Like idle time... I expect that most people will stress their CPU's much more heavily than their GPU's. Productivity software, music playback, background threads checking email, instant messages, etc. all require more CPU than GPU, whereas games, photo and video editing are probably the only mainstream apps with much of a GPU need. Take into consideration multi-tasking wherein you've got active apps that aren't displaying anything, and it becomes even clearer that the CPU is pulling a lot more weight than the GPU. I don't dispute that in a head-to-head folding race the GPU may still come out ahead, but it's got a major jump-start in the idle-time department.
1. Effectively, sailboats can go "straight into the wind" by zigzagging (tacking). Unfortunately, this doesn't work so well in narrow channels (e.g. rivers). In this regard, the solar ship would have an edge, particularly on heavily used rivers.
2. As many people here have pointed out, sailboats have been around for a very long time, meaning that we've had a lot of time to improve their design and construction. If the first generation of a solar ship can be competitive with current generation sailboats, I think that this bodes well for the solar ship in the long haul.
3. Owing to the enormous forces involved in propelling a large ship using wind, the design, construction and operation of sailing vessels can be quite expensive. Half a million for a boat that can cross the Atlantic doesn't seem so bad, especially for a first-generation custom-built effort. With large scale production, I would expect to see prices come down.
4. The masts, sails and standing rigging of a sailing vessel seem incompatible with modern top-loading cargo facilities, whereas I can imagine that a solar boat could be designed for compatibility with existing port equipment.
5. Although batteries weigh a lot, so does fuel. And, unlike cars and trucks driving cross-country, ships crossing an ocean don't have the luxury of refueling, so they have to carry it all with them. On a solar-powered ship, you just need enough battery capacity to get you through cloudy patches.
I'm not 100% convinced it'll work, but the idea has merit.
Great work has been done on applications for all platforms, but the original poster was right in thinking that (s)he's wrong to look for real innovation on the desktop. The reason for this is that the desktop metaphor is out-of-date and doesn't work well in a networked world. Google Search, Google Mail, Google Earth/Maps, Flickr, del.icio.us, myspace, What these have in common (other than that they all use the network) is that they all use ways of categorizing and organization information that are optimized for their particular task and that have very little in common with the outdated folder/file structure used by desktop operatings systems. The "desktop" application that I use most often (on both Windows and Linux) is Firefox, ironically because it gets me off the desktop and into a world of truly innovative (and often intuitive) applications known as the world wide web. Apps like Google Desktop, Beagle and Spotlight are becoming increasingly popular because they're our main hope for breaking free of our desktops without abandoning the useful applications that still only run on our desktops and not on the web.
Where Linux falls down is not so much in its applications as in the platform itself - as long as desktop clones like KDE and GNOME continue to dominate Linux users' experience, anyone looking for truly innovative applications is going to continue to find only disappointment. Instead of continuing to bloat the desktop with meaningless (yes, meaningless) eye candy like XGL, we should focus our efforts on building a next-generation platform that combines the best aspects of the web with the usability and speed advantages of thick-client applications, using concepts like the semantic web and fine-grained data/metadata, peer-to-peer computing and today's solid database and search technology. That may mean starting with either KDE or GNOME, it may mean starting with Firefox or it may mean something different all together. With the right platform, the community of creative, adventurous and dedicated open-source application developers will very quickly start to produce truly innovative work that will leave Windows and OS X in the dust.
For some constituencies (especially bands), MySpace has become an integral part of their value chain.
Band posts performance dates and venues on MySpace
Potential music listener searches MySpace for what's going on tonight
Potential music listener finds a potentially interesting performance and checks out the band's MySpace pages to see if they're any good
Their demos sound good, so potential music listener goes out with 4 of his closest friends, each pays a $10 cover to get in, two of them buy a $15 CD and all five buy about $20 of liquor each, creating $180 in economic activity.
This makes for happy music fans, happy bands and happy club owners.
When MySpace goes down for 9 hours, steps 2 through 4 don't happen, and you end up making angry music fans, angry bands and angry club owners. With more than a million visitors per day, how many of these transactions do you think didn't happen last evening?
And... while I realize that the audience for MySpace is young, I still think that the outage notification was worded extremely unprofessionally and not at all apologetically. I don't care whether I'm 10, 20 or 50, I expect better from those with whom I deal regularly.
Re:screw that, how about load balancing first?
on
The MySpace Ecosystem
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'll second that. I've written an adapter that lets me search MySpace music listings from my desktop, but because MySpace doesn't have a public API (unlike Yahoo, Google and even Amazon) I have had to rely entirely on screenscraping. Because the information is so poorly organized, the adapter has to do a little link crawling to actually get a decent set of data to display in the search results. While I was testing the link crawling, the MySpace web server performed so poorly and timed out so consistently that I was afraid they had some sort of denial-of-service protection that was blocking my IP. Now that I've actually used the site for a week, I understand that this is just typical MySpace slowness. Ugh!
Every comment I've seen on this so far is missing the crucial point behind this legislation. The Copyright office is trying to address the fact that streaming media for profit is currently a tricky undertaking, since it's unclear when and what to pay copyright holders for the right to stream their music, let alone finding out who the copyright holders are in the first place. The key thing is that this is about the relationship between those streaming the content (distributors) and those who created it (artists), and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the end-user.
The really interesting part of this legislation is that it proposes to redefine digital streaming as a "performance". To understand what this means, it's useful to discuss a real-life example of performance and royalty from the theater:
When you go to see a performance of a play, you pay the theater company to get in the door. This has nothing to do with copyrights or royalties or any of that gobledygook, it's just you paying for the privilege of watching that performance. You may pay on a per-performance basis or, if you're a big fan, get a subscription. Neither of these schemes is governed by copyright law, nor does it need to be. Where copyright comes in is that in order for the theater company to perform a work, they need to pay royalties to the playwright. In the theater world, this is fairly straightforward because you can go to one of a handful of licensing agencies (such as Dramatists Play Service) to license the work, rather than having to track down the individual copyright holder.
This legislation appears to be attempting to do something similar for online music delivery. In other words, the idea would be that when you listen to streamed music online, what the music service chooses to charge you for that "performance" is up to them. They may charge per play, on a subscription basis, or whatever. This legislation attempts to set up a regime for how that music service can easily do due diligence to make sure that fair royalties are being paid to the artist without actually having to individually negotiate with each artist or record company.
Without seeing the text of the bill, I wouldn't be able to guess whether or not the Copyright Office is going about this in a smart way, but it seems pretty clear that this is not about restricting your right to listen to music you've already purchased (in fact, the cited text makes clear that existing physical forms of distribution should be left alone), but rather about setting up a regime that makes it both easy (for the distributor) and fair (to the artist) to redistribute music digitally. One of the things that's always bugged me about ITunes and similar services is that they don't have many of the small-time artists that I like, which is largely due to the lack of a collective bargaining/blanket licensing regime. Legislation like this could solve that problem and greatly increase the diversity of music that's available for legitimate online consumption.
Again, the lynchpin here is the idea of defining streamed music as a performance. Since what you're streaming is really just a recording of a previous performance (by the artist), it seems that calling the streaming of that performance a performance is a leap that may or may not work. From my perspective, we shouldn't be trying to kill this legistlation, just trying to make sure it's not written in a way that actually impacts fair use or that hurts artists, which will require a much more nuanced understanding than this knee-jerk Slashdot FUD.
I think everyone sees the "crap" software out there because it's all "crap" to a certain extent.
Usability is definitely not a problem specific to OSS, but it's something that OSS hasn't helped. The author's post uses Windows as the standard of usability that the Linux desktop needs to match. From the work I see in both GNOME and KDE, it's clear that Windows (with a bit of Mac OS X) is also the standard for which the OSS community is aiming. The problem with this is that the Windows/Desktop metaphor probably outlived its usefulness a long time ago. A quick read of Jef Raskin's book The Humane Interface may convince you of that.
If OSS is going to be successful with normal end-users, it needs to aim higher. Let's not ape Windows and Mac, let's come up with something genuinely new and powerful. Let's now spend our time on building yet another window manager, yet another media player, yet another word processor or yet more eye-candy (XGL anyone?). The academic community has been doing lots of exciting research into usability for a long time (check out the University of Maryland's HCIL). We need to stop pouring effort into commodity software and outmoded interaction metaphors and figure out how to use the power of the OSS development model to bring these ideas from academia into the mainstream.
I think that efforts like the Linux Standard Base are a step in the right direction, but a part of me wants to throw out everything but the lowest-level graphics routines and start fresh, and with the amount of vested interests in an effort like the LSB, that's going to be impossible.
Slashdot Mirror
Like idle time ... I expect that most people will stress their CPU's much more heavily than their GPU's. Productivity software, music playback, background threads checking email, instant messages, etc. all require more CPU than GPU, whereas games, photo and video editing are probably the only mainstream apps with much of a GPU need. Take into consideration multi-tasking wherein you've got active apps that aren't displaying anything, and it becomes even clearer that the CPU is pulling a lot more weight than the GPU. I don't dispute that in a head-to-head folding race the GPU may still come out ahead, but it's got a major jump-start in the idle-time department.
1. Effectively, sailboats can go "straight into the wind" by zigzagging (tacking). Unfortunately, this doesn't work so well in narrow channels (e.g. rivers). In this regard, the solar ship would have an edge, particularly on heavily used rivers.
2. As many people here have pointed out, sailboats have been around for a very long time, meaning that we've had a lot of time to improve their design and construction. If the first generation of a solar ship can be competitive with current generation sailboats, I think that this bodes well for the solar ship in the long haul.
3. Owing to the enormous forces involved in propelling a large ship using wind, the design, construction and operation of sailing vessels can be quite expensive. Half a million for a boat that can cross the Atlantic doesn't seem so bad, especially for a first-generation custom-built effort. With large scale production, I would expect to see prices come down.
4. The masts, sails and standing rigging of a sailing vessel seem incompatible with modern top-loading cargo facilities, whereas I can imagine that a solar boat could be designed for compatibility with existing port equipment.
5. Although batteries weigh a lot, so does fuel. And, unlike cars and trucks driving cross-country, ships crossing an ocean don't have the luxury of refueling, so they have to carry it all with them. On a solar-powered ship, you just need enough battery capacity to get you through cloudy patches.
I'm not 100% convinced it'll work, but the idea has merit.
Great work has been done on applications for all platforms, but the original poster was right in thinking that (s)he's wrong to look for real innovation on the desktop. The reason for this is that the desktop metaphor is out-of-date and doesn't work well in a networked world. Google Search, Google Mail, Google Earth/Maps, Flickr, del.icio.us, myspace, What these have in common (other than that they all use the network) is that they all use ways of categorizing and organization information that are optimized for their particular task and that have very little in common with the outdated folder/file structure used by desktop operatings systems. The "desktop" application that I use most often (on both Windows and Linux) is Firefox, ironically because it gets me off the desktop and into a world of truly innovative (and often intuitive) applications known as the world wide web. Apps like Google Desktop, Beagle and Spotlight are becoming increasingly popular because they're our main hope for breaking free of our desktops without abandoning the useful applications that still only run on our desktops and not on the web.
Where Linux falls down is not so much in its applications as in the platform itself - as long as desktop clones like KDE and GNOME continue to dominate Linux users' experience, anyone looking for truly innovative applications is going to continue to find only disappointment. Instead of continuing to bloat the desktop with meaningless (yes, meaningless) eye candy like XGL, we should focus our efforts on building a next-generation platform that combines the best aspects of the web with the usability and speed advantages of thick-client applications, using concepts like the semantic web and fine-grained data/metadata, peer-to-peer computing and today's solid database and search technology. That may mean starting with either KDE or GNOME, it may mean starting with Firefox or it may mean something different all together. With the right platform, the community of creative, adventurous and dedicated open-source application developers will very quickly start to produce truly innovative work that will leave Windows and OS X in the dust.
- Band posts performance dates and venues on MySpace
- Potential music listener searches MySpace for what's going on tonight
- Potential music listener finds a potentially interesting performance and checks out the band's MySpace pages to see if they're any good
- Their demos sound good, so potential music listener goes out with 4 of his closest friends, each pays a $10 cover to get in, two of them buy a $15 CD and all five buy about $20 of liquor each, creating $180 in economic activity.
This makes for happy music fans, happy bands and happy club owners.When MySpace goes down for 9 hours, steps 2 through 4 don't happen, and you end up making angry music fans, angry bands and angry club owners. With more than a million visitors per day, how many of these transactions do you think didn't happen last evening?
And
I'll second that. I've written an adapter that lets me search MySpace music listings from my desktop, but because MySpace doesn't have a public API (unlike Yahoo, Google and even Amazon) I have had to rely entirely on screenscraping. Because the information is so poorly organized, the adapter has to do a little link crawling to actually get a decent set of data to display in the search results. While I was testing the link crawling, the MySpace web server performed so poorly and timed out so consistently that I was afraid they had some sort of denial-of-service protection that was blocking my IP. Now that I've actually used the site for a week, I understand that this is just typical MySpace slowness. Ugh!
Every comment I've seen on this so far is missing the crucial point behind this legislation. The Copyright office is trying to address the fact that streaming media for profit is currently a tricky undertaking, since it's unclear when and what to pay copyright holders for the right to stream their music, let alone finding out who the copyright holders are in the first place. The key thing is that this is about the relationship between those streaming the content (distributors) and those who created it (artists), and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the end-user.
The really interesting part of this legislation is that it proposes to redefine digital streaming as a "performance". To understand what this means, it's useful to discuss a real-life example of performance and royalty from the theater:
When you go to see a performance of a play, you pay the theater company to get in the door. This has nothing to do with copyrights or royalties or any of that gobledygook, it's just you paying for the privilege of watching that performance. You may pay on a per-performance basis or, if you're a big fan, get a subscription. Neither of these schemes is governed by copyright law, nor does it need to be. Where copyright comes in is that in order for the theater company to perform a work, they need to pay royalties to the playwright. In the theater world, this is fairly straightforward because you can go to one of a handful of licensing agencies (such as Dramatists Play Service) to license the work, rather than having to track down the individual copyright holder.
This legislation appears to be attempting to do something similar for online music delivery. In other words, the idea would be that when you listen to streamed music online, what the music service chooses to charge you for that "performance" is up to them. They may charge per play, on a subscription basis, or whatever. This legislation attempts to set up a regime for how that music service can easily do due diligence to make sure that fair royalties are being paid to the artist without actually having to individually negotiate with each artist or record company.
Without seeing the text of the bill, I wouldn't be able to guess whether or not the Copyright Office is going about this in a smart way, but it seems pretty clear that this is not about restricting your right to listen to music you've already purchased (in fact, the cited text makes clear that existing physical forms of distribution should be left alone), but rather about setting up a regime that makes it both easy (for the distributor) and fair (to the artist) to redistribute music digitally. One of the things that's always bugged me about ITunes and similar services is that they don't have many of the small-time artists that I like, which is largely due to the lack of a collective bargaining/blanket licensing regime. Legislation like this could solve that problem and greatly increase the diversity of music that's available for legitimate online consumption.
Again, the lynchpin here is the idea of defining streamed music as a performance. Since what you're streaming is really just a recording of a previous performance (by the artist), it seems that calling the streaming of that performance a performance is a leap that may or may not work. From my perspective, we shouldn't be trying to kill this legistlation, just trying to make sure it's not written in a way that actually impacts fair use or that hurts artists, which will require a much more nuanced understanding than this knee-jerk Slashdot FUD.
I think everyone sees the "crap" software out there because it's all "crap" to a certain extent.
Usability is definitely not a problem specific to OSS, but it's something that OSS hasn't helped. The author's post uses Windows as the standard of usability that the Linux desktop needs to match. From the work I see in both GNOME and KDE, it's clear that Windows (with a bit of Mac OS X) is also the standard for which the OSS community is aiming. The problem with this is that the Windows/Desktop metaphor probably outlived its usefulness a long time ago. A quick read of Jef Raskin's book The Humane Interface may convince you of that.
If OSS is going to be successful with normal end-users, it needs to aim higher. Let's not ape Windows and Mac, let's come up with something genuinely new and powerful. Let's now spend our time on building yet another window manager, yet another media player, yet another word processor or yet more eye-candy (XGL anyone?). The academic community has been doing lots of exciting research into usability for a long time (check out the University of Maryland's HCIL). We need to stop pouring effort into commodity software and outmoded interaction metaphors and figure out how to use the power of the OSS development model to bring these ideas from academia into the mainstream.
I think that efforts like the Linux Standard Base are a step in the right direction, but a part of me wants to throw out everything but the lowest-level graphics routines and start fresh, and with the amount of vested interests in an effort like the LSB, that's going to be impossible.