Try an engineer's perspective here, not just the pure science one. A geer would say:
"When we add the Dark Matter fudge factor, our equations tend to get better, and we haven't found many (if any) equations that break in major bad ways because of it so, we will build our next bridge using this fudge factor and be confident it will be the best inter-galactic bridge built in 2009."
To see what engineers have to deal with on a daily basis, have a look at any of the links off of this page: lmnoeng.com. All looks very civilized and mathematical until you look further down each sub-page and see how conditional & fractional & empirical it all is. But it is the best we have and we manage to build with it. It is very obvious to geers that these are not final exact equations. These are just answers that work, and we work 'em.
Wiki doesn't mention the lack of a throttle as the reason for low CO, but rather that diesel fuel is burned with excess air. The phrase "50% lean of stoichiometric" satisfied the chem eng in me more than "no throttle" but I would love it if you could elaborate on your explanation.
I made sure the music my kids had available to them growing up was my favorite music. I didn't want to listen to crap in the house. I set them up with their own fave lists that started off being my fave lists, and they could delete whatever they wanted. Sure once they hit mid-teens they started to diverge, but it made for some harmonic years:-).
So yeah, kids like their parents' music. And I liked my dad's music -- of course he was an original rocker at a time when other parents were buzz cut straights. I heard Ummagumma and Echoes a hundred times each before DSOTM hit vinyl.
Nova's "Ghost In Your Genes" documents a new approach to genetics and reveals the increased importance of epigenetics. This specific excerpt from the transcript hints at it:
What we are trying to do is diplomacy, trying to change the instructions of the cancer cells, reminding the cell, "Hey, you're a human cell. You shouldn't be behaving this way."
I found it a rather profound show and watched the DVD several times in a row. Note that the 2005 BBC version (on YouTube) is quite inferior to the 2006 WGBH/Nova one I managed to find on de.sevenload.com. Here are the 6 parts, TinyURL'd: 123456.
I hate bloat but are there performance issues with modern PCs for average users? Vista superfetching apps so they load quicker is a benefit for most people. Vista not needing to reboot as often after updates is also a benefit. Vista being a bit slower on head-to-head challenges is not going to be noticed by most people.
Dumping on Vista for a moderate overall performance drop is not going to get Joe Average on your side. Jane VideoEncoder and Connie CopyQueen will notice, but do not represent a sizeable part of the market.
Personally I am most bothered by Vista/7's Big Brother moves (protected video path), stupid interface changes and that brain dead "upgrade" of file moving/copying. But looking at what I just typed, I still don't think the average user is ever going to notice/bump into any of these limits/downgrades.
I think "casual gamer" means someone who can take it or leave it. I put myself in this category -- when I play it is because I happen to have a few hours up to a few tens of hours spread across a few days. Then three months go by before I again casually game.
Hardcore gamer = borderline addict. No need to explain this category to slashdotters.
Social gamer = not really a gamer, but finds that through games they can interact with people. Would be easily pleased by a wide variety of games, I imagine. Also with chatting in IM/chat rooms.
Isn't it obvious that global control freaks are playing us off one country against another (who will riot first), one person against another (who will report the other first), one belief against another (who will start a holy war first)?
And if anyone makes too big a fuss, they don't get version 1 of the latest subjugation idea, but their tax rate and bailouts go up one notch, while their government handouts drops one notch.
The counterpoint to this is that "the cobbler's children have no shoes". In this case, the Washington big boys could care less about local roads while they are trying to bring back billion contracts to their home states.
Many moons ago there was a true story about some group of people that used short brooms to sweep. These brooms forced them to stoop and thus caused numerous health problems. Some humanitarian type from the west saw a solution and got them to use longer brooms.
So instead, imagine our two salesmen entering this situation, trying to sell long brooms. One sees no opportunity as "They don't use long brooms". The other sees nothing but opportunity as "They don't use long brooms!"
I'm also happy to cease this discussion because you ignore most of what I say with "this conversation keeps getting deflected all over the place".
You ignore alternate revenue models (like a pay-for product that offers more features) and then whine that I'm not hyper-focused on your dear little advertising-supported web site.
You trivialize my web site, without acknowledging my point that I was making about it -- that I serve content without needing to make an ad-buck from them. For that matter I could publish to only those who paid to subscribe. Or I could stop publishing. Many solutions are possible. Whining about people who don't follow your view of the world is childish.
and that you are cherry-picking single quotes to quibble with rather than addressing the whole argument
Actually that is my point. Look at my second to last comment. I made a 9 point comment and got one or two points of reply. In my last comment you responded to my first line and my last line only. Pottle - kettle, etc.
As to people bypassing shareware programs, yes they do this and it can be an arms race. But it seems like Microsoft figured it out with XP. I think/. is technical enough to figure it out. Especially if Slashdot (represented by you, an A/C, at the moment) takes a less adversarial approach. But instead we have Slashdot (represented by you, an A/C, at the moment) arguing with a customer, instead of remembering the customer is ALWAYS right.
And by the way, what I posted isn't an argument. Bill Hicks is a comedian. He naturally gets the biggest laugh taking things to extreme. But his fundamental point speaks directly to the topic of this thread -- people don't want ads. Hicks is expressing some of the anger that people justifiably feel when advertisers take advantage of them, lie to them like Oracle did recently, won't shut off the ads in the middle of Jeopardy, market shamelessly to children, and on and on and on for years and decades.
Hicks vented. He had a platform to voice frustrations. Most consumers do not have this.
Closer to home, many (most?) slashdotters do not like Slashdot 2.0. They voice it in comments, they voice it in their SIGs, they no doubt send emails to the head honchos at/. And what happens? Nothing. They don't have a big enough voice. Slashdot is abusing their one-sided conversation with their readers by (1) ignoring things they could do to improve the reader experience, and (2) howling at the moon as you are doing to me in this sub-thread.
I think you are after some sort of theoretical victory -- "If I can just get this guy to admit that he is the man too then I will have won". This is so far from the point that it makes me laugh and want to say, once again, lighten up. Or change YOUR thinking -- you're not a tree. Models change. The net started with no ads, moved to extreme ads and it is time to throttle it back again to value ads -- marketing your feature & benefits in ad-speak.
Lose the dogmatic "You must view our ads or pay us for what WE perceive is a benefit" mentality, man. It will get you nowhere, I can guarantee you that.
Here, look, I will formally end this thread. I surrender. You are right. You and I are both the man. You win this battle.
And Slashdot is losing the war. Because they can't stop thinking of it as a war, apparently.
...The/. content model allows visitors to choose between three options: pay for the content we bring you by viewing ads, pay for the content by subscribing, or be a parasite who merely shifts their costs onto someone else.
No, the/. content model HOPES visitors will view ads or pay to not view them. And I hope for whirled peas. There is no allow -- people can come and more importantly go any time they please. You have to sell people to keep them coming back.
FWIW I think slashdot's ads are in the reasonable category, both the amount, content and size of them but you need to think shareware authors to understand this. I have registered a number of programs to get benefits I couldn't get otherwise. For example, I love xReminder Pro, the trial version allowed only 5 reminders total (I now have 240) and the registration cost of $20 lifetime was reasonable so I registered the product and plug it periodically. I did the same with Eudora and have even bought a few upgrades to that product. Money for value, it's how the world goes round. You can rail against it but it will be to no avail.
* The minuscule portion of people who are community exemplars and are absolved from ads is not even remotely germane to a conversation about content revenue models.
Did you really want to dump on the community exemplars, making them seem worthless? They provide a value, and get rewarded. Period.
I have to go to work in 2 minutes but I would like to try to respond a bit now.
you decline to participate in it because you want more benefits
No. Because I want a benefit.
Look, I'm also in the content business. I publish weekdaily to 6200 people. And I don't charge or gain a single penny from it. I accept that. Such is the Internet. But I have a family with hungry bellies and I can rarely afford to be charitable outside of my home. Sorry. The thing I was after would be trivial for slashdot to do -- provide more comments on a page if people want them -- i.e. settable in preferences but defaulting to 50 or 100. But a shot gun approach won't get me to sign up (not that I am accusing/. of that).
As to my analogy, the field(s) I had/have in mind are not someone's commercial fields. Mines are a third world thing. These people have next to nothing, and mines make that closer to nothing at all when they can't cross a field to get from A to B. In my analogy, the mines shouldn't be there, period. And in much of the world, ads shouldn't be there period -- example, the school system.
Take care and I may reply further if I get a chance.
(1) Like most slashdotters, I have configured my machine to not show ads. So no I am not complicit.
(2) Slashdot is not like most "ad-supported websites". For one thing, unlike most sites, people can and do subscribe to Slashdot to both support it and avoid ads.
(3) For another, people can and do get absolved from ads by none other than slashdot itself. Apparently you are not one of those "thanked for making slashdot great" or you would have acknowledge this possibility.
(4) Analogy time. Advertisers are like defense contractors with mines to peddle. Viewers are like children wanting to play soccer on that big open field while keeping both legs intact. The two sides, you see, are at odds. Now these defense contractors they _will_ sell their mines. And viewers _will_ lose as a result. But a fair number of people, mostly soccer ball players and wannabes, are not happy with the arrangement.
(5) Advertisers have LONG abused their privileges. Given a chance to run their ads at the same volume as TV shows, they crank up the volume. Allowed 5 or 10 minutes of ad time per hour, they (the advertisers _and_ the complicit TV stations) have jacked that up to almost 20 minutes per hour, and interstitialed us to death -- an ad overlay tonight covered up part of a Jeopardy question FFS! Same online -- there was a time when you'd see a top and maybe a bottom ad. Now you feel lucky to escape some websites without having to reboot.
(6) Bill Hicks speaks more than adequately for soccer players everywhere. Yes, there is another side of the story, but frankly they've had their chance for decades and always blown it, badly. No mic for them.
(7) FWIW, slashdot's subscription rate ($10 for 1,000 ad-free pages) is reasonable to me. But offers me nothing I don't already have. I emailed Malda about it and suggested things like allowing more than 100 comments max on a page for subscribers. Apparently this is possible for some other configuration of/. than the one I prefer (all comments displayed, and nested). Sale lost.
(8) If you want to succeed with a product, you have to make people want it, rather than ram it down their throats. This is what Bill Hicks was ever-so-politely pointing out.
(9) Good day to you, A/C. May I suggest a DVD rental of Anger Management?
By the way, if anyone here is in marketing or advertising...kill yourself. Thank you. Just planting seeds, planting seeds is all I'm doing. No joke here, really. Seriously, kill yourself, you have no rationalisation for what you do, you are Satan's little helpers. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now. Now, back to the show. Seriously, I know the marketing people: 'There's gonna be a joke comin' up.' There's no fuckin' joke. Suck a tail pipe, hang yourself...borrow a pistol from an NRA buddy, do something...rid the world of your evil fuckin' presence.
- Bill Hicks
The planet is tidally locked. Just stay on the dark side of the planet. The equilibrium temperature there is 59F -- not bad at all.
This star-facing side has a temperature of about 2600 degrees Kelvin (4220 degrees Fahrenheit). That's infernally hothot enough to vaporize rocks. The global average temperature of Earth's surface, in contrast, is only about 288 degrees Kelvin (59 degrees Fahrenheit).
Gear the punishment to sales. For example, in Europe the traffic fines are related to the person's income. So the head of Nokia got a speeding ticket for 12 million dollars.
In this case estimate how many sales were affected by this lie, and make the fine equal to the estimated profit on those sales. Then this type of problem would never happen again.
Wait, never mind, I forgot we are talking about a company based in the United States of Corruption.
Slashdot Mirror
Try an engineer's perspective here, not just the pure science one. A geer would say:
"When we add the Dark Matter fudge factor, our equations tend to get better, and we haven't found many (if any) equations that break in major bad ways because of it so, we will build our next bridge using this fudge factor and be confident it will be the best inter-galactic bridge built in 2009."
To see what engineers have to deal with on a daily basis, have a look at any of the links off of this page: lmnoeng.com. All looks very civilized and mathematical until you look further down each sub-page and see how conditional & fractional & empirical it all is. But it is the best we have and we manage to build with it. It is very obvious to geers that these are not final exact equations. These are just answers that work, and we work 'em.
Whitehorse is the capital of the Yukon territory, that borders the northern part of British Columbia and borders the eastern part of Alaska. [map]
Wiki doesn't mention the lack of a throttle as the reason for low CO, but rather that diesel fuel is burned with excess air. The phrase "50% lean of stoichiometric" satisfied the chem eng in me more than "no throttle" but I would love it if you could elaborate on your explanation.
Except that the free pdf link does not resolve...
The winning excavator from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Massachusetts lifted 500 kilograms within the allotted time.
[The article lists all weights in kilograms]
I made sure the music my kids had available to them growing up was my favorite music. I didn't want to listen to crap in the house. I set them up with their own fave lists that started off being my fave lists, and they could delete whatever they wanted. Sure once they hit mid-teens they started to diverge, but it made for some harmonic years :-).
So yeah, kids like their parents' music. And I liked my dad's music -- of course he was an original rocker at a time when other parents were buzz cut straights. I heard Ummagumma and Echoes a hundred times each before DSOTM hit vinyl.
I found it a rather profound show and watched the DVD several times in a row. Note that the 2005 BBC version (on YouTube) is quite inferior to the 2006 WGBH/Nova one I managed to find on de.sevenload.com. Here are the 6 parts, TinyURL'd: 1 2 3 4 5 6.
Linus updated his SSD post 5 months later and in the follow-up mentioned, among other things, an AnandTech article he liked at least parts of.
I hate bloat but are there performance issues with modern PCs for average users? Vista superfetching apps so they load quicker is a benefit for most people. Vista not needing to reboot as often after updates is also a benefit. Vista being a bit slower on head-to-head challenges is not going to be noticed by most people.
Dumping on Vista for a moderate overall performance drop is not going to get Joe Average on your side. Jane VideoEncoder and Connie CopyQueen will notice, but do not represent a sizeable part of the market.
Personally I am most bothered by Vista/7's Big Brother moves (protected video path), stupid interface changes and that brain dead "upgrade" of file moving/copying. But looking at what I just typed, I still don't think the average user is ever going to notice/bump into any of these limits/downgrades.
Time to rethink how we critique Windows.
I think "casual gamer" means someone who can take it or leave it. I put myself in this category -- when I play it is because I happen to have a few hours up to a few tens of hours spread across a few days. Then three months go by before I again casually game.
Hardcore gamer = borderline addict. No need to explain this category to slashdotters.
Social gamer = not really a gamer, but finds that through games they can interact with people. Would be easily pleased by a wide variety of games, I imagine. Also with chatting in IM/chat rooms.
2 - Incredibly packed places with Vegas-style machines, but with small silver balls that rush though mazes.
They are Pachinko parlors. Think of the earliest pinball machines, before bumpers and flippers, tilted vertical. No skill involved (like our slots).
That sample was remarkably inaudible, and I'm someone who is more than happy with low quality audio and regularly down samples stuff to 32kbps.
This was my first thought -- would all that high frequency sound annoy pets?
Isn't it obvious that global control freaks are playing us off one country against another (who will riot first), one person against another (who will report the other first), one belief against another (who will start a holy war first)?
And if anyone makes too big a fuss, they don't get version 1 of the latest subjugation idea, but their tax rate and bailouts go up one notch, while their government handouts drops one notch.
The counterpoint to this is that "the cobbler's children have no shoes". In this case, the Washington big boys could care less about local roads while they are trying to bring back billion contracts to their home states.
Many moons ago there was a true story about some group of people that used short brooms to sweep. These brooms forced them to stoop and thus caused numerous health problems. Some humanitarian type from the west saw a solution and got them to use longer brooms.
So instead, imagine our two salesmen entering this situation, trying to sell long brooms. One sees no opportunity as "They don't use long brooms". The other sees nothing but opportunity as "They don't use long brooms!"
I'm also happy to cease this discussion because you ignore most of what I say with "this conversation keeps getting deflected all over the place".
/. is technical enough to figure it out. Especially if Slashdot (represented by you, an A/C, at the moment) takes a less adversarial approach. But instead we have Slashdot (represented by you, an A/C, at the moment) arguing with a customer, instead of remembering the customer is ALWAYS right.
/. And what happens? Nothing. They don't have a big enough voice. Slashdot is abusing their one-sided conversation with their readers by (1) ignoring things they could do to improve the reader experience, and (2) howling at the moon as you are doing to me in this sub-thread.
You ignore alternate revenue models (like a pay-for product that offers more features) and then whine that I'm not hyper-focused on your dear little advertising-supported web site.
You trivialize my web site, without acknowledging my point that I was making about it -- that I serve content without needing to make an ad-buck from them. For that matter I could publish to only those who paid to subscribe. Or I could stop publishing. Many solutions are possible. Whining about people who don't follow your view of the world is childish.
and that you are cherry-picking single quotes to quibble with rather than addressing the whole argument
Actually that is my point. Look at my second to last comment. I made a 9 point comment and got one or two points of reply. In my last comment you responded to my first line and my last line only. Pottle - kettle, etc.
As to people bypassing shareware programs, yes they do this and it can be an arms race. But it seems like Microsoft figured it out with XP. I think
And by the way, what I posted isn't an argument. Bill Hicks is a comedian. He naturally gets the biggest laugh taking things to extreme. But his fundamental point speaks directly to the topic of this thread -- people don't want ads. Hicks is expressing some of the anger that people justifiably feel when advertisers take advantage of them, lie to them like Oracle did recently, won't shut off the ads in the middle of Jeopardy, market shamelessly to children, and on and on and on for years and decades.
Hicks vented. He had a platform to voice frustrations. Most consumers do not have this.
Closer to home, many (most?) slashdotters do not like Slashdot 2.0. They voice it in comments, they voice it in their SIGs, they no doubt send emails to the head honchos at
I think you are after some sort of theoretical victory -- "If I can just get this guy to admit that he is the man too then I will have won". This is so far from the point that it makes me laugh and want to say, once again, lighten up. Or change YOUR thinking -- you're not a tree. Models change. The net started with no ads, moved to extreme ads and it is time to throttle it back again to value ads -- marketing your feature & benefits in ad-speak.
Lose the dogmatic "You must view our ads or pay us for what WE perceive is a benefit" mentality, man. It will get you nowhere, I can guarantee you that.
Here, look, I will formally end this thread. I surrender. You are right. You and I are both the man. You win this battle.
And Slashdot is losing the war. Because they can't stop thinking of it as a war, apparently.
A great long post. Lots of bullet points. Paragraph upon paragraph. In this case the moderation says it all: 1.
It's dead, Jim.
Ok, a couple more thoughts.
...The /. content model allows visitors to choose between three options: pay for the content we bring you by viewing ads, pay for the content by subscribing, or be a parasite who merely shifts their costs onto someone else.
/. content model HOPES visitors will view ads or pay to not view them. And I hope for whirled peas. There is no allow -- people can come and more importantly go any time they please. You have to sell people to keep them coming back.
No, the
FWIW I think slashdot's ads are in the reasonable category, both the amount, content and size of them but you need to think shareware authors to understand this. I have registered a number of programs to get benefits I couldn't get otherwise. For example, I love xReminder Pro, the trial version allowed only 5 reminders total (I now have 240) and the registration cost of $20 lifetime was reasonable so I registered the product and plug it periodically. I did the same with Eudora and have even bought a few upgrades to that product. Money for value, it's how the world goes round. You can rail against it but it will be to no avail.
* The minuscule portion of people who are community exemplars and are absolved from ads is not even remotely germane to a conversation about content revenue models.
Did you really want to dump on the community exemplars, making them seem worthless? They provide a value, and get rewarded. Period.
I have to go to work in 2 minutes but I would like to try to respond a bit now.
/. of that).
you decline to participate in it because you want more benefits
No. Because I want a benefit.
Look, I'm also in the content business. I publish weekdaily to 6200 people. And I don't charge or gain a single penny from it. I accept that. Such is the Internet. But I have a family with hungry bellies and I can rarely afford to be charitable outside of my home. Sorry. The thing I was after would be trivial for slashdot to do -- provide more comments on a page if people want them -- i.e. settable in preferences but defaulting to 50 or 100. But a shot gun approach won't get me to sign up (not that I am accusing
As to my analogy, the field(s) I had/have in mind are not someone's commercial fields. Mines are a third world thing. These people have next to nothing, and mines make that closer to nothing at all when they can't cross a field to get from A to B. In my analogy, the mines shouldn't be there, period. And in much of the world, ads shouldn't be there period -- example, the school system.
Take care and I may reply further if I get a chance.
(1) Like most slashdotters, I have configured my machine to not show ads. So no I am not complicit.
/. than the one I prefer (all comments displayed, and nested). Sale lost.
(2) Slashdot is not like most "ad-supported websites". For one thing, unlike most sites, people can and do subscribe to Slashdot to both support it and avoid ads.
(3) For another, people can and do get absolved from ads by none other than slashdot itself. Apparently you are not one of those "thanked for making slashdot great" or you would have acknowledge this possibility.
(4) Analogy time. Advertisers are like defense contractors with mines to peddle. Viewers are like children wanting to play soccer on that big open field while keeping both legs intact. The two sides, you see, are at odds. Now these defense contractors they _will_ sell their mines. And viewers _will_ lose as a result. But a fair number of people, mostly soccer ball players and wannabes, are not happy with the arrangement.
(5) Advertisers have LONG abused their privileges. Given a chance to run their ads at the same volume as TV shows, they crank up the volume. Allowed 5 or 10 minutes of ad time per hour, they (the advertisers _and_ the complicit TV stations) have jacked that up to almost 20 minutes per hour, and interstitialed us to death -- an ad overlay tonight covered up part of a Jeopardy question FFS! Same online -- there was a time when you'd see a top and maybe a bottom ad. Now you feel lucky to escape some websites without having to reboot.
(6) Bill Hicks speaks more than adequately for soccer players everywhere. Yes, there is another side of the story, but frankly they've had their chance for decades and always blown it, badly. No mic for them.
(7) FWIW, slashdot's subscription rate ($10 for 1,000 ad-free pages) is reasonable to me. But offers me nothing I don't already have. I emailed Malda about it and suggested things like allowing more than 100 comments max on a page for subscribers. Apparently this is possible for some other configuration of
(8) If you want to succeed with a product, you have to make people want it, rather than ram it down their throats. This is what Bill Hicks was ever-so-politely pointing out.
(9) Good day to you, A/C. May I suggest a DVD rental of Anger Management?
By the way, if anyone here is in marketing or advertising...kill yourself. Thank you. Just planting seeds, planting seeds is all I'm doing. No joke here, really. Seriously, kill yourself, you have no rationalisation for what you do, you are Satan's little helpers. Kill yourself, kill yourself, kill yourself now. Now, back to the show. Seriously, I know the marketing people: 'There's gonna be a joke comin' up.' There's no fuckin' joke. Suck a tail pipe, hang yourself...borrow a pistol from an NRA buddy, do something...rid the world of your evil fuckin' presence.
- Bill Hicks
Since when are 'mph' S.I. units? I think you were going for 300,000,000 m/s .
Gear the punishment to sales. For example, in Europe the traffic fines are related to the person's income. So the head of Nokia got a speeding ticket for 12 million dollars.
In this case estimate how many sales were affected by this lie, and make the fine equal to the estimated profit on those sales. Then this type of problem would never happen again.
Wait, never mind, I forgot we are talking about a company based in the United States of Corruption.