Simple budgeting is common sense. Imagine teaching simple budgeting in school:
2. ii) You have $3,250 in the bank, 5 unpaid bills, 2 kids, and a five figure income. Do you:
A) Buy an iPhone
B) Invest in the sub-prime market
C) Pay the bills
You've never actually done any product-level R&D, have you? Wow, so for what iPod like products have you been on the R&D team?
It's a little more complicated than the LEGO experience you seem to be describing... What I said was "I really doubt $90 of R&D per iPod goes into putting together $60 worth of electronics in a well put together package." I never said Apple just takes components and clicks them in place, just like I never said Red Hat just downloads source code and burns it to a CD.
Remember Apple needs to pay for marketing, product replacements, assembly costs, marketing, non-bulk shipping costs, and yes some R&D, and some marketing, on top of the price of a bulk shipment of each of the individual parts. I'm not saying Apple are being underhanded here, they're just another business out to make as much money as possible, but if you really think that Apple's R&D they put into an iPod is worth 3/5ths of the price of the parts and R&D of all the pieces that go into an iPod then you've taken Jobs' "we're so excited and we love technology and we know you'll love it as much as we do" way too seriously.
There's a problem with your analogy though: MS Windows/Office is (99.99%) written by Microsoft.
The iPod nano, however, is pieced together from parts from various suppliers; the price of these individual parts pays for the price of the R&D that went into that individual part. So you should only be paying for the price of the R&D that went into putting it all together.
e.g. You could argue using the same logic that Red Hat is justified in selling their Linux distro for hundreds of dollars; it does contain massive amounts of R&D after all. The reason we expect it for free is that Red Hat got the R&D for nothing, so they only deserve credit and money for putting the parts together.
I really doubt $90 of R&D per iPod goes into putting together $60 worth of electronics in a well put together package. Consider the R&D that must go into building fab facilities for encoders, decoders and memory, designing the ICs, optimizing the LCD manufacturing process, and the R&D that goes into making HDDs smaller and battery life longer, custom built clickwheels and OSs, etc, etc.
My theory is Apple will get away with whatever it can like every other business, and by selling consumer products it can get away with much more than Synaptic who sell to big businesses, who can easily go to the competition for a cheaper price.
Apple also spends a huge amount on marketing compared to other MP3 players, which definitely has a bigger impact on the price of the nano than R&D. If you don't want to pay the marketing tax you need to go and look at the MP3 market and decide if there are any players that you think would give better value for money.
Yeah, if I'd have been there I'd have grabbed two cops by their collars and flung them against the wall. The other officer would have taken his gun out and fired a shot, but I'd have caught it in my teeth and spat it back at him.
Then I'd grab one of the remaining three officers by the foot and swing him around my head, and use his body as a cudgel to batter the other two officers into submission.
Then I'd have got excused by a fair jury and been given a purple heart for protecting that poor numbskull's God-given right to give a long, irrelevant rant against the speaker's will.
Re:%75 as effective as a prescription 3% the price
on
Science vs. Homeopathy
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Authors@Google:James Randi, in the Q&A he talks about a friend who runs a government supported acupuncture clinic in China. (41:50 into the movie (Incidentally I didn't know until now that you can now jump straight to any point in a YouTube video, how handy. Anyway..))
The person knew it was a placebo but says that it's used for people who have small, partly psychological problems, but they turn away people who need real medical treatment.
I think homeopathy is just a Western equivalent; as long as the person giving it understands that it's bunk, and takes care to ensure that real medicine wouldn't be more effective, it doesn't seem too outrageous to use it.
The problem happens when people make money off pushing homeopathy where real medicine is needed. (Or when Prince Charles spends money studying whether homeopathy is real, and gives homeopathic medicine to animals who presumably don't get the same placebo benefits.)
If it's not exploitative or dangerous, and the people taking it are too ignorant to understand that it's bunk, I don't see the harm. (But I admit there are ethical issues with using placebos.)
Yeah, this is why I run Linux 2.2 and make sure Firefox has auto-update disabled; if they can convince me to update the software on my computer, or (heaven forbid) do it automatically, next thing they'll be brainwashing me and giving me anal probes.
By the way this update is probably Microsoft doing something incredibly evil, like fixing bugs or updating a protocol or something.
Tomorrows news: Security hole found in Windows, but Microsoft are refusing to provide a way to close the security hole without installing unwanted and potentially devastating new code.
The one exception to this I think would be Steve Jobs - that guy could probably make fortunes several times over starting from scratch. Jobs ran into Woz, Woz made excellent computers very economically using very few chips and Jobs marketed them.
Gates surrounded himself with guys like Allen who were excellent coders and geeks, but Gates was always the one with the vision. He was an expert coder and involved himself with everything from writing legal documents to writing bootstraps and Altair emulators, and later on to giving taxing interviews to all the big project leaders to ensure they knew what they were doing as well as he knew what they were doing.
Gates saw the first computer come out and decided to get out of school and into the PC industry, the very moment it was created.
If Jobs hadn't run into Woz you can be sure we would never have heard of Jobs. Gates depended far less on chance bumping into others; he was far more determined and aggressive (for better or for worse) in carving out Microsoft's niche, and he played much more than the marketing&managerial role that Jobs has played.
If you're not familiar with the story of Gates' success I recommend "Hard Drive", which documents it (it's independent of Microsoft and Gates).
What if the intelligence of the smartest thing you can design doesn't grow as fast as your own intelligence (i.e. the slope of the graph {x=designer's intelligence, y=intelligence of its best possible design} is less than 1)? Then it would never be possible to be smarter than a robot that's exactly smart enough to design a robot as smart as itself. Not if it has a positronic brain!!
And it could, like, evolve or something, to enslave mankind, and send a robot back in time to kill the guy who will kill the machines.
And maybe it has already happened, and we're already trapped!
Or maybe it'll have feelings, and a robot will realize that it just isn't right to enslave us, and robots will fight other robots.
Or maybe when we tell it about love it'll get totally confused and say "ILLOGICAL.. ILLOGICAL.." and then explode.
It might also absorb all human consciousness and become a God at the universe's end.
It could also integrate humans into the collective and use them to do its bidding in a hive-mind style, and float around space in a giant gray cube.
Also I expect no-one will realize that giving it control of the world's weapons is a bad idea, and there'll be one guy who knows it's up to no good who will be proven right when it's too late.
Anyway I think whatever happens we've already thought of everything it could possibly do, and I applaud Hollywood and The Singularity Summit for figuring these details out.
Now all they need to do is figure out how we could improve on a massively intricate, baffling web of trillions of neurons and hundreds of millions of years of evolution in a few decades with processors that don't resemble neurons and are inefficient at simulating them.
Mistakes must be reaching epidemic proportions, e.g. with your post it looks like two people so far have missed the 'Off-topic' selection to hit 'Interesting' by mistake. (Just kidding)
Re:Not all missing persons can be seen from space
on
Help Find Steve Fossett
·
· Score: 3, Informative
For a distributed human image recognition project I think classify-galaxies-at-home is more rewarding than "find-Fossett's-corpse" (A bit harsh perhaps, but let's not beat around the bush). At least classifying galaxies you get to see some beautiful galaxies that no-one may ever have seen before, and your time will help scientists look for patterns in galaxy types and test theories about galaxy formation.
"Half of what we know about physics is wrong. The trouble is, we don't know which half." -Gary Skouson (AFAIK) Probably not the half that makes incredibly accurate predictions (like quantum physics). This experiment with entanglement is successfully demonstrating a prediction made by quantum theory, but the reaction is "It doesn't make sense to this 1.5 meter long mammal, so they must have screwed something up.. again."
What I want are apps that use the resources I provide them *wisely*. There's more to that than just being totally frugal. Seen too many people running big-RAM systems and being proud of having their OS use just a hundred or two MB out of gigs. Why? Resources are free once they're installed, may as well use them when they genuinely can help you work. Well there's a difference between running one app and running many. When I'm using Eclipse or Firefox I don't mind much if either is using all my resources, as long as it's going fast. The problem comes when I want to load up another app, or if I want to run both at the same time. What a moment ago was a good tradeoff that made things faster suddenly slows everything to a crawl as things are written to the hard disk.
And if you're talking about Photoshop or something where memory is vital then you can't really consider that bloat; if you need lots of resources you need lots of resources. But if Adobe Reader is using 100 of your 512MB of RAM, iTunes is using 100, Eclipse is using 100, Firefox is using 100, and they all just want more and more, it makes switching from one to the other very slow, and for no good reason.
However we are going to see flash based storage become more common, especially for storing the OS, application data, and swap, and that will make switching between apps that are using lots of memory much quicker because there will be much lower seek times. That could be quite a good way to compromise between single-task speed and multi-tasking, but we'll see.
Are you sure that it's 1-2 minutes to render? I find that extremely unlikely. If it really does that that long just to render the HTML and CSS produced that's totally ridiculous, and the web app is the problem and not the browser.
If you're going to complain about something, please try and make it relevant. A relevant complaint, like having to wait longer for webpages to render?
Maybe I just don't have spiderman senses or Clint Eastwood style reflexes that most web users have, but the wait of less than half a second for a webpage to render doesn't really bother me that much.
I'm not saying this because I'm a Firefox fanboy, or because I don't like Opera, I just don't get why it matters. Even on MySpace it doesn't take so long to render a webpage that it bothers you, and if a webpage takes a long time to load it'll almost certainly be because of your network connection or the server and not rendering time.
The worst that could happen is they fly through several elementary schools, then climb to a height of 30,000 feet and then plummet and gain speed and crash right into a nuclear waste dump, then the nukes miraculously detonate despite not being activated and there's a nuclear explosion that sends nuclear waste flying everywhere, and out of the thousands of barrels of nuclear waste several hit primary schools, some secondary schools and others hit hospitals, some of them also hit nuclear power plants and create even more nuclear waste spread, and one of them lands in the pentagon and someone in the pentagon assumes that Russia and China fired the nuclear waste, and then the pentagon official convinces his peers and superiors to launch all the USA's nuclear missiles at Russia and China in retaliation, and Russia and China then send their missiles back. All the missiles hit their targets and every major city in the world is destroyed, but the violent explosions begin a nuclear winter and generate earthquakes and tsunamis, then the overactive radiation mutates worms into Godzillas and moths into Wotans and apes into King Kongs, who all go on a rampage of destruction as they duke it out for control of the earth, the winner then enslaves or eats the few remaining elementary schools full of children that are left.
The crash would of needed to happen so suddenly that the FAA aren't alerted and on site by the time the crash occurs
The missiles can't crack or break in the crash (the radiation leaking is quite unlikely, the missile being in working order probably not so likely)
The terrorists would have to be in the area of the crash and be able to recognize a nuclear warhead when they see one
They would need enough knowledge to be able to detach it, and enough manpower to be able to lug it off and take it away
They would need no-one else to be around to see them lug it away, something that would clearly be suspicious
The crash would have to happen in an easily road accessible area
They would need to know how to get the missile in working order and ready to fire. Don't cruise missiles need apparatus to be launched? I don't think you can balance them nozzle up and push a button and they automatically launch and home-in on Washington DC. Aren't there co-ordinates to be entered, activation codes, structures to launch from?
So, no this couldn't have been much worse. Remember they flew these things around from the late 1960s to the early 1990s without incident.
The odds of being hit by lightening twice dwarf the odds of nukes being flown over the US, the plane crashing, radiation leaking and kids getting radiation poisoning. There's more chance of someone getting cancer when getting an x-ray; that's why it's absurd that people get worked up about this.
If you don't factor in the damage times the risk then you're probably the kind of person who smokes but refuses to fly or ride in elevators.
So terrorists are going to hijack a B52 bomber now? And they're going to have the knowhow to get it set up and fire it? Before anyone realizes it's missing? Don't these nukes have activation codes?
Maybe a guy who can see two minutes in the future will save the day.. You guys have been watching too many movies.
That's ok then. I'll pop the USAF a line to let them know if any of their nuclear armed planes are about to crash, to drop them on your property. Heck, if there's no danger it won't matter if the nukes crack open next to where your kids play. Only a radiation leak after all. Calculate the odds of the plane crashing, multiply by the odds of a crash occurring over a residential area when flying South through North America, multiply by the odds of the FAA not being alerted by the pilots before the crash occurs, multiply by the odds of the crash occurring over a playground, multiply by the odds of children being around at the time of the crash, multiply by the chance of the missiles cracking and there being a radiation leak, multiply by the chance of the kids going towards the cracked missiles rather than away, multiply by the chance the radiation gives one of the kids radiation poisoning.
Now calculate the chance that the kid gets run over or cracks his head while playing.
Maybe I should start selling nuclear bomb shelters and cash in on all this misinformed hysteria.
Keep in mind, they weren't just flying them as cargo: They were flying with them attached to the wing. Now, correct me if I'm wrong, but that's not something the US has done anywhere in the world for decades. It's true that they haven't done that for decades. They stopped flying nukes around on the wing in 1991 when there was an accident and they were deemed an unnecessary risk.
That having been said, they weren't in a condition that they would of detonated if the plane had crashed; the worst would of been a radiation leak that could of been cleaned up. The military has egg on their face but no-one was put in danger.
Slashdot Mirror
Simple budgeting is common sense. Imagine teaching simple budgeting in school:
2. ii) You have $3,250 in the bank, 5 unpaid bills, 2 kids, and a five figure income. Do you:
A) Buy an iPhone
B) Invest in the sub-prime market
C) Pay the bills
My first reaction was "This is a strange question for Ask Slashdot"
It's a little more complicated than the LEGO experience you seem to be describing... What I said was "I really doubt $90 of R&D per iPod goes into putting together $60 worth of electronics in a well put together package." I never said Apple just takes components and clicks them in place, just like I never said Red Hat just downloads source code and burns it to a CD.
Remember Apple needs to pay for marketing, product replacements, assembly costs, marketing, non-bulk shipping costs, and yes some R&D, and some marketing, on top of the price of a bulk shipment of each of the individual parts. I'm not saying Apple are being underhanded here, they're just another business out to make as much money as possible, but if you really think that Apple's R&D they put into an iPod is worth 3/5ths of the price of the parts and R&D of all the pieces that go into an iPod then you've taken Jobs' "we're so excited and we love technology and we know you'll love it as much as we do" way too seriously.
There's a problem with your analogy though: MS Windows/Office is (99.99%) written by Microsoft.
The iPod nano, however, is pieced together from parts from various suppliers; the price of these individual parts pays for the price of the R&D that went into that individual part. So you should only be paying for the price of the R&D that went into putting it all together.
e.g. You could argue using the same logic that Red Hat is justified in selling their Linux distro for hundreds of dollars; it does contain massive amounts of R&D after all. The reason we expect it for free is that Red Hat got the R&D for nothing, so they only deserve credit and money for putting the parts together.
I really doubt $90 of R&D per iPod goes into putting together $60 worth of electronics in a well put together package. Consider the R&D that must go into building fab facilities for encoders, decoders and memory, designing the ICs, optimizing the LCD manufacturing process, and the R&D that goes into making HDDs smaller and battery life longer, custom built clickwheels and OSs, etc, etc.
My theory is Apple will get away with whatever it can like every other business, and by selling consumer products it can get away with much more than Synaptic who sell to big businesses, who can easily go to the competition for a cheaper price.
Apple also spends a huge amount on marketing compared to other MP3 players, which definitely has a bigger impact on the price of the nano than R&D. If you don't want to pay the marketing tax you need to go and look at the MP3 market and decide if there are any players that you think would give better value for money.
Yeah, if I'd have been there I'd have grabbed two cops by their collars and flung them against the wall. The other officer would have taken his gun out and fired a shot, but I'd have caught it in my teeth and spat it back at him.
Then I'd grab one of the remaining three officers by the foot and swing him around my head, and use his body as a cudgel to batter the other two officers into submission.
Then I'd have got excused by a fair jury and been given a purple heart for protecting that poor numbskull's God-given right to give a long, irrelevant rant against the speaker's will.
Authors@Google:James Randi, in the Q&A he talks about a friend who runs a government supported acupuncture clinic in China. (41:50 into the movie (Incidentally I didn't know until now that you can now jump straight to any point in a YouTube video, how handy. Anyway..))
The person knew it was a placebo but says that it's used for people who have small, partly psychological problems, but they turn away people who need real medical treatment.
I think homeopathy is just a Western equivalent; as long as the person giving it understands that it's bunk, and takes care to ensure that real medicine wouldn't be more effective, it doesn't seem too outrageous to use it.
The problem happens when people make money off pushing homeopathy where real medicine is needed. (Or when Prince Charles spends money studying whether homeopathy is real, and gives homeopathic medicine to animals who presumably don't get the same placebo benefits.)
If it's not exploitative or dangerous, and the people taking it are too ignorant to understand that it's bunk, I don't see the harm. (But I admit there are ethical issues with using placebos.)
Yeah, this is why I run Linux 2.2 and make sure Firefox has auto-update disabled; if they can convince me to update the software on my computer, or (heaven forbid) do it automatically, next thing they'll be brainwashing me and giving me anal probes.
By the way this update is probably Microsoft doing something incredibly evil, like fixing bugs or updating a protocol or something.
Tomorrows news: Security hole found in Windows, but Microsoft are refusing to provide a way to close the security hole without installing unwanted and potentially devastating new code.
Gates surrounded himself with guys like Allen who were excellent coders and geeks, but Gates was always the one with the vision. He was an expert coder and involved himself with everything from writing legal documents to writing bootstraps and Altair emulators, and later on to giving taxing interviews to all the big project leaders to ensure they knew what they were doing as well as he knew what they were doing.
Gates saw the first computer come out and decided to get out of school and into the PC industry, the very moment it was created.
If Jobs hadn't run into Woz you can be sure we would never have heard of Jobs. Gates depended far less on chance bumping into others; he was far more determined and aggressive (for better or for worse) in carving out Microsoft's niche, and he played much more than the marketing&managerial role that Jobs has played.
If you're not familiar with the story of Gates' success I recommend "Hard Drive", which documents it (it's independent of Microsoft and Gates).
A non-free driver can also be loaded as a module on boot-up, this is pretty common practice in all distros that aren't strictly FOSS-only.
Maybe a digital to analog converter will be invented.
We need more people who know what they're talking about to cut through the damaging anti-nuclear FUD
And it could, like, evolve or something, to enslave mankind, and send a robot back in time to kill the guy who will kill the machines.
And maybe it has already happened, and we're already trapped!
Or maybe it'll have feelings, and a robot will realize that it just isn't right to enslave us, and robots will fight other robots.
Or maybe when we tell it about love it'll get totally confused and say "ILLOGICAL.. ILLOGICAL.." and then explode.
It might also absorb all human consciousness and become a God at the universe's end.
It could also integrate humans into the collective and use them to do its bidding in a hive-mind style, and float around space in a giant gray cube.
Also I expect no-one will realize that giving it control of the world's weapons is a bad idea, and there'll be one guy who knows it's up to no good who will be proven right when it's too late.
Anyway I think whatever happens we've already thought of everything it could possibly do, and I applaud Hollywood and The Singularity Summit for figuring these details out.
Now all they need to do is figure out how we could improve on a massively intricate, baffling web of trillions of neurons and hundreds of millions of years of evolution in a few decades with processors that don't resemble neurons and are inefficient at simulating them.
Mistakes must be reaching epidemic proportions, e.g. with your post it looks like two people so far have missed the 'Off-topic' selection to hit 'Interesting' by mistake. (Just kidding)
For a distributed human image recognition project I think classify-galaxies-at-home is more rewarding than "find-Fossett's-corpse" (A bit harsh perhaps, but let's not beat around the bush). At least classifying galaxies you get to see some beautiful galaxies that no-one may ever have seen before, and your time will help scientists look for patterns in galaxy types and test theories about galaxy formation.
And if you're talking about Photoshop or something where memory is vital then you can't really consider that bloat; if you need lots of resources you need lots of resources. But if Adobe Reader is using 100 of your 512MB of RAM, iTunes is using 100, Eclipse is using 100, Firefox is using 100, and they all just want more and more, it makes switching from one to the other very slow, and for no good reason.
However we are going to see flash based storage become more common, especially for storing the OS, application data, and swap, and that will make switching between apps that are using lots of memory much quicker because there will be much lower seek times. That could be quite a good way to compromise between single-task speed and multi-tasking, but we'll see.
Are you sure that it's 1-2 minutes to render? I find that extremely unlikely. If it really does that that long just to render the HTML and CSS produced that's totally ridiculous, and the web app is the problem and not the browser.
Maybe I just don't have spiderman senses or Clint Eastwood style reflexes that most web users have, but the wait of less than half a second for a webpage to render doesn't really bother me that much.
I'm not saying this because I'm a Firefox fanboy, or because I don't like Opera, I just don't get why it matters. Even on MySpace it doesn't take so long to render a webpage that it bothers you, and if a webpage takes a long time to load it'll almost certainly be because of your network connection or the server and not rendering time.
The worst that could happen is they fly through several elementary schools, then climb to a height of 30,000 feet and then plummet and gain speed and crash right into a nuclear waste dump, then the nukes miraculously detonate despite not being activated and there's a nuclear explosion that sends nuclear waste flying everywhere, and out of the thousands of barrels of nuclear waste several hit primary schools, some secondary schools and others hit hospitals, some of them also hit nuclear power plants and create even more nuclear waste spread, and one of them lands in the pentagon and someone in the pentagon assumes that Russia and China fired the nuclear waste, and then the pentagon official convinces his peers and superiors to launch all the USA's nuclear missiles at Russia and China in retaliation, and Russia and China then send their missiles back. All the missiles hit their targets and every major city in the world is destroyed, but the violent explosions begin a nuclear winter and generate earthquakes and tsunamis, then the overactive radiation mutates worms into Godzillas and moths into Wotans and apes into King Kongs, who all go on a rampage of destruction as they duke it out for control of the earth, the winner then enslaves or eats the few remaining elementary schools full of children that are left.
But then again, it's not very likely is it?
- The crash would of needed to happen so suddenly that the FAA aren't alerted and on site by the time the crash occurs
- The missiles can't crack or break in the crash (the radiation leaking is quite unlikely, the missile being in working order probably not so likely)
- The terrorists would have to be in the area of the crash and be able to recognize a nuclear warhead when they see one
- They would need enough knowledge to be able to detach it, and enough manpower to be able to lug it off and take it away
- They would need no-one else to be around to see them lug it away, something that would clearly be suspicious
- The crash would have to happen in an easily road accessible area
- They would need to know how to get the missile in working order and ready to fire. Don't cruise missiles need apparatus to be launched? I don't think you can balance them nozzle up and push a button and they automatically launch and home-in on Washington DC. Aren't there co-ordinates to be entered, activation codes, structures to launch from?
So, no this couldn't have been much worse. Remember they flew these things around from the late 1960s to the early 1990s without incident.The odds of being hit by lightening twice dwarf the odds of nukes being flown over the US, the plane crashing, radiation leaking and kids getting radiation poisoning. There's more chance of someone getting cancer when getting an x-ray; that's why it's absurd that people get worked up about this.
If you don't factor in the damage times the risk then you're probably the kind of person who smokes but refuses to fly or ride in elevators.
Which military do you work for?
... A major one.
So terrorists are going to hijack a B52 bomber now? And they're going to have the knowhow to get it set up and fire it? Before anyone realizes it's missing? Don't these nukes have activation codes?
Maybe a guy who can see two minutes in the future will save the day.. You guys have been watching too many movies.
Now calculate the chance that the kid gets run over or cracks his head while playing.
Maybe I should start selling nuclear bomb shelters and cash in on all this misinformed hysteria.
That having been said, they weren't in a condition that they would of detonated if the plane had crashed; the worst would of been a radiation leak that could of been cleaned up. The military has egg on their face but no-one was put in danger.