The longshoremen were happy to use new and better technologies in their ports, so long as they got a peice of the action.
Very good point. The real benefit of the technology to PMA is that it lets them cut labor costs. Most of the other benefits of automation in the port go to others (like the truckers that ferry containers into an out of the shipyard), to freight owners (like lower inventory costs for accelerated shipping processes), or to carriers (faster turn-around on the ships). As such, I'm sure the PMA would not accept a deal in which they get to pay for the technology and pay for a bunch of unneeded workers to sit around doing nothing. I wonder if the union would accept a deal in which the workers get early retirement at partial pay? $62k/yr (25% of 250,000) for doing nothing sounds like a sweet deal (unless you can hold out for 250k/yr for doing almost nothing).
It's two monopolies vying for cash. Anyone who picks a side is selling something.
LOL! So true! Another classic case of both sides suck.
Wow, that's nearly eight hours a day, every single day of the year. What do you do for a living?
I'm a consultant (usually working on how companies can use technology to improve business) who likes his job and likes his Mac. Not all of the 8 hrs/day is spent working. Some of it is spent on/.
But ports shut down because of a lock-out, not a strike. Everyone that writes about this and wants to paint them in a bad light casually fails to mention that.
Yes it was a lock-out. But it was because the union refused to allow basic technologies (like automated gatereaders) used by many of the worlds better shipping ports (like Rotterdam, Hong Kong and Singapore). These technologies would accelerate the flow of goods in the port, reduce traffic jams, improve accuracy, reduce costs for consumers, etc. But they would also improve productivity and eliminate manual tasks, which means you don't need as many longshoremen.
If these longshoreman want the highest wages in the world (for their job) they should deliver the highest productivity in the world. Nobody is insisting these guys work harder, they just want them to work smarter.
I use my computer about 3,000 hours per year. Even with shipping, that makes Panther cost less than 5 cents per hour. That seems like an amazing deal to me.
The main problem would more likely be what if a cold current of air changes the refractivity of some part of the atmosphere just a little bit so that the beam goes just.1 of a degree off and cooks up a residential neighbourhood instead of providing it with electricity...
Lets check the math on this one. Air has an index of refraction of about 1.000292. The.000292 portion is roughly proportional to the density of the air, which is roughly proportional to the absolute temperature of the air. Assuming a 40,000 foot air column and a beam-to-atmosphere incidence angle of 50 degreees (power to a city in the far north or south from an equatorial-orbit power station), the deflection angle due to refraction is about 0.02 degrees or about 14 feet in total.
This 14 foot refraction is also roughly proportional to the absolute temperature of the air. Between summer (35 C) and winter(-35 C), we have a temperature range of about 23%. So the beam will wander about only about 3 feet over the most extreme temperature variations that are likely. (This calculation is only an approximation, but I am sure it is accurate enough to show that refraction is not a big deal.)
The article lacks useful information on the expected density of the circuits in large-scale applications. On the one hand, the nano nature of the device would seem to permit tremendous density that far exceeds anything that can be fabricated with masks and etching. On the other hand, two major major problems would limit the practical density of memory cells in usefully large dies.
1) I would expect these devices to have a very large fraction of unusable cells. A fair percentage of nanocells would probably be fixed live (always storing a 1), fixed dead (always storing a 0), leaky (decaying faster than the nominal refresh time), or disconnected. The percentage of writable, readable, nonvolatile, connected cells might be very low. This makes the effect density (and effective memory cell size) much worse than the nanoscale of the process would lead one to expect.
2) The reach of the disordered connections into the field of nanocells would be limited in distance. I would bet that the disordered wires cannot be made to reach very far from the edge. Phenomena like wire-to-wire disconnects, wire-to-wire shorts, wire-to-substrate shorts, accumulated resistance, accumulated leakage would limit how far from the edge we can access the field of nanocells. Note that the experimental cell is only 10 microns by 40 microns. Can this technology be scaled to a 1000 micron x 1000 micron die or bigger? Even if the density is extremely high, the inability to scale to size might mean that all we can do is an extremely small 64 kilobit device. Of course, this might be solvable with clever overlays (like a mesh of traditionally fabricated conductors) that let us create macroscopic nanoRAM dies that have scale-limited microscopic nanocell field areas. The statistics of interconnections (or percolation theory) can help us determine the scalability of the concept.
I'm not suggesting we abandon nanocell technology, only that we consider the scaling effects when trying to predict whether this nanocell technology has the potential to revial existing technologies. Moreover, the existing semiconductor technologies are a moving target. By the time nanocells reach the market, we might have 3 nanometer semiconductor circuits using gamma-ray free-electron lasers and vertical ion implantion in a diamond substrate (or something). Future semiconductor densities might makes the nanocell density not that competative.
Some of the more interesting bulk nanochemical processes create fairly ordered 1-D patterns (like zebra stripes). I'd bet that people are working to create orthogonal 2-layer structures of 1D patterns to create a nice lattices. Sandwich in the appropriate inter-layer, splice in connections at the edges and you have the makings of a 2D array of memory locations.
3D animation is a great medium, but unless Disney can develop some kind of style for it, they're screwed. They're throwing out their 2D style, which is absolutely unique, and jumping into 3D which they're not going to be able to brand anywhere near as easily.
Good point, but.....3D modelling gives you 2D automatically when a 3D scene is rendered for a frame. The trick for Disney is to create their own 3D modeling and 3D-to-2D rendering algorithms that replicate that Disney 2D animation style. Although many see photorealism as the Holy Grail for 3D, nothing is stopping clever programmers from rendering a 3D scenes as a series of flat "cartoon-like" objects or adding in embellishments like object distortion with speed or "whoosh" lines.
I understand the reasons for blacklisting ( I won't argue about the due process issues in which some people get wrongly blacklisted or find it hard to be un-blacklisted). Blocking evil senders of spam is good, even if some people are overzealous. But the situation here is the recipient was prevented from accessing data that they wanted.
If I, the requestor and recipient of communications, want web pages, e-mail, etc. from a given domain, why shouldn't I be able to get them? Since when is the ISP in loco parentis for my communications? I appreciate the blacklist, but shouldn't each user have the right to create whitelist exceptions to any blacklist? One person's spam is another person's interesting newsletter, web page, or whatever.
Signed,
Hates spam, but hates overlords even more.
There are sequences of moves for rotating a corner cube, or flipping an edge cube.
Hmmm... now that I think of it, I bet your right. Was it exchanging two corner pieces? or exchanging two edge pieces?
I know that a simple clever reassembly of the cube (no sticker removals needed) can create an insolvable puzzle. But I did this more than 20 years ago when the cube first appeared. Since then a lot of packets have passed through the old noodle. Sigh....
My theory is that movies with colons in the title are bad. Its like the studio knows the movie is crap but hopes that one part of the title or the other might attract some paying customers.
Any job which requires no creativity (for want of a less fuzzy word) can be done by a computer without any human intervention. For example, if you are simply entering data and running programs A, B and C, a better system could enter the data and run the programs without you.
I would say that any worker using a computer who can do his job without doing ANY programming could be replaced by a slightly better program than the one he is ``operating''.
Exactly! The problem with the original article is that it fails to explain why computer language is as powerful, if not more powerful, than written language. The article's ranting about CLIs vs. GUIs misses the point entirely.
Written human language is powerful because it allows people to encapsulate their thoughts and transmit them to another person (or even transmit them to themselves in the case of a reminder note). Writing is archival, asynchronous, and scalable in a way that speaking was not (until the advent of dictaphones, audiotapes, radio, and the like). In many ways written language is a computer language that runs on the "Homo sapiens" processer. Its cool, but labor-intensive. A million people reading and using the thoughts contained in a 200 page book consumes at least 7 million human labor hours just in the read-phase alone.
Computer language (of any type) is powerful because it allows people to encapsulate their thoughts and transmit them to a computer that then can then act on them repeatedly. Computer language is also archival, asynchronous, and scalable. But the labor costs for execution are neglible. A million computers reading and executing the code contained in a 200 page application consumes virtually zero human labor hours and exponentially decreasing CPU-hours.
The point is that computer languages let you delegate work to a computer whereas human languages only let you delegate work to another person. Employees who can offload their problems and mental labors on to a computer are much more valuable than people (in a similar job) that can only offload their problems and mental labors on to another person. This is why computer literacy (real literacy as in reading and writing some type of computer language) is so powerful.
But the original article misses two conflicting forces in the computer language literacy issue. The first is that computer languages are becoming much more like human languages (i.e., compare machine language, assembler, BASIC, and Applescript). Its more efficient to employ a few thousand programmers to create a more human-readable programming language than it is to teach billions of people how to use a less human-readable programming language. A person can be fully computer literate and never use a CLI.
Second, computer languages only reach full power when they include certain constructs such as conditionals, looping, decomposition (either in terms of subroutines or objects), and recursion. Many computer languages, such as most CLI and HTML lack these structures or are widely used without these constructs. Languages that only let you (or are only used to) execute a linear script of tasks (A, B, C) are not very powerful (and do not count as computer language literacy).
The problem with this second issue is that so few people have the logical thought processes needed to understand and use concepts like conditionals, looping, decomposition, and recursion. Judging by the poor quality of most software and e-commerce websites, I'd say that most paid programmers don't have the logical thought processes needed for these constructs. Although most people can learn and employ a linear programming language (e.g., a macro langauge), few seem able to use the power inherent in full-strength computer languages. Whether this is a flaw in education, a flaw in our current too-easy-to-use OSes, or a flaw in the construction of the human brain is unknown.
Whether most people will need to know a computer language depends on the interplay
Fun hack for those insufferable solvers
on
Rubik's Cube Comeback
·
· Score: 2, Funny
1. Take apart a cube
2. rotate one of the vertex pieces by 120 degrees
3. reassemble and rotate into a mixed state
4. give to your least favorite "cube genius"
5. watch'em suffer as they try to solve it
6. Profit!
The AFV program makes horribly naive assumptions about the numbers of artists that a given consumer enjoys. Between books, CDs, movies, magazines, and art, I probably enjoy the artistic output of at least 1000 "artists" per year (especially when you consider the multiple artists involved in producing a CD or movie). How am I to allocate my $100 voucher among these numerous artists?
I consume media across formats and genres, so no intermediary is likely to represent even a small fraction of my interests (and the intermediary is likely to support artists that I don't like). And listing all these artists on my tax form would be a major pain. Instead, I'd rather make a small payment to the artist when I actually buy or consume their work. Sounds like the current system to me.
What happens if an artist signs up for AFV, but gets only $1000. They are screwed because in signing up for AFV, they had to sign over the copyright to their works for 5 years. Without copyright, no traditional publisher will sign them.
So any artist who enters the AFV program better have a good marketing budget to ensure that they get their promised $40,000. Maybe they can get marketing help by signing over some of their AFV money to a publicist. Maybe they need to promise the first $20,000 to the marketing person, and a fat percentage of any AFV money above that $20,000. Maybe this look just like a traditional publishing deal.
Whoops! We're back where we started. The artist is poor and the people so sell art to the public are rich.
Interesting idea. I wonder how long it will take before a secondary market forms to buy/sell these vouchers. Since the cost of vouncher to the owner is less than voucher's benefit to the artist, there is opportunity for the sale of voucher rights. For example, an artist might pay $10 (up to $99 if the artist is in a 0% tax bracket) to people to sign their $100 voucher over them. The voucher owner gets cash and a tax break, the "artist" gets $100 minus what they paid to buy the vouncher.
> > Who still creates CAD drawings with a keyboard only?
Just about everyone. I know many many many engineers and have worked in many engineering offices and I have yet to see a digitizer in any of them. With 3D CAD these days there are a few 3D manipulators, but the mouse works just great with a scroll wheel etc.
If you use the mouse, its not keyboard-only. The mouse is a tangible manipulator that provides a good correspondence between X-Y motion of the hand and X-Y motion on the screen. The keyboard is only used in CAD for mode-selection short-cuts, an occasional dimensional entry, or naming of objects/layers/files. Trying to do CAD without a mouse or pointer of any kind is quite hard and inefficient as far as I know.
I can understand why some people are appalled by tangible interface concepts. These are the same people that refered to GUIs as WIMPs (Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pointers). For some people, a command line, keyboard-coded interface just works. But it is not the best interface for everyone or every application.
1) Media creation: Who still creates CAD drawings with a keyboard only? I used some early versions of Autocad that where keyboard-only -- they sucked. Sometimes a tangible pointer with a 1-to-1 interface mapping between a 2-D surface and the screen is superior. For artists, the use of an LCD graphics pad and pressure-sensitive stylus means much higher productivity and finer control. (I've even scene academic research suggesting that a two-mouse interface could improve productivity.)
2) Mapping to the Realworld: Go aboard an aircraft carrier and look at how they keep track of flight-deck operations. A miniature replica of the flight deck and miniature aircraft provide an intuitive 1-to-1 mapping between the model and the real-world. I'd bet that they could improve flight deck operations if those little aircraft moved automatically to reflect actual locations and if manual movements of aircraft spawned automatic commands to flight deck personel.
3) Multiuser interfaces: the demos of MIT's system that I have seen (a business-oriented supply chain visualization tool) leverage the table interface for multi-user applications. With the table, anyone around it can reach over and move a block. And everyone can easily see who moved the block.
The power of tangible interfaces is that they can help create a more literal mapping between a digital artifact and the real-world. Sometimes less abstraction leads to better ease-of-use.
What if they make the blocks smarter by building a display on the top-surface, wheels on the bottom, and a processor inside? The block-top interface could display additional information. The table could automatically move the blocks into an pre-designed configuration (or adjust the configuration to match user-initiated movements of some other blocks). The wheeled mechanism could provide haptic-feedback as the user moves the blocks along the table. Distributed processing among the wirelessly networked blocks could help sense what the user is doing.
Why a difference? Because some places (like Colorado) have insanely complicated sales tax codes. Where I live, the tax districts include: state, county, city, regional transportation district, cultural facilities district, a special downtown district, and probably some others.
Each district's tax depends on the nature of the goods (food, clothing, electronics, services, etc. all have different tax rates in different jurisdictions). The difference is that a local retailer can (with difficulty) figure out their tax liability based on their own address. But what address do you use for an internet retailer when decide which local sales taxes to apply?
The only solution with internet sales taxes is to use the address of the recipient. And that means that each internet retailer must figure out which of all the overlapping tax districts EVERY customer is in and the calculate the tax on each item based on the type of item and the district's tax structure and then remit them to the appropriate agency.
With VoiceXML and ENUM every POTS device becomes an internet access device. Does this means that every mail order retailer that currently collects sales taxes (due to local point-of-presense sales tax laws) can stop collecting those taxes?
I suspect that the senate found it rather hard to create a clear demarcation between commerce based on "internet access" versus commerce based on traditional, taxed categories of custmer interactions.
Don't burn at 52 speed. Use media that is specced for the lowest speed you can find, and burn it at that speed or lower. You need to drink coffee anyway.
If the data on CD-R's decays by either reverting or fogging, then reading at a slower speed might help. Do all drives automatically slow down when BER (bit error rate) increases? Are some of the variations in people's experience with different brands of media due to the quality of the drive they use to read the CD-R?
I'd bet that in many cases the data is still on the CD-R, its just a bit harder to read. On the other hand, if the media layer flakes off, the data is gone.
I wonder if the fragility of CD-R is in part a problem with the fragility of the data formats used of the disk? Has anyone mapped the spatial distribution of data errors in CD-R as they age or display various age-related problems?
If the errors are patchy (i.e., flakes of media delaminating, spots of corrosion, etc.), then a data format with long-distance redundancy could increase the effective life of the disk. It would have to be a radically different format -- the directory would need to be redundantly stored and the drive would need to know to look in different parts of the disk to find and reconstruct clean directory data.
If, on the otherhand, the errors are diffuse and have a steadily increasing probability that rapidly approaches 1, then nothing can be done.
Slashdot Mirror
The longshoremen were happy to use new and better technologies in their ports, so long as they got a peice of the action.
Very good point. The real benefit of the technology to PMA is that it lets them cut labor costs. Most of the other benefits of automation in the port go to others (like the truckers that ferry containers into an out of the shipyard), to freight owners (like lower inventory costs for accelerated shipping processes), or to carriers (faster turn-around on the ships). As such, I'm sure the PMA would not accept a deal in which they get to pay for the technology and pay for a bunch of unneeded workers to sit around doing nothing. I wonder if the union would accept a deal in which the workers get early retirement at partial pay? $62k/yr (25% of 250,000) for doing nothing sounds like a sweet deal (unless you can hold out for 250k/yr for doing almost nothing).
It's two monopolies vying for cash. Anyone who picks a side is selling something.
LOL! So true! Another classic case of both sides suck.
Wow, that's nearly eight hours a day, every single day of the year. What do you do for a living?
/.
I'm a consultant (usually working on how companies can use technology to improve business) who likes his job and likes his Mac. Not all of the 8 hrs/day is spent working. Some of it is spent on
But ports shut down because of a lock-out, not a strike. Everyone that writes about this and wants to paint them in a bad light casually fails to mention that.
Yes it was a lock-out. But it was because the union refused to allow basic technologies (like automated gatereaders) used by many of the worlds better shipping ports (like Rotterdam, Hong Kong and Singapore). These technologies would accelerate the flow of goods in the port, reduce traffic jams, improve accuracy, reduce costs for consumers, etc. But they would also improve productivity and eliminate manual tasks, which means you don't need as many longshoremen.
If these longshoreman want the highest wages in the world (for their job) they should deliver the highest productivity in the world. Nobody is insisting these guys work harder, they just want them to work smarter.
Given the seeming inability of MS to produce high quality engineered products from the first version, they should avoid hard-wired silicon.
I use my computer about 3,000 hours per year. Even with shipping, that makes Panther cost less than 5 cents per hour. That seems like an amazing deal to me.
The main problem would more likely be what if a cold current of air changes the refractivity of some part of the atmosphere just a little bit so that the beam goes just .1 of a degree off and cooks up a residential neighbourhood instead of providing it with electricity...
Lets check the math on this one. Air has an index of refraction of about 1.000292. The .000292 portion is roughly proportional to the density of the air, which is roughly proportional to the absolute temperature of the air. Assuming a 40,000 foot air column and a beam-to-atmosphere incidence angle of 50 degreees (power to a city in the far north or south from an equatorial-orbit power station), the deflection angle due to refraction is about 0.02 degrees or about 14 feet in total.
This 14 foot refraction is also roughly proportional to the absolute temperature of the air. Between summer (35 C) and winter(-35 C), we have a temperature range of about 23%. So the beam will wander about only about 3 feet over the most extreme temperature variations that are likely. (This calculation is only an approximation, but I am sure it is accurate enough to show that refraction is not a big deal.)
Others will have to comment on scattering.
The article lacks useful information on the expected density of the circuits in large-scale applications. On the one hand, the nano nature of the device would seem to permit tremendous density that far exceeds anything that can be fabricated with masks and etching. On the other hand, two major major problems would limit the practical density of memory cells in usefully large dies.
1) I would expect these devices to have a very large fraction of unusable cells. A fair percentage of nanocells would probably be fixed live (always storing a 1), fixed dead (always storing a 0), leaky (decaying faster than the nominal refresh time), or disconnected. The percentage of writable, readable, nonvolatile, connected cells might be very low. This makes the effect density (and effective memory cell size) much worse than the nanoscale of the process would lead one to expect.
2) The reach of the disordered connections into the field of nanocells would be limited in distance. I would bet that the disordered wires cannot be made to reach very far from the edge. Phenomena like wire-to-wire disconnects, wire-to-wire shorts, wire-to-substrate shorts, accumulated resistance, accumulated leakage would limit how far from the edge we can access the field of nanocells. Note that the experimental cell is only 10 microns by 40 microns. Can this technology be scaled to a 1000 micron x 1000 micron die or bigger? Even if the density is extremely high, the inability to scale to size might mean that all we can do is an extremely small 64 kilobit device. Of course, this might be solvable with clever overlays (like a mesh of traditionally fabricated conductors) that let us create macroscopic nanoRAM dies that have scale-limited microscopic nanocell field areas. The statistics of interconnections (or percolation theory) can help us determine the scalability of the concept.
I'm not suggesting we abandon nanocell technology, only that we consider the scaling effects when trying to predict whether this nanocell technology has the potential to revial existing technologies. Moreover, the existing semiconductor technologies are a moving target. By the time nanocells reach the market, we might have 3 nanometer semiconductor circuits using gamma-ray free-electron lasers and vertical ion implantion in a diamond substrate (or something). Future semiconductor densities might makes the nanocell density not that competative.
Some of the more interesting bulk nanochemical processes create fairly ordered 1-D patterns (like zebra stripes). I'd bet that people are working to create orthogonal 2-layer structures of 1D patterns to create a nice lattices. Sandwich in the appropriate inter-layer, splice in connections at the edges and you have the makings of a 2D array of memory locations.
Nanocore memory anyone?
3D animation is a great medium, but unless Disney can develop some kind of style for it, they're screwed. They're throwing out their 2D style, which is absolutely unique, and jumping into 3D which they're not going to be able to brand anywhere near as easily.
Good point, but.....3D modelling gives you 2D automatically when a 3D scene is rendered for a frame. The trick for Disney is to create their own 3D modeling and 3D-to-2D rendering algorithms that replicate that Disney 2D animation style. Although many see photorealism as the Holy Grail for 3D, nothing is stopping clever programmers from rendering a 3D scenes as a series of flat "cartoon-like" objects or adding in embellishments like object distortion with speed or "whoosh" lines.
I understand the reasons for blacklisting ( I won't argue about the due process issues in which some people get wrongly blacklisted or find it hard to be un-blacklisted). Blocking evil senders of spam is good, even if some people are overzealous. But the situation here is the recipient was prevented from accessing data that they wanted.
If I, the requestor and recipient of communications, want web pages, e-mail, etc. from a given domain, why shouldn't I be able to get them? Since when is the ISP in loco parentis for my communications? I appreciate the blacklist, but shouldn't each user have the right to create whitelist exceptions to any blacklist? One person's spam is another person's interesting newsletter, web page, or whatever.
Signed,
Hates spam, but hates overlords even more.
Maybe they are rewriting Virtual PC to run on the IBM 360.
Wrong!
There are sequences of moves for rotating a corner cube, or flipping an edge cube.
Hmmm... now that I think of it, I bet your right. Was it exchanging two corner pieces? or exchanging two edge pieces?
I know that a simple clever reassembly of the cube (no sticker removals needed) can create an insolvable puzzle. But I did this more than 20 years ago when the cube first appeared. Since then a lot of packets have passed through the old noodle. Sigh....
My theory is that movies with colons in the title are bad. Its like the studio knows the movie is crap but hopes that one part of the title or the other might attract some paying customers.
Any job which requires no creativity (for want of a less fuzzy word) can be done by a computer without any human intervention. For example, if you are simply entering data and running programs A, B and C, a better system could enter the data and run the programs without you.
I would say that any worker using a computer who can do his job without doing ANY programming could be replaced by a slightly better program than the one he is ``operating''.
Exactly! The problem with the original article is that it fails to explain why computer language is as powerful, if not more powerful, than written language. The article's ranting about CLIs vs. GUIs misses the point entirely.
Written human language is powerful because it allows people to encapsulate their thoughts and transmit them to another person (or even transmit them to themselves in the case of a reminder note). Writing is archival, asynchronous, and scalable in a way that speaking was not (until the advent of dictaphones, audiotapes, radio, and the like). In many ways written language is a computer language that runs on the "Homo sapiens" processer. Its cool, but labor-intensive. A million people reading and using the thoughts contained in a 200 page book consumes at least 7 million human labor hours just in the read-phase alone.
Computer language (of any type) is powerful because it allows people to encapsulate their thoughts and transmit them to a computer that then can then act on them repeatedly. Computer language is also archival, asynchronous, and scalable. But the labor costs for execution are neglible. A million computers reading and executing the code contained in a 200 page application consumes virtually zero human labor hours and exponentially decreasing CPU-hours.
The point is that computer languages let you delegate work to a computer whereas human languages only let you delegate work to another person. Employees who can offload their problems and mental labors on to a computer are much more valuable than people (in a similar job) that can only offload their problems and mental labors on to another person. This is why computer literacy (real literacy as in reading and writing some type of computer language) is so powerful.
But the original article misses two conflicting forces in the computer language literacy issue. The first is that computer languages are becoming much more like human languages (i.e., compare machine language, assembler, BASIC, and Applescript). Its more efficient to employ a few thousand programmers to create a more human-readable programming language than it is to teach billions of people how to use a less human-readable programming language. A person can be fully computer literate and never use a CLI.
Second, computer languages only reach full power when they include certain constructs such as conditionals, looping, decomposition (either in terms of subroutines or objects), and recursion. Many computer languages, such as most CLI and HTML lack these structures or are widely used without these constructs. Languages that only let you (or are only used to) execute a linear script of tasks (A, B, C) are not very powerful (and do not count as computer language literacy).
The problem with this second issue is that so few people have the logical thought processes needed to understand and use concepts like conditionals, looping, decomposition, and recursion. Judging by the poor quality of most software and e-commerce websites, I'd say that most paid programmers don't have the logical thought processes needed for these constructs. Although most people can learn and employ a linear programming language (e.g., a macro langauge), few seem able to use the power inherent in full-strength computer languages. Whether this is a flaw in education, a flaw in our current too-easy-to-use OSes, or a flaw in the construction of the human brain is unknown.
Whether most people will need to know a computer language depends on the interplay
1. Take apart a cube
2. rotate one of the vertex pieces by 120 degrees
3. reassemble and rotate into a mixed state
4. give to your least favorite "cube genius"
5. watch'em suffer as they try to solve it
6. Profit!
The AFV program makes horribly naive assumptions about the numbers of artists that a given consumer enjoys. Between books, CDs, movies, magazines, and art, I probably enjoy the artistic output of at least 1000 "artists" per year (especially when you consider the multiple artists involved in producing a CD or movie). How am I to allocate my $100 voucher among these numerous artists?
I consume media across formats and genres, so no intermediary is likely to represent even a small fraction of my interests (and the intermediary is likely to support artists that I don't like). And listing all these artists on my tax form would be a major pain. Instead, I'd rather make a small payment to the artist when I actually buy or consume their work. Sounds like the current system to me.
What happens if an artist signs up for AFV, but gets only $1000. They are screwed because in signing up for AFV, they had to sign over the copyright to their works for 5 years. Without copyright, no traditional publisher will sign them.
So any artist who enters the AFV program better have a good marketing budget to ensure that they get their promised $40,000. Maybe they can get marketing help by signing over some of their AFV money to a publicist. Maybe they need to promise the first $20,000 to the marketing person, and a fat percentage of any AFV money above that $20,000. Maybe this look just like a traditional publishing deal.
Whoops! We're back where we started. The artist is poor and the people so sell art to the public are rich.
Interesting idea. I wonder how long it will take before a secondary market forms to buy/sell these vouchers. Since the cost of vouncher to the owner is less than voucher's benefit to the artist, there is opportunity for the sale of voucher rights. For example, an artist might pay $10 (up to $99 if the artist is in a 0% tax bracket) to people to sign their $100 voucher over them. The voucher owner gets cash and a tax break, the "artist" gets $100 minus what they paid to buy the vouncher.
> > Who still creates CAD drawings with a keyboard only?
Just about everyone. I know many many many engineers and have worked in many engineering offices and I have yet to see a digitizer in any of them. With 3D CAD these days there are a few 3D manipulators, but the mouse works just great with a scroll wheel etc.
If you use the mouse, its not keyboard-only. The mouse is a tangible manipulator that provides a good correspondence between X-Y motion of the hand and X-Y motion on the screen. The keyboard is only used in CAD for mode-selection short-cuts, an occasional dimensional entry, or naming of objects/layers/files. Trying to do CAD without a mouse or pointer of any kind is quite hard and inefficient as far as I know.
I can understand why some people are appalled by tangible interface concepts. These are the same people that refered to GUIs as WIMPs (Windows, Icons, Menus, and Pointers). For some people, a command line, keyboard-coded interface just works. But it is not the best interface for everyone or every application.
1) Media creation: Who still creates CAD drawings with a keyboard only? I used some early versions of Autocad that where keyboard-only -- they sucked. Sometimes a tangible pointer with a 1-to-1 interface mapping between a 2-D surface and the screen is superior. For artists, the use of an LCD graphics pad and pressure-sensitive stylus means much higher productivity and finer control. (I've even scene academic research suggesting that a two-mouse interface could improve productivity.)
2) Mapping to the Realworld: Go aboard an aircraft carrier and look at how they keep track of flight-deck operations. A miniature replica of the flight deck and miniature aircraft provide an intuitive 1-to-1 mapping between the model and the real-world. I'd bet that they could improve flight deck operations if those little aircraft moved automatically to reflect actual locations and if manual movements of aircraft spawned automatic commands to flight deck personel.
3) Multiuser interfaces: the demos of MIT's system that I have seen (a business-oriented supply chain visualization tool) leverage the table interface for multi-user applications. With the table, anyone around it can reach over and move a block. And everyone can easily see who moved the block.
The power of tangible interfaces is that they can help create a more literal mapping between a digital artifact and the real-world. Sometimes less abstraction leads to better ease-of-use.
What if they make the blocks smarter by building a display on the top-surface, wheels on the bottom, and a processor inside? The block-top interface could display additional information. The table could automatically move the blocks into an pre-designed configuration (or adjust the configuration to match user-initiated movements of some other blocks). The wheeled mechanism could provide haptic-feedback as the user moves the blocks along the table. Distributed processing among the wirelessly networked blocks could help sense what the user is doing.
Why a difference? Because some places (like Colorado) have insanely complicated sales tax codes. Where I live, the tax districts include: state, county, city, regional transportation district, cultural facilities district, a special downtown district, and probably some others. Each district's tax depends on the nature of the goods (food, clothing, electronics, services, etc. all have different tax rates in different jurisdictions). The difference is that a local retailer can (with difficulty) figure out their tax liability based on their own address. But what address do you use for an internet retailer when decide which local sales taxes to apply?
The only solution with internet sales taxes is to use the address of the recipient. And that means that each internet retailer must figure out which of all the overlapping tax districts EVERY customer is in and the calculate the tax on each item based on the type of item and the district's tax structure and then remit them to the appropriate agency.
Its not as easy as it looks.
With VoiceXML and ENUM every POTS device becomes an internet access device. Does this means that every mail order retailer that currently collects sales taxes (due to local point-of-presense sales tax laws) can stop collecting those taxes?
I suspect that the senate found it rather hard to create a clear demarcation between commerce based on "internet access" versus commerce based on traditional, taxed categories of custmer interactions.
Don't burn at 52 speed. Use media that is specced for the lowest speed you can find, and burn it at that speed or lower. You need to drink coffee anyway.
If the data on CD-R's decays by either reverting or fogging, then reading at a slower speed might help. Do all drives automatically slow down when BER (bit error rate) increases? Are some of the variations in people's experience with different brands of media due to the quality of the drive they use to read the CD-R?
I'd bet that in many cases the data is still on the CD-R, its just a bit harder to read. On the other hand, if the media layer flakes off, the data is gone.
I wonder if the fragility of CD-R is in part a problem with the fragility of the data formats used of the disk? Has anyone mapped the spatial distribution of data errors in CD-R as they age or display various age-related problems?
If the errors are patchy (i.e., flakes of media delaminating, spots of corrosion, etc.), then a data format with long-distance redundancy could increase the effective life of the disk. It would have to be a radically different format -- the directory would need to be redundantly stored and the drive would need to know to look in different parts of the disk to find and reconstruct clean directory data.
If, on the otherhand, the errors are diffuse and have a steadily increasing probability that rapidly approaches 1, then nothing can be done.