I would compare this with the carpool lanes on USA highways.They are one of the few instances that I could think of that has signs posted every few hundred feet to warn would-be violators about the dire consequences. It basically boils down to the fact that it is impossible to effectively police the carpool lane vehicle occupant policy (due to the fact that many vehicles have tinted windows and are moving at a high rate of speed, thereby making it difficult to see inside the vehicle), so they have to try and scare people instead.
I live in an area with many carpool lanes.
I personally know of many cases where people are fined for driving alone in the carpool lane. They actually are policed, and the fines are high enough to support policing. (It also helps that traffic is very, very, very dense.)
It's more than that- to get good, you need experience. To prove to HR that you're good, you need experience that you can put on a resume (no, writing a virus to control a 50,000 node botnet isn't experience). And getting that experience is exactly what is being outsourced. It's not just the incompetent that have lost their jobs- it's also the ignorant young guys who might have become good programmers if given half a chance.
Only bad programmers need a job for experience. I created my "half a chance" on my own initiative:
I self-taught myself basic programming by playing with GWBasic writing simple calculators, games, animations, ect, when I was in Junior High School.
When I was in high school, I took a few programming classes, won a programming competition, and ran a highly-customized dial-up BBS.
In college, I took challenging classes and got As on about 80% of the programming-based homeworks. (I struggled through classes on theory...)
In college, every summer I had an internship that involved programming.
After I graduated, I took some time to gain experience by writing software on my own time, on my own dime.
I still continue to write software, for learning purposes, outside of my employment.
I've always been able to list experience from personal work on my resume.
All of my oppertunities are still available to "the ignorant young guys who might have become good programmers if given half a chance." While some of the technologies have changed, (Visual Basic.Net instead of GWBasic, blogs instead of dail-up BBSs,) the oppertunities still exist.
I've worked with people who suddenly decide that they want to become a Software Engineer, and expect to be given some kind of a yellow-brick-road to follow to riches. It just doesn't happen! Becoming a great software engineer is a life's calling, and takes a life's dedication.
I've found that, "if you're good", there's pleny of people willing to pay you to cater to their whims and daydreams. "If you're good", you might be employed, but that doesn't mean your creative energies will be put to best use.
If you're really good, you can figure out a way to make a living by creating something of value. Sometimes this entials doing as you're told, other times this entails taking a risk without a garuntee of any pay at all.
People who are truly good don't need a job to tell them what to do; they can create things of value on their own initiative, and figure out how to not get screwed in the process.
Why would you drive to a store when you could download it? Bandwidth, quality, and selection. You would get guaranteed quality, and you could get a lot more music in a trip to the store than you could downloading in the same amount of time. Not to mention selection!
Honestly, with the slowest Comcast cable modem, I still can download incredibly high-quality music in about the time it'll take me to drive a store. (This includes lossless FLACs and 20-bit 5.1 DTS CDs.) You still haven't convinced me that I need to drive to a store.
Look, all I'm doing is buying information. Bits and bytes. That's it. There's no reason to force me to drive to a store when I have a perfectly good internet connection at home.
Think about this... why would people spend hours downloading questionable quality music when they could go into a store and walk away with a CD, DVD, or portable device FULL of music for a decent price? Then, people are in the store - you can sell them DVDs, Tshirts, CDs, etc. You could have a massive digital catalog to choose from. Keep it in the stores, but maybe make the track lists available online so they could submit an order and go in and pick it up. Charge a nominal burning fee for media. You could have "top 100" lists from all genres, people could upload their playlists for others to purchase..... there are LOTS of possiblities.
Your pricing scheme is good, but...
Why would I drive to a store when I can download at home??? At this point, you're just setting up a welfare scheme for record stores.
I think our economy is strong enough to absorb the people who no longer are employed by record stores.
Here's the kind of thing I'm imagining. Let's say you buy a copy of Shrek 3 on DVD and pay, say $20 for it. $3 could be called the media cost, and $17 could be the licensing cost of having the movie. With the DVD, you get a code you can use to register the fact that you own the rights to watch Shrek 3. Now let's say that you really want a copy of it for your iPod. You get on the web site, pay an incremental $2 fee (you don't need to pay the other $17, you already have!), and you have the movie on your iPod. You want an HD-DVD version? Pay an incremental $5 fee for the media, and there you go. There's a Platinum Extended Edition released a year later? Add another $5 for the content, plus $3 for the new media cost, and you don't have to buy a movie you already own again. Maybe even have a $50 or so "master" version that guarantees you the movie in all formats and with extended material going forward.
That's WAAAAAAY too complex and confusing. It sounds just like Divx DVDs, which flopped. Besides, if I paid for the DVD, why should I have to pay to copy it to my iPod?
Remember, I'm the paying customer, and in this case, I don't care what kind of fantacy you have about me giving you lots of money, "the customer is always right." You can't get me to pay extra to copy a DVD to my iPod; I already do that with my CDs for free. Period. End of discussion.
IMO, complex payment schemes ultimatly fail because the general public will get confused, and then realize that they're paying too much. I personally believe that simple schemes will work; IE, you have a usage tax applied to your ISP subscription, or a teired internet that works a lot like the old 1-900 numbers.
Besides, with information, you can keep prices very low and make profits on volume. Why have 100 people pay $100, when 1000 can pay $10? 10000 can pay $1!
While it may be simple to break the code on the chip, you still need a copy of the key unless the car is push-button-ignition.
These days, many high-end car keys are CNC cut (my mini's key has huuuuuge tooling marks from a spindle-out-of-square), which will actually cause a bit of trouble. This isn't something you could easily do a putty-transfer on, nor does the group of people who spend a lot of time breaking cyphers typically overlap with the group of people who have and can work with CNC equipment.
In the end, I think flatbedding the car is the way to go. All the big chop shops are doing this now. If you're small-time, carjack. Alternately, get a real job.
Couldn't you just hotwire the car after cloning the cypher? Or is there something I'm missing...?
Besides, the jackass who stole my car stereo smashed my window. I want shatter-proof glass and a way to automatically hide my valuables.
While these two Goliaths are locking horns and fighting over soon-to-be-obsolete technology, a third player will sneak behind them and steal the pot of gold
That type of thinking works in the software industry, where the cost of putting up a web site is incredibly low. In the microchip industry, manufacturing capacitiy often is considered MORE important then who's chip is better then who's.
With microchips, having lots of well-running, up-to-date factories is what's needed to sell lots of chips. Your "third player" could design a better chip then Intel or AMD, but without significant manufacturing capabilities, the third chip would end up being a low availability, high-priced, boutique processor.
It might also be construed as profiting from illegal behavior.
...Or as a better alternative to 'Net Neutrality. When a customer uses a high-bandwidth site, like YouTube or NetFlix, (s)he pays more. Electricity is sold in a similar way! When you buy electricity, you pay for what you use, not what you connection is capable of carrying.
In such a scenario, the ISP wins because it gets to profit when people use bandwidth-intensive applications; and the customer benefits because (s)he can access any site, service, and protocol. The customer also benefits because competition will force ISPs to compete to lower prices, thus allowing more consumption of bandwidth.
Here are some videos I took of the digibarn last fall. Unfortunatly, my camera malfunctioned when I tried to take more videos during Bruce's most recent tour.
Maybe CDs are more scratch resistant than LPs (which isn't saying much), but they're still ridiculously fragile.
Actually, that is saying a lot. I have a rather sizeable LP collection, and I have to handle them like fragile relics if I don't want them to get scratched!. With LPs from the 60s and 70s, (before better vinyl came out,) slipping when picking up the needle could leave a permanent audible click over 10 seconds of music! My original pressing of "Switched On Bach" picked up a few scratches, even though I treated it much better then I treat my CDs! I ended up buying about 100 plastic sleeves for my collection because the original paper sleeves were scratching the records.
You know, even when betamax had the better recording quality, VHS still won out because it was easier to obtain. Widespread access inevitably makes a defacto standard.
You're pretty much making the same point that I'm making. Looking at VHS, it won because it had some tangible advantages over Betamax. (Porn, price, and a longer recording time.) While people argue that Betamax had a better picture, I doubt that the difference was appreciable on the average 19" TV. (My family bought VHS.)
It's the same thing with Open Office (and ODF.) There needs to be tangible features that are comparable to porn, price, and a longer recording time.
That out of the way, this is obviously promising work. After all, there's nothing inherently wrong with burning hydrocarbons as a fuel - if we can get around the problems of increasing atmospheric carbon and the finite supply of said hydrocarbons. Yes, a more efficient solar-to-kinetic/electrical/thermal energy conversion process would be better, but I don't think the development of such a technology will be hindered by making it feasible to extend the use of hydrocarbons (I believe it was Larry Burns who said, "the stone age didn't end because we ran out of stones."). A gap technology that staved off the critical problems of hydrocarbon dependence would give us breathing room to pursue work on other technologies.
Besides, it's economically unfeasable to immediatly throw away every single petroleum-based internal combusion engine. A technology like this can (hopefully) significantly reduce our carbon emmissions without changing our lifestyles.
CDs are heavily filtered above 16KHz-18KHz to avoid digital aliasing and this affects the sound. It's why musicians say that vinyl sounds better. Plus musicians get full audio range very loudly and clearly from their stage amps. Johnny Winter says that CDs sound like shit. He has been standing 10 feet away from an amp playing the sounds that come from his guitar for 40 years. Compared to that, well yes, everything else pales in comparison. You probably won't hear any difference.
In my experience, most people don't have good enough speakers to really appreciate the difference between a low-bitrate MP3 and something like SACD or DVD-A. Likewise, with things like fans, air conditioners, dishwashers, road noise, ect; all of the subtlties of a recording are already drowned out.
Perhaps the recording industry will offer some 96/24 downloads at a high bitrate?
Those who prefer to listen to non-mainstream artists would get cheaper music, while those who prefer to listen to mainstream artists would pay more for it. It almost sounds like a tax on lack of musical taste to subsidize music geeks!
No, it's a tax on music geeks, because it's cheaper to get mainstream music at The Pirate Bay.;)
On the flip side, why is there such an excess of not-so-great programmers out there? The answer is simple: The higher education system is turning out not-so-great graduates.
Not really... There's too many people who chose CS because they want the paychecks from the bubble...
Smart and Gets Things Done.
I'm a little dismissive of the mystique around the required "super hackers" that never need to look for work but there is a ton of great advice on just hiring people.
I read Joel's book as a way to prepare for job interviews, so I could see what kind of techniques good companies would use.
Don't be dismissive of the mystique about "super hackers". I'm pretty close to his description; I used Monster straight out of college, but now I only take jobs from people I know or meet through networking. For example, I met a recruiter from a major tech company at a local SDForum; this is allowing me to leave a job where the hiring manager PERSONALLY knew me and stole me from a job that I got from another connection... Publicly posting my resume just nets me SPAM and bad companies that will waste my time because I'm not a cheap ass-kissing coder-slave.
Basically, Joel really is right about how to find good talent; you need to go to industry events, intern parties, conventions, ect. Encourage your HR person to drop into an SDForum, or an old computers show, DEFCON, OOPSLA, Google Developer Day, ect. You'll find people like me.
Once, when I first had wrist pain, I bought a giant Crayola trackball. It was 5-6" in diameter. Overall, it was very comfortable to use, but because it was designed for children, the buttons were on the top of the trackball instead of the bottom. Also, it required a serial port.
I ended up hooking it up to my Fraternity's jukebox computer. The drunks loved it.
Lease or buy isn't important. What's important is that batteries become standardized. Recharge at home by all means, but when your car is running out of juice on a trip, you pull into a juice station, slide out the battery, slide in a recharged one, and slide your discharged one into a rack for recharging. You pay for your "refill" like you pay for a tank of gas, and drive out.
That's really not practical. There are some important facts worth considering:
Quick-charge batteries exist that can charge to 90% capacity in 10 minutes.
Tesla is banking on a Moore's law of batteries; they claim that capacity doubles every 5 years. This means that your 200 mile battery will be a 400 mile battery in 5 years, 800 in 10 years, and 1600 in 15 years! In 20 years, the 200 mile battery will go 3200 miles, which is about as far as older cars went between oil changes, and almost far enough to drive across the US.
Current batteries are so big and bulky that there's not really a conceivable way to make a chassis that allows for swapping. You'd have weird weight distribution ratios that would make the car drive poorly. (In my hybrid, the battery is directly behind the back seat.)
Admittedly the car itself emits very little carbon, but this just means that the carbon emissions are being diverted to the power generation (unless of course, the electricity is being generated using a perpetual motion machine).
I buy solar and wind power directly from the Grid. It's 100% carbon-neutral. If I owned an electrc car and charged it only from my home, I'd be driving 100% carbon-neutral.
It's also worthwhile to note that ICE-based cars are about 20-30% efficent, while electric cars are about 90-95% efficent. An electrc car charged from a coal plant causes significantly less carbon to enter the atmosphere then a traditional ICE engine.
A rule of thumb when trying to replace one product in the marketplace with another is that the new product needs two tangible advantages. ODF needs to have one "gotta-have" feature that non-technical people can understand and appreciate in order for it to successfully beat out Office.
Yes, ODF is theoretically cheaper then Office. However, the productivity boost of spending $500 / employee is a bargain when the employee's time is worth $50 / hour! (Remember, a guy making $20 an hour really does cost the company $40-$50 an hour.)
The "Open" aspect of ODF is too abstract for many people to understand. To the non-technical person, Office "just works".
Thus, in order for there to be a demand for ODF, there needs to be tangible features that work better with ODF then Office. What tangible features could people appreciate from ODF? Here are some suggestions that come to mind.
ODF works better through email because it's easier to filter out viruses.
Some web services that require the user to upload documents work better when used with ODF.
An ODF-based Office Suite has really cool fonts.
Automated document generation products work better with ODF.
Thus, to repeat, in order for ODF to really succeed it needs to have easy-to-understand features that non-technical people will desire. Competing on price alone won't beat Office.
Researchers are also working on a 3D model that is better at removing hiss
A few weeks ago, I was digitiging a record that hasn't made it to CD. For shits & giggles, I ran a noise reduction filter on its lowest setting. Parts of the record sounded like a very low bitrate MP3. What I realized is that sometimes the hiss masks flaws in the recording medium, and removing hiss can sound worse!
*original audiovisual production in excess of 60 minutes, (by original I mean not just a tweaked remix)
Actually, it's important that tweaked remixes are allowed to be seen as derrivitive works that deserve protection. For example, someone could spend $100,000 restoring a poorly-kept movie by cleaning up all scratches and discolorations. The restored version of the film really deserves protection.
Another issue with regard to copyright is that it can apply to the medium. Let's say that the copyright on a film in a vault is expired... Is the newly-encoded MPEG2 copyrightable? Thus, it could be illegal to copy a DVD of an expired film, but perfectly legal to stick an expired film into a telecine and master your own DVD.
I agree that Sony will win the HD format war, but I don't believe that it will convey any real advantage to Sony. The uptake on HD formats has been incredibly slow. Even if Sony were to wipe out HD-DVD tomorrow, they would only inherit a very small piece of market share.
The only thing to consider is that giant TVs are dropping in price. Last december, a top-of-the-line 46" flat LCD cost more then $4000; now it's about $1600. Likewise, a 70" TV that used to cost almost $8000 is now just over $4000.
Regular DVDs just don't look very good on giant TVs.
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I live in an area with many carpool lanes.
I personally know of many cases where people are fined for driving alone in the carpool lane. They actually are policed, and the fines are high enough to support policing. (It also helps that traffic is very, very, very dense.)
Only bad programmers need a job for experience. I created my "half a chance" on my own initiative:
I've always been able to list experience from personal work on my resume.
All of my oppertunities are still available to "the ignorant young guys who might have become good programmers if given half a chance." While some of the technologies have changed, (Visual Basic.Net instead of GWBasic, blogs instead of dail-up BBSs,) the oppertunities still exist.
I've worked with people who suddenly decide that they want to become a Software Engineer, and expect to be given some kind of a yellow-brick-road to follow to riches. It just doesn't happen! Becoming a great software engineer is a life's calling, and takes a life's dedication.
I've found that, "if you're good", there's pleny of people willing to pay you to cater to their whims and daydreams. "If you're good", you might be employed, but that doesn't mean your creative energies will be put to best use.
If you're really good, you can figure out a way to make a living by creating something of value. Sometimes this entials doing as you're told, other times this entails taking a risk without a garuntee of any pay at all.
People who are truly good don't need a job to tell them what to do; they can create things of value on their own initiative, and figure out how to not get screwed in the process.
Honestly, with the slowest Comcast cable modem, I still can download incredibly high-quality music in about the time it'll take me to drive a store. (This includes lossless FLACs and 20-bit 5.1 DTS CDs.) You still haven't convinced me that I need to drive to a store.
Look, all I'm doing is buying information. Bits and bytes. That's it. There's no reason to force me to drive to a store when I have a perfectly good internet connection at home.
Up next: A-la-carte cable won't work with CableCard! Let's just skirt the issue and push for 'Net Neutrality and commodity internet.
Your pricing scheme is good, but...
Why would I drive to a store when I can download at home??? At this point, you're just setting up a welfare scheme for record stores.
I think our economy is strong enough to absorb the people who no longer are employed by record stores.
That's WAAAAAAY too complex and confusing. It sounds just like Divx DVDs, which flopped. Besides, if I paid for the DVD, why should I have to pay to copy it to my iPod?
Remember, I'm the paying customer, and in this case, I don't care what kind of fantacy you have about me giving you lots of money, "the customer is always right." You can't get me to pay extra to copy a DVD to my iPod; I already do that with my CDs for free. Period. End of discussion.
IMO, complex payment schemes ultimatly fail because the general public will get confused, and then realize that they're paying too much. I personally believe that simple schemes will work; IE, you have a usage tax applied to your ISP subscription, or a teired internet that works a lot like the old 1-900 numbers.
Besides, with information, you can keep prices very low and make profits on volume. Why have 100 people pay $100, when 1000 can pay $10? 10000 can pay $1!
Couldn't you just hotwire the car after cloning the cypher? Or is there something I'm missing...?
Besides, the jackass who stole my car stereo smashed my window. I want shatter-proof glass and a way to automatically hide my valuables.
That type of thinking works in the software industry, where the cost of putting up a web site is incredibly low. In the microchip industry, manufacturing capacitiy often is considered MORE important then who's chip is better then who's.
With microchips, having lots of well-running, up-to-date factories is what's needed to sell lots of chips. Your "third player" could design a better chip then Intel or AMD, but without significant manufacturing capabilities, the third chip would end up being a low availability, high-priced, boutique processor.
...Or as a better alternative to 'Net Neutrality. When a customer uses a high-bandwidth site, like YouTube or NetFlix, (s)he pays more. Electricity is sold in a similar way! When you buy electricity, you pay for what you use, not what you connection is capable of carrying.
In such a scenario, the ISP wins because it gets to profit when people use bandwidth-intensive applications; and the customer benefits because (s)he can access any site, service, and protocol. The customer also benefits because competition will force ISPs to compete to lower prices, thus allowing more consumption of bandwidth.
Here are some videos I took of the digibarn last fall. Unfortunatly, my camera malfunctioned when I tried to take more videos during Bruce's most recent tour.
Actually, that is saying a lot. I have a rather sizeable LP collection, and I have to handle them like fragile relics if I don't want them to get scratched!. With LPs from the 60s and 70s, (before better vinyl came out,) slipping when picking up the needle could leave a permanent audible click over 10 seconds of music! My original pressing of "Switched On Bach" picked up a few scratches, even though I treated it much better then I treat my CDs! I ended up buying about 100 plastic sleeves for my collection because the original paper sleeves were scratching the records.
You're pretty much making the same point that I'm making. Looking at VHS, it won because it had some tangible advantages over Betamax. (Porn, price, and a longer recording time.) While people argue that Betamax had a better picture, I doubt that the difference was appreciable on the average 19" TV. (My family bought VHS.)
It's the same thing with Open Office (and ODF.) There needs to be tangible features that are comparable to porn, price, and a longer recording time.
Besides, it's economically unfeasable to immediatly throw away every single petroleum-based internal combusion engine. A technology like this can (hopefully) significantly reduce our carbon emmissions without changing our lifestyles.
In my experience, most people don't have good enough speakers to really appreciate the difference between a low-bitrate MP3 and something like SACD or DVD-A. Likewise, with things like fans, air conditioners, dishwashers, road noise, ect; all of the subtlties of a recording are already drowned out.
Perhaps the recording industry will offer some 96/24 downloads at a high bitrate?
No, it's a tax on music geeks, because it's cheaper to get mainstream music at The Pirate Bay. ;)
Not really... There's too many people who chose CS because they want the paychecks from the bubble...
I read Joel's book as a way to prepare for job interviews, so I could see what kind of techniques good companies would use.
Don't be dismissive of the mystique about "super hackers". I'm pretty close to his description; I used Monster straight out of college, but now I only take jobs from people I know or meet through networking. For example, I met a recruiter from a major tech company at a local SDForum; this is allowing me to leave a job where the hiring manager PERSONALLY knew me and stole me from a job that I got from another connection... Publicly posting my resume just nets me SPAM and bad companies that will waste my time because I'm not a cheap ass-kissing coder-slave.
Basically, Joel really is right about how to find good talent; you need to go to industry events, intern parties, conventions, ect. Encourage your HR person to drop into an SDForum, or an old computers show, DEFCON, OOPSLA, Google Developer Day, ect. You'll find people like me.
Once, when I first had wrist pain, I bought a giant Crayola trackball. It was 5-6" in diameter. Overall, it was very comfortable to use, but because it was designed for children, the buttons were on the top of the trackball instead of the bottom. Also, it required a serial port.
I ended up hooking it up to my Fraternity's jukebox computer. The drunks loved it.
That's really not practical. There are some important facts worth considering:
I buy solar and wind power directly from the Grid. It's 100% carbon-neutral. If I owned an electrc car and charged it only from my home, I'd be driving 100% carbon-neutral.
It's also worthwhile to note that ICE-based cars are about 20-30% efficent, while electric cars are about 90-95% efficent. An electrc car charged from a coal plant causes significantly less carbon to enter the atmosphere then a traditional ICE engine.
A rule of thumb when trying to replace one product in the marketplace with another is that the new product needs two tangible advantages. ODF needs to have one "gotta-have" feature that non-technical people can understand and appreciate in order for it to successfully beat out Office.
Yes, ODF is theoretically cheaper then Office. However, the productivity boost of spending $500 / employee is a bargain when the employee's time is worth $50 / hour! (Remember, a guy making $20 an hour really does cost the company $40-$50 an hour.)
The "Open" aspect of ODF is too abstract for many people to understand. To the non-technical person, Office "just works".
Thus, in order for there to be a demand for ODF, there needs to be tangible features that work better with ODF then Office. What tangible features could people appreciate from ODF? Here are some suggestions that come to mind.
Thus, to repeat, in order for ODF to really succeed it needs to have easy-to-understand features that non-technical people will desire. Competing on price alone won't beat Office.
A few weeks ago, I was digitiging a record that hasn't made it to CD. For shits & giggles, I ran a noise reduction filter on its lowest setting. Parts of the record sounded like a very low bitrate MP3. What I realized is that sometimes the hiss masks flaws in the recording medium, and removing hiss can sound worse!
Actually, it's important that tweaked remixes are allowed to be seen as derrivitive works that deserve protection. For example, someone could spend $100,000 restoring a poorly-kept movie by cleaning up all scratches and discolorations. The restored version of the film really deserves protection.
Another issue with regard to copyright is that it can apply to the medium. Let's say that the copyright on a film in a vault is expired... Is the newly-encoded MPEG2 copyrightable? Thus, it could be illegal to copy a DVD of an expired film, but perfectly legal to stick an expired film into a telecine and master your own DVD.
The only thing to consider is that giant TVs are dropping in price. Last december, a top-of-the-line 46" flat LCD cost more then $4000; now it's about $1600. Likewise, a 70" TV that used to cost almost $8000 is now just over $4000.
Regular DVDs just don't look very good on giant TVs.