And uh, what network was this cell phone connecting to? Because you know there's a series of cell towers and satellites that need to be in place for cell phones to work and I don't recall anyone having the foresight to erect such towers in 1928.
The cell phones of the future don't require cell towers.
Taxis and buses could do the exact-same job, and they are profitable.
No, they don't do the exact-same job. I can't reasonably take a taxi from Boston to Washington DC, and taking that trip on a train vs a bus is a pretty different experience in terms of reliability, comfort, and throughput.
Yeah I've looked at the numbers for my area (Baltimore). The number of Amtrak riders is 0.1% of the total number of daily commuters
Yeah, but you're talking about commuters in Baltimore. What are you going to do when the Amtrak train lets you out in Penn Station, take the light rail? The problem isn't the train, the problem is that you live in fricken Baltimore.
I agree with this point, but you'll notice those routes never get shutdown.
Yes, and part of the reason is because the point isn't necessarily to be profitable, but to provide a public transportation option.
The C64 is an old obsolete technology, and so too is the train, because it's tied to steel rails and can't go anywhere but where the rails lead it.
That's madness, frankly. It's like saying planes are an obsolete form of transportation because you can only go to other airports. Or saying Internet backbones are obsolete because they don't cover the last mile. Aside from shipping on water, rail is the most energy efficient form of travel. Newer trains can go hundreds of miles per hour much more safely than anything on a road.
I can hop in my car right now, and drive to the beach, without having to check schedules. I can even do it in the middle of the night, when trains do run.
I can hop on a train and go to the beach right now, without having to check schedules. I can do it in the middle of the night, because the trains run 24/7. And I can do it without spending tens of thousands of dollars on a car, paying for gas and maintenance, and buying car insurance. And if I get drunk on the beach, I can get back home without driving drunk. Don't blame the technology because your city sucks.
Not to be trite, but every program is successful for those that gain benefit from it...
And every program is successful insofar as it is successful. And every program is beneficial towards those whom it benefits. I think you're missing the key point of what I was saying: The train system benefits people who don't pay for tickets.
especially when we don't consider the opportunity costs from not spending that money on a better solution.
Right, and every solution you choose has an opportunity cost of not choosing other solutions. Every solution you choose has the possibility of there being better solutions.
The reason I'm against rail is that it's terribly wasteful and inefficient.... If people begin moving to a new area, you just create new or change the current bus routes or increase capacity by more frequent buses.
That assumes some things-- for example, that you have the infrastructure in place to accommodate however many busses are required. It also assumes that the same people who would take a train will also take a bus. It's very hard to get an apples-to-apples comparison.
So how are you accounting for the efficiency of rail travel vs. road travel? Does it include the cost of building/maintaining the roads/busses/cars vs. the costs of building/maintaining trains and train cars? Does it include measures of energy efficiency? Are we including the various subsidies that the government has given to each industry? Are we including the subsidizing effect of shipping goods over each infrastructure system?
Are we talking highspeed rail or the stuff that's been around since forever? Are we talking about local public transportation (the subway) or long-distance (Amtrak)? Are we assuming the current volume of travel for each system, or are we assuming the same amount of traffic in both cases? Or are we talking about the theoretical efficiency in some idealized future-city that doesn't exist yet? Are we talking about commuter traffic, or vacation travel? Are we talking about travel within sparse suburban areas, or between major cities?
There are so many questions. But my point is less about whether Amtrak itself is good, and more about the sort of argument we're having. It's not as simple as "my logic is good and yours is bad." It's more like, "we're thinking about different things, making different assumptions, and prioritizing different values."
I would boil it down to this: our country needs passenger rail. If this can't be done profitably by the private sector, then it should be subsidized or (even better!) taken over by the government completely.
Nice. I'm glad someone understood how I was trying to connect Amtrak to your earlier statement, "Most political differences are a result of disagreement of premises, not conclusions."
I kind of lost my train of thought, and wasn't as explicit as I'd intended to be. Thanks for helping to clarify.
There are good reasons the government has to use coercion; public transport is not a defensible one.
So.... wait, you oppose transportation? You'd prefer that we just couldn't travel or ship anything? Or do you fail to recognize that people, left to make their own choices freely, wouldn't have created the interstate highway system?
Or how about this: People, left to make their own choices freely, elected a government which created Amtrak. They did it because they know that no "free market" business will build any of the necessary infrastructure to have a modern society with a thriving economy.
I don't know if you're trolling, but there's no need to get hostile or sarcastic. However, you've completely ignored the point of my post: we probably shouldn't be judging Amtrak (or any public transportation) based solely on its overall balance sheet.
The balance sheet doesn't address the increased access to transportation being offered to those without a lot of money, nor the economic benefit that might result. "Free market capitalism" tends to only measure the satisfaction and benefit to those people who already have money.
Nor does Amtrak's balance sheet address the benefit provided to a city like New York in offering people an alternative way to get to the city. Take away trains, and NYC's roads and bridges would be overrun. NYC would have to build more bridges or tunnels, roads and bridges would be more expensive to maintain, and we'd see increased economic waste from people spending so much time in traffic.
Now I'm not trying to argue about the value of Amtrak specifically, but I'm just trying to show that these things are more complicated than people tend to acknowledge. You'll make a lot of mistakes if you try to simplify things down to the level of "Amtrak wasn't profitable overall, and therefore the entire train system is a failure and should be shut down."
Yes, if you talk to some "conservatives", liberals want to legislate every aspect of your life, deciding what you're allowed to eat and when you can go to the bathroom. Liberals want to take all your money and give it to poor, lazy, inner-city black people. Liberals are weirdo hippy peaceniks and would surrender to the first attack on this country.
And if you ask some "liberals", conservatives are a bunch of hateful, xenophobic bigots who cling to their religion because they're too stupid to think for themselves. Conservatives want to take all your money and give it to one super-rich set of overlord corporate conspirators who will rule the world with an iron fist.
Both have some small amount of truth to them, but are mostly unfair. In both the case of "liberal" and "conservative", the terms might have several meanings. Many "conservatives", for example, are actually quite radical.
I think this talk is a pretty good place to start for a discussion on the virtues of being liberal vs. conservative.
Well first, to take your example of Amtrak, whether it worked and why it worked or didn't work is still open to interpretation. I notice you limited your "results" to Amtrak's overall balance sheet. You haven't taken into account the benefit Amtrak brought to the people who do take trains, nor the alleviation of car traffic brought to congested cities. There's also the fact that some routes are more heavily trafficked than others, and Amtrak could be said to be very successful if you only looked at those routes. So in some ways, I'd say that Amtrak is a successful program.
But also your criticism of "not enough customers" doesn't begin to address the question of "why weren't there enough customers?" There are tons of socioeconomic issues involving culture, infrastructure development, and civic design that lead to a situation where taking a train is undesirable or infeasible-- but most of those things can be changed.
In reality, most people decide first whether they like/dislike public transportation on emotional grounds, and then find arguments that support their position.
I agree that the summary is far from unbiased. It's making it sound like Ubuntu is dropping Gnome, which isn't quite what's happening.
A more reasonable way to look at it, in my opinion, is that Gnome is currently undergoing a large set of changes in the 3.0 release. The people running the Gnome project are planning a radical shift from the current UI to something called "Gnome-Shell". Ubuntu is apparently not sold on this dramatic redesign, so instead they'll be going their own way with a UI that is, in some ways, closer to the current UI.
Having tried Gnome-Shell out for a little while, I have to say I'm not excited about the change. I appreciate that they're trying something very new and trying to be innovative, but at the very least it didn't feel ready for use.
This is an argument directly related to the Nyquist theorem: to capture a signal, scan at a resolution at least twice your desired sensitivity.
I think that's specifically related to waveforms and frequency, though. I'm not sure it applies to discrete pixels in a visual field of view. You do get aliasing in pictures, but I think the ~350 DPI *is* what you need to make it so aliasing isn't visible at ~10". It depends on the person's visual acuity, and of course there's still the question of "what if I hold the display 6 inches from my face?" But no, I don't think we need to go to 700 DPI for displays.
I wonder if, after 300-500 DPI, it might make more sense to put work into increasing the color gamut of displays, especially what can be visible in direct sunlight. It seems to me like that will be more fruitful.
You may get a lot of advice on different tools to use, but ultimately there's no substitute for actually being organized. That really great note-taking application or task list manager or photo manager might help you simplify some part of your process, but if you're not organized, an organizational tool won't make you organized.
But maybe your question is, how do I actually get organized? Well, there's no single way. It depends on what kind of information you're trying to keep track of and for what purpose. Taking notes for school? Well you'll need to know yourself well enough to know what works for you, and what you'll actually remember. A good place to start, though, is by writing it by hand in whichever way seems most natural to you, and then going home later and typing up your notes into a a form that you might understand even if you'd never attended the classes. Once you do that, you might find that you never need to revisit your notes because writing them and then rewriting them made you memorize them. But then that's just one suggestion, you'll have to find what works for you through some trial and error.
Keeping your computer organized? I find good old directories are highly underrated. Everyone these days want something fancy and automatic, but al well-chosen directory structure can go a long way.
And as some people have mentioned, when trying to be organized, what you choose to throw away is as important as sorting the things you keep. If you keep every file and every note you generate, trying to organize it all will be overwhelming. I used to have a rule about stuff in my closet: if I haven't used it or thought about it in 2 years, then i don't need it and should probably throw it away. Of course, there's less of a need to throw away digital stuff, but you can archive it off to some other medium and forget about it.
Well just recently, Flash and JVM. I haven't bought a Mac recently, but it wasn't so long ago they'd include a couple pieces of free software or trialware. I think a Mac I bought a few years ago had a trial version of MS Office and a full version of OmniOutliner, but that would have been a few years ago.
But my point is, there's much less of a reason to include additional software when they have the infrastructure to recommend, install, and update software easily. With the new App Store, Adobe could easily manage their own updates instead of relying on Apple to do it in their Software Update.
Also, it's worth noting that Apple is pulling 3rd party applications from their default OS install right before launching an app store for 3rd party software that will have an easy installation and update mechanisms.
I don't think that's the plan. The networks have shown over and over again that they are willing to put their shows online on your computer, but they don't want the internet distribution to end up on your TV set. They want to continue having TV distributed on "channels" during certain "time slots", because their entire business is built around the concept. They're willing to try to supplant the old business model with "new media", but they don't want to abandon the old business model for a new one.
Sooner or later, something will force their hands. Until then, expect them to block set-top boxes from getting content whenever possible.
The same can be said of producing a high-quality product. Producing a high-quality product will be much less impressive if everyone produces high-quality products, but that doesn't mean its a bad idea.
And who says we need this to scale? If a bunch of artists producing good products and engaging with their customers can't scale, then it's because the market isn't big enough to support them all. Oh well, too bad. Looks like we'll only get the artists that we need, and we won't have an enormous bloated bureaucratic cartel that attacks its own customers. What a shame.
Well, to correct myself, they are malicious, but the malice is in structuring all of their business deals to rip *everyone* off. I just don't think the anti-piracy campaign is a new or interesting form of malice, but rather a failure to understand the position their industry is in.
I think you're mistaking short-sightedness, foolishness, and incompetence for malice. Mostly the MAFIAA is made up of a bunch of poor businessmen who haven't realized that this isn't the 1950s anymore.
It's not that underpowered. It has fast internal storage and a decent amount of RAM. The processor is well below the top of the line, but probably still faster than the top of the line from a few years ago. It's going to be a hell of a lot faster and more capable than most netbooks on the market.
"Netbook" is a very vague marketing term that's supposed to define a class of laptop, but it's kind of like talking about "cloud computing" or "Web 2.0"-- people disagree about what the term actually means. By many accounts, this is not a netbook.
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And uh, what network was this cell phone connecting to? Because you know there's a series of cell towers and satellites that need to be in place for cell phones to work and I don't recall anyone having the foresight to erect such towers in 1928.
The cell phones of the future don't require cell towers.
oops... I've said too much.
You're a former young person? Wow, me too! We should hang out.
Taxis and buses could do the exact-same job, and they are profitable.
No, they don't do the exact-same job. I can't reasonably take a taxi from Boston to Washington DC, and taking that trip on a train vs a bus is a pretty different experience in terms of reliability, comfort, and throughput.
Yeah I've looked at the numbers for my area (Baltimore). The number of Amtrak riders is 0.1% of the total number of daily commuters
Yeah, but you're talking about commuters in Baltimore. What are you going to do when the Amtrak train lets you out in Penn Station, take the light rail? The problem isn't the train, the problem is that you live in fricken Baltimore.
I agree with this point, but you'll notice those routes never get shutdown.
Yes, and part of the reason is because the point isn't necessarily to be profitable, but to provide a public transportation option.
The C64 is an old obsolete technology, and so too is the train, because it's tied to steel rails and can't go anywhere but where the rails lead it.
That's madness, frankly. It's like saying planes are an obsolete form of transportation because you can only go to other airports. Or saying Internet backbones are obsolete because they don't cover the last mile. Aside from shipping on water, rail is the most energy efficient form of travel. Newer trains can go hundreds of miles per hour much more safely than anything on a road.
I can hop in my car right now, and drive to the beach, without having to check schedules. I can even do it in the middle of the night, when trains do run.
I can hop on a train and go to the beach right now, without having to check schedules. I can do it in the middle of the night, because the trains run 24/7. And I can do it without spending tens of thousands of dollars on a car, paying for gas and maintenance, and buying car insurance. And if I get drunk on the beach, I can get back home without driving drunk. Don't blame the technology because your city sucks.
Not to be trite, but every program is successful for those that gain benefit from it...
And every program is successful insofar as it is successful. And every program is beneficial towards those whom it benefits. I think you're missing the key point of what I was saying: The train system benefits people who don't pay for tickets.
especially when we don't consider the opportunity costs from not spending that money on a better solution.
Right, and every solution you choose has an opportunity cost of not choosing other solutions. Every solution you choose has the possibility of there being better solutions.
The reason I'm against rail is that it's terribly wasteful and inefficient.... If people begin moving to a new area, you just create new or change the current bus routes or increase capacity by more frequent buses.
That assumes some things-- for example, that you have the infrastructure in place to accommodate however many busses are required. It also assumes that the same people who would take a train will also take a bus. It's very hard to get an apples-to-apples comparison.
So how are you accounting for the efficiency of rail travel vs. road travel? Does it include the cost of building/maintaining the roads/busses/cars vs. the costs of building/maintaining trains and train cars? Does it include measures of energy efficiency? Are we including the various subsidies that the government has given to each industry? Are we including the subsidizing effect of shipping goods over each infrastructure system?
Are we talking highspeed rail or the stuff that's been around since forever? Are we talking about local public transportation (the subway) or long-distance (Amtrak)? Are we assuming the current volume of travel for each system, or are we assuming the same amount of traffic in both cases? Or are we talking about the theoretical efficiency in some idealized future-city that doesn't exist yet? Are we talking about commuter traffic, or vacation travel? Are we talking about travel within sparse suburban areas, or between major cities?
There are so many questions. But my point is less about whether Amtrak itself is good, and more about the sort of argument we're having. It's not as simple as "my logic is good and yours is bad." It's more like, "we're thinking about different things, making different assumptions, and prioritizing different values."
I would boil it down to this: our country needs passenger rail. If this can't be done profitably by the private sector, then it should be subsidized or (even better!) taken over by the government completely.
How now bonkeyd cow?
Nice. I'm glad someone understood how I was trying to connect Amtrak to your earlier statement, "Most political differences are a result of disagreement of premises, not conclusions."
I kind of lost my train of thought, and wasn't as explicit as I'd intended to be. Thanks for helping to clarify.
Really? Your complaints about "big government" are hate-crime legislation, sexual harassment laws, and gun control?
This just gets sillier and sillier.
There are good reasons the government has to use coercion; public transport is not a defensible one.
So.... wait, you oppose transportation? You'd prefer that we just couldn't travel or ship anything? Or do you fail to recognize that people, left to make their own choices freely, wouldn't have created the interstate highway system?
Or how about this: People, left to make their own choices freely, elected a government which created Amtrak. They did it because they know that no "free market" business will build any of the necessary infrastructure to have a modern society with a thriving economy.
I don't know if you're trolling, but there's no need to get hostile or sarcastic. However, you've completely ignored the point of my post: we probably shouldn't be judging Amtrak (or any public transportation) based solely on its overall balance sheet.
The balance sheet doesn't address the increased access to transportation being offered to those without a lot of money, nor the economic benefit that might result. "Free market capitalism" tends to only measure the satisfaction and benefit to those people who already have money.
Nor does Amtrak's balance sheet address the benefit provided to a city like New York in offering people an alternative way to get to the city. Take away trains, and NYC's roads and bridges would be overrun. NYC would have to build more bridges or tunnels, roads and bridges would be more expensive to maintain, and we'd see increased economic waste from people spending so much time in traffic.
Now I'm not trying to argue about the value of Amtrak specifically, but I'm just trying to show that these things are more complicated than people tend to acknowledge. You'll make a lot of mistakes if you try to simplify things down to the level of "Amtrak wasn't profitable overall, and therefore the entire train system is a failure and should be shut down."
Yes, if you talk to some "conservatives", liberals want to legislate every aspect of your life, deciding what you're allowed to eat and when you can go to the bathroom. Liberals want to take all your money and give it to poor, lazy, inner-city black people. Liberals are weirdo hippy peaceniks and would surrender to the first attack on this country.
And if you ask some "liberals", conservatives are a bunch of hateful, xenophobic bigots who cling to their religion because they're too stupid to think for themselves. Conservatives want to take all your money and give it to one super-rich set of overlord corporate conspirators who will rule the world with an iron fist.
Both have some small amount of truth to them, but are mostly unfair. In both the case of "liberal" and "conservative", the terms might have several meanings. Many "conservatives", for example, are actually quite radical.
I think this talk is a pretty good place to start for a discussion on the virtues of being liberal vs. conservative.
Seriously, though, you're going to say liberals are "freedom-damaging", citing "Big government etc." as your *only* example?
Well first, to take your example of Amtrak, whether it worked and why it worked or didn't work is still open to interpretation. I notice you limited your "results" to Amtrak's overall balance sheet. You haven't taken into account the benefit Amtrak brought to the people who do take trains, nor the alleviation of car traffic brought to congested cities. There's also the fact that some routes are more heavily trafficked than others, and Amtrak could be said to be very successful if you only looked at those routes. So in some ways, I'd say that Amtrak is a successful program.
But also your criticism of "not enough customers" doesn't begin to address the question of "why weren't there enough customers?" There are tons of socioeconomic issues involving culture, infrastructure development, and civic design that lead to a situation where taking a train is undesirable or infeasible-- but most of those things can be changed.
In reality, most people decide first whether they like/dislike public transportation on emotional grounds, and then find arguments that support their position.
By reading this response, you agree to pay me $1,000. If you don't pay me, I'll sue.
Are you also a little short for a Storm Trooper?
I agree that the summary is far from unbiased. It's making it sound like Ubuntu is dropping Gnome, which isn't quite what's happening.
A more reasonable way to look at it, in my opinion, is that Gnome is currently undergoing a large set of changes in the 3.0 release. The people running the Gnome project are planning a radical shift from the current UI to something called "Gnome-Shell". Ubuntu is apparently not sold on this dramatic redesign, so instead they'll be going their own way with a UI that is, in some ways, closer to the current UI.
Having tried Gnome-Shell out for a little while, I have to say I'm not excited about the change. I appreciate that they're trying something very new and trying to be innovative, but at the very least it didn't feel ready for use.
This is an argument directly related to the Nyquist theorem: to capture a signal, scan at a resolution at least twice your desired sensitivity.
I think that's specifically related to waveforms and frequency, though. I'm not sure it applies to discrete pixels in a visual field of view. You do get aliasing in pictures, but I think the ~350 DPI *is* what you need to make it so aliasing isn't visible at ~10". It depends on the person's visual acuity, and of course there's still the question of "what if I hold the display 6 inches from my face?" But no, I don't think we need to go to 700 DPI for displays.
I wonder if, after 300-500 DPI, it might make more sense to put work into increasing the color gamut of displays, especially what can be visible in direct sunlight. It seems to me like that will be more fruitful.
You may get a lot of advice on different tools to use, but ultimately there's no substitute for actually being organized. That really great note-taking application or task list manager or photo manager might help you simplify some part of your process, but if you're not organized, an organizational tool won't make you organized.
But maybe your question is, how do I actually get organized? Well, there's no single way. It depends on what kind of information you're trying to keep track of and for what purpose. Taking notes for school? Well you'll need to know yourself well enough to know what works for you, and what you'll actually remember. A good place to start, though, is by writing it by hand in whichever way seems most natural to you, and then going home later and typing up your notes into a a form that you might understand even if you'd never attended the classes. Once you do that, you might find that you never need to revisit your notes because writing them and then rewriting them made you memorize them. But then that's just one suggestion, you'll have to find what works for you through some trial and error.
Keeping your computer organized? I find good old directories are highly underrated. Everyone these days want something fancy and automatic, but al well-chosen directory structure can go a long way.
And as some people have mentioned, when trying to be organized, what you choose to throw away is as important as sorting the things you keep. If you keep every file and every note you generate, trying to organize it all will be overwhelming. I used to have a rule about stuff in my closet: if I haven't used it or thought about it in 2 years, then i don't need it and should probably throw it away. Of course, there's less of a need to throw away digital stuff, but you can archive it off to some other medium and forget about it.
Well just recently, Flash and JVM. I haven't bought a Mac recently, but it wasn't so long ago they'd include a couple pieces of free software or trialware. I think a Mac I bought a few years ago had a trial version of MS Office and a full version of OmniOutliner, but that would have been a few years ago.
But my point is, there's much less of a reason to include additional software when they have the infrastructure to recommend, install, and update software easily. With the new App Store, Adobe could easily manage their own updates instead of relying on Apple to do it in their Software Update.
Also, it's worth noting that Apple is pulling 3rd party applications from their default OS install right before launching an app store for 3rd party software that will have an easy installation and update mechanisms.
I don't think that's the plan. The networks have shown over and over again that they are willing to put their shows online on your computer, but they don't want the internet distribution to end up on your TV set. They want to continue having TV distributed on "channels" during certain "time slots", because their entire business is built around the concept. They're willing to try to supplant the old business model with "new media", but they don't want to abandon the old business model for a new one.
Sooner or later, something will force their hands. Until then, expect them to block set-top boxes from getting content whenever possible.
The same can be said of producing a high-quality product. Producing a high-quality product will be much less impressive if everyone produces high-quality products, but that doesn't mean its a bad idea.
And who says we need this to scale? If a bunch of artists producing good products and engaging with their customers can't scale, then it's because the market isn't big enough to support them all. Oh well, too bad. Looks like we'll only get the artists that we need, and we won't have an enormous bloated bureaucratic cartel that attacks its own customers. What a shame.
Well, to correct myself, they are malicious, but the malice is in structuring all of their business deals to rip *everyone* off. I just don't think the anti-piracy campaign is a new or interesting form of malice, but rather a failure to understand the position their industry is in.
I think you're mistaking short-sightedness, foolishness, and incompetence for malice. Mostly the MAFIAA is made up of a bunch of poor businessmen who haven't realized that this isn't the 1950s anymore.
It's not that underpowered. It has fast internal storage and a decent amount of RAM. The processor is well below the top of the line, but probably still faster than the top of the line from a few years ago. It's going to be a hell of a lot faster and more capable than most netbooks on the market.
"Netbook" is a very vague marketing term that's supposed to define a class of laptop, but it's kind of like talking about "cloud computing" or "Web 2.0"-- people disagree about what the term actually means. By many accounts, this is not a netbook.
But "netboook" is basically a meaningless marketing term anyway. If we didn't listen to marketers, we wouldn't call it a netbook.