I took the traditional route and went to a brick and mortar school for my CS degree. While there, I met a number of very interesting people. Some of these people asked me to help them revive the school's sailing team. A boatload of CS and physics students engaged in a non-profit startup in the middle of the Hudson river is hardly what I expected, but I'm very glad that it happened to me.
Along the way I learned that graduate work is fun and picked up an MS degree as well.
While my education allows me to check the "has a BS" and "has an MS" boxes on job applications, the real benefit came from the faculty and students I met over the course of my four years.
That having been said, I think there is an enormous opportunity for online education. My education was expensive, and in this economy there is no guarantee that you will have a job on graduation. High quality schools have can accept only a limited number of students. The Internet is an incredible way to inexpensively disseminate information to a large number of people.
The original universities expanded substantially as books and paper became more and more available. Surely the internet will change education to an even greater extent.
Of course I'm talking about Joe Aoluser, as is the music industry. It took several weeks to get my freshman dorm up to speed on how to use usenet, and they were honors engineering students. Since then I've seen a wide range of competency in acquiring digital media, but nothing terribly impressive.
I'm trying to change the discussion from "can a sufficiently educated person gain access to the information they want" to "is there a way to sell some popular stuff to lazy people with money."
I believe the answer to both questions is yes. What is important is where the emphasis is placed.
Fifty percent? Has that failure rate been observed in practice? And if so, is it any better than the legitimate route? I've experienced some pretty high failure rates when renting DVD videos, where "failure" == "disc is so scratched up that playback stutters in a key scene".
I've observed the 50% failure rate based on the media purchased by friends in the Phillipines, Beijing and Hong Kong. The 50% rate appears to hold for software, music, and VCDs purchased between 1997 and 2002. I have no direct data outside that period.
When you rent a video, you have contracted the rental company to provide you with a video. So they give you a new video when you return to the store. The pirate by his very nature is outside the legal framework, so you have no recourse.
If a particular rip is widely shared, it's likely not to be corrupt.
Exactly my point! The consumer must expend significant effort to locate a quality "pirate" copy. I'd rather spend my time developing interesting software and let iTunes worry about my music.
This is quite a large class, even ignoring the fact that the American economy...
OK, you go try to sue people with no income, and I'll try to sell music to people with income. We can compare notes next week.
Well the loss thing is a nifty bit of accounting that is nothing more than a stall tactic until they really figure out how to milk the digital music industry. Unless you are a shareholder who is taken in by the theft argument, it is largely irrelevant as digital theft is clearly not isomorphic to real world theft (See my other post in this thread for details).
The $100 M blockbuster is a fixed cost that can be spread over all of the copies. So if you sell one hundred million copies (considering the global market of ~7 B people, not unreasonable) your cost per copy of media is $1. Now the pirate cost is still low, but in both cases "production cost" tends towards zero.
Now, back to distribution.
Assuming the pirate and the legitimate product have identical distribution and identical production cost, there is still the playback cost to the consumer. I claim that pirate material is MUCH more expensive to playback than legitimate. However, this cost is better measured in hours used than dollars spent.
(1) Pirate CD/VCD media -- often the pirate media simply does not work. If the failure rate is 50%, your $2 pirate metallica disc now costs $4 on average. Now add in the time it took you to bring the disc home, put it in to your cd player, discover it does not work, return to the vendor and buy a new disc. You can save time brining a discman with you, but now you have to carry a discman and spend a minute or two trying to listen to the disc. Suppose 15 minutes of effort here.
(2) Kazaa -- Take five minutes to look for the track you want, take another ten to download. You have spent 15 minutes acquiring a song which may be corrupt. Now burn drop it into winamp or burn it to CDR. Kazaa doesn't have a built in burning tool yet, so add in the cost of Nero -- either in dollars or the time it takes to obtain a pirate copy.
(3) Bittorrent Video -- Take ten minutes to locate a torrent for your video of choice. Note that this video must be a recently released video or otherwise popular in the pirate world. Now take 8 hours to download the video. Spend another half an hour burning it to CD(s) so you can play it.
So in case (1) you pay $4 for the pirate disc plus 15 minutes of your time. In case (2) you still contribute 15 minutes of time, but probably closer to $0.25 for CDR media. In case (3) you spend over eight hours acquiring the media.
Now the class of consumers who have unlimited time or otherwise undervalue their time is limited to those who are either unemployed or employeed beneath some poverty line (in this case, defined for the benefit of this example). While a tiny fraction of thses unemployed consumers are independantly wealthy, we can ignore them. The remaining pirates steal because they cannot afford anything.
Now the digital piracy is not the same as real world piracy. The architypical poor guy who takes a loaf of bread is actually depriving the hard working employed guy of his hard earned meal. In the digital case, the bread is still there, so the hardworking consumer may still benefit despite the theft.
This does not mean that the industry will stop caring about piracy -- after all, the hardworking guy needs a good reason to believe that he should actually pay for his media. But it is clear that it is more efficient for the recording industry to build efficient distribution systems and spend minimal effort complaining about theft.
Schechter, Greenstadt and Smith write that "to thward piracy the entertainment industry must keep distribution costs high, reduce the size of distribution networks and raise the cost of extracting content". While that may be a true statement, it is as useful as Saddam Hussein's military advisors recommending that Iraqui aviation enginners be sent to major American defense contractors to increase fuel consumption of US bombers and reduce the accuracy of their communication systems.
Since the entertainment industry does not own fiber, switches, PCs, or consumer CD burners they must take Schechter's advice and invert it to suit the networks that they do own.
I'll restate their conclusion as follows: To thward piracy the entertainment industry must keep distribution costs low> , reducing the total cost for consumers to acquire legitimate content. When it takes less total effort (purchase price + effort) to acquire legitimate media the users will abandon piracy. This approach has been clearly demonstrated with Apple's iTunes product.
The "bada-bing" catchphrase, often followed by "bada-boom" appears to be an rhythmic onomatopiea which reinforces rapid and successful execution of some mission or objective. A group whose memebes repeatedly exchange these vocalizations emphasises the importance of timing, coordination and speed of action.
Lets assume the universe is a computer. Lets further assume that individual humans are cogs in the universal machine. Now each human has some degree of self awareness. Some of the humans will believe that they are destined towards certain actions, while others choose actions as they go.
Clearly the fate-free will dichotomy is binary. Therefore, every self aware human can represent at least a single bit in the universal computer.
Now self aware humans communicate with other self aware humans in a variety of ways. Vocalizations and hand gestures provide the most basic interconnects between human compute elements. Phones and internet communication provide rapid long distance communication. Air transport provides maximal burst bandwidth.
Certain humans record their experience in textual archival form. Others read these documents and recount their findings to other humans. Clearly this is long term storage.
I see no reason to call life a simulation. It is simply life operating as it may operate or as it must. the itneractions we have are as real as we want them to be. More interesting is to investigate the extant of our bubble and what may lie beyond it. Perhaps we can learn the answer by studying the very things we communicate.
1. Buy aircraft carrier for $4.5 M 2. Refit with 200 luxury condos 3. basketball courts on top, leave space for helipad 4. Park near your favorite expensive city and sell units for $600 K each 5. PROFIT !!! 6. ???
Nokia used to make the best phones -- compact, reliable, with modern features. Now their phones look like Nokia raided Ideo's discard pile. These phones look great as objects, but each new Nokia suggests "phone" to me less and less.
If you want a feature packed monster, go for the Sony-Ericsson P800. Now THAT is a phone!
Re:What's that other Internet Explorer thing again
on
Mozilla 1.4 RC1
·
· Score: 1
Microsoft was involved in the Motif standard, but the only similarities between motif and windows are visual. Motif got the 3D look well before Windows did, but Windows figured out the desktop metaphor before X based systems did.
Sorry, thanks for playing
on
fvwm Turns Ten
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
80386 DX was a full 32 bit chip 80386 SX was a 386 DX with 24 bit memory bus and maybe a 16 bit data bus
For faster time to market, the 80386DX could work with an 80287 *or* 80387 math-co. There never was a 386 with built in FPU.
When Intel introduced the 486, everything changed: 80486DX had a built in FPU 80486SX had a built in FPU but was disabled (maybe due to poor QA rating) 80487 was an 80486DX with alternate pinout to fit in the "487" slot. Upon insertion, the 80486SX is disabled 80486SL was an 80486SX with some power saving features and lower clock speeds 80486SLC was a cyrix chip that had 16 bit data bus, 24 bit memory addresses, and no math co. It performed somewhat better than a 386SX but was cheap and drew little power. It was popular for notebook computers.
80486DX2 was the first clock doubling CPU 80486DX50 was a rare 50 MHz cpu with no clock doubling 80486DX2-66 / DX2-50 were clock doubling CPUs 80486DX4 were clock trippling CPUs
Then there were a bunch of pentia.
Re:why didn't this window manager die LONG AGO?
on
fvwm Turns Ten
·
· Score: 1
Sixteen megs on your 386 DX ?? We were happy if we had 4 MB on our 386 SXes.
Then, while we were waiting for a slackware distribution to be created, we downloaded SLS at 2400 BPs and were happy if it came with a 0.99pl12 kernel.
Those of us unlucky enough to be caught with a Diamond video card hard to manually tweak the clock generation chip while those with ET4000s *might* get accelerated bitblit.
Those were the days when rain(6) was the best visualization to go along with head seek chatter.
Slashdot Mirror
What else needs to be done to make chickens into batteries?
I took the traditional route and went to a brick and mortar school for my CS degree. While there, I met a number of very interesting people. Some of these people asked me to help them revive the school's sailing team. A boatload of CS and physics students engaged in a non-profit startup in the middle of the Hudson river is hardly what I expected, but I'm very glad that it happened to me.
Along the way I learned that graduate work is fun and picked up an MS degree as well.
While my education allows me to check the "has a BS" and "has an MS" boxes on job applications, the real benefit came from the faculty and students I met over the course of my four years.
That having been said, I think there is an enormous opportunity for online education. My education was expensive, and in this economy there is no guarantee that you will have a job on graduation. High quality schools have can accept only a limited number of students. The Internet is an incredible way to inexpensively disseminate information to a large number of people.
The original universities expanded substantially as books and paper became more and more available. Surely the internet will change education to an even greater extent.
Someone patent the Blue Screen of Death. Then you can cross license with Microsoft!
He is probably concealing vegetables of mass destruction. Best to kill his family as well, they may be harboring negitave feelings about you...
GOOD parenting encourages violence. We must kill all the terrorists! Counterstrike!
Appears to be Rush Limbaugh's Uncle or Cousin! (looks like this Stephen is the cousin)
Training on violent video games was one of the key contributing factors to the United States' success in invading Iraq.
Of course I'm talking about Joe Aoluser, as is the music industry. It took several weeks to get my freshman dorm up to speed on how to use usenet, and they were honors engineering students. Since then I've seen a wide range of competency in acquiring digital media, but nothing terribly impressive.
I'm trying to change the discussion from "can a sufficiently educated person gain access to the information they want" to "is there a way to sell some popular stuff to lazy people with money."
I believe the answer to both questions is yes. What is important is where the emphasis is placed.
Fifty percent? Has that failure rate been observed in practice? And if so, is it any better than the legitimate route? I've experienced some pretty high failure rates when renting DVD videos, where "failure" == "disc is so scratched up that playback stutters in a key scene".
I've observed the 50% failure rate based on the media purchased by friends in the Phillipines, Beijing and Hong Kong. The 50% rate appears to hold for software, music, and VCDs purchased between 1997 and 2002. I have no direct data outside that period.
When you rent a video, you have contracted the rental company to provide you with a video. So they give you a new video when you return to the store. The pirate by his very nature is outside the legal framework, so you have no recourse.
If a particular rip is widely shared, it's likely not to be corrupt.
Exactly my point! The consumer must expend significant effort to locate a quality "pirate" copy. I'd rather spend my time developing interesting software and let iTunes worry about my music.
This is quite a large class, even ignoring the fact that the American economy...
OK, you go try to sue people with no income, and I'll try to sell music to people with income. We can compare notes next week.
Well the loss thing is a nifty bit of accounting that is nothing more than a stall tactic until they really figure out how to milk the digital music industry. Unless you are a shareholder who is taken in by the theft argument, it is largely irrelevant as digital theft is clearly not isomorphic to real world theft (See my other post in this thread for details).
The $100 M blockbuster is a fixed cost that can be spread over all of the copies. So if you sell one hundred million copies (considering the global market of ~7 B people, not unreasonable) your cost per copy of media is $1. Now the pirate cost is still low, but in both cases "production cost" tends towards zero.
Now, back to distribution.
Assuming the pirate and the legitimate product have identical distribution and identical production cost, there is still the playback cost to the consumer. I claim that pirate material is MUCH more expensive to playback than legitimate. However, this cost is better measured in hours used than dollars spent.
(1) Pirate CD/VCD media -- often the pirate media simply does not work. If the failure rate is 50%, your $2 pirate metallica disc now costs $4 on average. Now add in the time it took you to bring the disc home, put it in to your cd player, discover it does not work, return to the vendor and buy a new disc. You can save time brining a discman with you, but now you have to carry a discman and spend a minute or two trying to listen to the disc. Suppose 15 minutes of effort here.
(2) Kazaa -- Take five minutes to look for the track you want, take another ten to download. You have spent 15 minutes acquiring a song which may be corrupt. Now burn drop it into winamp or burn it to CDR. Kazaa doesn't have a built in burning tool yet, so add in the cost of Nero -- either in dollars or the time it takes to obtain a pirate copy.
(3) Bittorrent Video -- Take ten minutes to locate a torrent for your video of choice. Note that this video must be a recently released video or otherwise popular in the pirate world. Now take 8 hours to download the video. Spend another half an hour burning it to CD(s) so you can play it.
So in case (1) you pay $4 for the pirate disc plus 15 minutes of your time. In case (2) you still contribute 15 minutes of time, but probably closer to $0.25 for CDR media. In case (3) you spend over eight hours acquiring the media.
Now the class of consumers who have unlimited time or otherwise undervalue their time is limited to those who are either unemployed or employeed beneath some poverty line (in this case, defined for the benefit of this example). While a tiny fraction of thses unemployed consumers are independantly wealthy, we can ignore them. The remaining pirates steal because they cannot afford anything.
Now the digital piracy is not the same as real world piracy. The architypical poor guy who takes a loaf of bread is actually depriving the hard working employed guy of his hard earned meal. In the digital case, the bread is still there, so the hardworking consumer may still benefit despite the theft.
This does not mean that the industry will stop caring about piracy -- after all, the hardworking guy needs a good reason to believe that he should actually pay for his media. But it is clear that it is more efficient for the recording industry to build efficient distribution systems and spend minimal effort complaining about theft.
Schechter, Greenstadt and Smith write that "to thward piracy the entertainment industry must keep distribution costs high, reduce the size of distribution networks and raise the cost of extracting content". While that may be a true statement, it is as useful as Saddam Hussein's military advisors recommending that Iraqui aviation enginners be sent to major American defense contractors to increase fuel consumption of US bombers and reduce the accuracy of their communication systems.
Since the entertainment industry does not own fiber, switches, PCs, or consumer CD burners they must take Schechter's advice and invert it to suit the networks that they do own.
I'll restate their conclusion as follows:
To thward piracy the entertainment industry must keep distribution costs low> , reducing the total cost for consumers to acquire legitimate content. When it takes less total effort (purchase price + effort) to acquire legitimate media the users will abandon piracy. This approach has been clearly demonstrated with Apple's iTunes product.
The "bada-bing" catchphrase, often followed by "bada-boom" appears to be an rhythmic onomatopiea which reinforces rapid and successful execution of some mission or objective. A group whose memebes repeatedly exchange these vocalizations emphasises the importance of timing, coordination and speed of action.
Lets assume the universe is a computer. Lets further assume that individual humans are cogs in the universal machine. Now each human has some degree of self awareness. Some of the humans will believe that they are destined towards certain actions, while others choose actions as they go.
Clearly the fate-free will dichotomy is binary. Therefore, every self aware human can represent at least a single bit in the universal computer.
Now self aware humans communicate with other self aware humans in a variety of ways. Vocalizations and hand gestures provide the most basic interconnects between human compute elements. Phones and internet communication provide rapid long distance communication. Air transport provides maximal burst bandwidth.
Certain humans record their experience in textual archival form. Others read these documents and recount their findings to other humans. Clearly this is long term storage.
I see no reason to call life a simulation. It is simply life operating as it may operate or as it must. the itneractions we have are as real as we want them to be. More interesting is to investigate the extant of our bubble and what may lie beyond it. Perhaps we can learn the answer by studying the very things we communicate.
No one can be told what Aimee is. You have to see her for yourself. This is your last chance. After this there is no turning back.
Oh Really! Do the uber ravers come with the phone?
Just to keep the gnomes happy...
1. Buy aircraft carrier for $4.5 M
2. Refit with 200 luxury condos
3. basketball courts on top, leave space for helipad
4. Park near your favorite expensive city and sell units for $600 K each
5. PROFIT !!!
6. ???
A tailhook kit for the ole' gulfstream.
All your browser are belong to us.
Nokia used to make the best phones -- compact, reliable, with modern features. Now their phones look like Nokia raided Ideo's discard pile. These phones look great as objects, but each new Nokia suggests "phone" to me less and less.
If you want a feature packed monster, go for the Sony-Ericsson P800. Now THAT is a phone!
So, does that mean Mozilla is like Mosaic?
Microsoft was involved in the Motif standard, but the only similarities between motif and windows are visual. Motif got the 3D look well before Windows did, but Windows figured out the desktop metaphor before X based systems did.
80386 DX was a full 32 bit chip
80386 SX was a 386 DX with 24 bit memory bus and maybe a 16 bit data bus
For faster time to market, the 80386DX could work with an 80287 *or* 80387 math-co. There never was a 386 with built in FPU.
When Intel introduced the 486, everything changed:
80486DX had a built in FPU
80486SX had a built in FPU but was disabled (maybe due to poor QA rating)
80487 was an 80486DX with alternate pinout to fit in the "487" slot. Upon insertion, the 80486SX is disabled
80486SL was an 80486SX with some power saving features and lower clock speeds
80486SLC was a cyrix chip that had 16 bit data bus, 24 bit memory addresses, and no math co. It performed somewhat better than a 386SX but was cheap and drew little power. It was popular for notebook computers.
80486DX2 was the first clock doubling CPU
80486DX50 was a rare 50 MHz cpu with no clock doubling
80486DX2-66 / DX2-50 were clock doubling CPUs
80486DX4 were clock trippling CPUs
Then there were a bunch of pentia.
Sixteen megs on your 386 DX ?? We were happy if we had 4 MB on our 386 SXes.
Then, while we were waiting for a slackware distribution to be created, we downloaded SLS at 2400 BPs and were happy if it came with a 0.99pl12 kernel.
Those of us unlucky enough to be caught with a Diamond video card hard to manually tweak the clock generation chip while those with ET4000s *might* get accelerated bitblit.
Those were the days when rain(6) was the best visualization to go along with head seek chatter.