is always right, they may lose all contact with their consumers.
We're still using keyboards limited by the design of 5-bit BAUDOT teleltypewriters-- despite the fact that the keyboards are commonly used to enter basic calculations, we still don't have a real multiply or divide symbol, and are using asterisk and slash as substitutes. Some would probably like to do away with keyboards altogether, but that's not gonna happen. The mouse was a step backwards (I've got 10 fingers, not just 1 or two, BTW).
As far as a new OS, the ones that are sure to have a very limited lifespan will be monolithic utopian attempts to encapsulate everything you'll ever want to do in an OS. Unix has had the long life it has, simply because it was extensible-- you didn't have to use the drivers or interfaces it provided, and could reconfigure individual components and their interconnections so whe you wanted to rework something you didn't have to write it ALL from scratch, just the parts that needed to be different. A successful OS will have to be very component oriented and extensible.
Firefox better than IE? Not saying much...
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The Future of Firefox
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The Firefox team is pretty full of themselves-- it will take the attention to detail to make Firefox better, but I don't get the sense they are aware of that. Things like the annoying way it incessantly steals your input focus while you're typing, the fact that the Open New Window feature is virtually useless due to the Home Page feature which is itself useless (two areas where IE is actually better). Features that should have been worked out before the "sexy" features like popup blockers which can be done externally (and better, too). But users can always be retrained anyway, because We Know Better(TM).
Firefox should remember that they don't have to add sexy features every release like Microsoft does, and in fact that is Microsoft's biggest problem-- they have to add new features because they need you to update. Unfortunately, the Firefox team apparently also needs you to update in order to sustain the overinflation of their egos.
Both teams need a draconian Steve Jobs to force them to improve the usability first (and I don't even use a Mac). Someone who will take them to task over the little things. Otherwise creeping featurism and bloat will kill them off. The problem is, the little things just aren't as exciting to work on or talk about, which is a big reason why Microsoft's products are so lousy. Here's hoping it isn't becoming Firefox's reason too...
It shouldn't be too surprising that things have gotten to this obfuscated extent. I remember seeing a story where various political organizations would tune the text of their political messages by test-selecting the specific verbage in order to appeal to the largest number of voters. The examples showed several announcers being tested on test groups, where in each case the announcers choice of terminology was slightly varied and the participants would signal whether or not they were favorably disposed to the message. Some groups have really gotten it down to a science-- by couching the message in just the right terms, you can get almost anyone to agree with it. Once elected, is they seem to then believe their own propaganda, as they consider it a 'mandate' that they implement their plan, never mind that the tuned marketspeak they used to describe it turns out to be a rather poor representation of what they actually aim to do...
No, mathematically, it is an inevitability. Randomness filtered by virtually any selection processes will in fact, produce a reduction in randomness and therefore an increase in structure (and easily demonstrated by mathematical simulation). A mathematician may be a "designer" of a simulation, but that does not make him the designer of the system he is simulating, any more than the designer of a wind tunnel is the "designer" of the physics that produce lift.
Is your mind really so clouded by superstition that you are unable to see that the output of the Life algorithm is not predetermined by the programmer, and that the Life program is merely a very simple simulation of a minimal set of physical characteristics?.
Slashdot Mirror
Apparently, none of the top problems in computer science are going to be solved in the United States.
At least not by Microsoft...
The reason Google is on top is NOT because of the best search engine technology. It was because Google presents a non-tyrannical alternative. Gates can't see that though, because he's too wedded to his tyrannies...
It's a ridiculous idea, but if it were to happen, it has the following implications:
- Cost of software would have to go WAY up. Time to produce would increase significantly as well. Developers would take longer to produce software so more developers were needed or less software would be produced. MORE DEVELOPER JOBS. Better job security.
- Increase in cost of software would cause more in-house development in order to save money, where there is no external liability as the software is not sold in the independent marketplace, only used internally. Thus, the security constraints would be less as a company isn't going to sue itself for the insecure software it chose to use. More in-house development projects. MORE DEVELOPER JOBS. Better job security.
...and there's no unions to blame. So, rather than addressing the need for (and expense of) solid security requirements, standards and certification, let's blame the developers for not implementing features the client and/or management for the most part hasn't bothered to even mention, much less specify or budget for. As if developers should be expected to be perfectly prescient. And as if developers even have the power to enforce such security standards on the products they work on.
It's morons with responsibility-dodging attitudes like this that has given us the impotent swiss cheese of bolt-on security that we have now.
The "education system" is another convenient scapegoat. The "education system" in the U.S. at least, tends more and more to teach only what industry wants it to teach-- and industry hasn't been asking for security until very recently. But, the education system is a particularly popular scapegoat...
Just when you thought they couldn't be any worse, the current administration shows they are still fully capable of collossal errors in judgement and complete ignorance of the facts. Buffoonery on parade, Schmidt's just the baton twirler for today...
No wonder Linux has grown into a monster...
...to their suite that are unsupported by the open format. That's what they did to IE, Java, C#, etc.-- there's no reason to think the office file format will be any different...
... until they implement this. Then my huge collection of Vinyl LPs will be worth big bucks! Right now, you can't even give them away...
I wish they'd spend more time making a worthwhile GUI on Linux. I still use console/svgalib, as KDE/Gnome/X quite simply, sucks. Why these guys are so incessant in preserving "remote desktop" capabilities in a baseline GUI is beyond me. I hate "remote desktop"/"PC Anywhere"/"X Windows" performance. It sucks. Even if we all had guaranteed 100GB network performance, it'd suck compared to a direct frame-buffer based GUI. If I could run OS X on my existing PC hardware, I'd dump Linux for it in a minute. At that point I could forgo any need to dual-boot Windows-- the reason I dual-boot Windows now is NOT for application compatibility-- it's for PERFORMANCE. As long as graphics under GUI performance on the SAME hardware in Windows is so much better than Linux, Linux will remain just a second-class overdeveloped too-many-cooks dependency hell nightmare that only significantly differs from Windows in that it doesn't perform as well and you don't have to pay for it...
Yeah, and I know this is way incendiary-- but thick heads are resistant to reality...
-- You lose your push, when you beat around the bush. -- Don Van Vliet
It's quite simple, really. Say for example, you are a company with a 200M promotion budget. If you spend 40M on 5 bands, you can afford to a) produce and promote some videos, b) saturate the channels with ads & videos, etc. c) payola the crap out of the radio stations, d) pay to get them into some TV appearances and soundtracks of feature films. The resultant overexposure generates gobs of sales and the projects take off. On the other hand, if you spend that 200M as 5M on 40 bands, you can barely afford to pay for anything, they don't get much exposure and consequently, nothing takes off. You've spread the money too thin.
The quality of the music is not as critical as the quality of the marketing, which takes lots of money. You don't want to be wasting those gobs of money on bands the success of which you are unsure of-- the money is being spent to help guarantee success. Also, note that most new bands are young and naive, and are easy to fool into working for peanuts, which is why they rarely get much of the take, and why long term contracts are so popular with the corporations-- it locks them in before they've had the opportunity to wise up.
...for their poor sales performance...
It's too much work, even with better tools, I've got things I'd rather be doing. While I may not trust Google to do it the way I'd like, what they end up with will be more than I have interest in doing by myself...
And just what does Gates mean by "tools to organize"-- I doubt he means web-spider programs that will generate your own search engine database-- would it not likely mean that the tools would access a Microsoft database (that they apparently, haven't even bothered to organize) and you could then organize your links into Microsoft's data? Yeah, that sounds better than what Google's doing :-)...
Heck, with numbers like that it seems like Linux could run circles around XP Pro for audio/video apps such as streaming, recording, and playback!"
You say that like it's a hard mark to hit.
It is as long as one insists on jamming all the GUI and graphics data through a TCP/IP bottleneck...
I keep a postit on my monitor with a bunch of nonsense words that don't mean anything. I figure anyone trying to hack in will waste an enormous amount of time trying to figure out what they unlock...
Besides the obvious that have aready been mentioned multiple times, there is no end to the list of "what's wrong" with movie theaters...
Number one on my list, is they have not kept up with the increase in the DIVERSITY of TASTE of the viewing public. They target a couple of relatively narrow categories, those which they appear to believe cover significant market segments (and probably do, but there's a lot more of them now than there used to be), to the exclusion of all others. I look up what's playing in my neighborhood, and find at lest 150 screens to go sit in front of within a reasonable distance, but find that all 150 screens are showing the same 12 movies, virtually none of which I'm interested in seeing. So while in fact I do have 150 screens to choose from, I only have 12 movies to choose from. It wouldn't matter to me if I see "Skeleton Key" in theater A or theater B or theater C or theater D, all within close distance, if I wanted to see "Skeleton Key" at all! But they're trying to amortize their ad budgets, preferring "blockbusters" to diversity. Get a clue guys, the "blockbuster" concept is a complete anachronism in an extremely diverse marketplace. The music industry could stand to figure that out as well and get over the "good old days" of the supergroup.
Frankly, I prefer OLD movies, and actually WOULD like to see them on a big screen. There's one theater near me that will do that, a neat REALLY OLD classic theater but that has one of the worst sound systems I've ever heard-- the reverberations in the theater make the experience awful. Plus, whoever picks their selection of old movies needs their head examined-- they really suck. It needs someone who knows the old films well enough to actually seek out those known to be particularly enhanced by the large screen projection and be able to get them! Unfortunately, it's probably getting harder and harder if not impossible to get good prints of old films on demand, they have to find some restoration society or something because they aren't likely to get much help with that from the studios...
Last time I saw an ad on TV for a movie I actually wanted to see, I looked for it in my neighborhood. Come to find out it was only playing one place anywhere in a radius of about 150 miles, and that was 50 miles away-- yet they spent big bucks advertising the movie to get me there. I'm sorry, those big ad bucks weren't enough to get me to drive 50 miles to see it, despite the fact that I was willing to go somewhat out of my way for that particular movie-- they just made it TOO HARD (the movie was Howl's Moving Castle, BTW). Consequently, it's obvious that the movie index sites are only useful for people who want to go to the theater to see ANY movie, not to see a particular movie. They have to face it, there's just fewer and fewer people willing to do that. And if they can't find a way to fix it, film theaters may just go the way of the drive-ins. At least in drive-ins you had SOME privacy, and wouldn't have to listen to cell phones and the like if drive-ins still exited. The big problem with drive-ins was they couldn't keep you from bringing in your own snacks (oh, that's not a problem for ME, it's only a problem for THEM. That's customer-centric for you).
Bob Moog proved that the term "honorable businessman" is not an oxymoron, at least not in his case.
Bob had the occasion to visit Raymond Scott in his studio, and see one of Scott's secret inventions-- the sequencer. Scott unfortunately, was very protective of his ideas-- so much so that he undoubtedly took many of them to his grave. Scott didn't want his secret invention to get out-- though apparently needed some confirmation from someone qualified to appreciate it, else why would Bob be seeing it in the first place?
Consequently, the Moog Synthesizers did not have sequencers until the competition came up with them and started beating Moog up in the marketplace, so finally Scott let Bob off the hook and allowed Bob to manufacture sequencers for his synthesizers. Bob probably could have just stolen the idea, though in fact it's likely he would have arrived at it independently, but because Bob was honorable, he didn't use the sequencer concept without Scott's OK.
Just one of a wide variety of great stories. They don't make them like that anymore...
I got to meet Bob briefly in L.A. at the unveiling of the Fairlight CMI in the 1970s (or was it early '80s, I forget)-- he was involved in some of the PR of the instrument. It was a small group, and Bob gave a nice talk on music technologies. Great guy...
The Moog VCF is still being emulated (along with most of his other components) in digital "virtual analog" synthesizers today. I had a chance to pick up a classic Moog modular setup in the '70s for about $500. I still kick myself for passing it up. (big darn thing though, I had an Arp 2600 at the time (still have) and preferred the convenience of it, but while the 2600 has increased in value, not nearly as much as an original Moog modular-- plus the coolness factor now of a big 1/4" jack patched synth would now be pretty hard to beat)...
Not sure how hard that would be (don't know the OS X kernel), but if they could do that even if just to the extent that a few minor mods were required, a lot of the drivers would be available, and they wouldn't actually have to support them. Plus, flaky drivers in a Unix environment aren't as bad as flaky drivers in Windows, as they won't take the whole system down quite so often-- Unixes are a little more insulated from individual wayward programs than Windows is and the implementations are cleaner (no 16-bit THUNKs to worry about :-)...
Yeah, the hardware support is the killer, and why they won't do it. Where would all the drivers for all the obsolete hardware out there come from? Just getting it to boot on most 3-year old systems would mean having to write tens of thousands of drivers. Not gonna happen.
You have to realize, that if Apple does nothing, Microsoft and Linux are going to be battling it out over the next generation of desktops running on ultracheap commodity hardware. Apple has a unique opportunity here to jump in and really make some inroads into that marketplace, perhaps even to become the major player. They have a mature, solid and easy to use product that would be way ahead of either Microsoft or Linux in their own marketplace, if it could run on that same commodity hardware.
Plus, Apple's hardware has never been their strong point-- early Macs for example, were minimalist hardware, doing everything in software that the competition was doing in hardware. Their "hardware" innovations have been mostly cosmetics-- "toaster computers," "color coordinated computers," etc. Software has always been their business, certainly enhanced by the fact that their expensive "Sharper Image" dongle hardware had huge margins-- but those margins have been dwindling as commodity hardware gets cheaper and cheaper and they have to follow suit to an extent or the price difference gets so large they start losing out too much because of it. Now, they're butting up against the fact that they can't make the hardware themselves anywhere near as cheap as the competitive marketplace is getting it for, so even a 20% margin isn't enough to cover it-- they're experiencing a squeeze that they have to find a solution for, and at the same time there's this new opportunity, see, as Windows is now aged to the point that it's time for a quantum jump into a new product-- a perfect time for Apple to jump in and grab a serious piece of the action. Plus, Linux is whittling on it as well, and can prove to be somewhat of an ally in several ways-- it's another "unix," a source of drivers and other compatible code, etc...
I use Linux a lot now, but if I could get OS-X that would run on my generic '86 boxes, I'd probably move in that direction for the desktop, as Apple's is light years ahead of that KDE/GNOME and dependency hell crap IMHO (I run Linux, but primarily in console mode). Instead of dual-booting to Windows I'd dual boot to OS-X and would probably end up spending more time in OS-X than Linux in the long run...
I miss the old MP3.com. Originally, it was THE major player in LEGAL free music distribution. Now they've gone pay, and the other free distribution sites either have too, or have diversified too much, or are too small, or whatever to build up the kind of momentum that MP3.com had before it became mismanaged by fools that didn't understand the artists role in their success-- preferring to see the artist as customer rather than collaborator.. IUMA too has dried up, and while there are dozens of smaller sites now, the idea of a centralized catalogue of legal free music has pretty much gone...
Read the book, you will understand where the other side is coming from. It is not a religious issue for everybody but a strictly philosophical and scientific one. The reason people are so angry against ID is because religious people have hijacked a perfectly legitimate scientific challenge to evolution.
No, ID is a transparent attempt to resurrect the failed Watchmaker argument. There are several immediately obvious problems with ID:
- "irreducability" suggests that the only way a structure can exist is by being "built up" from something less complex. In fact, structures can also exist through the reduction of other structures via the loss of characteristics. For example, the construction of an arch often involves a scaffolding, which after the arch is constructed is removed. The resultant arch, it could be argued, is irreducibly complex as you can't take one brick away and have a viable structure. However, removing one brick is not the only way to incrementally backtrack the construction of the structure, and in fact has no connection to how the structure was actually constructed. Further it is concievable that a "natural" arch could arise from a rock avalanche falling on a mound of dirt that is later eroded away-- no defying of physics is required.
- There's also a tacit assumption that the "intelligence" in "intelligent design" is necessarily self-aware. Intelligence can be defined as the accumulation and application of information. Certainly DNA has that capability, yet is not self-aware. It has the ability to accumulate modifications and "learn" from mistakes, without self-awareness. Consequently, the term "intelligent design" is a misnomer, as evolution itself can be said to be a) a design process and b) intelligent. The true difference between evolution as an intelligent design process and ID, is one characteristic the ID proponents always leave out of their arguments-- self awareness. Show me an ID proponent who will admit that the I in ID doesn't require self-awareness, then I'll show you someone who's theory doesn't contradict evolution. The real skeleton hiding in the ID camp is the belief that "intelligence must be self-aware." It is that skeleton that reveals the religious nature of ID.
- As has already been stated, evolution is an explanation for many many known facts in biology, genetics, geology and I'm sure several other sciences I'm too tired to think of at the moment. While like any scientific explanation, it doesn't answer every possible question that can be posed, any replacement for it will have to explain notably more. Evolution however, is as close to a unified theory in these areas than we've seen by a long shot, and mainstream scientists are well aware of that-- that is why ID proponents must take their argument to the high schools where the less science literate can be buffooned into the bogus "fair play" argument that ID should have equal time. An argument in reality no different from an argument that Jesus should have "equal time" with Einstein in science classes. Dress it up in more PC language and sell it to the science-ignorant and there you have it...
Yes, the RIAA is very vocal about people ripping them off, but by saying nothing in regards to the institutionalized theft from the public and independent artists that is payola, their completely corrupt nature is revealed.
The RIAA cockroaches have developed payola to a fine art and it has continued unabated since the original case in the '50s. They'll never reach the "hearts and minds" of the public regarding digital media until they clean up their own house regarding the rampant PIRACY of the airwaves that is going on...
Marketeers have to get over characterizing customers as consumers.
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If companies can't remember the adage, the customer is always right, they may lose all contact with their consumers.
Argh!
Looks like I should have quoted the term in the last sentence-- I was arguing in their language, not mine.
Or did I mis-read what the Argh! was referring to?...
Marketeers often forget that the user actually has some say in the process as well. Just as services like Paypal allow you to mask your credit data from a vendor, eventually anonymous buying services will provide the ability to mask your identity completely. Imagine a service, say, BuyMaster.com, combined with a new AnonyShip service from UPS or FedEx where you can purchase through them and all the vendor site knows about the purchase is it was placed through BuyMaster and then must turn the product over to FedEx with only an ID number. Only BuyMaster knows who bought it and only FedEx knows where it's being sent. The vendor is completely disconnected from his market data-- the majority of purchases being placed by a single entity from his perspective. Now providing you can trust buymaster and the shipper this sounds like a valuable service-- at the very least the customer limits the propagation of his data. The customer could at his option, enable the ability to reveal certain aspects of his demographic in order to improve services, such as age, gender, interests, etc., but completely at the customer's discretion.
Marketeers have to get over characterizing customers as consumers. There's a difference. Really, what does it say about a company that views their buyers in that way? Do they provide a customer-friendly service, or are they simply tossing their products into a brightly painted swill bucket and opening the gate to the hog pen? If companies can't remember the adage, the customer is always right, they may lose all contact with their consumers.
We're still using keyboards limited by the design of 5-bit BAUDOT teleltypewriters-- despite the fact that the keyboards are commonly used to enter basic calculations, we still don't have a real multiply or divide symbol, and are using asterisk and slash as substitutes. Some would probably like to do away with keyboards altogether, but that's not gonna happen. The mouse was a step backwards (I've got 10 fingers, not just 1 or two, BTW).
As far as a new OS, the ones that are sure to have a very limited lifespan will be monolithic utopian attempts to encapsulate everything you'll ever want to do in an OS. Unix has had the long life it has, simply because it was extensible-- you didn't have to use the drivers or interfaces it provided, and could reconfigure individual components and their interconnections so whe you wanted to rework something you didn't have to write it ALL from scratch, just the parts that needed to be different. A successful OS will have to be very component oriented and extensible.
The Firefox team is pretty full of themselves-- it will take the attention to detail to make Firefox better, but I don't get the sense they are aware of that. Things like the annoying way it incessantly steals your input focus while you're typing, the fact that the Open New Window feature is virtually useless due to the Home Page feature which is itself useless (two areas where IE is actually better). Features that should have been worked out before the "sexy" features like popup blockers which can be done externally (and better, too). But users can always be retrained anyway, because We Know Better(TM).
Firefox should remember that they don't have to add sexy features every release like Microsoft does, and in fact that is Microsoft's biggest problem-- they have to add new features because they need you to update. Unfortunately, the Firefox team apparently also needs you to update in order to sustain the overinflation of their egos.
Both teams need a draconian Steve Jobs to force them to improve the usability first (and I don't even use a Mac). Someone who will take them to task over the little things. Otherwise creeping featurism and bloat will kill them off. The problem is, the little things just aren't as exciting to work on or talk about, which is a big reason why Microsoft's products are so lousy. Here's hoping it isn't becoming Firefox's reason too...
It shouldn't be too surprising that things have gotten to this obfuscated extent. I remember seeing a story where various political organizations would tune the text of their political messages by test-selecting the specific verbage in order to appeal to the largest number of voters. The examples showed several announcers being tested on test groups, where in each case the announcers choice of terminology was slightly varied and the participants would signal whether or not they were favorably disposed to the message. Some groups have really gotten it down to a science-- by couching the message in just the right terms, you can get almost anyone to agree with it. Once elected, is they seem to then believe their own propaganda, as they consider it a 'mandate' that they implement their plan, never mind that the tuned marketspeak they used to describe it turns out to be a rather poor representation of what they actually aim to do...
No, mathematically, it is an inevitability. Randomness filtered by virtually any selection processes will in fact, produce a reduction in randomness and therefore an increase in structure (and easily demonstrated by mathematical simulation). A mathematician may be a "designer" of a simulation, but that does not make him the designer of the system he is simulating, any more than the designer of a wind tunnel is the "designer" of the physics that produce lift.
Is your mind really so clouded by superstition that you are unable to see that the output of the Life algorithm is not predetermined by the programmer, and that the Life program is merely a very simple simulation of a minimal set of physical characteristics?.
-- Why do you think they call it apologetics?