The net cost to publishers would rise because they would not be able to reliably recover as much of their costs,
What costs? The only _real_ costs is the sustenance of the artists. The problem with the publishing industry is that they no longer have a function. In the days when the capital required to distribute a work was significant or the access to the vehicle of advertising (like radio for music) was limited then there was a purpose for a distributor (and see how this is still true for books because they still require the capital of the printing process but even then vainity publishing costs have come down and electronic publishing os free, essentially). That time is gone. The industry of digital media distribution is dead and it just doesn't know it yet.
so the publication of works would become increasingly rarer. Although any material may be freely shared, not all of it would necessarily be easy to find.
Even if I were to concede your first point about decreasing recovery of publication costs, this assertion just doesn't follow. Just because "publishers" cant make a buck it doesn't follow that less work is produced, just that publishers have no role to play in the process.
Fans of artists or authors of obscure works would be entirely out of luck.
An even more absurd suggestion. It is the obscure works are the ones gaining the most from the new technology the publishers have always argued (certainly by theri actions of not their words) that tyhey needed the mass market to fund the "unpopular" works and so the always ignore the obscure as much as they can.
I may well have just got trolled but I couldn't let a +4 insightful load like this, troll or otherwise go unchallenged.
Commodity software is increasing. I like to think of the issue in terms of the barrier to entry for "developing" solutions to problems. As it stands now, tools (frameworks?) like the Microsoft Backoffice suite and.NET, even Java have lowered the barrier to entry for developing solutions to 80% of "softwqre problems" or perhaps have lowered the barrier to developing solutions that solve 80% of a given problem. As the commoditisation continues. it will be "bigger chunks" of the problem space that will become commoditised so that, for example, in 10 years time the "NewCo GUI Magic (TM)" will slice and dice an interface to your application that is just perfect, or to expand my example above will slice and dice and interface to 80% of your application that is just perfect.
What is interesting to me is that the real work exists in the other 20%. The other 20% that is the premium part of the industry. Either because it is a luxury that you have a hand crafted interface (thing Rolls Royce versus Toyota) or because you happen to care about the 20% that the commodity cannot handle, your problem is the hard 20% or you need the hard 20% of the problem solved. We find exactly this situation today, and I think it will continue, the only difference will be where one draws the lines about where the 20% exists, or the actual percentage itself.
And you should wear your zealotry with pride. Some of the best innovations our company has made to products have been because of specific individuals zealous introduction of new ideas / technologies to the systems (not just technical, but process as well). Zealotry is the driving force of this industry and Fanboys like your colleagues are the mindless sheep that will lie crsuhed beneath our feet as we make the world the shape we want. Oops, did that come out a little harsh?
Well, anyone who knows a prime from a hole in the ground would choose (e), but the correct answer was (f), 8. And why? Because it is the only "symmetrical" number, as printed on the page!
And even worse that answer isn't right either. Even assuming that the 8 was type faced nicely, it still has vertical and horizontal reflection symmetry and rotational symmetry order 2. 10 has horizontal reflection symmetry so it is all just a crock
Much like a hashing algorithm (and the pigeonhole principle) if two items can hash to the same spot, then the algorithm is broken; or in this instance two people look alike and the computer can't tell them apart.
Er, actually no. Hashing two templates to the same key is not evidence of a broken algorithm as long as some of a whole range of other factors can be used to "work" the collision. In particular you want the algorithm to return an even distribution accross the key space and even more particularly yuou do not want similar faces to hash to similar keys, that is a sign of a potentially broken algorithm. The trade off is keyspace size versus computational complexity (and the range of factors like non stochastic key mapping and keyspace coverage). So for example if you hash the faced independent of skin colour, and eye colour (not the best but what the hey) then when you got the collision you could store those metrics with the template to allow for the more detailed comparison to be performed. Thus if dissimialr faces hash to the same key, you could easily have a factor of ten in the keyspace and still easily identify different faces.
Having said that, the discovery of the hashing process is where the difficulty lies and that ain't my area.
I agree that this phenomenon of simple gaming is increasing but I think it is only because of the constraints of the technology. The only games available on the bus are the ones in my phone (or previously in my Pilot PDA) and both are just timewasters because there is nothing better. I don't want to carry a book around with me all the time and I do not yet have a suitable "book" presence in my phone and so I can't read (which would probably be my preference) so I play a few minutes of tetris or the qix clone on my T68 (and is not that just a sucky phone) for the 15 minutes that my night bus home takes.
If I had a non intrusive way of playing quake I would certainly rather be doing that, but the technology is not yet there. When it is then the story will be "People miss more and more bus stops as immersive games go on the commute" or the like.
Au contraire. This encapsulates eveything about why the gubmint should view software as a public good and spend, oh i don't know, 10% of that figure to make _every single piece of free software they want _perfect_ for the task, and thus perfect for the _entire_ country. That kind of investment makes perfect sense. Indeed on any basis I would argue that the decision as puiblicised is verging on the criminal misuse of money.
I too started receiving such spams all of a sudden, different domain, different country. I wondered if some kind of members list had been compromised or if one of the spam lists had started "guessing" mail addresses from some of the "larger" domains. In the same way that bigpond is the dominant email domain in Australia, so too is mine in the UK.
I guess one test would be to create a new email address that is not name related and see how long before the spam arrives.
"Customers know exactly what they want even if it may not be exactly what we think they need, and that's a big difference"
The hell they do! Some customers do know what they want, I'll grant you, but many (most?) have _no_ idea what they want. The proof of this is that they will often express their wants in a pseudo design paradigm. That is not what they want. The problem is they have no idea how to express what they want and only marginally more idea of how to question themselves to even try and clarify it in their own minds before expressing it.
My favourite example of this occurs time and time again. Customers will always say that they want a "popup" with this event happens or that event happens, but I say to them, you need a _REALLY_ good reason to interrupt the workflow of a user and I don't think that you really want to interrupt the workflow for that event. But no, no, a popup is the requirement and so we implement the popup (usually with the non popup solution as well) and when their users complain about the popup and they come back to use asking for the CR we just point out the non popup option (if we don't point it out at the start). I can think of at least four different customers where that exact process has taken place.
What you have to remember, is that in many circumstances, customers are buying the expertise of the software vendor and the benefit of all the lessons learnt from previous projects if not the software itself. That expertise is valuable (in my opinion the only real value of the vendor) and as such it should be used.
As for implementing broken business practice because of history, you should always question every practice you implement. Again a classic example, from securities trading, many stock exchanges have the idea of a lot size, the smallest parcel of shares that can be traded automatically. These lot sizes are an artefact of physical clearing and settlement processes when you actually had to find certificates to total the amount of any given trade. To do so down to the ones and twos was a nightmare. In an electronic system, such a business practice is irrelevant since there are no certificates to be allocated thus it is painful at best and downright inefficient regardless.
"after independently inventing the wheel, they used it for children's toys exclusively"
Indeed. I also love the idea that the ancient greeks had a childrens toy (or at least a novelty) that was essentially a steam engine. If we have gone from feudal agrarian society to the moon since we "discovered" the steam engine, imagine how far we will have gone in an extra 2 thousand years (yeah yeah, smart alecs, extinct, I know, very funny) and imagine if it had been the ancient greeks who were doing the going. Remarkable.
The small bit of randomness that can have a surprise effect.
The idea of the randomness of human error is appropriate only if "what goes around comes around". I have watched a bit of baseball in my time (not much, maybe 50 games) and I have _never_ seen a batter "self call" a strike when they were just plain beaten by a strike pitch called a ball (and they could easily do this). Further, it is really tough for a pitcher to compensate for a pitch called a strike that they know was a ball. I mean you can't just throw a strike because the cost of knowing a strike is coming is too high. So, in baseball at least, the only way that "what goes around comes around" can work is if on average the number of balls called strikes compares with the number of strikes called balls (and arguably with a 25% or 33% premium given that balls are less valueable than strikes since you get four of them). I have no real feel for whether this is true or not, but I suspect that it is not true and that there is a natural bias from specific umpires one way or another. In which case, it comes down to does their bias occur evenly accross teams. This is where the redemption lies, becuase here I think it is mostly true that the errors the umpires make are evenly distributed accross the teams, in MLB at least.
When you get problems is when this is not true. In cricket for example, when there used to be "home town" umpires in international matches there was arguably a big problem. It has been said that at this time, certain high profile batsmen were _never_ given out LBW (the most subjective of the methods of getting out) on home turf. Now that is a big problem. Thankfully that problem is reduced now, but it is important to use the kind of analysis that these systems provide to ensure that the problem does not recurr.
While we're at it, the two umpiring issues that really shit me are (1) the penalty given to a side when they are defending (or in their own half) that the umpire would never give to a side attacking the opponents line/goal because they haven't got the balls to make the game changing call and (2) the gutless get square penalty that an umpire will make to "correct" a mistake they made earlier, but they make the call in a much less "dangerous" part of the field or stage of the game. The best umpires wear their mistakes as they happen and the _great_ umpires will make the tough call. I remember the world cup (soccer) where some ref gave a game winning penalty to the underdog side in the nth minute of injury time at the end of the game. It was a great call and all to easy not to make at sucha critical moment. The biggest redemption of using machines to adjudicate is that they should be immune to these "external" pressures when making a call.
I actually had a reference to that unfortunate link (in Oz the problem is sanitary towels not tampons) but took it out since, yeah, good names sometimes suffer by the pre existing lie of the land:-)
South Australia has a history of legal innovation. Indeed, beyond the issues of suffrage for which they are well known, the system of land registration known as Torrens Title has been exported widely. One of the most interesting aspects of this is the legal definition of open source that has been provided in the Act. I am sure that JMS would be disappointed with the phrase "open source" being the legally enshrined thing for which the government departments must make consideration. I too would prefer to find "Free Software" as the phrase, even "Software Libre", but the name concerns me little.
My question to the reading populace is are we happy with the definition? It is always difficult to get such things right and ammendments can always be made to refine things, but is the definition as it stands even adequate? I think it is adequate, in fact I would go further and think that as a generic description it is actually very good.
I am very flexible with the people who work for me. I don't clock watch them so if they need to leave early or start late from time to time I am pretty flexible. But if something needs to be done by Tuesday then I expect it to be done by Tuesday. If that means long hours for them, then I _expect_ it. That is the payback for the flexibility. Like your employers, I don't specify a project without resourcing it properly, and yet times are tough and so sometimes we do have to do things that we don't like just to make ends meet.
Most of the "projects" on which I work have a 12 - 18 month time frame and the stress through which we go in the closing three months of such a project, culminating in the horrible live date, are really nasty. But the sense of satisfaction at the end can be extremely rewarding.
Having said all that, this project will fail. I don't mean to be down on your team, but it is just not possible to work for the length of time that the schedule you have outlined demands. Your bosses probably understand this but will make a delivery to the client at the due time, regardless of it's quality and the final live date will slip whilst you fix the probelms resulting from the insanity of the preceeding 3 months. It really makes much more sense for the client to be made to understand this sooner rather than later.
It is absolutely correct for the state in Brazil to be doing this kind of thing. Even if specific Software libre tools are not quite the best tool for the job, by the very nature of them being used in government they will get better and the non tangible benefits of SL would tip any analysis on favour of SL
I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with javasript that would make it broken enough to suggest that it is a bad place to start.
It is with every machine you can think of. It has procedural aspects, some decent obect oriented features, yep, I reckon it just might work. Nice idea!
The motion picture companies have the right to charge what they want for a movie, after all how else are we going to get 200 million dollar blockbusters?
The hell they do. They are a natural monopoly provider of their material since they have stupid IP on their side. So given that they are a monopoly if they abuse that power to charge a non-economic price then that is an anti-trust or monopolies issue. The current pricing scheme of movie distributors is a crime. The fixing of retail price by wholesalers has been found to be illegal in most western jurisdictions for a _long_ time now. The way movie ticket prices work is pretty close.
As for how else do you get a 200 million dollar blockbuster, well first of all when the budget of the film stops being a corrollary to the size of the studios dicks, and they stop paying fsking actors 20M to star in a film, or if they, god forbid, had to constrain production costs like a real business then that number would quarter, but even if not, lets do the math...
Top, english language blockbuster, opens in US on 3600 screens spends four weeks getting a decent share of the cinema goers budget so lets say that on average these screens are 50% full and they show 4 sessions a day that is 3600 x 4 x 0.5 * 28, now for simplicities sake, lets say that is 200,000 full cinema sessions worth of people that means that each cinema session needs to get about 1000 bucks in order for the distributor to cover the cost of the film in the first four weeks in America alone!!!!! I woulod argue that the numbers above are pretty conservative, Matrix reloaded is currently trading at 130M in the first week or so. So the "blockbusters wouldn't exist" argument is just specious.
Frequent viewer miles - Standby viewings - Movie ticket scalping -
Last minute rushes for extremely low prices
All the ideas you mention except the last one will probably work, the last one might work as well however, the "easyjet" model is that no one who books after you will pay less than you and that is the incentive to book early and thus allow them to schedule accordingly. To be honest it is really very clever. I think it might just work in cinema, and I just wish that (a) I had the idea first and (b) I had ther money to fight the distributors to make it happen, 'cause this is a big shitfight waiting to happen and hopefully it will make the movie industry rationalise.
But the _REASON_ that most cinemas make their money from concession sales is that the distributors take up to 100% of _revenue_ from ticket sales, thats right, not 100% of profits but 100% of face value. (someone earleir said 90% but it is true that for something like Matrix, the cinema owner will get nothing from the ticket until about week 3 and they have to warrant that they will show it for N weeks. The whole thing is a complete farce (and a racket if one actually looks at it). And the classic side effect of this is the 2,000,000 screen opening of a crap film that we have started to see in the last few years. That is, a film that has tested badly but sounds interesting is opened on as many screens as they can get on weekend 1 (no reviews allowed beforehand) and then when everyone has seen it _and_ worked out how crap it is the distributor has still managed to get 2,000,000 x (3 or 4) screens worth of ticket sales in the first weekend, just criminal.
Stelios, is a bit of a rogue in some respects but more power to him. The movie industry is scared shitless that he will win and they will bo forced under competiition law to wholsesale their product at a fair price to the retailers, it may even be the case that their current pricing model is found to be illegal which would just make my day since I have hated it ever since I was "buying" films from the distributors for our student film club, and the distributirs used to whine about our ticketing prices since we were "affecting" their porofits by being cheap. It is jast a farce.
The cinema is a big lump of capital that is invested to show movies, even the multiplexes, the fact that they are forced into making money by extorting their customers with the price of popcorn and soft drink (or beer in Europe:-) is a feature of the criminal activity of the content creators. The ssoner it changes the better for everyone, including the movie industry since the stupid salaries and costs it currently endures would be vapourised by real competition.
The schism is coming. Once the consumers of advertising wake up to the scam, the ass is going to fall out of that market and $1M per episode just ain't gonna happen. In the mean time, I will watch what's on until it bores me and then I'll surf the net or download something from Gutenberg and read that.
Even further, I await the first pop-prog with the bollocks to just swap out a lead actor on a regular arbitrary basis. Indeed to actually script the thing so that there is no "lead" person on whom the identity of the show is formed. Even if the character remains the actor just changes. What do I care, I have never "got wet" (so to speak) over the specific lumps and lines of a given actor, and I am sure that those who do would just as happily do it over one leggy blonde/tall, dark and handsome as another.
I have absolutely no problem with media consolidation, my _only_ proviso is that it must be trivial to know who owns what. And the information must be available from the newspaper, magazine, radio station TV station I am watching. If it really gets that crap that noone really cares then the market is in the right place for competition and that is where the barriers to entry come in. These barriers wrt to the distribution of content are only getting lower. So "rock on" CC, blandify whatever you like, I await the second coming of the pirates.
Mate, everyone knows that you keep your money and car keys in your shoes or under your towel while you're at the beach, or at least bury it if you're paranoid...
I guess I have been travelling alone for too long, you learn to be very careful about contingency planning, or I must be uber paranoid since I tie my car key to the drawstring on my speedos (no special techie key for me) and keep my folding currency in my pocket and body bash to my hearts content without even worrying about those that would nick my stuff (I even keep a spare shirt and towel in the car).
Australia has been using plastic notes for years. These notes are much harder to forge they have a transparent section and a translucent dual sided motiff incorporated into the design to aid forgery identifcation. And that is just for starters, other benefits include that the notes last many times longer (and hence despite the higher cost to produce they save the treasury loads), they go through the wash just fine (and you can even have them in your board shorts whilst surfing without fear of being unable to buy a pie for lunch). They don't really tear (they do but its much harder to get started on the rip) and are generally much more durable. They look kinda weird even for Australian currency, and the one drawback is that IIRC they are a bit more difficult to handle if you are manipulating lots of cash manually.
Once again this sums up the whole problem with non-scientific research, and I do mean research in to non-scientific areas I mean research that just ignores the tenets of the scientific method.
A statistical analysis of correlation that has _zero_ predicitive value. Don't waste your time thinking about it.
Slashdot Mirror
The net cost to publishers would rise because they would not be able to reliably recover as much of their costs,
What costs? The only _real_ costs is the sustenance of the artists. The problem with the publishing industry is that they no longer have a function. In the days when the capital required to distribute a work was significant or the access to the vehicle of advertising (like radio for music) was limited then there was a purpose for a distributor (and see how this is still true for books because they still require the capital of the printing process but even then vainity publishing costs have come down and electronic publishing os free, essentially). That time is gone. The industry of digital media distribution is dead and it just doesn't know it yet.
so the publication of works would become increasingly rarer. Although any material may be freely shared, not all of it would necessarily be easy to find.
Even if I were to concede your first point about decreasing recovery of publication costs, this assertion just doesn't follow. Just because "publishers" cant make a buck it doesn't follow that less work is produced, just that publishers have no role to play in the process.
Fans of artists or authors of obscure works would be entirely out of luck.
An even more absurd suggestion. It is the obscure works are the ones gaining the most from the new technology the publishers have always argued (certainly by theri actions of not their words) that tyhey needed the mass market to fund the "unpopular" works and so the always ignore the obscure as much as they can.
I may well have just got trolled but I couldn't let a +4 insightful load like this, troll or otherwise go unchallenged.
Commodity software is increasing. I like to think of the issue in terms of the barrier to entry for "developing" solutions to problems. As it stands now, tools (frameworks?) like the Microsoft Backoffice suite and .NET, even Java have lowered the barrier to entry for developing solutions to 80% of "softwqre problems" or perhaps have lowered the barrier to developing solutions that solve 80% of a given problem. As the commoditisation continues. it will be "bigger chunks" of the problem space that will become commoditised so that, for example, in 10 years time the "NewCo GUI Magic (TM)" will slice and dice an interface to your application that is just perfect, or to expand my example above will slice and dice and interface to 80% of your application that is just perfect.
What is interesting to me is that the real work exists in the other 20%. The other 20% that is the premium part of the industry. Either because it is a luxury that you have a hand crafted interface (thing Rolls Royce versus Toyota) or because you happen to care about the 20% that the commodity cannot handle, your problem is the hard 20% or you need the hard 20% of the problem solved. We find exactly this situation today, and I think it will continue, the only difference will be where one draws the lines about where the 20% exists, or the actual percentage itself.
And you should wear your zealotry with pride. Some of the best innovations our company has made to products have been because of specific individuals zealous introduction of new ideas / technologies to the systems (not just technical, but process as well). Zealotry is the driving force of this industry and Fanboys like your colleagues are the mindless sheep that will lie crsuhed beneath our feet as we make the world the shape we want. Oops, did that come out a little harsh?
Well, anyone who knows a prime from a hole in the ground would choose (e), but the correct answer was (f), 8. And why? Because it is the only "symmetrical" number, as printed on the page!
And even worse that answer isn't right either. Even assuming that the 8 was type faced nicely, it still has vertical and horizontal reflection symmetry and rotational symmetry order 2. 10 has horizontal reflection symmetry so it is all just a crock
Much like a hashing algorithm (and the pigeonhole principle) if two items can hash to the same spot, then the algorithm is broken; or in this instance two people look alike and the computer can't tell them apart.
Er, actually no. Hashing two templates to the same key is not evidence of a broken algorithm as long as some of a whole range of other factors can be used to "work" the collision. In particular you want the algorithm to return an even distribution accross the key space and even more particularly yuou do not want similar faces to hash to similar keys, that is a sign of a potentially broken algorithm. The trade off is keyspace size versus computational complexity (and the range of factors like non stochastic key mapping and keyspace coverage). So for example if you hash the faced independent of skin colour, and eye colour (not the best but what the hey) then when you got the collision you could store those metrics with the template to allow for the more detailed comparison to be performed. Thus if dissimialr faces hash to the same key, you could easily have a factor of ten in the keyspace and still easily identify different faces.
Having said that, the discovery of the hashing process is where the difficulty lies and that ain't my area.
I agree that this phenomenon of simple gaming is increasing but I think it is only because of the constraints of the technology. The only games available on the bus are the ones in my phone (or previously in my Pilot PDA) and both are just timewasters because there is nothing better. I don't want to carry a book around with me all the time and I do not yet have a suitable "book" presence in my phone and so I can't read (which would probably be my preference) so I play a few minutes of tetris or the qix clone on my T68 (and is not that just a sucky phone) for the 15 minutes that my night bus home takes.
If I had a non intrusive way of playing quake I would certainly rather be doing that, but the technology is not yet there. When it is then the story will be "People miss more and more bus stops as immersive games go on the commute" or the like.
Au contraire. This encapsulates eveything about why the gubmint should view software as a public good and spend, oh i don't know, 10% of that figure to make _every single piece of free software they want _perfect_ for the task, and thus perfect for the _entire_ country. That kind of investment makes perfect sense. Indeed on any basis I would argue that the decision as puiblicised is verging on the criminal misuse of money.
I too started receiving such spams all of a sudden, different domain, different country. I wondered if some kind of members list had been compromised or if one of the spam lists had started "guessing" mail addresses from some of the "larger" domains. In the same way that bigpond is the dominant email domain in Australia, so too is mine in the UK.
I guess one test would be to create a new email address that is not name related and see how long before the spam arrives.
"Customers know exactly what they want even if it may not be exactly what we think they need, and that's a big difference"
The hell they do! Some customers do know what they want, I'll grant you, but many (most?) have _no_ idea what they want. The proof of this is that they will often express their wants in a pseudo design paradigm. That is not what they want. The problem is they have no idea how to express what they want and only marginally more idea of how to question themselves to even try and clarify it in their own minds before expressing it.
My favourite example of this occurs time and time again. Customers will always say that they want a "popup" with this event happens or that event happens, but I say to them, you need a _REALLY_ good reason to interrupt the workflow of a user and I don't think that you really want to interrupt the workflow for that event. But no, no, a popup is the requirement and so we implement the popup (usually with the non popup solution as well) and when their users complain about the popup and they come back to use asking for the CR we just point out the non popup option (if we don't point it out at the start). I can think of at least four different customers where that exact process has taken place.
What you have to remember, is that in many circumstances, customers are buying the expertise of the software vendor and the benefit of all the lessons learnt from previous projects if not the software itself. That expertise is valuable (in my opinion the only real value of the vendor) and as such it should be used.
As for implementing broken business practice because of history, you should always question every practice you implement. Again a classic example, from securities trading, many stock exchanges have the idea of a lot size, the smallest parcel of shares that can be traded automatically. These lot sizes are an artefact of physical clearing and settlement processes when you actually had to find certificates to total the amount of any given trade. To do so down to the ones and twos was a nightmare. In an electronic system, such a business practice is irrelevant since there are no certificates to be allocated thus it is painful at best and downright inefficient regardless.
"after independently inventing the wheel, they used it for children's toys exclusively"
Indeed. I also love the idea that the ancient greeks had a childrens toy (or at least a novelty) that was essentially a steam engine. If we have gone from feudal agrarian society to the moon since we "discovered" the steam engine, imagine how far we will have gone in an extra 2 thousand years (yeah yeah, smart alecs, extinct, I know, very funny) and imagine if it had been the ancient greeks who were doing the going. Remarkable.
The small bit of randomness that can have a surprise effect.
The idea of the randomness of human error is appropriate only if "what goes around comes around". I have watched a bit of baseball in my time (not much, maybe 50 games) and I have _never_ seen a batter "self call" a strike when they were just plain beaten by a strike pitch called a ball (and they could easily do this). Further, it is really tough for a pitcher to compensate for a pitch called a strike that they know was a ball. I mean you can't just throw a strike because the cost of knowing a strike is coming is too high. So, in baseball at least, the only way that "what goes around comes around" can work is if on average the number of balls called strikes compares with the number of strikes called balls (and arguably with a 25% or 33% premium given that balls are less valueable than strikes since you get four of them). I have no real feel for whether this is true or not, but I suspect that it is not true and that there is a natural bias from specific umpires one way or another. In which case, it comes down to does their bias occur evenly accross teams. This is where the redemption lies, becuase here I think it is mostly true that the errors the umpires make are evenly distributed accross the teams, in MLB at least.
When you get problems is when this is not true. In cricket for example, when there used to be "home town" umpires in international matches there was arguably a big problem. It has been said that at this time, certain high profile batsmen were _never_ given out LBW (the most subjective of the methods of getting out) on home turf. Now that is a big problem. Thankfully that problem is reduced now, but it is important to use the kind of analysis that these systems provide to ensure that the problem does not recurr.
While we're at it, the two umpiring issues that really shit me are (1) the penalty given to a side when they are defending (or in their own half) that the umpire would never give to a side attacking the opponents line/goal because they haven't got the balls to make the game changing call and (2) the gutless get square penalty that an umpire will make to "correct" a mistake they made earlier, but they make the call in a much less "dangerous" part of the field or stage of the game. The best umpires wear their mistakes as they happen and the _great_ umpires will make the tough call. I remember the world cup (soccer) where some ref gave a game winning penalty to the underdog side in the nth minute of injury time at the end of the game. It was a great call and all to easy not to make at sucha critical moment. The biggest redemption of using machines to adjudicate is that they should be immune to these "external" pressures when making a call.
I actually had a reference to that unfortunate link (in Oz the problem is sanitary towels not tampons) but took it out since, yeah, good names sometimes suffer by the pre existing lie of the land :-)
South Australia has a history of legal innovation. Indeed, beyond the issues of suffrage for which they are well known, the system of land registration known as Torrens Title has been exported widely. One of the most interesting aspects of this is the legal definition of open source that has been provided in the Act. I am sure that JMS would be disappointed with the phrase "open source" being the legally enshrined thing for which the government departments must make consideration. I too would prefer to find "Free Software" as the phrase, even "Software Libre", but the name concerns me little.
My question to the reading populace is are we happy with the definition? It is always difficult to get such things right and ammendments can always be made to refine things, but is the definition as it stands even adequate? I think it is adequate, in fact I would go further and think that as a generic description it is actually very good.
I am very flexible with the people who work for me. I don't clock watch them so if they need to leave early or start late from time to time I am pretty flexible. But if something needs to be done by Tuesday then I expect it to be done by Tuesday. If that means long hours for them, then I _expect_ it. That is the payback for the flexibility. Like your employers, I don't specify a project without resourcing it properly, and yet times are tough and so sometimes we do have to do things that we don't like just to make ends meet.
Most of the "projects" on which I work have a 12 - 18 month time frame and the stress through which we go in the closing three months of such a project, culminating in the horrible live date, are really nasty. But the sense of satisfaction at the end can be extremely rewarding.
Having said all that, this project will fail. I don't mean to be down on your team, but it is just not possible to work for the length of time that the schedule you have outlined demands. Your bosses probably understand this but will make a delivery to the client at the due time, regardless of it's quality and the final live date will slip whilst you fix the probelms resulting from the insanity of the preceeding 3 months. It really makes much more sense for the client to be made to understand this sooner rather than later.
It is absolutely correct for the state in Brazil to be doing this kind of thing. Even if specific Software libre tools are not quite the best tool for the job, by the very nature of them being used in government they will get better and the non tangible benefits of SL would tip any analysis on favour of SL
I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with javasript that would make it broken enough to suggest that it is a bad place to start.
It is with every machine you can think of. It has procedural aspects, some decent obect oriented features, yep, I reckon it just might work. Nice idea!
The motion picture companies have the right to charge what they want for a movie, after all how else are we going to get 200 million dollar blockbusters?
The hell they do. They are a natural monopoly provider of their material since they have stupid IP on their side. So given that they are a monopoly if they abuse that power to charge a non-economic price then that is an anti-trust or monopolies issue. The current pricing scheme of movie distributors is a crime. The fixing of retail price by wholesalers has been found to be illegal in most western jurisdictions for a _long_ time now. The way movie ticket prices work is pretty close.
As for how else do you get a 200 million dollar blockbuster, well first of all when the budget of the film stops being a corrollary to the size of the studios dicks, and they stop paying fsking actors 20M to star in a film, or if they, god forbid, had to constrain production costs like a real business then that number would quarter, but even if not, lets do the math...
Top, english language blockbuster, opens in US on 3600 screens spends four weeks getting a decent share of the cinema goers budget so lets say that on average these screens are 50% full and they show 4 sessions a day that is 3600 x 4 x 0.5 * 28, now for simplicities sake, lets say that is 200,000 full cinema sessions worth of people that means that each cinema session needs to get about 1000 bucks in order for the distributor to cover the cost of the film in the first four weeks in America alone!!!!! I woulod argue that the numbers above are pretty conservative, Matrix reloaded is currently trading at 130M in the first week or so. So the "blockbusters wouldn't exist" argument is just specious.
Frequent viewer miles - Standby viewings - Movie ticket scalping -
Last minute rushes for extremely low prices
All the ideas you mention except the last one will probably work, the last one might work as well however, the "easyjet" model is that no one who books after you will pay less than you and that is the incentive to book early and thus allow them to schedule accordingly. To be honest it is really very clever. I think it might just work in cinema, and I just wish that (a) I had the idea first and (b) I had ther money to fight the distributors to make it happen, 'cause this is a big shitfight waiting to happen and hopefully it will make the movie industry rationalise.
But the _REASON_ that most cinemas make their money from concession sales is that the distributors take up to 100% of _revenue_ from ticket sales, thats right, not 100% of profits but 100% of face value. (someone earleir said 90% but it is true that for something like Matrix, the cinema owner will get nothing from the ticket until about week 3 and they have to warrant that they will show it for N weeks. The whole thing is a complete farce (and a racket if one actually looks at it). And the classic side effect of this is the 2,000,000 screen opening of a crap film that we have started to see in the last few years. That is, a film that has tested badly but sounds interesting is opened on as many screens as they can get on weekend 1 (no reviews allowed beforehand) and then when everyone has seen it _and_ worked out how crap it is the distributor has still managed to get 2,000,000 x (3 or 4) screens worth of ticket sales in the first weekend, just criminal.
:-) is a feature of the criminal activity of the content creators. The ssoner it changes the better for everyone, including the movie industry since the stupid salaries and costs it currently endures would be vapourised by real competition.
Stelios, is a bit of a rogue in some respects but more power to him. The movie industry is scared shitless that he will win and they will bo forced under competiition law to wholsesale their product at a fair price to the retailers, it may even be the case that their current pricing model is found to be illegal which would just make my day since I have hated it ever since I was "buying" films from the distributors for our student film club, and the distributirs used to whine about our ticketing prices since we were "affecting" their porofits by being cheap. It is jast a farce.
The cinema is a big lump of capital that is invested to show movies, even the multiplexes, the fact that they are forced into making money by extorting their customers with the price of popcorn and soft drink (or beer in Europe
The schism is coming. Once the consumers of advertising wake up to the scam, the ass is going to fall out of that market and $1M per episode just ain't gonna happen. In the mean time, I will watch what's on until it bores me and then I'll surf the net or download something from Gutenberg and read that.
Even further, I await the first pop-prog with the bollocks to just swap out a lead actor on a regular arbitrary basis. Indeed to actually script the thing so that there is no "lead" person on whom the identity of the show is formed. Even if the character remains the actor just changes. What do I care, I have never "got wet" (so to speak) over the specific lumps and lines of a given actor, and I am sure that those who do would just as happily do it over one leggy blonde/tall, dark and handsome as another.
I have absolutely no problem with media consolidation, my _only_ proviso is that it must be trivial to know who owns what. And the information must be available from the newspaper, magazine, radio station TV station I am watching. If it really gets that crap that noone really cares then the market is in the right place for competition and that is where the barriers to entry come in. These barriers wrt to the distribution of content are only getting lower. So "rock on" CC, blandify whatever you like, I await the second coming of the pirates.
Saw my first ClearChannel signed billboard near my home in London :-(. Begun this advertising war has.
Mate, everyone knows that you keep your money and car keys in your shoes or under your towel while you're at the beach, or at least bury it if you're paranoid...
I guess I have been travelling alone for too long, you learn to be very careful about contingency planning, or I must be uber paranoid since I tie my car key to the drawstring on my speedos (no special techie key for me) and keep my folding currency in my pocket and body bash to my hearts content without even worrying about those that would nick my stuff (I even keep a spare shirt and towel in the car).
We are a short fsking walk from Fahrenheit 451, except in reverse where remembering the book will be the illegal part. This is just getting INSANE!!!!
Australia has been using plastic notes for years. These notes are much harder to forge they have a transparent section and a translucent dual sided motiff incorporated into the design to aid forgery identifcation. And that is just for starters, other benefits include that the notes last many times longer (and hence despite the higher cost to produce they save the treasury loads), they go through the wash just fine (and you can even have them in your board shorts whilst surfing without fear of being unable to buy a pie for lunch). They don't really tear (they do but its much harder to get started on the rip) and are generally much more durable. They look kinda weird even for Australian currency, and the one drawback is that IIRC they are a bit more difficult to handle if you are manipulating lots of cash manually.
Once again this sums up the whole problem with non-scientific research, and I do mean research in to non-scientific areas I mean research that just ignores the tenets of the scientific method.
A statistical analysis of correlation that has _zero_ predicitive value. Don't waste your time thinking about it.