I hope not; I want to see them get to 802.11wtf someday soon!
(And, looking at the Wikipedia list of 802.11 standards, there are already some planned for after "ad".)
But here's the problem: the very concept of "marginal cost of production" is nearly made obsolete by computers and the Internet. It used to be that the effort to produce the copies was proportional to the number of copies being made. Not any more. (Why else would we have spam?)
Maybe the real measure of value is the total cost of production. It used to be that total cost and marginal cost were pretty closely related. But in today's world, the amount of effort to create a work has stayed the same (apparent quality of said work should be ignored for the sake of this discussion), while the effort to duplicate or distribute said work has gone way down.
This is the same situation created by the printing press in the 1500s: it used to be that monks had to transcribe documents by hand in order to distribute them thus making scrolls and so on highly prized. Suddenly people could make many, many more copies quite easily. However, it still required individual effort to make each copy, so marginal cost of production still applied.
Radio and television upset the balance even further. Someone could broadcast a work just once, and it didn't matter how many people were watching or listening. But the market managed to twist a way to apply the idea of "marginal cost" by figuring out about how many people were tuning in, thus deriving an apparent value. Hence, advertising and the Nielsen ratings.
There's not going to be an easy answer to the problem.
Well first, consider that there's a cost of maintaining a server, or for paying to have space on one of the cloud services. Also, I can think of plenty of scenarios where having a hard copy (so to speak) of the file is better... for business situations, what if you leave your job? What if access to the server is constricted for some reason? What if you want to carry these files home, but the corporate firewall doesn't permit access to a remote server?
For home users, maybe you want to archive your photos in case of a hard drive failure. (The original post wasn't just talking about distribution, it was also talking about archiving/preserving the data.) Or maybe you want to save a lot of your files in a safe deposit box or something. And maybe you only want to save 5GB worth of data. What's the point in spending money on a giant hard drive that you're only going to use a fraction of? CDs and DVDs are still much smaller than hard drives, physically, for relatively small amounts of data.
I certainly agree that the ideal of having everything be server-based makes sense, but it's hardly the be-all and end-all of the answer. As with many things in the technology world, having alternatives is a Good Thing(TM).
Stupid question, but why is the poster still using CDs for data? Hard drives are down to 10 cents per gigabyte
Are you serious? CDs are a useful way to distribute a large group of files through a method other than e-mail (or "the cloud," though I kinda hate that term). It's especially helpful if the information needs to be available for a while... That is, rather than storing the files somewhere on a server where things can get lost or moved, sometimes having a physical CD is just a better option.
By your logic, if I wanted to send 400MB of files to, say, 50 people, you'd have me buy 50 hard drives? Or even 50 USB flash drives?
The Internet may be making medium-sized file transfers (in the 50MB-to-5GB range) a lot easier, but sometimes an indirect transfer by CD or DVD is still a better option. Sure, the Internet transfer method is only going to get easier over time, and CDs will eventually go the way of floppies. But that time is a lot farther away than you seem to think.
That's a great idea for a delaying tactic, but it could easily backfire on you if the survey indicates that people aren't using the wiki correctly or at all...
"The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing; every one must be an author; some out of vanity, to acquire celebrity and raise up a name, others for the sake of mere gain." -- Martin Luther predicts the Internet, ca. 1530
The problem is that some recruiters might not tell you the name of the company up front. When I got a call from a recruiter a few months back, he wouldn't give me the name of the company until I agreed to pursue the prospect and he got the ball rolling on his end. He wanted to get the credit for me, rather than have me go directly to the company themselves.
And from what I can see, there IS a benefit of external recruiters: they work basically like temp agencies. With a huge list of contacts and recruits, if someone doesn't get hired for the initial job prospect, the recruiter can then recycle that same recruit to another company instead. This benefits the hiring companies in aggregate because they each have access to a potentially larger pool than individual, in-house recruiting departments. It's annoying for US, but it's still practical.
Yeah, really! We need to send every single damn lazy chemist and nutritionist down at the FDA out to Afghanistan... that'll be sure to nab Osama! And don't forget the jerks down at the DMV, too! Maybe they could manage to get him run over during a driving test or something.
*sighs, shakes head*
But don't forget that profits from films and other forms of entertainment are often divided based on percentages. How can one be certain they're getting their contractually agreed-upon share without open and equal access to the financial numbers? Based on my reading of the various articles, that seems to be the core of the dispute. Peter Jackson's open letter specifically stated it's not primarily about the money... it's about fulfilling contractual obligations and receiving the (perfectly normal) right to have full access to the accounting information.
Most people don't realize that even certain VHS tapes had DRM -- or at least a basic form thereof. Many years ago, for a high school video project, I wanted to splice a little scene from "Return of the Jedi" into our project. (The scene with the Ewoks bowing and scraping to Threepio, as a metaphor for the Aztecs greeting Cortez.) But when I tried to record it onto the family VHS video camera for splicing and transfer (we were using our VCR and the camera to create a very basic editing system; this was 1996!), the camera would quit recording after a few seconds, saying something about a "protected" video or something.
I forget how I got around it, but it was a pain in the ass. All for less than thirty seconds of fair-use footage for a damn high school project!
But when you buy a new car, do you not also expect it to come with a tank of gas? I certainly wouldn't want to have to push my car over to the nearest gas station to fill it up!
That being said, I do agree that PC manufacturers need to offer choice of operating system at the time of purchase. But it's not entirely HP's fault... HP doesn't want to be put at a competitive disadvantage by being forced to pay higher prices for Windows on their machines, which would drive their prices up. France should be going after Microsoft for the OEM pricing racket they've got going, instead.
He also did Men in Tights (1993) and Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995). Not everybody loved those, but I thought they were both reasonably amusing, to say the least.
Retirement is that milestone in your life where you (probably) have enough money earned and saved that you can live off said savings for the remainder of your life. Considering that (1) life expectancy is increasing and there's the possibility of life extension treatments on the horizon, and (2) the national budget is in the toilet (at least in the USA) with grim prospects for the long-range viability of Social Security... I think it's ludicrous to think about early retirement at all. Unless you're a serious workaholic, the old adage "slow and steady wins the race" still applies!
Also, I'm not impressed by that survey... I'd bet that the vast majority of those jobs are small fast-food-joint type affairs where they spend 10 or 20 hours a week at most, as a way to get some extra spending money. We've got several people who do that where I work. Working two full-time jobs would be ridiculous.
Besides, if anyone actually had two full-time jobs, they wouldn't likely have time to read Slashdot now, would they?
Why the heck was the parent modded funny? Although I disagree about the "phones going wireless is a step backwards" argument, the part pertaining to networking is dead-on. For example, when I'm grabbing the latest OS update from the local server to a client machine, downloading via ethernet is sometimes TEN TIMES faster. And when you're trying to update thirty machines at once, going over the wires is definitely a Good Thing(TM).
I think the original question needs to have a bit more specificity: what kind of general work are they doing? How critical is download speed to the operation? How big are the files they'll be working with?
Overall, I have to agree with the general consensus (so far, anyway): Though going wireless has a few advantages, and some of the old disadvantages are no longer a problem, the question of reliability is still critical for a business. Going wired is the only way to get the ultimate reliability.
>> While Microsoft always had and will have their cadre of softies following and coding to all of the Microsoft whistles and bells, I think this time many middle-roaders feel stung by the crap that was IE and are more inclined to steer clear of gee-whiz stuff and cater more to globally accepted standards.
Add to that the fact that Microsoft now wants everybody to re-code their websites to work around the required EOLAS patch...
Okay... so what about backups? What about large photo collections, or home movie projects? There are plenty of things that you always want to have a redundant copy of, just on the off chance that something fries your system.
IANAL, but I don't think that the GPL had all that much to do with it. Certainly SCO was raising a hell of a fuss over the GPL for a while (some of their funniest moments, those), but it never seemed to be all of the core of the issue -- as far as I've understood it (and I've been reading GrokLaw for quite a while), it's mainly been (supposedly) about breach of contract. Everything else seems to have stemmed from that initial charge. Apparently, anyway. I seriously doubt that IBM is idealistic enough to simply be going to this friggin' huge expense simply to uphold the GPL, contract or not. Otherwise the GPL would be forming a much greater part of IBM's arguments.
No, IBM is fighting back because (1) they know that SCO has no case whatsoever, (2) they need to defend their "good name" in this regard because they see profit in the Linux business going forward, and (3) because the Nazgul haven't been fed in a while and they're getting hungry again.
>> Only the guilty should give in to those tactics.
So, if someone ever tries to mug me in the mall parking lot because he claims that the cash I'm carrying was stolen, and threatens to shoot me if I don't hand it over, then I should confidently resist because I know I'm not guilty? Sure, sounds good.
In Microsoft's case, I have never heard of a government agency requiring ordinary citizens (not contractors/vendors to the agency) to use Windows.
Uh, hello? Didn't you get the memo about FEMA's disaster-assistance web application form? You know, the one that requires you to use Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (a Windows-only browser) in order to fill out the paperwork?
Sure, there's a valid concern about rejection. But I my (admittedly rather uninformed) opinion/guess is that the vast majority of those kinds of decisions are just the result of corporate paranoia and overprotectiveness; in other words, the managers are willing to accept the lost money from not having a person do his job during the two weeks' notice period, on the assumption that any damage the employee could do would cost a great deal more.
It's sad when people have to assume the worst in such situations, when often it's just that people are deciding to move on (and you'd think that there'd be at least some trust involved in a business), but, this is Corporate America we're talking about here. It all comes down to The Almighty Dollar.
(Of course, it occurs to me that all these people are generally worrying about nothing. Think about it: if you were intent on committing sabotage, wouldn't you just do it before you submit your resignation, so they don't suspect a thing? Or am I being too naive again?)
Slashdot Mirror
I hope not; I want to see them get to 802.11wtf someday soon! (And, looking at the Wikipedia list of 802.11 standards, there are already some planned for after "ad".)
But here's the problem: the very concept of "marginal cost of production" is nearly made obsolete by computers and the Internet. It used to be that the effort to produce the copies was proportional to the number of copies being made. Not any more. (Why else would we have spam?)
Maybe the real measure of value is the total cost of production. It used to be that total cost and marginal cost were pretty closely related. But in today's world, the amount of effort to create a work has stayed the same (apparent quality of said work should be ignored for the sake of this discussion), while the effort to duplicate or distribute said work has gone way down.
This is the same situation created by the printing press in the 1500s: it used to be that monks had to transcribe documents by hand in order to distribute them thus making scrolls and so on highly prized. Suddenly people could make many, many more copies quite easily. However, it still required individual effort to make each copy, so marginal cost of production still applied.
Radio and television upset the balance even further. Someone could broadcast a work just once, and it didn't matter how many people were watching or listening. But the market managed to twist a way to apply the idea of "marginal cost" by figuring out about how many people were tuning in, thus deriving an apparent value. Hence, advertising and the Nielsen ratings.
There's not going to be an easy answer to the problem.
Then they become smarter than us and take over? I think I saw that movie.
Well first, consider that there's a cost of maintaining a server, or for paying to have space on one of the cloud services. Also, I can think of plenty of scenarios where having a hard copy (so to speak) of the file is better... for business situations, what if you leave your job? What if access to the server is constricted for some reason? What if you want to carry these files home, but the corporate firewall doesn't permit access to a remote server?
For home users, maybe you want to archive your photos in case of a hard drive failure. (The original post wasn't just talking about distribution, it was also talking about archiving/preserving the data.) Or maybe you want to save a lot of your files in a safe deposit box or something. And maybe you only want to save 5GB worth of data. What's the point in spending money on a giant hard drive that you're only going to use a fraction of? CDs and DVDs are still much smaller than hard drives, physically, for relatively small amounts of data.
I certainly agree that the ideal of having everything be server-based makes sense, but it's hardly the be-all and end-all of the answer. As with many things in the technology world, having alternatives is a Good Thing(TM).
Are you serious? CDs are a useful way to distribute a large group of files through a method other than e-mail (or "the cloud," though I kinda hate that term). It's especially helpful if the information needs to be available for a while... That is, rather than storing the files somewhere on a server where things can get lost or moved, sometimes having a physical CD is just a better option.
By your logic, if I wanted to send 400MB of files to, say, 50 people, you'd have me buy 50 hard drives? Or even 50 USB flash drives?
The Internet may be making medium-sized file transfers (in the 50MB-to-5GB range) a lot easier, but sometimes an indirect transfer by CD or DVD is still a better option. Sure, the Internet transfer method is only going to get easier over time, and CDs will eventually go the way of floppies. But that time is a lot farther away than you seem to think.
That's a great idea for a delaying tactic, but it could easily backfire on you if the survey indicates that people aren't using the wiki correctly or at all...
Damn that's evil! Really, what quicker way to drive away users - program your application to piss them off and then stop working.
I don't know why people are thinking this is a new idea. After all, Windows has been doing the exact same thing for years.
"The multitude of books is a great evil. There is no limit to this fever for writing; every one must be an author; some out of vanity, to acquire celebrity and raise up a name, others for the sake of mere gain." -- Martin Luther predicts the Internet, ca. 1530
The problem is that some recruiters might not tell you the name of the company up front. When I got a call from a recruiter a few months back, he wouldn't give me the name of the company until I agreed to pursue the prospect and he got the ball rolling on his end. He wanted to get the credit for me, rather than have me go directly to the company themselves.
And from what I can see, there IS a benefit of external recruiters: they work basically like temp agencies. With a huge list of contacts and recruits, if someone doesn't get hired for the initial job prospect, the recruiter can then recycle that same recruit to another company instead. This benefits the hiring companies in aggregate because they each have access to a potentially larger pool than individual, in-house recruiting departments. It's annoying for US, but it's still practical.
Why? Because a geek must have his chocolate!
Yeah, really! We need to send every single damn lazy chemist and nutritionist down at the FDA out to Afghanistan... that'll be sure to nab Osama! And don't forget the jerks down at the DMV, too! Maybe they could manage to get him run over during a driving test or something. *sighs, shakes head*
But don't forget that profits from films and other forms of entertainment are often divided based on percentages. How can one be certain they're getting their contractually agreed-upon share without open and equal access to the financial numbers? Based on my reading of the various articles, that seems to be the core of the dispute. Peter Jackson's open letter specifically stated it's not primarily about the money... it's about fulfilling contractual obligations and receiving the (perfectly normal) right to have full access to the accounting information.
Most people don't realize that even certain VHS tapes had DRM -- or at least a basic form thereof. Many years ago, for a high school video project, I wanted to splice a little scene from "Return of the Jedi" into our project. (The scene with the Ewoks bowing and scraping to Threepio, as a metaphor for the Aztecs greeting Cortez.) But when I tried to record it onto the family VHS video camera for splicing and transfer (we were using our VCR and the camera to create a very basic editing system; this was 1996!), the camera would quit recording after a few seconds, saying something about a "protected" video or something.
I forget how I got around it, but it was a pain in the ass. All for less than thirty seconds of fair-use footage for a damn high school project!
But when you buy a new car, do you not also expect it to come with a tank of gas? I certainly wouldn't want to have to push my car over to the nearest gas station to fill it up!
That being said, I do agree that PC manufacturers need to offer choice of operating system at the time of purchase. But it's not entirely HP's fault... HP doesn't want to be put at a competitive disadvantage by being forced to pay higher prices for Windows on their machines, which would drive their prices up. France should be going after Microsoft for the OEM pricing racket they've got going, instead.
He also did Men in Tights (1993) and Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995). Not everybody loved those, but I thought they were both reasonably amusing, to say the least.
"If you don't patch Windows, the terrorists win!"
Shouldn't this article instead be from the "twenty-years-too-late" department?
Retirement is that milestone in your life where you (probably) have enough money earned and saved that you can live off said savings for the remainder of your life. Considering that (1) life expectancy is increasing and there's the possibility of life extension treatments on the horizon, and (2) the national budget is in the toilet (at least in the USA) with grim prospects for the long-range viability of Social Security... I think it's ludicrous to think about early retirement at all. Unless you're a serious workaholic, the old adage "slow and steady wins the race" still applies!
Also, I'm not impressed by that survey... I'd bet that the vast majority of those jobs are small fast-food-joint type affairs where they spend 10 or 20 hours a week at most, as a way to get some extra spending money. We've got several people who do that where I work. Working two full-time jobs would be ridiculous.
Besides, if anyone actually had two full-time jobs, they wouldn't likely have time to read Slashdot now, would they?
Why the heck was the parent modded funny? Although I disagree about the "phones going wireless is a step backwards" argument, the part pertaining to networking is dead-on. For example, when I'm grabbing the latest OS update from the local server to a client machine, downloading via ethernet is sometimes TEN TIMES faster. And when you're trying to update thirty machines at once, going over the wires is definitely a Good Thing(TM).
I think the original question needs to have a bit more specificity: what kind of general work are they doing? How critical is download speed to the operation? How big are the files they'll be working with?
Overall, I have to agree with the general consensus (so far, anyway): Though going wireless has a few advantages, and some of the old disadvantages are no longer a problem, the question of reliability is still critical for a business. Going wired is the only way to get the ultimate reliability.
>> While Microsoft always had and will have their cadre of softies following and coding to all of the Microsoft whistles and bells, I think this time many middle-roaders feel stung by the crap that was IE and are more inclined to steer clear of gee-whiz stuff and cater more to globally accepted standards.
Add to that the fact that Microsoft now wants everybody to re-code their websites to work around the required EOLAS patch...
Okay... so what about backups? What about large photo collections, or home movie projects? There are plenty of things that you always want to have a redundant copy of, just on the off chance that something fries your system.
>> The GPL pretty much bound IBM to not settle.
IANAL, but I don't think that the GPL had all that much to do with it. Certainly SCO was raising a hell of a fuss over the GPL for a while (some of their funniest moments, those), but it never seemed to be all of the core of the issue -- as far as I've understood it (and I've been reading GrokLaw for quite a while), it's mainly been (supposedly) about breach of contract. Everything else seems to have stemmed from that initial charge. Apparently, anyway. I seriously doubt that IBM is idealistic enough to simply be going to this friggin' huge expense simply to uphold the GPL, contract or not. Otherwise the GPL would be forming a much greater part of IBM's arguments.
No, IBM is fighting back because (1) they know that SCO has no case whatsoever, (2) they need to defend their "good name" in this regard because they see profit in the Linux business going forward, and (3) because the Nazgul haven't been fed in a while and they're getting hungry again.
>> Only the guilty should give in to those tactics.
So, if someone ever tries to mug me in the mall parking lot because he claims that the cash I'm carrying was stolen, and threatens to shoot me if I don't hand it over, then I should confidently resist because I know I'm not guilty? Sure, sounds good.
In Microsoft's case, I have never heard of a government agency requiring ordinary citizens (not contractors/vendors to the agency) to use Windows.
Uh, hello? Didn't you get the memo about FEMA's disaster-assistance web application form? You know, the one that requires you to use Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 (a Windows-only browser) in order to fill out the paperwork?
Sure, there's a valid concern about rejection. But I my (admittedly rather uninformed) opinion/guess is that the vast majority of those kinds of decisions are just the result of corporate paranoia and overprotectiveness; in other words, the managers are willing to accept the lost money from not having a person do his job during the two weeks' notice period, on the assumption that any damage the employee could do would cost a great deal more.
It's sad when people have to assume the worst in such situations, when often it's just that people are deciding to move on (and you'd think that there'd be at least some trust involved in a business), but, this is Corporate America we're talking about here. It all comes down to The Almighty Dollar.
(Of course, it occurs to me that all these people are generally worrying about nothing. Think about it: if you were intent on committing sabotage, wouldn't you just do it before you submit your resignation, so they don't suspect a thing? Or am I being too naive again?)