Your clothing analogy is right on. They've got it, you want it, and what it cost to make has almost nothing to do with the price. When a pair of pants can go on a rack for $150, and eventually get marked down to $10, there's obviously something screwy going on.
I'm not saying I want to live in a Wal-Mart world, but it would be really cool if every object you purchased had a true value-stream accounting available for it, so you could see that the $3 Orange Juice in the grocery store is actually giving $0.03 to the pickers who harvest the oranges, $0.07 to the owner of the land/trees, $0.05 to the owner of the refinery, $0.15 to the packaging, $0.06 to the grocery store that sells it to you, and $2.64 to the fuel / energy consumed in transporting / processing the oranges.
With transparency in profit structures, consumers could actually make sensible choices if they wanted to.
I have had similar experiences - less time in actual Apple hardware, but my 2.5 year old MacBook Pro (no AppleCare) has an annoying hardware fault that makes it all too apparent that Macs are subject to the same faults as any other PC.
OS-X is nice, until you start really trying to do Unix stuff on it, then you might as well run a Linux VM instead of fighting with all the necessary "adjustments" to make whatever happy under OS-X.
The Apple apps are o.k. if you use that sort of thing, I did for about a year when I first got them. I just don't have enough free time to screw around making DVD slideshows that nobody really cares about.
For a brief time in 2006-7 the MacPros were good value for money compared to open market dual CPU socket PCs. They're still decent machines, but I agree the prices seem to have stayed high while the competition has come down.
Until Display Port gets much wider market penetration, I'm going to call it a proprietary, overpriced $30 dongle PITA.
I think that OS-X would be a lot more useful if Psystar wins some kind of court decision forcing legal acceptance of hackintoshes. I'd still be tempted to buy the Apple "reference hardware" for professional applications where I don't want to screw around with compatibility issues.
pay 8 bucks at your local book store for something that cost them 1 buck to make.
Hey, it only cost them $0.21 for the paper and ink to make that book. It cost them another $0.33 for packaging, storage and shipping. Then it cost them $0.64 for promotion (free copies, advertising, signing parties). If you bought the book in a shopping mall, they're probably paying $1.50 per book in rent for the mall space (say $20K per month rent vs 40K books in the store that stay there for 3 months each), and another $1.50 per book for the cheerful staff who ignore you until you shout at them that you're ready to pay now, please! Corporate management, insurance, accounting, debt service, shareholder profits, etc. account for another $3.80, and then the author gets their 0.02 per copy royalty.
Who could possibly want to disturb such a vibrant ecosystem by delivering content directly from the author to their readers efficiently?
And in a digital age, I don't know that we can afford this anymore.
What does a digital age have to do with anything?
Start with the fact that communication of any information from the Continental Congress to the remote corners of the Union took several days.
Fast forward to millions of channels of HD video available planetwide in a matter of seconds, and the concept of "public information" takes on a whole new dimension. Yes, for the most part society has just dealt with it and moved on. Most of society doesn't deal with the courts on a daily basis.
When I, or anyone with a net-connected computer, can sit at my desk, at home, well after business hours, and for the effort of a few keystrokes search for "Your Name Here felony" and come up with a listing of all accusations ever made, anywhere in the world - maybe it's time to rethink what all needs to be "public information."
The part that matters, to me, is the fact that before disclosure is required, the courts are actually looking at the claim rather than simply accepting on face value from the plaintiff that the statements are defamatory.
But on the other hand, how can the claim be evaluated without the anonymous writer being there to defend it? I worry that this could turn into "pre-trying" the defendant before he's identified -- after all, if you've already decided that the statement is defamatory enough to identify the writer, then you're right on the edge of deciding that the writer is guilty, too. It would suck if the court improperly decided to identify the writer, and then he didn't get a fair trial due to the lingering presumption of guilt.
(No, I don't have a solution for this.)
Between the two choices: 1) drag the accused to court before making an initial determination, and 2) make the determination before identifying the accused, I can only get behind 2) as the preferable choice.
As for the warning part, it should probably be more onerous to reduce frivolous claims. I'm in favor of the plaintiff posting bond to cover the defendant's time and legal costs in the event that the plaintiff does not prevail.
I saw the silverlight only option too, I took it so we could use the MacBook as a viewer in the bedroom, but it was pretty clear what was going to happen.
For what it's worth, I've had a better end user experience with the Netflix Silverlight viewer than I have with hulu.com , better A/V sync, slightly better picture, fewer server dropouts (I've had hulu die on me in the middle of viewing an episode, damn annoying to have to switch to fox.com and watch their ads.), I can't really rate the old MS viewer because we only had a really old (800MHz) XP pc to run it on at the time, so naturally it was unusable.
Their instant viewing subscriber base has been climbing tremendously.
I would expect it to die down soon enough - the content they offer on Instant View seems to be the bottom 10% of the catalog. We have 450 DVDs in our queue, there were about 45 available for instant view, once those were gone, there's not really anything compelling left in the Instant View catalog.
I would open another Netflix account and sell my old-school-player account on Ebay. New accounts now are Silverlight-only and the ability to use the old player has market value.
I would wager that the minute their Silverlight player comes out of beta the old player will be discontinued though.
Yeah, but anyone who is rabid enough to buy something like this on eBay probably has a cat-like brain that is unable to make complex deductions like that.
If you can ship in that much much aluminum, why not just ship in that much hydrogen instead?
Hydrogen is notoriously hard to contain, you might need to generate more than 9kg of hydrogen in order to get 1kg of it through the pipeline, stored in a tank and into an IC engine. If you're going to try to store pressurized or liquid H2, the tank is going to be non-trivial too.
Who wouldn't expect to spend more energy than you receive in a portable source? What's the overall efficiency of chemical storage batteries? This is just kinda cool because it uses relatively harmless stuff to make relatively clean relatively easy to access energy.
Where's that energy coming from? Milking invisible pink unicorns?
The unicorns aren't pink, they're blue, and unfortunately they're rather large.
Seriously, this (Al powder) isn't an energy generation solution, it's an energy distribution solution. Most (populated) areas have both water and oxygen in the air, so if you can get the water to this powder and get hydrogen back... that could be very interesting.
If you look at the overall efficiency of the fossilized oil cycle, starting with solar input and running through geologic time as a major part of the refining process toward becoming a portable fuel, recycling oxidized aluminum is pretty damn attractive.
The article doesn't really give details - it could be an interesting idea if they have a highly efficient method of producing the desired clusters in a very high density - and oxidizing Aluminum to generate pure hydrogen is at least novel.
An efficient recycling step would make this interesting for widespread use - without that it does seem like just a novelty.
In an ideal scenario, you could have an aluminum reactor tank all set up to dissociate water and release hydrogen gas - pour in the water, get the hydrogen for use in an IC engine, turbine, or whatever, and when the reactor tank is too oxidized to be useful, swap it out for another, and recycle the first one.
If the recycling process is highly efficient and environmentally friendly, this might make sense for a portable clean fuel solution.
Some big ifs in there... still not a bad thing to spend research dollars on.
Yep, it's hard to have an opinion of whether or not someone is a rapist.
The interesting libel example I heard was "I think I saw Bob having a drink with Sally." If you know that Bob is an alcoholic and that he might lose his job if he is caught drinking, that could be libelous if it turns out to not be true. But, in the example at least, if you don't know that (Bob has a drinking problem) then the statement is not libelous.
In my opinion, the whole lawyering thing has gotten out of hand and should face stronger systematic dis-incentives, especially when abused.
It may be that anonymous statements of opinion, as in "I think ZeroDgZ is sociopathic", should be protected, but statements presented as facts that are actually lies should not. Using anonymity to protect against suit for libel should also not be protected (it is illegal in many countries as regards print media at least).
Look up slander. Statements of opinion or true facts are protected, false statements of fact are not.
"Just another reason why capitalism fails. The public-facing side of any single company is considered far more important than the life of any individual. Way to go mankind."
Whoa hold on there. I was in agreement with everything you said up until this last paragraph.
I think if you substitute the "system of publicly traded corporations who employ a significant portion of working America" for "capitalism", you'll get the intended meaning.
I bought a GPS module for the Handspring Visor - it was supposed to get an open API, yadda yadda... firm went bankrupt in the dot-com crash and the receivers of the company always found a reason to hold on to "their intellectual property" thinking they could make a dime off of it at some time in the future, rather than giving it to the open source community.
You can argue all day long about how wonderful it would be if... but the shark that is feeding on the remains of the company is usually only interested in turning their $0.02 on the dollar investment into $0.03, and they typically know little or nothing about what they have other than they got it for really cheap.
Cool, maybe there's hope after all. I've just gotten jaded after hearing all the fiber-to-the-home-hype that was running around in 1997-1998. It's still not near me today, nor most places I've lived, but they might actually achieve a decent rollout by 2020.
In the end, fiber is so much better than twisted copper or co-ax, especially when it gets wet. All you really have to guard against is cutting it. And, of course, even if the node can't fill the pipe to the house, it's better to have the extra capacity rather than having to train techs how to juggle cable channel numbers, tune DSL modems to available bandwidth, etc.
Yep, with the right software, this thing could be a cost effective alternative to the TS-109 that I use... I chose the 109 over a retired Pentium box because of total power draw considerations.
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Your clothing analogy is right on. They've got it, you want it, and what it cost to make has almost nothing to do with the price. When a pair of pants can go on a rack for $150, and eventually get marked down to $10, there's obviously something screwy going on.
I'm not saying I want to live in a Wal-Mart world, but it would be really cool if every object you purchased had a true value-stream accounting available for it, so you could see that the $3 Orange Juice in the grocery store is actually giving $0.03 to the pickers who harvest the oranges, $0.07 to the owner of the land/trees, $0.05 to the owner of the refinery, $0.15 to the packaging, $0.06 to the grocery store that sells it to you, and $2.64 to the fuel / energy consumed in transporting / processing the oranges.
With transparency in profit structures, consumers could actually make sensible choices if they wanted to.
I have had similar experiences - less time in actual Apple hardware, but my 2.5 year old MacBook Pro (no AppleCare) has an annoying hardware fault that makes it all too apparent that Macs are subject to the same faults as any other PC.
OS-X is nice, until you start really trying to do Unix stuff on it, then you might as well run a Linux VM instead of fighting with all the necessary "adjustments" to make whatever happy under OS-X.
The Apple apps are o.k. if you use that sort of thing, I did for about a year when I first got them. I just don't have enough free time to screw around making DVD slideshows that nobody really cares about.
For a brief time in 2006-7 the MacPros were good value for money compared to open market dual CPU socket PCs. They're still decent machines, but I agree the prices seem to have stayed high while the competition has come down.
Until Display Port gets much wider market penetration, I'm going to call it a proprietary, overpriced $30 dongle PITA.
I think that OS-X would be a lot more useful if Psystar wins some kind of court decision forcing legal acceptance of hackintoshes. I'd still be tempted to buy the Apple "reference hardware" for professional applications where I don't want to screw around with compatibility issues.
pay 8 bucks at your local book store for something that cost them 1 buck to make.
Hey, it only cost them $0.21 for the paper and ink to make that book. It cost them another $0.33 for packaging, storage and shipping. Then it cost them $0.64 for promotion (free copies, advertising, signing parties). If you bought the book in a shopping mall, they're probably paying $1.50 per book in rent for the mall space (say $20K per month rent vs 40K books in the store that stay there for 3 months each), and another $1.50 per book for the cheerful staff who ignore you until you shout at them that you're ready to pay now, please! Corporate management, insurance, accounting, debt service, shareholder profits, etc. account for another $3.80, and then the author gets their 0.02 per copy royalty.
Who could possibly want to disturb such a vibrant ecosystem by delivering content directly from the author to their readers efficiently?
The article talks about two approaches: building protective berms, or paving with rocks large enough that they don't get blasted away.
This, being the first ever attempt at building such a facility, might be the time to try both approaches simultaneously?
And in a digital age, I don't know that we can afford this anymore.
What does a digital age have to do with anything?
Start with the fact that communication of any information from the Continental Congress to the remote corners of the Union took several days.
Fast forward to millions of channels of HD video available planetwide in a matter of seconds, and the concept of "public information" takes on a whole new dimension. Yes, for the most part society has just dealt with it and moved on. Most of society doesn't deal with the courts on a daily basis.
When I, or anyone with a net-connected computer, can sit at my desk, at home, well after business hours, and for the effort of a few keystrokes search for "Your Name Here felony" and come up with a listing of all accusations ever made, anywhere in the world - maybe it's time to rethink what all needs to be "public information."
But on the other hand, how can the claim be evaluated without the anonymous writer being there to defend it? I worry that this could turn into "pre-trying" the defendant before he's identified -- after all, if you've already decided that the statement is defamatory enough to identify the writer, then you're right on the edge of deciding that the writer is guilty, too. It would suck if the court improperly decided to identify the writer, and then he didn't get a fair trial due to the lingering presumption of guilt.
(No, I don't have a solution for this.)
Between the two choices: 1) drag the accused to court before making an initial determination, and 2) make the determination before identifying the accused, I can only get behind 2) as the preferable choice.
As for the warning part, it should probably be more onerous to reduce frivolous claims. I'm in favor of the plaintiff posting bond to cover the defendant's time and legal costs in the event that the plaintiff does not prevail.
"10-12 hours battery life" = static display, guessing 3-4 hours battery life if actually browsing the web or watching a video.
"whole package for $300" = $529.95 at launch, settling down to $450 or so when the smoke clears.
"Spring of this year" = limited quantities shipping in August 2009, hey, isn't that spring in New Zealand?
I saw the silverlight only option too, I took it so we could use the MacBook as a viewer in the bedroom, but it was pretty clear what was going to happen.
For what it's worth, I've had a better end user experience with the Netflix Silverlight viewer than I have with hulu.com , better A/V sync, slightly better picture, fewer server dropouts (I've had hulu die on me in the middle of viewing an episode, damn annoying to have to switch to fox.com and watch their ads.), I can't really rate the old MS viewer because we only had a really old (800MHz) XP pc to run it on at the time, so naturally it was unusable.
Their instant viewing subscriber base has been climbing tremendously.
I would expect it to die down soon enough - the content they offer on Instant View seems to be the bottom 10% of the catalog. We have 450 DVDs in our queue, there were about 45 available for instant view, once those were gone, there's not really anything compelling left in the Instant View catalog.
I would open another Netflix account and sell my old-school-player account on Ebay. New accounts now are Silverlight-only and the ability to use the old player has market value.
I would wager that the minute their Silverlight player comes out of beta the old player will be discontinued though.
Yeah, but anyone who is rabid enough to buy something like this on eBay probably has a cat-like brain that is unable to make complex deductions like that.
If you can ship in that much much aluminum, why not just ship in that much hydrogen instead?
Hydrogen is notoriously hard to contain, you might need to generate more than 9kg of hydrogen in order to get 1kg of it through the pipeline, stored in a tank and into an IC engine. If you're going to try to store pressurized or liquid H2, the tank is going to be non-trivial too.
Who wouldn't expect to spend more energy than you receive in a portable source? What's the overall efficiency of chemical storage batteries? This is just kinda cool because it uses relatively harmless stuff to make relatively clean relatively easy to access energy.
Where's that energy coming from? Milking invisible pink unicorns?
The unicorns aren't pink, they're blue, and unfortunately they're rather large.
Seriously, this (Al powder) isn't an energy generation solution, it's an energy distribution solution. Most (populated) areas have both water and oxygen in the air, so if you can get the water to this powder and get hydrogen back... that could be very interesting.
If you look at the overall efficiency of the fossilized oil cycle, starting with solar input and running through geologic time as a major part of the refining process toward becoming a portable fuel, recycling oxidized aluminum is pretty damn attractive.
The article doesn't really give details - it could be an interesting idea if they have a highly efficient method of producing the desired clusters in a very high density - and oxidizing Aluminum to generate pure hydrogen is at least novel.
An efficient recycling step would make this interesting for widespread use - without that it does seem like just a novelty.
In an ideal scenario, you could have an aluminum reactor tank all set up to dissociate water and release hydrogen gas - pour in the water, get the hydrogen for use in an IC engine, turbine, or whatever, and when the reactor tank is too oxidized to be useful, swap it out for another, and recycle the first one.
If the recycling process is highly efficient and environmentally friendly, this might make sense for a portable clean fuel solution.
Some big ifs in there... still not a bad thing to spend research dollars on.
Yep, it's hard to have an opinion of whether or not someone is a rapist.
The interesting libel example I heard was "I think I saw Bob having a drink with Sally." If you know that Bob is an alcoholic and that he might lose his job if he is caught drinking, that could be libelous if it turns out to not be true. But, in the example at least, if you don't know that (Bob has a drinking problem) then the statement is not libelous.
In my opinion, the whole lawyering thing has gotten out of hand and should face stronger systematic dis-incentives, especially when abused.
It may be that anonymous statements of opinion, as in "I think ZeroDgZ is sociopathic", should be protected, but statements presented as facts that are actually lies should not. Using anonymity to protect against suit for libel should also not be protected (it is illegal in many countries as regards print media at least).
Look up slander. Statements of opinion or true facts are protected, false statements of fact are not.
"Just another reason why capitalism fails. The public-facing side of any single company is considered far more important than the life of any individual. Way to go mankind."
Whoa hold on there. I was in agreement with everything you said up until this last paragraph.
I think if you substitute the "system of publicly traded corporations who employ a significant portion of working America" for "capitalism", you'll get the intended meaning.
I bought a GPS module for the Handspring Visor - it was supposed to get an open API, yadda yadda... firm went bankrupt in the dot-com crash and the receivers of the company always found a reason to hold on to "their intellectual property" thinking they could make a dime off of it at some time in the future, rather than giving it to the open source community.
You can argue all day long about how wonderful it would be if... but the shark that is feeding on the remains of the company is usually only interested in turning their $0.02 on the dollar investment into $0.03, and they typically know little or nothing about what they have other than they got it for really cheap.
they should release an open server even if it lacks the content and patch the client to allow the user to specify a server.
Should... yes. Unfortunately, that would require more of what they already don't have enough of (money and/or people who work for free.)
If I were running it, I'd want the CC numbers just to cut down on people running multiple accounts.
Cool, maybe there's hope after all. I've just gotten jaded after hearing all the fiber-to-the-home-hype that was running around in 1997-1998. It's still not near me today, nor most places I've lived, but they might actually achieve a decent rollout by 2020.
In the end, fiber is so much better than twisted copper or co-ax, especially when it gets wet. All you really have to guard against is cutting it. And, of course, even if the node can't fill the pipe to the house, it's better to have the extra capacity rather than having to train techs how to juggle cable channel numbers, tune DSL modems to available bandwidth, etc.
you can also always get satellite, but it's not even as good as bad DSL, and marginally more expensive.
What cities have fiber to the home? (not just to the neighborhood node - which, admittedly, has improved actual service quite a bit.)
Yep, with the right software, this thing could be a cost effective alternative to the TS-109 that I use... I chose the 109 over a retired Pentium box because of total power draw considerations.
The 4 example products are all some form of NAS, or making your NAS function better by providing protocol translations.
You could run a nice little webserver off of this, it looks like linuxdevices.com might be trying this right now.