You don't understand the fact that reality does not need to conform to business models, it's the other way around. The reality of the software industry is that the first copy of a digital work (be it music, movie, or program) is where all the cost is incurred (in the current system the producer pays this cost up front), all subsequent copies cost nothing to produce (or very nearly nothing, depends on the distribution medium).
There are really two problems here. First the way software is currently sold (the business model) defies reality by assuming that all copies beyond the first one have a production cost that is a significant fraction of the production cost of the first copy. The second problem is that virtually all existing economic systems (E.G. Capitalism) are first and foremost a system of managing scarcity, which is a property that IP inherently lacks (it is by definition impossible to physically own IP, therefor it is not property in the traditional sense). Piracy is a direct result of the fact that you're attempting to map a non-scarce resource onto a system designed to regulate and manage scarcity.
Yes, but that same small log, even though it was found by you and cost you almost nothing (it did cost you the time to pick it up and move it) is still a physical limited resource. The cost of that small log is ultimately the energy and time cost that went into making it including the time it took for the tree it came from to grow. Had you not been able to find a suitable small log lying around in the area you either would have to have spent more time attempting to find something to bridge that washout or perhaps bought or otherwise fashioned something. All physical goods have an intrinsic value even if it's small (at the minimum the energy stored in their physical structure). It cost you a few seconds of your time to acquire that log because of where you were at the time, and you had no better use for it than as an impromptu bridge which had more value to you than what it cost you to acquire the log or the value of the log itself. Someone else may have valued that log more as a fuel source and collected it to dry out and burn in a fireplace without regard for your attempt to use it as a bridge. Because it's a physical good, both you and the person who wants to use it as fuel cannot use it at the same time. Capitalism is one possible way of dealing with the question of which of you actually gets to use that log. Capitalism is also more of a category of system than it is a implementation of a system, and as such different "capitalist" systems with have variances (likewise socialism, communism, agrarianism, barter systems, etc.).
It's also important to note that most of the existing systems evolved around the idea of distributing limited physical resources (that is, they manage scarcity) in which the investment of time and effort is directly related to the value of a physical good. The problem we're running into is that we're attempting to merge systems based on the management of scarcity with resources that by their definition have no scarcity to manage, merely one shot time and effort costs.
I'm not sure if you fully understand the point of my post, as the tone of your post seems rather aggressive in making a point that more or less coincides with the point I made. Also this
Sorry, "pay enough" is an excuse capitalists use to try to get "consumers" to play along more with their system.
makes it seem like you have some sort of issue with capitalism which really has nothing to do with this discussion. Capitalism is one of many systems that have been developed over the years for distribution of resources. It has its flaws, much like all other systems, but it also has its advantages. If you have a system you feel is better at distributing resources I'm sure many people would be willing to discuss it with you and perhaps point out some of its advantages and disadvantages that you may have overlooked.
Nothing ever costs nothing, there's always a cost in anything you do, just not necessarily a monetary one. It's also wrong to assume that time has an intrinsic monetary value, even though most people are able to find someone to pay them for their time (in essence they have negotiated a deal to assign monetary value to their time, but it's not an intrinsic property of their time itself).
It's essentially impossible to have a situation in which something has utility but has 0 cost unless you're rounding off the cost due to it being such a low amount. Likewise I cannot readily think of anything with a utility of 0, except perhaps a black hole, but even then I'm not convinced that's true.
You can always find a better quality solution if you're willing to pay enough, but as value is roughly modeled as utility/cost, with utility including quality, and cost including both monetary value as well as time and incidental costs (like training) your value will tend to plummet as your costs go up even if your quality goes up as well. Ironically Open Source tends to have better value specifically because of its cost even if the quality is often somewhat less than commercial offerings (not talking code quality here, but rather design and interface quality).
Distribution only raises mind-share if the distribution system has specifically been engineered to publish that data. Rather the distribution does not raise mind share, the distribution mechanism does. If TPB didn't have a top 100 list, would the OP have been able to tell that indie labels rarely hit the top 100? More importantly how many from that top 100 list went up in distribution after first achieving a spot in the top 100? You're viewing the relationship backwards, the mind-share is generated by the system from the input variable of distribution. The input variable is arbitrary, it could just as easily post a list of least shared 100 which would work to increase mind-share as well (and might ultimately be more useful as it would tend to encourage high turnover in the list, unlike the top 100).
I think his point was something more along the lines of a correlation not equaling causation type argument. Bands can get popular for many reasons, among which are being promoted by a media label. It isn't the act of signing with the media label, but rather the promotion by the media label that leads to the popularity (well, leads to being well known, which is often confused with being well liked). The media labels do not however have a monopoly on promotion even though they try very hard to. It is possible to be promoted independently, even if it is much harder due to limited resources. The point is more along the lines of a record label is an easy way to become popular if you're willing to pay the price (more or less all of your profits belong to the record label unless you're very very lucky, as well as all your creative work), but there are other ways of achieving popularity. Popularity is not directly caused by being signed by a label, but it is one of the ways to achieve popularity.
The key is in more fully understanding the space that music exists in. Someone needs to do for music search what google did for web searching. If you look at a site like Pandora, a lot of people miss the real service provided by them, which is not first and foremost a way to stream music. If all Pandora did was stream music they'd have nothing to distinguish them from any other internet radio station. The service Pandora provides is a very advanced and in-depth analysis of the contents, themes, and styles of music combined with an advanced heuristic to attempt to find similar but not identical content. Ultimately what it provides is a form of music search, but not for a song or artist, but rather for a style or mood of music. You tell them, I really like "x by y" what else is out there that I might like as well, and from that starting point you then refine down exactly what it is your searching for. When you consider the future of music, in which anyone with a little bit of talent, some basic music gear, and a PC (used generically here, a Mac is in fact a PC as well) will be able to publish and distribute their own work, the only way to find something you might like in the sea of music will be services like Pandora that go beyond the traditional simple bins used in the past (metal, rap, country, etc.), to a more in-depth deeper understanding of musical style and content.
Personally I think the days of the media fed music super-stars are numbered. Oh, we'll get the odd star from time to time, but it's going to be a natural organic thing (think star wars kid), not something designed and engineered by a billion dollar ad and promotional organization. I think we'll see a lot more flash-in-the-pan type songs, and even more regular bands people will follow and look forward to new content from, but the days of success being defined as at least hundreds of thousands of sales are numbered. Rather, a successful band will be one that manages to consistently sell a thousand copies of a song, who becomes well known enough that when they release a new song they start to accrue sales within the first 24 hours, because someone actually cared enough about them to be waiting for that release.
If I could get back all the money I've put in, I'd happily sign that document. I've seen what the government does with those funds and I'm not impressed. Personally I fully expect that by the time my turn comes around to collect I'll be lucky to receive even 10% of what I've paid in.
Didn't Jack make some sort of statement prior to being disbarred that he was going to file a class action lawsuit against the Florida bar? Lawyers may be sharks, but they look after their own, one lawyer tries to go after another one (let alone an entire body like the Florida bar) and he'll find himself rather quickly taking a long walk off a short pier, as Jack found out.
I read it more as most spam comes from random relays over in China which we can't really do anything about, but here is an instance where it's trivially easy to point out exactly who is sending the spam. It gets even easier from a prosecution standpoint because Jack is too simple (read boneheaded) to even consider trying to deny sending the e-mails, rather he's going to try to argue that the e-mails constitute protected speech under the first amendment (oh the irony), and just to dig himself a bit deeper start throwing allegations of corruption, bribery, and conspiracy at anyone who disagrees with him (as if the only way someone might not have exactly the same views as him is if they've been bought by some megacorp).
Actually the write performance degradation problem is a bit more involved than that, but the way you describe it is essentially correct. There are some applications out there that can consolidate an SSD to get back to the original performance (think of it as SSD defrag), but having support for the new erase command in both hardware and the OS will ultimately be the best solution. I've heard rumor that Windows 7 is going to have support for it when it ships, and I assume Linux either has, or will have soon support for it as well. Interestingly enough, attempting to defragment a SSD drive using traditional utilities will only make the problem worse.
As for the $-for-$ argument, if you're talking low to mid range performance, then yes, once you start talking high performance SSD edges out HDD because you start having to do all kinds of expensive RAID setups in order to match performance. Now, in terms of dollar per gigabyte costs, yes HDD is still going to smoke SSD for a few more years.
SSD gives phenomenal random read performance, equally good serial read performance, and average write and random write performance (at least if you get a good SSD, the low end ones using the crap IO chips are worse than budget HDs). The only way to beat the read performance of a good SSD is a really expensive SAS RAID, and even then it's not going to be by much. Yes you can take a hit on serial write performance, but not much of one (it's on par with most medium to high end HDs, with surprisingly few high end HDs able to outperform it). If you're primarily going to be doing reads, particular random reads, or even if you're going to be doing mostly random writes rather than serial writes, an SSD is probably a good idea.
Yes, but he said "the earthquake is going to happen in 6 to 24 hours".
And he was right, just not about the magnitude. According to another comment after the smaller quake he re-ran the numbers and predicted the larger one that hit a week later but was barred from telling anyone about it.
The best solution is a modified yeast like bacteria that produces wastes compatible with the host. That sort of genetic engineering is still in its infancy though. My biggest concern would be more along the lines of ensuring the bacteria remain where they're supposed to be and don't decide to wander out into the rest of the patient or don't mutate into something more dangerous.
I think he's shooting for an achievement for -5 troll... just a guess, you know with the title and all.
In a vaguely related manner, does it still count as a april fools story if it's a story linking to a april fools story on another site? We're at one level of indirection here.
Sure she will, she'll just be more careful about cleaning up the evidence. Plus in a few more years it'll be legal no matter how you look at it so she'll be free to do as she pleases and there's not a damn thing your uptight ass can do about it.
Slashdot Mirror
You don't understand the fact that reality does not need to conform to business models, it's the other way around. The reality of the software industry is that the first copy of a digital work (be it music, movie, or program) is where all the cost is incurred (in the current system the producer pays this cost up front), all subsequent copies cost nothing to produce (or very nearly nothing, depends on the distribution medium).
There are really two problems here. First the way software is currently sold (the business model) defies reality by assuming that all copies beyond the first one have a production cost that is a significant fraction of the production cost of the first copy. The second problem is that virtually all existing economic systems (E.G. Capitalism) are first and foremost a system of managing scarcity, which is a property that IP inherently lacks (it is by definition impossible to physically own IP, therefor it is not property in the traditional sense). Piracy is a direct result of the fact that you're attempting to map a non-scarce resource onto a system designed to regulate and manage scarcity.
Yes, but that same small log, even though it was found by you and cost you almost nothing (it did cost you the time to pick it up and move it) is still a physical limited resource. The cost of that small log is ultimately the energy and time cost that went into making it including the time it took for the tree it came from to grow. Had you not been able to find a suitable small log lying around in the area you either would have to have spent more time attempting to find something to bridge that washout or perhaps bought or otherwise fashioned something. All physical goods have an intrinsic value even if it's small (at the minimum the energy stored in their physical structure). It cost you a few seconds of your time to acquire that log because of where you were at the time, and you had no better use for it than as an impromptu bridge which had more value to you than what it cost you to acquire the log or the value of the log itself. Someone else may have valued that log more as a fuel source and collected it to dry out and burn in a fireplace without regard for your attempt to use it as a bridge. Because it's a physical good, both you and the person who wants to use it as fuel cannot use it at the same time. Capitalism is one possible way of dealing with the question of which of you actually gets to use that log. Capitalism is also more of a category of system than it is a implementation of a system, and as such different "capitalist" systems with have variances (likewise socialism, communism, agrarianism, barter systems, etc.).
It's also important to note that most of the existing systems evolved around the idea of distributing limited physical resources (that is, they manage scarcity) in which the investment of time and effort is directly related to the value of a physical good. The problem we're running into is that we're attempting to merge systems based on the management of scarcity with resources that by their definition have no scarcity to manage, merely one shot time and effort costs.
Sorry, "pay enough" is an excuse capitalists use to try to get "consumers" to play along more with their system.
makes it seem like you have some sort of issue with capitalism which really has nothing to do with this discussion. Capitalism is one of many systems that have been developed over the years for distribution of resources. It has its flaws, much like all other systems, but it also has its advantages. If you have a system you feel is better at distributing resources I'm sure many people would be willing to discuss it with you and perhaps point out some of its advantages and disadvantages that you may have overlooked.
Nothing ever costs nothing, there's always a cost in anything you do, just not necessarily a monetary one. It's also wrong to assume that time has an intrinsic monetary value, even though most people are able to find someone to pay them for their time (in essence they have negotiated a deal to assign monetary value to their time, but it's not an intrinsic property of their time itself).
It's essentially impossible to have a situation in which something has utility but has 0 cost unless you're rounding off the cost due to it being such a low amount. Likewise I cannot readily think of anything with a utility of 0, except perhaps a black hole, but even then I'm not convinced that's true.
You can always find a better quality solution if you're willing to pay enough, but as value is roughly modeled as utility/cost, with utility including quality, and cost including both monetary value as well as time and incidental costs (like training) your value will tend to plummet as your costs go up even if your quality goes up as well. Ironically Open Source tends to have better value specifically because of its cost even if the quality is often somewhat less than commercial offerings (not talking code quality here, but rather design and interface quality).
Distribution only raises mind-share if the distribution system has specifically been engineered to publish that data. Rather the distribution does not raise mind share, the distribution mechanism does. If TPB didn't have a top 100 list, would the OP have been able to tell that indie labels rarely hit the top 100? More importantly how many from that top 100 list went up in distribution after first achieving a spot in the top 100? You're viewing the relationship backwards, the mind-share is generated by the system from the input variable of distribution. The input variable is arbitrary, it could just as easily post a list of least shared 100 which would work to increase mind-share as well (and might ultimately be more useful as it would tend to encourage high turnover in the list, unlike the top 100).
I think his point was something more along the lines of a correlation not equaling causation type argument. Bands can get popular for many reasons, among which are being promoted by a media label. It isn't the act of signing with the media label, but rather the promotion by the media label that leads to the popularity (well, leads to being well known, which is often confused with being well liked). The media labels do not however have a monopoly on promotion even though they try very hard to. It is possible to be promoted independently, even if it is much harder due to limited resources. The point is more along the lines of a record label is an easy way to become popular if you're willing to pay the price (more or less all of your profits belong to the record label unless you're very very lucky, as well as all your creative work), but there are other ways of achieving popularity. Popularity is not directly caused by being signed by a label, but it is one of the ways to achieve popularity.
The key is in more fully understanding the space that music exists in. Someone needs to do for music search what google did for web searching. If you look at a site like Pandora, a lot of people miss the real service provided by them, which is not first and foremost a way to stream music. If all Pandora did was stream music they'd have nothing to distinguish them from any other internet radio station. The service Pandora provides is a very advanced and in-depth analysis of the contents, themes, and styles of music combined with an advanced heuristic to attempt to find similar but not identical content. Ultimately what it provides is a form of music search, but not for a song or artist, but rather for a style or mood of music. You tell them, I really like "x by y" what else is out there that I might like as well, and from that starting point you then refine down exactly what it is your searching for. When you consider the future of music, in which anyone with a little bit of talent, some basic music gear, and a PC (used generically here, a Mac is in fact a PC as well) will be able to publish and distribute their own work, the only way to find something you might like in the sea of music will be services like Pandora that go beyond the traditional simple bins used in the past (metal, rap, country, etc.), to a more in-depth deeper understanding of musical style and content.
Personally I think the days of the media fed music super-stars are numbered. Oh, we'll get the odd star from time to time, but it's going to be a natural organic thing (think star wars kid), not something designed and engineered by a billion dollar ad and promotional organization. I think we'll see a lot more flash-in-the-pan type songs, and even more regular bands people will follow and look forward to new content from, but the days of success being defined as at least hundreds of thousands of sales are numbered. Rather, a successful band will be one that manages to consistently sell a thousand copies of a song, who becomes well known enough that when they release a new song they start to accrue sales within the first 24 hours, because someone actually cared enough about them to be waiting for that release.
If I could get back all the money I've put in, I'd happily sign that document. I've seen what the government does with those funds and I'm not impressed. Personally I fully expect that by the time my turn comes around to collect I'll be lucky to receive even 10% of what I've paid in.
Which reminds me, where did I put my plasgun...
Didn't Jack make some sort of statement prior to being disbarred that he was going to file a class action lawsuit against the Florida bar? Lawyers may be sharks, but they look after their own, one lawyer tries to go after another one (let alone an entire body like the Florida bar) and he'll find himself rather quickly taking a long walk off a short pier, as Jack found out.
I read it more as most spam comes from random relays over in China which we can't really do anything about, but here is an instance where it's trivially easy to point out exactly who is sending the spam. It gets even easier from a prosecution standpoint because Jack is too simple (read boneheaded) to even consider trying to deny sending the e-mails, rather he's going to try to argue that the e-mails constitute protected speech under the first amendment (oh the irony), and just to dig himself a bit deeper start throwing allegations of corruption, bribery, and conspiracy at anyone who disagrees with him (as if the only way someone might not have exactly the same views as him is if they've been bought by some megacorp).
I can only say for sure that truth is a defense to libel in the US. I know in at least part of the UK truth isn't considered a defense against libel.
Actually the write performance degradation problem is a bit more involved than that, but the way you describe it is essentially correct. There are some applications out there that can consolidate an SSD to get back to the original performance (think of it as SSD defrag), but having support for the new erase command in both hardware and the OS will ultimately be the best solution. I've heard rumor that Windows 7 is going to have support for it when it ships, and I assume Linux either has, or will have soon support for it as well. Interestingly enough, attempting to defragment a SSD drive using traditional utilities will only make the problem worse.
As for the $-for-$ argument, if you're talking low to mid range performance, then yes, once you start talking high performance SSD edges out HDD because you start having to do all kinds of expensive RAID setups in order to match performance. Now, in terms of dollar per gigabyte costs, yes HDD is still going to smoke SSD for a few more years.
SSD gives phenomenal random read performance, equally good serial read performance, and average write and random write performance (at least if you get a good SSD, the low end ones using the crap IO chips are worse than budget HDs). The only way to beat the read performance of a good SSD is a really expensive SAS RAID, and even then it's not going to be by much. Yes you can take a hit on serial write performance, but not much of one (it's on par with most medium to high end HDs, with surprisingly few high end HDs able to outperform it). If you're primarily going to be doing reads, particular random reads, or even if you're going to be doing mostly random writes rather than serial writes, an SSD is probably a good idea.
How dare you insssult my preciousss emacsssssss!!
Please, real programmers use butterflies.
Apple: We do Evil with Style*
*: Available in high gloss black, white and limited edition brushed aluminum.
Actually "do no evil" was Google shtick, not Apples. Apple has never claimed not to be evil, they're just very stylish about it.
Yes, but he said "the earthquake is going to happen in 6 to 24 hours".
And he was right, just not about the magnitude. According to another comment after the smaller quake he re-ran the numbers and predicted the larger one that hit a week later but was barred from telling anyone about it.
I vote for a whooosh achievement for when you fail to get the joke... not sure how you would automate assigning that though.
The best solution is a modified yeast like bacteria that produces wastes compatible with the host. That sort of genetic engineering is still in its infancy though. My biggest concern would be more along the lines of ensuring the bacteria remain where they're supposed to be and don't decide to wander out into the rest of the patient or don't mutate into something more dangerous.
Maybe? There really should be an achievement for this.
I think he's shooting for an achievement for -5 troll... just a guess, you know with the title and all.
In a vaguely related manner, does it still count as a april fools story if it's a story linking to a april fools story on another site? We're at one level of indirection here.
Sure she will, she'll just be more careful about cleaning up the evidence. Plus in a few more years it'll be legal no matter how you look at it so she'll be free to do as she pleases and there's not a damn thing your uptight ass can do about it.
TL;DR