From the article - "Four hundred thousand dollars, someone quoted. Four hundred thousand."
"Someone" - yeah, that's some top notch reporting right there. Has anyone contacted the Pulitzer people yet? I don't see a single mention in the article of how much Pepsi is on the hook for. This might be shocking to you, but they probably wrote the contract so that actual results would be expected.
Actually, that's a good analogy. This is the equivalent of a total sleazebag with no ethics, and a track record of selfishness, asking a woman out to an expensive lobster dinner. The woman would have to be fairly clueless to think there were no expectations, and then complain when the sleazebag expected something.
I don't think you're getting it, so I'll put this in capital letters for you - PEPSI. Do you really think PEPSI does altruistic things like showing the public interesting subcultures? The same company that spent $2.4 million to stop GMO labeling in California? The same company that was the biggest contributor the $7.2 million dark money pool to stop GMO labeling in Washington? The same company that cheerfully conducts business in Burma, because shareholders?
All I'm saying is: know who you're dealing with instead of being a clueless dork. If you deal with megacorporations, and take megacorporation money, then expect the megacorporation to set the prostitution dial anywhere they damn well please...
This definition is from Wikipedia, I would imagine it is fairly non-controversial:
"Reality television is a genre of television programming that documents unscripted situations and actual occurrences, and often features a previously unknown cast. The genre often highlights personal drama and conflict to a much greater extent than other unscripted television such as documentary shows."
So, BY DEFINITION, what they were doing was producing a reality show, since there is no way you could call this a documentary. Why on Earth would you think that Pepsi would care who the most skilled was? How does that help to sell Taco Bell or Mountain Dew? If you're going on TV and making your sponsor money, you're an actor, like it or not. You would have to be incredibly naïve to believe that Pepsi just wanted to showcase your mad programming skills, just because they like programming that darn much.
You're still looking at it from the outside. I negotiated sponsorships with corporations in a past life. There is a significant failure rate - some ideas seem good at first glance, but just don't work out. Pepsi realizes this, and isn't heartbroken when money is spent on testing an idea. It is unlikely that this is a "failure" to them. In fact, the vast majority of sponsorship ideas go nowhere. People who are not familiar with the process think that the large corporation just gives you a ton of money to have their name somewhere in small print in the background. It just doesn't work that way. The lower profile the event, the more exposure they will want to squeeze out of you. If you don't like that, just produce the project yourself.
The only ones that failed were the participants. If I were putting six figures into a reality show, there is no way I would want a prima donna who refused to drink Mountain Dew on camera.
What "bad press"? Slashdot is the only channel I have seen this "story" on, and frankly, Pepsi probably doesn't care that a lot of programmers got butthurt on this deal. If anything, it sends the message that if you want their money, you follow their rules. Oh wait, you're thinking that the Internet is going to rise up in solidarity, and everyone is going to refuse to accept sponsorship money from Pepsi now, right? Let me laugh even harder...
Reality check - Pepsi didn't waste money on this. Their consultant told them that they were working with a bunch of prima donnas, and they didn't foot the investment. The entire project got scrapped before cameras were rolling, and now every other corporation knows to stay clear of these whiners because they are hard to work with.
Do you think the people on Survivor are in danger of starving to death if they can't get a fire going?
Do you think Bear Grylls does his show without any of it being faked?
Do you think American Idol rewards the contestant with the most musical talent?
These guys signed up for a reality show with heavy corporate branding. At that point, no one gives a flying fuck about how well you document your code. You're a paid actor, meant to bring visibility to a brand. And yes, it looks really, REALLY bad when you sponsor an event where the all-women teams get crushed. It looks bad when the two token black guys finish last. I don't like it any more than you do, but no corporation wants that taste in their mouth.
This is reality in the corporate world. If you don't like the way the game is played, then write code at your own desk, or in your basement, not in front of a production crew.
You can't be that dense. This is a media production. You don't get to sign up to play Hamlet, and then demand to be able to drink Pepsi while the cameras are rolling. That's the line between being a programmer and being an actor. These guys signed up to be actors, but they don't want to follow the rules.
From Adriel Wallick: "The game jam was to be sponsored by Pepsi and produced by Polaris/Maker."
That was after the contract negotiations. This wasn't a case where Maker Studios ran out behind the participants' backs and recruited Pepsi. The participants' knew from the onset that Pepsi was involved. Without Pepsi, there was no project, no matter how they try to spin this.
Here's what really happened - these whiny little dorks thought that Pepsi would just throw a few sacks of money at their project and stay out of their way while they looked cool on TV. They didn't realize that corporations want value for their investment. Of course Pepsi is going to send in someone to make sure they're getting something out of it. Sorry, you don't get to deal with the devil, and then complain that there's not enough water underneath those hot studio lights...
These guys made a deal with Pepsi, the epitome of a soulless American corporation which will drown fat teenagers in high fructose corn syrup to get a quarterly profit, and they expected Fiji water and organic bananas on the set?
There are about a gazillion indie film makers looking for work. If you don't like corporate, don't do corporate. Your little vanity project is helping keep the lardasses in this country hooked on Taco Bell and buckets of Pepsi, so please don't expect sympathy that your precious self had to drink some Mountain Dew.
I don't know, maybe for their next project they can ask for $5 million from Nike, and do the entire project barefoot... or better, see if Fox has any interest in a "I'm a clueless techie dork" reality show...
Isn't that what Americans were saying about Apollo? Here you go:
A rat done bit my sister Nell. (with Whitey on the moon) Her face and arms began to swell. (and Whitey's on the moon) I can't pay no doctor bill. (but Whitey's on the moon) Ten years from now I'll be payin' still. (while Whitey's on the moon) The man jus' upped my rent las' night. ('cause Whitey's on the moon) No hot water, no toilets, no lights. (but Whitey's on the moon) I wonder why he's uppi' me? ('cause Whitey's on the moon?) I wuz already payin' 'im fifty a week. (with Whitey on the moon) Taxes takin' my whole damn check, Junkies makin' me a nervous wreck, The price of food is goin' up, An' as if all that shit wuzn't enough: A rat done bit my sister Nell. (with Whitey on the moon) Her face an' arm began to swell. (but Whitey's on the moon) Was all that money I made las' year (for Whitey on the moon?) How come there ain't no money here? (Hmm! Whitey's on the moon) Y'know I jus' 'bout had my fill (of Whitey on the moon) I think I'll sen' these doctor bills, Airmail special (to Whitey on the moon)
I know very little about audio, but a cursory search turned this up from Wikipedia:
"Because the clipped waveform has more area underneath it than the smaller unclipped waveform, the amplifier produces more power than its rated (sine wave) output when it is clipping. This extra power can damage any part of the loudspeaker, including the woofer, or the tweeter, by causing over-excursion, or by overheating the voice coil. It may cause damage to the amplifier's power supply or simply blow a fuse."
The digital signal obviously has to be converted to analog at some point, so I believe this is what Dell is talking about.
This is exactly what I did. I would have been happy to shell out $50-$100 for an online package since I haven't watched actual OTA TV in years. Since that was not an option, I went out and bought a Channel Master DVR+ that can record off the antenna. Now I'm watching the whole thing ad-free.
Elucidate a tad on this "4 month contract" deal. Are you providing full benefits? When hired, does that time count towards your vacation days and so on? Is there a well-defined set of criteria for how someone on this 4 month criteria is evaluated, and how it will be determined if they get a permanent job?
See, for someone like myself who's not at their first rodeo, this sounds like "bait and switch". The fact that you're not willing to even name your employer speaks volumes more.
Right now, we can't even agree on greenhouse gases, something that every reputable scientist agrees is a major problem for the planet.
Now imagine a species significantly more advanced than ours making contact.
The US would try to be a "world leader", whatever that means these days. China and Russia would be jockeying for influence, claiming the US did not speak for everyone. Venezuela would be sending pictures to the aliens of how the US massacred civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki just this century. Europe would try to the mediator. The Arab states would scream imperialism. Africa would ask why a minority of white people are deciding the future of the planet. The UN would try to come up with enough votes to put together a strongly worded letter.
Would you want to deal with that? It would be smarter to wait until species XYZ had its shit together enough to come up with a single government. World government is a bad idea to you because you only see the negative attributes in people. A civilization that was peaceful, intelligent, and cooperated with each other would have no problems at all with a single government.
The math does not work out in your argument. The universe being old should make the search easier - there are planets much older than Earth, so why would we be the first in the galaxy to become intelligent? And our radio telescopes are already reaching out across a sphere billions of light years in diameter - out of all that space, why is there not one single clear signal? SETI has been searching for 46 years now, with nothing to show.
At this point in the search, it makes more sense to assume that there is something else going on that we're not aware of. Maybe there's a periodic galaxy wide event that destroys consciousness, so civilizations never get beyond a certain technological level, and we just popped up between clean slate events. Maybe we're in quarantine, and no one is allowed to talk to us until we develop a world government that can speak for us with one voice. Whatever the case, it's starting to look like listening for radio is a dead end.
... is the phrase "WHEN the search finally succeeds" (emphasis added). There is not a single good explanation of why it has not succeeded already, which is a red flag that we are missing something fundamental about the nature of extraterrestrial intelligence.
I'm an application deployment guy, not a programmer. Every time we push something that needs.NET Framework, the end users complain about it being hideously slow. Our MS developers of course want everyone to have a Core i7 machine with 64GB RAM and SSD hard drive - to which I reply "learn how to write some fucking code without seven layers of frameworks and abstraction layers".
Then of course, I can never get a straight answer from the developers on which.NET to install. Do you want 4, 3.5 SP1, 2? The usual answer is "load all of them". I get that.NET Framework is great in theory, but if you have to deal with the actual implementation, you'll see things differently. A lot of times we'll get screen glitches which the devs are convinced is a MS issue, but there's no available fix, so we go with "that's not a serious enough problem to fix".
On the other side of the fence are the Linux apps I have to deploy. The Linux devs send me a.DEB file. I generally have that pushed out the same day.
Relax, pal - frameworks that don't particularly care about accuracy have been around for years now. If you don't believe me, talk to anyone who uses.NET Framework.
The question is not whether organic chemistry is too difficult, the question is whether it is even necessary. My brother is a practicing physician, has been out of premed for 20 years, but can still look at a sketch of Ibogaine and understand what he's looking at. Which is completely useless in the context of his job.
However, he has no clue what Bayes' theorem is, or how it is relevant to his decisions. If I'm seeing a doctor who's evaluating me for an angioplasty vs Lipitor, I damn well want someone who understands Bayes' theorem and has a good intuitive handle on probability, not someone who can sketch complex molecules.
"They were trying to find a method for improving fuzzy images, such as the ones generated by MRIs when there is insufficient time to complete a scan. On a hunch, Candes applied an algorithm designed to clean up fuzzy images,[...]"
Wow! That would be the last thing I thought of in that situation...
Police officers are constantly in environments where their pistol could be taken by a criminal. Why are the proponents of this technology not requiring cops to use it? And why are cops refusing to even consider these kinds of mechanisms?
I can't tell if you're being intentionally dense or just querulous...
In 1969, the aerospace industry itself was a novelty. The computers they were using were custom designed for the project. Computers were by no means in widespread usage - to the lay person, not the expert, they WERE new. Hence the word "novelty".
Use this thing called "Google" if you don't believe me. Curiosity, in comparison, was running a PowerPC 750 design. Released in 1997. On top of VxWorks. Which was first released in 1987. The design was criticized for being archaic, to which NASA responded that they wanted to go with safe.
The shuttle program was NOT a success. It was a colossal failure. It was intended to be a cheap, reusable vehicle to get cargo to low earth orbit. Per Wikipedia, the original target was $630/lb to get payload up to orbit, in 2011 dollars. The actual cost wound up being $27,000/lb. That's 4,100% over budget. If you consider that a success, I'd hate to see what you consider a failure.
Hubble? You mean the telescope that they launched with a mirror that was ground in the wrong shape? The one that cost millions to fix while it was in orbit? That one? We got a lot of pretty pictures, sure, but there was nothing revolutionary about the technology itself.
JWST is a fine idea. But it's just a better version of Hubble for $8.7 billion. All I'm saying is that when you're talking about budgets of billions, we should expect more than we're getting from NASA.
I'm sorry, but you're making about zero sense. If the sky-crane explodes and drops the 1 ton robot, who exactly is going to get hurt? The Martians? What exactly is the risk in this operation?
Slashdot Mirror
From the article - "Four hundred thousand dollars, someone quoted. Four hundred thousand."
"Someone" - yeah, that's some top notch reporting right there. Has anyone contacted the Pulitzer people yet? I don't see a single mention in the article of how much Pepsi is on the hook for. This might be shocking to you, but they probably wrote the contract so that actual results would be expected.
Actually, that's a good analogy. This is the equivalent of a total sleazebag with no ethics, and a track record of selfishness, asking a woman out to an expensive lobster dinner. The woman would have to be fairly clueless to think there were no expectations, and then complain when the sleazebag expected something.
I don't think you're getting it, so I'll put this in capital letters for you - PEPSI. Do you really think PEPSI does altruistic things like showing the public interesting subcultures? The same company that spent $2.4 million to stop GMO labeling in California? The same company that was the biggest contributor the $7.2 million dark money pool to stop GMO labeling in Washington? The same company that cheerfully conducts business in Burma, because shareholders?
All I'm saying is: know who you're dealing with instead of being a clueless dork. If you deal with megacorporations, and take megacorporation money, then expect the megacorporation to set the prostitution dial anywhere they damn well please...
This definition is from Wikipedia, I would imagine it is fairly non-controversial:
"Reality television is a genre of television programming that documents unscripted situations and actual occurrences, and often features a previously unknown cast. The genre often highlights personal drama and conflict to a much greater extent than other unscripted television such as documentary shows."
So, BY DEFINITION, what they were doing was producing a reality show, since there is no way you could call this a documentary. Why on Earth would you think that Pepsi would care who the most skilled was? How does that help to sell Taco Bell or Mountain Dew? If you're going on TV and making your sponsor money, you're an actor, like it or not. You would have to be incredibly naïve to believe that Pepsi just wanted to showcase your mad programming skills, just because they like programming that darn much.
You're still looking at it from the outside. I negotiated sponsorships with corporations in a past life. There is a significant failure rate - some ideas seem good at first glance, but just don't work out. Pepsi realizes this, and isn't heartbroken when money is spent on testing an idea. It is unlikely that this is a "failure" to them. In fact, the vast majority of sponsorship ideas go nowhere. People who are not familiar with the process think that the large corporation just gives you a ton of money to have their name somewhere in small print in the background. It just doesn't work that way. The lower profile the event, the more exposure they will want to squeeze out of you. If you don't like that, just produce the project yourself.
The only ones that failed were the participants. If I were putting six figures into a reality show, there is no way I would want a prima donna who refused to drink Mountain Dew on camera.
What "bad press"? Slashdot is the only channel I have seen this "story" on, and frankly, Pepsi probably doesn't care that a lot of programmers got butthurt on this deal. If anything, it sends the message that if you want their money, you follow their rules. Oh wait, you're thinking that the Internet is going to rise up in solidarity, and everyone is going to refuse to accept sponsorship money from Pepsi now, right? Let me laugh even harder...
Another butthurt programmer, great...
Reality check - Pepsi didn't waste money on this. Their consultant told them that they were working with a bunch of prima donnas, and they didn't foot the investment. The entire project got scrapped before cameras were rolling, and now every other corporation knows to stay clear of these whiners because they are hard to work with.
Again, are programmers really this naïve?
Do you think the people on Survivor are in danger of starving to death if they can't get a fire going?
Do you think Bear Grylls does his show without any of it being faked?
Do you think American Idol rewards the contestant with the most musical talent?
These guys signed up for a reality show with heavy corporate branding. At that point, no one gives a flying fuck about how well you document your code. You're a paid actor, meant to bring visibility to a brand. And yes, it looks really, REALLY bad when you sponsor an event where the all-women teams get crushed. It looks bad when the two token black guys finish last. I don't like it any more than you do, but no corporation wants that taste in their mouth.
This is reality in the corporate world. If you don't like the way the game is played, then write code at your own desk, or in your basement, not in front of a production crew.
You can't be that dense. This is a media production. You don't get to sign up to play Hamlet, and then demand to be able to drink Pepsi while the cameras are rolling. That's the line between being a programmer and being an actor. These guys signed up to be actors, but they don't want to follow the rules.
From Adriel Wallick: "The game jam was to be sponsored by Pepsi and produced by Polaris/Maker."
That was after the contract negotiations. This wasn't a case where Maker Studios ran out behind the participants' backs and recruited Pepsi. The participants' knew from the onset that Pepsi was involved. Without Pepsi, there was no project, no matter how they try to spin this.
Here's what really happened - these whiny little dorks thought that Pepsi would just throw a few sacks of money at their project and stay out of their way while they looked cool on TV. They didn't realize that corporations want value for their investment. Of course Pepsi is going to send in someone to make sure they're getting something out of it. Sorry, you don't get to deal with the devil, and then complain that there's not enough water underneath those hot studio lights...
These guys made a deal with Pepsi, the epitome of a soulless American corporation which will drown fat teenagers in high fructose corn syrup to get a quarterly profit, and they expected Fiji water and organic bananas on the set?
There are about a gazillion indie film makers looking for work. If you don't like corporate, don't do corporate. Your little vanity project is helping keep the lardasses in this country hooked on Taco Bell and buckets of Pepsi, so please don't expect sympathy that your precious self had to drink some Mountain Dew.
I don't know, maybe for their next project they can ask for $5 million from Nike, and do the entire project barefoot... or better, see if Fox has any interest in a "I'm a clueless techie dork" reality show...
Isn't that what Americans were saying about Apollo? Here you go:
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face and arms began to swell.
(and Whitey's on the moon)
I can't pay no doctor bill.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Ten years from now I'll be payin' still.
(while Whitey's on the moon)
The man jus' upped my rent las' night.
('cause Whitey's on the moon)
No hot water, no toilets, no lights.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
I wonder why he's uppi' me?
('cause Whitey's on the moon?)
I wuz already payin' 'im fifty a week.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Taxes takin' my whole damn check,
Junkies makin' me a nervous wreck,
The price of food is goin' up,
An' as if all that shit wuzn't enough:
A rat done bit my sister Nell.
(with Whitey on the moon)
Her face an' arm began to swell.
(but Whitey's on the moon)
Was all that money I made las' year
(for Whitey on the moon?)
How come there ain't no money here?
(Hmm! Whitey's on the moon)
Y'know I jus' 'bout had my fill
(of Whitey on the moon)
I think I'll sen' these doctor bills,
Airmail special
(to Whitey on the moon)
I know very little about audio, but a cursory search turned this up from Wikipedia:
"Because the clipped waveform has more area underneath it than the smaller unclipped waveform, the amplifier produces more power than its rated (sine wave) output when it is clipping. This extra power can damage any part of the loudspeaker, including the woofer, or the tweeter, by causing over-excursion, or by overheating the voice coil. It may cause damage to the amplifier's power supply or simply blow a fuse."
The digital signal obviously has to be converted to analog at some point, so I believe this is what Dell is talking about.
This is exactly what I did. I would have been happy to shell out $50-$100 for an online package since I haven't watched actual OTA TV in years. Since that was not an option, I went out and bought a Channel Master DVR+ that can record off the antenna. Now I'm watching the whole thing ad-free.
Elucidate a tad on this "4 month contract" deal. Are you providing full benefits? When hired, does that time count towards your vacation days and so on? Is there a well-defined set of criteria for how someone on this 4 month criteria is evaluated, and how it will be determined if they get a permanent job?
See, for someone like myself who's not at their first rodeo, this sounds like "bait and switch". The fact that you're not willing to even name your employer speaks volumes more.
Right now, we can't even agree on greenhouse gases, something that every reputable scientist agrees is a major problem for the planet.
Now imagine a species significantly more advanced than ours making contact.
The US would try to be a "world leader", whatever that means these days. China and Russia would be jockeying for influence, claiming the US did not speak for everyone. Venezuela would be sending pictures to the aliens of how the US massacred civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki just this century. Europe would try to the mediator. The Arab states would scream imperialism. Africa would ask why a minority of white people are deciding the future of the planet. The UN would try to come up with enough votes to put together a strongly worded letter.
Would you want to deal with that? It would be smarter to wait until species XYZ had its shit together enough to come up with a single government. World government is a bad idea to you because you only see the negative attributes in people. A civilization that was peaceful, intelligent, and cooperated with each other would have no problems at all with a single government.
The math does not work out in your argument. The universe being old should make the search easier - there are planets much older than Earth, so why would we be the first in the galaxy to become intelligent? And our radio telescopes are already reaching out across a sphere billions of light years in diameter - out of all that space, why is there not one single clear signal? SETI has been searching for 46 years now, with nothing to show.
At this point in the search, it makes more sense to assume that there is something else going on that we're not aware of. Maybe there's a periodic galaxy wide event that destroys consciousness, so civilizations never get beyond a certain technological level, and we just popped up between clean slate events. Maybe we're in quarantine, and no one is allowed to talk to us until we develop a world government that can speak for us with one voice. Whatever the case, it's starting to look like listening for radio is a dead end.
... is the phrase "WHEN the search finally succeeds" (emphasis added). There is not a single good explanation of why it has not succeeded already, which is a red flag that we are missing something fundamental about the nature of extraterrestrial intelligence.
I'm an application deployment guy, not a programmer. Every time we push something that needs .NET Framework, the end users complain about it being hideously slow. Our MS developers of course want everyone to have a Core i7 machine with 64GB RAM and SSD hard drive - to which I reply "learn how to write some fucking code without seven layers of frameworks and abstraction layers".
.NET to install. Do you want 4, 3.5 SP1, 2? The usual answer is "load all of them". I get that .NET Framework is great in theory, but if you have to deal with the actual implementation, you'll see things differently. A lot of times we'll get screen glitches which the devs are convinced is a MS issue, but there's no available fix, so we go with "that's not a serious enough problem to fix".
.DEB file. I generally have that pushed out the same day.
Then of course, I can never get a straight answer from the developers on which
On the other side of the fence are the Linux apps I have to deploy. The Linux devs send me a
Relax, pal - frameworks that don't particularly care about accuracy have been around for years now. If you don't believe me, talk to anyone who uses .NET Framework.
The question is not whether organic chemistry is too difficult, the question is whether it is even necessary. My brother is a practicing physician, has been out of premed for 20 years, but can still look at a sketch of Ibogaine and understand what he's looking at. Which is completely useless in the context of his job.
However, he has no clue what Bayes' theorem is, or how it is relevant to his decisions. If I'm seeing a doctor who's evaluating me for an angioplasty vs Lipitor, I damn well want someone who understands Bayes' theorem and has a good intuitive handle on probability, not someone who can sketch complex molecules.
"They were trying to find a method for improving fuzzy images, such as the ones generated by MRIs when there is insufficient time to complete a scan. On a hunch, Candes applied an algorithm designed to clean up fuzzy images,[...]"
Wow! That would be the last thing I thought of in that situation...
Police officers are constantly in environments where their pistol could be taken by a criminal. Why are the proponents of this technology not requiring cops to use it? And why are cops refusing to even consider these kinds of mechanisms?
I can't tell if you're being intentionally dense or just querulous...
In 1969, the aerospace industry itself was a novelty. The computers they were using were custom designed for the project. Computers were by no means in widespread usage - to the lay person, not the expert, they WERE new. Hence the word "novelty".
Use this thing called "Google" if you don't believe me. Curiosity, in comparison, was running a PowerPC 750 design. Released in 1997. On top of VxWorks. Which was first released in 1987. The design was criticized for being archaic, to which NASA responded that they wanted to go with safe.
The dots. Connect them.
These are just stale NASA talking points.
The shuttle program was NOT a success. It was a colossal failure. It was intended to be a cheap, reusable vehicle to get cargo to low earth orbit. Per Wikipedia, the original target was $630/lb to get payload up to orbit, in 2011 dollars. The actual cost wound up being $27,000/lb. That's 4,100% over budget. If you consider that a success, I'd hate to see what you consider a failure.
Hubble? You mean the telescope that they launched with a mirror that was ground in the wrong shape? The one that cost millions to fix while it was in orbit? That one? We got a lot of pretty pictures, sure, but there was nothing revolutionary about the technology itself.
JWST is a fine idea. But it's just a better version of Hubble for $8.7 billion. All I'm saying is that when you're talking about budgets of billions, we should expect more than we're getting from NASA.
I'm sorry, but you're making about zero sense. If the sky-crane explodes and drops the 1 ton robot, who exactly is going to get hurt? The Martians? What exactly is the risk in this operation?