TV is broken because, with a few exceptions, content is tied to a specific time and location.
Fixing this will be, as they say, complicated.
One of the critical complications is the financing model for content creation.
Most content production is paid for by advertisers,
with content aggregators like networks acting as middle-men.
One of the things advertisers pay for is having their commercials
presented to the potential audience at specific times of day.
This reflects the tendency of specific demographics to watch TV
in fairly patterns.
An example that used to be used frequently in the business is that
ads for products for the elderly are not run during the local evening news
because elderly viewers like the news;
it's because elderly viewers have the TV turned on at that time of day
and to a surprising degree,
independent of the content.
Within limits, obviously;
the elderly are willing to watch the news, but not some other types of content.
The complaint about time- and location-specificity is actually a complaint about
how the content creation process is financed.
Fixing that to accommodate a pure time- and location-independent delivery system
is going to take at least a generation,
if it can be done at all.
I spent the last decade of my technology career watching
these arguments go back and forth between the involved parties
(less the actual viewers, of course).
I'm not sure that there is a viable solution
simply because I'm not sure that there's a business model that distributes
the financial risks in an acceptable fashion.
Don't be silly.
The vast majority of the Greenland ice sheet existed throughout the viking occupation.
The vast majority of the ice-free area along the coast
where the vikings settled
continues to be ice free to this day.
The "greening" was the result of changes in the extent and type of plants
growing in existing ice-free areas along selected portions of the coast.
Decades ago, I was in a telco central office where multiple electromechanical switching systems (and associated relay logic) were powered off 48VDC. The main power buses down in the basement near the battery farm consisted of multiple copper 2x6s strapped together, with about 18 inches between ground and -48VDC. At one point I noticed that there were two little stubs sticking an inch or two out from the copper and asked about them. The craft got a big grin and explained that a newbie had been standing on those power runs, doing something with a steel pry bar, and had dropped it -- and it landed across the conductors. He said it was like a giant flash bulb going off. 48 volts, about a bazillion amps, and a one- or two-ohm conductor shorted across it...
Well, unless the proponents of abiotic oil theories are correct...
And only if their theories successfully predict new classes of oil traps where
commercial quantities of crude can be extracted at reasonable rates and costs --
and it is my understanding that they haven't done that yet.
There is no practical difference between
"Diffuse oil from organic sources has been concentrated over millions of years in
sedimentary rock structures with specific characteristics" and
"Diffuse oil formed deep in the mantle has been concentrated over millions of years
in sedimentary rock structures with specific characteristics."
We're not finding new volumes with the proper characteristics
at anything near historic rates,
or even at rates that match our current extractions.
Isn't this also the same game where the players stop playing the game during commercials [wikipedia.org]? Yeah, paint me surprised.
Not to mention all the other times when nothing is happening.
Until you've seen a game at the stadium,
you don't realize just how hard the TV production team is working
to fill up the dead time.
I also drag out Moon is a Harsh Mistress every several years. I have a similar soft spot for Glory Road; not because I like Oscar, but I've always wanted to grow up to be Rufo.
Yes.
In a number of fields,
Excel as it runs on Windows (including the warts like VBA and Solver)
is the default computational platform.
If I were working in isolation, that wouldn't be an issue.
If I'm going to collaborate, or build on the work of others, or leave work for others to build on,
it's an enormous issue.
Many years ago, one of the statistics about the kind of people that Bell Labs hired was that the Labs hired almost 25% of all new physics PhDs each year. Internally, what was always added was "...and one or two of them actually get to do physics." People who finish a PhD in physics are generally pretty darned good practical electrical engineers and/or applied mathematicians. The Labs was up front about what their jobs would be; the ones that I knew seemed to be perfectly happy solving challenging technical problems, even if they weren't physics problems.
My state is one where they do allow professional people in as "supervised" teachers. Once there, though, the seniority thing rears its ugly head. A friend with an MS in applied math, several years of experience, and a terrific flair for explaining concepts, was hired as a high-school math teacher. The plum assignments— small classes of motivated students learning trig and calculus— went to teachers with lots of years but who, in my friend's opinion, couldn't have passed those courses as students. My friend was stuck in Algebra I classes, filled with students whose only interest was getting the D that the state required for them to graduate.
...great when you have a small screen, awful and confusing on a big screen one, especially when an app spawns multiple windows.
Yeah, this was my complaint -- no obvious way to pick which window to pull to the top,
especially with xterms.
If they're going to steal eye candy from OS X,
they might borrow Mission Control.
Two quick clicks to pull essentially any window on any virtual desktop to the top.
While it's true that a considerable amount of Eastern electricity is derived from Western sources, the "Long Wires" are railroads and pipelines moving coal and natural gas respectively. In very round numbers, 25% of Eastern electricity is generated by burning coal from Wyoming and points farther west. Another 15% or so is generated by burning natural gas from Texas/Louisiana/GOM, the Rocky Mountain region, and western Canada. As others have noted, relatively little electricity is actually moved between the three Interconnect regions in the US, particularly on net.
C) Power *can* be shipped cross-country with rather low losses, via HVDC lines. Which are surprisingly affordable; HVDC has a lot of per-terminal cost but a not-unreasonable per-mile cost.
I've decided that I'm going to be an advocate for the idea of
the 11 western continental states seceding
(everyone should champion at least one impossible cause).
In support of that,
I'll point out that cross-country HVDC lines are relatively fragile and
dynamite is cheap.
Attempting to power the East Coast with
solar electricity from the desert Southwest and
geothermal electricity from the Great Basin
could be... unreliable:^)
Sorry, but yes, it does.
Sometimes by people who get paid more than interns, too.
To make it more interesting,
the individual tables were designed by different people so at best they're not quite consistent.
Even though they know the status quo is grossly inefficient,
management has trouble committing to paying to
have a unified data model developed,
moving data including possibly historical data moved to the new format,
verifying the accuracy of the transfer (since at least some of it will have been transcribed by hand),
developing and verifying the various report generators that replace
the (often surprisingly complex) Excel summary pages that have grown up over the years,
etc.
In the case that I'm most familiar with,
the difficulty was that converting was going to require
the entire staff to take about a month off from their regular jobs
to implement the conversion.
It doesn't match exactly with "professional", but Apple has always shied away from "enterprise".
When I worked for a giant corporation,
Microsoft was "officially" notified that because we had 30,000 seats,
mostly people who were not computer people and
who would have to repeat training if the way the desktop worked changed,
we would not buy a new version of Windows unless they guaranteed
a backwards-compatible UI.
MS, who is enterprise first and individual consumers second,
has been willing to do this across multiple releases.
Apple does not want to be constrained in this fashion;
it's one of the reasons they ignore the "enterprise" market.
Unless one is a religious/capitalist wacko who believes in the abiotic origins of oil...
Even if the wackos are right, and oil is abiotic in origin, it's not material.
The abiotic theory does not predict any new types of traps that could be commercially exploited.
Yes, there's $2.5T in the trust fund -- about five years worth of benefit payments at current rates. The fund is tapped only when current income is insufficient to pay benefits -- tapped for relatively small amounts the last couple of years due to substantial drop-offs in revenue caused by higher unemployment and the payroll-tax holiday. I agree with you that SS is solvent, and can be solvent forever with small adjustments, but it's still very much a pay-as-you-go system, not a savings system.
Note that things are playing out very much like the forecasts made by the Greenspan Commission when they made their proposals for SS in 1983. In fact, they only got one assumption wrong -- that productivity gains would be reflected in wages up and down the wage scale. When they made their recommendations on formulas, that had been true for the last 40 years. Unfortunately, almost as soon as the new formulas were adopted, productivity gains began to be concentrated in the wages of those making more than the cap.
Government transfers of money to the old is money saved from them from before they were old.
Simply not true. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (just about 50% of Medicaid payments now go to the elderly) are now, and always have been, pay-as-you-go programs. "Trust" funds exist primarily to allow irregular revenues to be smoothed. There was a plan to use the SS trust fund to accumulate funding to help pay for the Baby Boomers' benefits, but Congress has probably screwed that up -- they certainly haven't followed the recommendations of the Greenspan Commission who made the proposal. Social Security was originally described as if it were a savings plan, even though it's not, because FDR feared the voters wouldn't tolerate a PAYG public pension system.
Spot on.
You and I can think we know what a law says;
the legislature that passed it and the executive that signed it can think they know what a law says;
but until it's been through court and multiple judges have consistently ruled the same way,
no one really knows what the law says.
There's also the hypothesis that "success" for an infectious organism is to maximize the number of people that get infected. In that case, it is possible for a disease to be too virulent: if too many victims die too fast, the spread eventually peters out. If that's a valid argument, then it's possible that a Y. pestis variant that is not so lethal would eventually crowd out the Middle Ages' version. Proponents of the hypothesis usually point to rhinoviruses as being nearly ideal. They're highly infectious, but don't kill the victim, so they can spread to very large numbers of people.
Having skimmed the article, I am concerned that they seem to ignore the well-known network effect: the value of a network to those attached to it increases at a rate faster than linear as a function of the number of others attached. This property has generally meant that once a network-layer protocol is sufficiently well established, it is hard to displace; a winner-take-all situation. Telegraph network. Telephone network. In the data world, IP, ATM, and a handful of others slugged it out, and eventually IPv4 reached critical mass and "won".
Starting back in the late 70s, I spent a career telling senior managers in telecom and cable that "...it's a software world. Your projects aren't late because the hardware isn't ready, they're late because of software problems. The embarrassing failures in the widgets aren't hardware problems, they are in the software. The hang-up on rolling new services is that the billing and customer care software systems can't handle it."
And in my last paid gig, trying to explain that last one to members of the state legislature: "No, you can't make that particular change be effective in July, because it will take 12 months to get the necessary modifications in the state's software systems finished."
We have a whole closet full of old hardware, but $1,000 to license software XYZ for all of them would be very helpful.
We have a closet full of new hardware donated by big company X, but 20 hours per week of volunteer sys admin time to set them up and keep them running would be very helpful.
Your old hardware is too limited, we need X GHz processor and Y Gbytes of memory to run software ABC.
The local schools and libraries all have Windows and IE, so we insist on that.
Our volunteer sys admins are all Windows and IE folks, so we insist on that.
Slashdot Mirror
Fixing this will be, as they say, complicated. One of the critical complications is the financing model for content creation. Most content production is paid for by advertisers, with content aggregators like networks acting as middle-men. One of the things advertisers pay for is having their commercials presented to the potential audience at specific times of day. This reflects the tendency of specific demographics to watch TV in fairly patterns. An example that used to be used frequently in the business is that ads for products for the elderly are not run during the local evening news because elderly viewers like the news; it's because elderly viewers have the TV turned on at that time of day and to a surprising degree, independent of the content. Within limits, obviously; the elderly are willing to watch the news, but not some other types of content.
The complaint about time- and location-specificity is actually a complaint about how the content creation process is financed. Fixing that to accommodate a pure time- and location-independent delivery system is going to take at least a generation, if it can be done at all. I spent the last decade of my technology career watching these arguments go back and forth between the involved parties (less the actual viewers, of course). I'm not sure that there is a viable solution simply because I'm not sure that there's a business model that distributes the financial risks in an acceptable fashion.
Don't be silly. The vast majority of the Greenland ice sheet existed throughout the viking occupation. The vast majority of the ice-free area along the coast where the vikings settled continues to be ice free to this day. The "greening" was the result of changes in the extent and type of plants growing in existing ice-free areas along selected portions of the coast.
Decades ago, I was in a telco central office where multiple electromechanical switching systems (and associated relay logic) were powered off 48VDC. The main power buses down in the basement near the battery farm consisted of multiple copper 2x6s strapped together, with about 18 inches between ground and -48VDC. At one point I noticed that there were two little stubs sticking an inch or two out from the copper and asked about them. The craft got a big grin and explained that a newbie had been standing on those power runs, doing something with a steel pry bar, and had dropped it -- and it landed across the conductors. He said it was like a giant flash bulb going off. 48 volts, about a bazillion amps, and a one- or two-ohm conductor shorted across it...
And only if their theories successfully predict new classes of oil traps where commercial quantities of crude can be extracted at reasonable rates and costs -- and it is my understanding that they haven't done that yet. There is no practical difference between "Diffuse oil from organic sources has been concentrated over millions of years in sedimentary rock structures with specific characteristics" and "Diffuse oil formed deep in the mantle has been concentrated over millions of years in sedimentary rock structures with specific characteristics." We're not finding new volumes with the proper characteristics at anything near historic rates, or even at rates that match our current extractions.
Not to mention all the other times when nothing is happening. Until you've seen a game at the stadium, you don't realize just how hard the TV production team is working to fill up the dead time.
I also drag out Moon is a Harsh Mistress every several years. I have a similar soft spot for Glory Road; not because I like Oscar, but I've always wanted to grow up to be Rufo.
Yes. In a number of fields, Excel as it runs on Windows (including the warts like VBA and Solver) is the default computational platform. If I were working in isolation, that wouldn't be an issue. If I'm going to collaborate, or build on the work of others, or leave work for others to build on, it's an enormous issue.
Many years ago, one of the statistics about the kind of people that Bell Labs hired was that the Labs hired almost 25% of all new physics PhDs each year. Internally, what was always added was "...and one or two of them actually get to do physics." People who finish a PhD in physics are generally pretty darned good practical electrical engineers and/or applied mathematicians. The Labs was up front about what their jobs would be; the ones that I knew seemed to be perfectly happy solving challenging technical problems, even if they weren't physics problems.
My state is one where they do allow professional people in as "supervised" teachers. Once there, though, the seniority thing rears its ugly head. A friend with an MS in applied math, several years of experience, and a terrific flair for explaining concepts, was hired as a high-school math teacher. The plum assignments— small classes of motivated students learning trig and calculus— went to teachers with lots of years but who, in my friend's opinion, couldn't have passed those courses as students. My friend was stuck in Algebra I classes, filled with students whose only interest was getting the D that the state required for them to graduate.
Out of curiosity, what was "college level" algebra?
Yeah, this was my complaint -- no obvious way to pick which window to pull to the top, especially with xterms. If they're going to steal eye candy from OS X, they might borrow Mission Control. Two quick clicks to pull essentially any window on any virtual desktop to the top.
While it's true that a considerable amount of Eastern electricity is derived from Western sources, the "Long Wires" are railroads and pipelines moving coal and natural gas respectively. In very round numbers, 25% of Eastern electricity is generated by burning coal from Wyoming and points farther west. Another 15% or so is generated by burning natural gas from Texas/Louisiana/GOM, the Rocky Mountain region, and western Canada. As others have noted, relatively little electricity is actually moved between the three Interconnect regions in the US, particularly on net.
I've decided that I'm going to be an advocate for the idea of the 11 western continental states seceding (everyone should champion at least one impossible cause). In support of that, I'll point out that cross-country HVDC lines are relatively fragile and dynamite is cheap. Attempting to power the East Coast with solar electricity from the desert Southwest and geothermal electricity from the Great Basin could be... unreliable :^)
Sorry, but yes, it does. Sometimes by people who get paid more than interns, too. To make it more interesting, the individual tables were designed by different people so at best they're not quite consistent. Even though they know the status quo is grossly inefficient, management has trouble committing to paying to have a unified data model developed, moving data including possibly historical data moved to the new format, verifying the accuracy of the transfer (since at least some of it will have been transcribed by hand), developing and verifying the various report generators that replace the (often surprisingly complex) Excel summary pages that have grown up over the years, etc.
In the case that I'm most familiar with, the difficulty was that converting was going to require the entire staff to take about a month off from their regular jobs to implement the conversion.
It doesn't match exactly with "professional", but Apple has always shied away from "enterprise".
When I worked for a giant corporation, Microsoft was "officially" notified that because we had 30,000 seats, mostly people who were not computer people and who would have to repeat training if the way the desktop worked changed, we would not buy a new version of Windows unless they guaranteed a backwards-compatible UI. MS, who is enterprise first and individual consumers second, has been willing to do this across multiple releases. Apple does not want to be constrained in this fashion; it's one of the reasons they ignore the "enterprise" market.
Even if the wackos are right, and oil is abiotic in origin, it's not material. The abiotic theory does not predict any new types of traps that could be commercially exploited.
Yeah, that one jumped out at me too.
Yes, there's $2.5T in the trust fund -- about five years worth of benefit payments at current rates. The fund is tapped only when current income is insufficient to pay benefits -- tapped for relatively small amounts the last couple of years due to substantial drop-offs in revenue caused by higher unemployment and the payroll-tax holiday. I agree with you that SS is solvent, and can be solvent forever with small adjustments, but it's still very much a pay-as-you-go system, not a savings system.
Note that things are playing out very much like the forecasts made by the Greenspan Commission when they made their proposals for SS in 1983. In fact, they only got one assumption wrong -- that productivity gains would be reflected in wages up and down the wage scale. When they made their recommendations on formulas, that had been true for the last 40 years. Unfortunately, almost as soon as the new formulas were adopted, productivity gains began to be concentrated in the wages of those making more than the cap.
Simply not true. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid (just about 50% of Medicaid payments now go to the elderly) are now, and always have been, pay-as-you-go programs. "Trust" funds exist primarily to allow irregular revenues to be smoothed. There was a plan to use the SS trust fund to accumulate funding to help pay for the Baby Boomers' benefits, but Congress has probably screwed that up -- they certainly haven't followed the recommendations of the Greenspan Commission who made the proposal. Social Security was originally described as if it were a savings plan, even though it's not, because FDR feared the voters wouldn't tolerate a PAYG public pension system.
Spot on. You and I can think we know what a law says; the legislature that passed it and the executive that signed it can think they know what a law says; but until it's been through court and multiple judges have consistently ruled the same way, no one really knows what the law says.
...positioning things so they can sell it off. Move it out of the line organization, into a special headquarters group, then sell it.
There's also the hypothesis that "success" for an infectious organism is to maximize the number of people that get infected. In that case, it is possible for a disease to be too virulent: if too many victims die too fast, the spread eventually peters out. If that's a valid argument, then it's possible that a Y. pestis variant that is not so lethal would eventually crowd out the Middle Ages' version. Proponents of the hypothesis usually point to rhinoviruses as being nearly ideal. They're highly infectious, but don't kill the victim, so they can spread to very large numbers of people.
Having skimmed the article, I am concerned that they seem to ignore the well-known network effect: the value of a network to those attached to it increases at a rate faster than linear as a function of the number of others attached. This property has generally meant that once a network-layer protocol is sufficiently well established, it is hard to displace; a winner-take-all situation. Telegraph network. Telephone network. In the data world, IP, ATM, and a handful of others slugged it out, and eventually IPv4 reached critical mass and "won".
Starting back in the late 70s, I spent a career telling senior managers in telecom and cable that "...it's a software world. Your projects aren't late because the hardware isn't ready, they're late because of software problems. The embarrassing failures in the widgets aren't hardware problems, they are in the software. The hang-up on rolling new services is that the billing and customer care software systems can't handle it."
And in my last paid gig, trying to explain that last one to members of the state legislature: "No, you can't make that particular change be effective in July, because it will take 12 months to get the necessary modifications in the state's software systems finished."