Your theories on market failure seem very sound. Thank you for presenting them.
However, I don't think government sponsorship of textbooks will help, because it will become a political nightmare. Imagine all of the fights over textbooks happening all at once on a national level!
Also, who is going to supervise the government's work, and what guarantee is there that the people supervising the work would have the proper discretion anyway? Frankly, just saying "the government can do it" does NOT make me think that the problems of bias and politicizing of textbooks would somehow magically go away. I don't think big government possesses the degree of wisdom and impartiality that you seem to be attributing to it. I'd rather be able to yell at my school board and get rid of the bad eggs at the next local elections, thank you.
What the government could do that would help would be to shine more light on the issues of how much of the costs of textbooks go towards for marketing and fluff. And, if there are small publishers whose work is a relative bargain, the Department of Education would be wise to set up a cheap web page pointing these kinds of bargains out to school boards and teachers.
One of the big advantages electronic text has over printed text is price. Bits are CHEAP, and pushing them around is cheap. No million-dollar book press, no billion-dollar physical distribution system.
This makes electronic text a really good way to give consumers a taste of the book, so that you can sell them a physical copy later.
I'm reading H.G. Wells' When The Sleeper Wakes right now on my Palm Pilot. I'm already going to buy it in hardcopy, so that I have a nice, permanent version to read.
This would help publishers with one of their big problems right now: people aren't discovering new authors they like because with the high price of books, it's too expensive to experiment. Letting people try out new writers cheaply via electronic text sets consumers up to then buy hardcopy of the stuff they like.
Another nice thing about electronic text is that it is well-suited to ephemeral publishing like periodicals and software doc, because it is easy to replace with the next issue/version and you don't waste a lot of paper doing so.
Actually my favorite character is Jet. The scene from Mushroom Samba where Jet is sitting in his Bonsai room saying "Now I understand everything" makes me laugh every time I think of it.
Faye is just eye candy most of the time. When she has a characterization episode it doesn't really affect the rest of the show.
This seems to me to be exactly the kind of "laying down the basic framework" type thing that would be best served by an amendment to the constitution. Maybe stick some reasonable privacy stuff in there as well.
Passing a law would only lead to years and years of lawsuits until the law is confirmed or shot down by the Supreme Court.
I didn't see Anastasia, but I really liked Titan A.E. Great, great design work, and the plot wasn't as bad as people say. The mix of 2D and 3D worked for me. It was a LOT better than the last Trek movie. I'm sad it went out of theaters so fast: I wanted to see it again.
Let's face it, traditional "pen and ink" animation has been stale for many years, and the foul stench of its rotting corpse is beginning to upset cinema goers.
Odd, then, that attendance at anime conventions is growing by leaps and bounds. Odd that Disney is doing quite well, and branching out to release the Studio Ghibli movies. Odd that there are more animated TV shows than I can ever remember, and more movies coming out all the time.
I also believe that computer generated animation will prove to be a short-lived fad, since this animation has a cold, soulless quality which doesn't endear it to the public. Ironically, the future for animation doesn't lie with animation itself - live action "animation", in the style of the "Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers", which combines traditional cartoon humour and slapstick action together with real actors and heightened realism represents the future of animation. The spirit and values of traditional animation will survive in this form of "animation", but the tired old methods of traditional animation will finally be laid to (a well deserved) rest.
Hello? Bueller? TRON came out, what, 20 years ago? Pixar has been going for about as long. Kind of a long-lived "short-lived fad," if you ask me.
As for the rest of your pedantic rant, get a clue. Radio didn't kill the printed page, TV didn't kill radio, photography didn't kill painting, and traditional animation isn't dying either.
Call me cynical, but when I see Microsoft working on something that will sit between the OS and the user and filter out what gets the user's attention, I don't think of it being used for good.
I think of it being used to crush rival companies' instant messenger programs.
I like the $1 a song bit. That's good. However, i don't think the artist would agree to it. When they write about 12 songs to go on a CD, they probably love everyone of them and they would want everyone to have all of those 12 songs. Therefore they would probably get pissed off if people only want three of their songs.
I don't think this is a concern for most artists. After all, they sell singles on CD...
But both the CD-R and the.MP3 are a pain in the ass to get, one because the download time is huge unless you're on a T1, and the other because finding the files is tricky (all I ever find is dead links, and after an hour I give up. Obviously I'm doing something wrong, or I don't know the right places to go, but still...).
Anyway, I'd pay for the convenience of getting the real thing. But I wouldn't pay the unreasonable amounts companies are asking now ($3.99 for one song?).
I'm assuming the 90 years Gibson is referring to is the time between the beginning widespread use of the phonograph and the current day. (There were things like player pianos and music boxes for at many years before the phonograph, but they were expensive and/or limited.) So, really his 90 year window begins with the start of recorded music, and he's only saying that it's not going to be possible to make money off music soon.
I still find this dubious. It's quite easy to duplicate a book these days, but hardly anyone does it. It's easier to buy the book, because you get a nicer copy of the book than a photocopy provides you, and it's not prohibitively expensive.
What I'm hoping will happen is that the various companies will realise that if they provide a legal outlet that's cheap and easier to use than finding the.MP3 out on the web (_I_ can't seem to find anything!), people will just use the easy way and pay the cost (1$ a song sounds good). After all, the distribution costs will still be very small compared to shipping out CDs that in many cases will never sell.
Of course, I still want the files in an open format I can keep and use on multiple devies, instead of some nasty limited proprietary format.
New Hampshire, Oregon, Montana, Alaska, Delaware (N.O.M.A.D.)
And, FWIW, Delaware is getting along just fine, thank you. They are snagging huge amounts of sales away from the states around them, because people will drive over the border to pick up those big-ticket items w/o sales tax. They also sell lots of liquor to PA residents who are sick of the lousy state liquor store sytem back home (socialism, anyone?)
As someone above mentioned, the income tax in Delaware is VERY high (about twice the Pennsylvania rate, from personal experience:(). Supposedly you make it up if you own a home though. They also tax businesses more, so prices may be slightly higher.
Added benefit of Delware: they make it damn hard to become a lawyer there. Keeps the population down!
I had expected to see a LARGE fine attached to the breakup order.
Now, the breakup of Microsoft will certainly cost the company an immense amount of money as it buys new lodgings for the spinoff company, duplicates support staff, reorganizes, etc. But none of that money will be going to the companies that were harmed by Microsoft's illegal actions. I'd have liked to see them get a few hundred million each.
The OS/2 community had been doing a lot of work on emulating win32 programs, and I have read that a lot of this know-how is being channeled into Wine on Linux.
Note that this is not code from IBM itself, but from OS/2 enthusiasts.
Also, someone was also porting a very cool Asteroids-like game called 'Roids over to Linux the last time I checked. Great game, but yeah, a somewhat questionable name...:)
Anybody who reads up and has their sources can predict pretty accurately what basic inventions will be available(bar the great, society-changing ones).
Not really. For instance, most writers from the 50's thought we'd have much more space travel by now. Or take videophones, they've never taken off, yet the technology is fairly trivial.
It's hard to predict what's going to work, because in addition to technical issues, there are also economic, societal and simple ease-of-use, "do I really WANT this?" issues which effect whether ideas become successful.
1 part Dystopian society 1 part utopian technology (good fast AND cheap) 1 part glamorous writing style
I've read plenty of VR-type stories, including the "if you die in VR, you die in the real world" cliche, dating from the 50's and 60's.
I'd classify William F. Nolan's LOGAN'S RUN books as cyberpunk, and they came out long before Gibson or Vinge.
To give credit where it's due, Gibson did a great deal to POPULARISE cyberpunk. I'd also like to add Walter Jon Williams as a writer who did cyberpunk really well.
I'd comment more about Vinge, but I haven't found a copy of True Names yet.
Secondly, your facts are in error. SDI was not cancelled because "the new laser technology failed to materialise." The whole POINT of the SDI effort was to build simple kinetic energy interceptors using off the shelf parts. Lasers were never part of the game plan, except in a "in 20 years, if this becomes available we'll use that too" sort of way. (Unlike Joe Reporter, I actually bothered to read the government releases on the SDI program in NTIS.)
The kinetic energy interceptors WERE developed, with a fair degree of success. They were called "brilliant pebbles," which is a play on "smart rocks," which is slang for kinetic energy interceptors. They made the news, and I even saw video of one of them flying around. Unfortunately, since the press had never done their research in the first place, they covered the story as "hey, guess those lasers didn't work out," which is insulting given that the only people talking seriously about fielding lasers at that point were Time and Newsweek.
I recommend checking around at college or city libraries near you to see if you can browse the NTIS reports (Otherwise, you'd have to spend big bucks getting things mailed to you on microfiche). You will get a lot clearer picture of what was going on than was given in the mainstream press.
It cost the North Vietnamese 0.5 dollars per confirmed kill of US soldiers. It cost America 10,000 dollars per confirmed kill of NVs.
But what this really means is "North Vietnam spent practically nothing on their poorly equipped forces." Whereas the US could AFFORD $10K a kill. It's cheap, in fact, when you factor in how much it costs to train a soldier (must be 1960's money).
Where did you get these numbers, btw? Did they include the amounts China and the USSR contributed to North Vietnam?
Jon
"Silicon Snake Oil" doesn't do its subject justice
on
Laptops In Education
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· Score: 2
Silicon Snake Oil was one of the most disappointing books I have read recently. I frankly woudn't quote it as a reference: someone might actually read it, and it would undermine your case.
I'm fairly sympathetic to the idea that computers won't solve all of our problems, and I really enjoyed The Cuckoo's Egg, so I had high expectations for the book. At the very least, I thought Stoll would have something interesting to say.
Sadly, although he does have a lot to say, Stoll makes his arguments surprisingly poorly. Over and over again he simply repeats the pattern of setting up a straw man, knocking it down, than making claims that are too big to be supported by the example. He claims that computers don't make publishing better, for instance, because WIRED is so ugly. Ignoring the fact that print production has become several orders of magnitude easier to do well these days, because most of the mechanical work is done for you by a computer now instead of having to be done by hand.
Also, he weakens his case by claiming that computers are bad for EVERYTHING, and everthing that involves a computer is bad. This is patently false: there are some things like calculation that computers are clearly superior at. If he had taken a "good for this, bad for that" approach, his book would be a great deal easier to swallow.
Overall, the book is deeply flawed, and in my opinion, just not worth reading.
Does anyone have an example of a better book on this topic?
I have watched every single episode, subtitled of course, and both movies. And it was easy to get the overall story, since it only advanced about a half centimeter every episode, and there might have as well have been blinking words on the screen saying "overall story arc now advancing" when it did.
Of course, your mileage may vary. If you enjoyed it, I certainly don't wish to rain on your parade. But I enjoyed Patlabor about ten billion times more.
I would not reccommend Evangelion, because I was very disappointed with it.
I didn't sympathise with any of the characters, the plot of the series really went nowhere, and then it turned into an incoherent art flick at the end. None of the characters really change or grow (unless you count dying or losing their minds), and by the time it ends, you just don't care any more.
I forgive Anno, because Kareshi Kanojo no Jijyou, his next series, is really great, but Eva just left a bad taste in my mouth.
There are a lot better series out there: Escaflowne, Cowboy Bebop, Irresponsible Captian Tyler, Slayers, Maison Ikkoku, Kimagure Orange Road, etc., etc.
Slashdot Mirror
Your theories on market failure seem very sound. Thank you for presenting them.
However, I don't think government sponsorship of textbooks will help, because it will become a political nightmare. Imagine all of the fights over textbooks happening all at once on a national level!
Also, who is going to supervise the government's work, and what guarantee is there that the people supervising the work would have the proper discretion anyway? Frankly, just saying "the government can do it" does NOT make me think that the problems of bias and politicizing of textbooks would somehow magically go away. I don't think big government possesses the degree of wisdom and impartiality that you seem to be attributing to it. I'd rather be able to yell at my school board and get rid of the bad eggs at the next local elections, thank you.
What the government could do that would help would be to shine more light on the issues of how much of the costs of textbooks go towards for marketing and fluff. And, if there are small publishers whose work is a relative bargain, the Department of Education would be wise to set up a cheap web page pointing these kinds of bargains out to school boards and teachers.
Jon
One of the big advantages electronic text has over printed text is price. Bits are CHEAP, and pushing them around is cheap. No million-dollar book press, no billion-dollar physical distribution system.
This makes electronic text a really good way to give consumers a taste of the book, so that you can sell them a physical copy later.
I'm reading H.G. Wells' When The Sleeper Wakes right now on my Palm Pilot. I'm already going to buy it in hardcopy, so that I have a nice, permanent version to read.
This would help publishers with one of their big problems right now: people aren't discovering new authors they like because with the high price of books, it's too expensive to experiment. Letting people try out new writers cheaply via electronic text sets consumers up to then buy hardcopy of the stuff they like.
Another nice thing about electronic text is that it is well-suited to ephemeral publishing like periodicals and software doc, because it is easy to replace with the next issue/version and you don't waste a lot of paper doing so.
Jon
"Fan Service" is slang for gratuitous T & A drawn into a series to titillate the fanboys in the audience.
Jon
Actually my favorite character is Jet. The scene from Mushroom Samba where Jet is sitting in his Bonsai room saying "Now I understand everything" makes me laugh every time I think of it.
Faye is just eye candy most of the time. When she has a characterization episode it doesn't really affect the rest of the show.
Ed is just way too out there for me.
Jon
Maybe you were betrayed by your expectations?
All I know is, I went into the theater with a basically skeptical outlook, and ended up really enjoying myself. I'll be buying the DVD.
Jon
For those of us in the United States, at least.
This seems to me to be exactly the kind of "laying down the basic framework" type thing that would be best served by an amendment to the constitution. Maybe stick some reasonable privacy stuff in there as well.
Passing a law would only lead to years and years of lawsuits until the law is confirmed or shot down by the Supreme Court.
Jon
As for the rest of your pedantic rant, get a clue. Radio didn't kill the printed page, TV didn't kill radio, photography didn't kill painting, and traditional animation isn't dying either.
Jon
Call me cynical, but when I see Microsoft working on something that will sit between the OS and the user and filter out what gets the user's attention, I don't think of it being used for good.
I think of it being used to crush rival companies' instant messenger programs.
"Windows ME Isn't Done Till ICQ Doesn't Run"
Jon
I think that was an episode of Spiderman and His Amazing Friends, where the X-Men guest-starred. Not their finest hour, really.
Jon
I don't think this is a concern for most artists. After all, they sell singles on CD...
Jon
But both the CD-R and the .MP3 are a pain in the ass to get, one because the download time is huge unless you're on a T1, and the other because finding the files is tricky (all I ever find is dead links, and after an hour I give up. Obviously I'm doing something wrong, or I don't know the right places to go, but still...).
Anyway, I'd pay for the convenience of getting the real thing. But I wouldn't pay the unreasonable amounts companies are asking now ($3.99 for one song?).
I'm assuming the 90 years Gibson is referring to is the time between the beginning widespread use of the phonograph and the current day. (There were things like player pianos and music boxes for at many years before the phonograph, but they were expensive and/or limited.) So, really his 90 year window begins with the start of recorded music, and he's only saying that it's not going to be possible to make money off music soon.
.MP3 out on the web (_I_ can't seem to find anything!), people will just use the easy way and pay the cost (1$ a song sounds good). After all, the distribution costs will still be very small compared to shipping out CDs that in many cases will never sell.
I still find this dubious. It's quite easy to duplicate a book these days, but hardly anyone does it. It's easier to buy the book, because you get a nicer copy of the book than a photocopy provides you, and it's not prohibitively expensive.
What I'm hoping will happen is that the various companies will realise that if they provide a legal outlet that's cheap and easier to use than finding the
Of course, I still want the files in an open format I can keep and use on multiple devies, instead of some nasty limited proprietary format.
Jon
I've got versions of Bomberman and Gauntlet for the playstation. That's the original Gauntlet, btw, not Gauntlet Legends.
Gauntlet is a lot of fun.
Jon
New Hampshire, Oregon, Montana, Alaska, Delaware (N.O.M.A.D.)
:(). Supposedly you make it up if you own a home though. They also tax businesses more, so prices may be slightly higher.
And, FWIW, Delaware is getting along just fine, thank you. They are snagging huge amounts of sales away from the states around them, because people will drive over the border to pick up those big-ticket items w/o sales tax. They also sell lots of liquor to PA residents who are sick of the lousy state liquor store sytem back home (socialism, anyone?)
As someone above mentioned, the income tax in Delaware is VERY high (about twice the Pennsylvania rate, from personal experience
Added benefit of Delware: they make it damn hard to become a lawyer there. Keeps the population down!
Jon
I had expected to see a LARGE fine attached to the breakup order.
Now, the breakup of Microsoft will certainly cost the company an immense amount of money as it buys new lodgings for the spinoff company, duplicates support staff, reorganizes, etc. But none of that money will be going to the companies that were harmed by Microsoft's illegal actions. I'd have liked to see them get a few hundred million each.
Kind of disappointing...
Jon
The OS/2 community had been doing a lot of work on emulating win32 programs, and I have read that a lot of this know-how is being channeled into Wine on Linux.
:)
Note that this is not code from IBM itself, but from OS/2 enthusiasts.
Also, someone was also porting a very cool Asteroids-like game called 'Roids over to Linux the last time I checked. Great game, but yeah, a somewhat questionable name...
Jon Acheson
Not really. For instance, most writers from the 50's thought we'd have much more space travel by now. Or take videophones, they've never taken off, yet the technology is fairly trivial.
It's hard to predict what's going to work, because in addition to technical issues, there are also economic, societal and simple ease-of-use, "do I really WANT this?" issues which effect whether ideas become successful.
Jon
Recipe for cyberpunk:
1 part Dystopian society
1 part utopian technology (good fast AND cheap)
1 part glamorous writing style
I've read plenty of VR-type stories, including the "if you die in VR, you die in the real world" cliche, dating from the 50's and 60's.
I'd classify William F. Nolan's LOGAN'S RUN books as cyberpunk, and they came out long before Gibson or Vinge.
To give credit where it's due, Gibson did a great deal to POPULARISE cyberpunk. I'd also like to add Walter Jon Williams as a writer who did cyberpunk really well.
I'd comment more about Vinge, but I haven't found a copy of True Names yet.
Jon
First of all, it's SDI, not "Star Wars."
Secondly, your facts are in error. SDI was not cancelled because "the new laser technology failed to materialise." The whole POINT of the SDI effort was to build simple kinetic energy interceptors using off the shelf parts. Lasers were never part of the game plan, except in a "in 20 years, if this becomes available we'll use that too" sort of way. (Unlike Joe Reporter, I actually bothered to read the government releases on the SDI program in NTIS.)
The kinetic energy interceptors WERE developed, with a fair degree of success. They were called "brilliant pebbles," which is a play on "smart rocks," which is slang for kinetic energy interceptors. They made the news, and I even saw video of one of them flying around. Unfortunately, since the press had never done their research in the first place, they covered the story as "hey, guess those lasers didn't work out," which is insulting given that the only people talking seriously about fielding lasers at that point were Time and Newsweek.
I recommend checking around at college or city libraries near you to see if you can browse the NTIS reports (Otherwise, you'd have to spend big bucks getting things mailed to you on microfiche). You will get a lot clearer picture of what was going on than was given in the mainstream press.
Jon
Where did you get these numbers, btw? Did they include the amounts China and the USSR contributed to North Vietnam?
Jon
I'm fairly sympathetic to the idea that computers won't solve all of our problems, and I really enjoyed The Cuckoo's Egg, so I had high expectations for the book. At the very least, I thought Stoll would have something interesting to say.
Sadly, although he does have a lot to say, Stoll makes his arguments surprisingly poorly. Over and over again he simply repeats the pattern of setting up a straw man, knocking it down, than making claims that are too big to be supported by the example. He claims that computers don't make publishing better, for instance, because WIRED is so ugly. Ignoring the fact that print production has become several orders of magnitude easier to do well these days, because most of the mechanical work is done for you by a computer now instead of having to be done by hand.
Also, he weakens his case by claiming that computers are bad for EVERYTHING, and everthing that involves a computer is bad. This is patently false: there are some things like calculation that computers are clearly superior at. If he had taken a "good for this, bad for that" approach, his book would be a great deal easier to swallow.
Overall, the book is deeply flawed, and in my opinion, just not worth reading.
Does anyone have an example of a better book on this topic?
Jon
I have watched every single episode, subtitled of course, and both movies. And it was easy to get the overall story, since it only advanced about a half centimeter every episode, and there might have as well have been blinking words on the screen saying "overall story arc now advancing" when it did.
:)
I recommend you visit Evangelion Thumbnail Theatre to see a listless, overhyped series made fun of.
Of course, your mileage may vary. If you enjoyed it, I certainly don't wish to rain on your parade. But I enjoyed Patlabor about ten billion times more.
Jon
He NEVER CAME BACK! (NEVER CAME BACK! NEVER CAME BACK! NEVER CAME BACK!)
I still remember seeing that episode, and it's probably been 20 years.
Jon
I would not reccommend Evangelion, because I was very disappointed with it.
I didn't sympathise with any of the characters, the plot of the series really went nowhere, and then it turned into an incoherent art flick at the end. None of the characters really change or grow (unless you count dying or losing their minds), and by the time it ends, you just don't care any more.
I forgive Anno, because Kareshi Kanojo no Jijyou , his next series, is really great, but Eva just left a bad taste in my mouth.
There are a lot better series out there: Escaflowne, Cowboy Bebop, Irresponsible Captian Tyler, Slayers, Maison Ikkoku, Kimagure Orange Road, etc., etc.
Jon
For the keyboard and mouse, use separate PS2-style sockets, and if necessary put the splitter on the keyboard/mouse.
I wouldn't use the iOpener with the keyboard/gamepad it comes with. Make it easy to swap these parts out.
I agree, ethernet is better than a modem.
Good luck, Netpliance!
Jon