I went to a Montessori school from pre-K through 6th grade. Overall I think it was a good experience. But the transition to traditional school was very rough. I was mostly fine academically, but socially it was brutal. I had been going to school with the same 10 people for most of my life, and then suddenly found myself in a crowd of hundreds of strangers with no clue how to make new friends. Add to that all the hormonal stuff going on with 12-13 year olds, and it's a bad scene. It took me about 3 years to acclimate. I think 7th grade is a particularly bad time to be making the transition. It might have been easier if I'd made the jump in grade 5 or 6.
Based on what I've seen in their engineering blogs, they've been spending a lot of time on streamlining the production and distribution process. I guess that makes sense for a production company. But I wonder if they're getting good value for what they're spending on it. It may so much less than what they're spending on producing content that nobody's paying attention.
Anecdotally, I've heard working with netflix on the production side is not that fun. They ask a lot of you and pay a little, and you don't have creative freedom. Maybe that's the streamlining they are referring to? We will see if this helps them or hurts them by shooing what could have been good production talent for them to HBO and other competitors in town.
Streamlining production seems like a wrong goal in this game. I mean, who cares if you can efficiently churn out dozens or hundreds of new TV-shows and movies if none of them are good? Having one really good TV-show on the catalogue is worth a hundred crappy TV-shows. And if you manage to produce one good show, who cares if its' production process was extremely efficient. It's a long tail game.
Being able to quickly and efficiently set up a group pitching some creative vision but lacking any experience with Netflix-sized budgets? Preferably without installing some cookie-cutter producers that make everything they touch look, feel and taste the same? That's huge if they are good at it.
I'm not saying that they are, but now that streaming seems to be basically solved (it has become a commodity) this is the quality that will likely make the winners.
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Yup. Back when I was dealing with depression, I heard it all the time.
"Smile" and "Cheer up" are still two of the most rage-inducing things anyone can say to me. It's just one of those things about appearance I have to roll with. I also don't get to show up barefoot, with no t-shirt and just wearing boardshorts. So I play along and part of that is acting much happier and more amenable than I really am.
The main difference is that I don't have people constantly telling me this is caused by an oppressive societal structure pushing me to conform. (I mean, it is, but it's not treated as one. I'm certainly not constantly told I need to be to rejecting. By media that makes me weaker to it, and teaches me to suffer even harder when effected by those social structures.)
> "Smile" and "Cheer up" are still two of the most rage-inducing things anyone can say to me.
I'm not dealing with clinical depression but I can see what you mean. If I'm upset enough about something that it is visible, the last thing I want is someone telling me to "cheer up."
I guess I'm fortunate never to have worked with the kind of people (commissioned sales people? politicians? child molesters? I mean, I can't even imagine) who would notice I'm upset and tell me to "smile."
I guess I'm fortunate never to have worked with the kind of people [...] who would notice I'm upset and tell me to "smile."
It's not only some demanding command to modify your mood, it can be a good natured suggestion to try and keep your chin up. The person who said it to me most was my mother.
edit: I'm surprised by your reply... only because it seems incongruous with the statement I replied to. interesting.
Just because people were well-intentioned didn't make it any less infuriating. I've gotten it in the "cheer up" sense and the "be more presentable" sense and the "comply with norms" sense. Not a huge difference in how it feels, non family ones are a bit easier though.
You're choosing to interpret it one way (and only one way). What the commenters in this thread are suggesting is that the phrase is often used with genuinely positive intent.
No matter how ill advised or inappropriate you find it, I don't think you should assume intent.
At least, where I'm from this is true. Maybe it's a societal norm that varies by culture and region.
It happens to me occasionally (I'm male). Unless I'm making a conscious effort my face normally looks sad or down and people tell me to smile or cheer up. It really annoys me when they do that too.
Yes. It's called empathy, and the lowest effort way of showing something that you acknowledge their bad mood is by saying "hey, cheer up" or "hey, smile buddy!"
Not saying it's tactful but I'm not a psychologist
There are lots of people working on this problem. The NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure has funded quite a few projects working on long-term data storage and discoverability. The largest of those are probably DataOne (http://www.dataone.org/) and Data Conservancy (http://dataconservancy.org/). The hard part is convincing scientists to use the tools that are available. The NSF already requires that all new proposals include a data management plan. I imagine it won't be long before they start requiring projects to deposit their data in a public or eventually-public repository.
Post hoc ergo propter hoc? Murder rates have declined comparable amounts in lots of cities that aren't systematically targeting minority residents for harassment.
> What do you want the police to do, patrol around Lincoln Park and Lakeview where all the wealthy white people are?
No, but city and state gov't should be responsive to the causes of these issues and be proactive about solving them. Usually that will mean looking at class and race disparity and implementing policy that will provide better opportunities for those people, as well as defeating existing roadblocks that prevent those people from taking control of their lives.
Either the author or Andreesen completely misunderstands or misrepresents the concept of network neutrality. Network neutrality doesn't mean users don't pay for the bandwidth they consume. It means they pay the same price for that bandwidth regardless of what it's used for.
Exactly. The telcos want to charge Youtube (and others) more money for a faster connection to me, but I already paid for my connection to be fast.
Those aren't Youtube's bits coming to me over the wire though, they are mine. I paid for them, both in money to the telco for my connection through them, and to Youtube with my attention to their ads.
Well, but other subscribers paid as much as you but may not be using Youtube as heavily. When they do use Youtube, they want that fast connection, but in aggregate they use less capacity because they are less frequent users. Charging Youtube is one way to account for this difference in usage. Charging consumers based on aggregate usage (like mobile carriers now do) would be another way.
so all you are saying is that some people pay for (N gigabytes per month) and actually use N, while others pay for the same plan but only use a fraction of N?
I'm referring to typical home/business service where you pay for X downstream/Y downstream, not aggregate usage. Almost everyone will use the full bandwidth at some point (just watch just one video) but some people use it more frequently.
Granted, Andreesen was talking about mobile where pricing is N gigs/month, but even that structure might not capture true cost. It also depends when the user uses that bandwidth. During peak hours, capacity is short and end-user Quality of Service might get degraded to accommodate. Rather than complicating end-user pricing with these issues (like charging $Y for X bits at ZZ:ZZ PM), it might make sense to charge the content providers.
Who knows what the best solution is. Maybe it's charging content providers, maybe end-users. The point is that it's not a good idea to have the government set a one-size-fits-all solution.
It's not even that complicated, they just want to use the existing pay-TV business models that businesspeople have studied for decades. It's highly inconvenient for established businesspeople to have to invent new business and revenue models, so a power grab and an encircling legal framework comes as no surprise. These are the people who hire lobbyists, and current internet freedoms are anathema to (the current form of) capitalism.
It's not anathema to capitalism at all. Amazon, Google, eBay, Facebook, Dropbox and many, many more are making good money off the internet as it is. I don't understand the anti-capitalism jibe. What's the alternative? Would they be better off as state owned public services?
The idea is that the current state of capitalism, as I'm using the phrase, is somewhat static in the way that many Internet businesses are attempting to use it in terms of past business models. Consider the music industry.
Why are capitalists so sensitive that criticism always registers as "anti?" Psychologists have a lot to say about absolutist thinking, calling it "either/or," "black/white," "polarized," "binary," "catastrophizing," and similar. My illustration in terms of pay-TV should have been enough of a clue of the distinction I'm making, and that that distinction was not concerned with eliminating an entire ideology.
He is dead wrong on his comment about how there are no incentives on the supply side to reduce bandwidth consumption.
Everyone pays for transit and it is a major cost for any website operator other than something nearly pure text like hacker-news. Even the Tier 1 networks pay each-other transit fees based on ongoing negotiation.
It seems it's very difficult to maintain awareness of where your knowledge is accurate and where it isn't the more success you accumulate as a more passive desiccation maker than in the trenches problem solver.
i was at the talk and yes i think he misused "network neutrality." he seemed to be talking more about regulation, and government pressure on telcos to keep prices lower than what the market could bear.
I'm not really sure I follow that argument. I get that consumers often prefer unlimited mobile data plans to paying per byte, but what does that have to do with regulation? I'm not aware of any current or proposed rule that would mandate or even encourage unmetered bandwidth and the mobile market is clearly moving away from unlimited data all on its own.
I think the major funding agencies are aware of the problem and the potential, and are working on solutions in their own way (for example, the NSF Office of Cyberinfrastructure's DataNet program, http://www.nsf.gov/funding/pgm_summ.jsp?pims_id=503141). But major cultural change in the way scientific research is conducted just isn't going to happen overnight.
Does anybody remember Apple Dylan (http://wiki.opendylan.org/wiki/view.dsp?title=Apple%20Dylan)? I never used it myself, but I remember reading a lot about it in the late 1990's because I was using Macintosh Common Lisp at the time. In the Apple Dylan IDE, every function, class, and module was an object in an object database; there were no files at all. The IDE was at least 10 years ahead of its time, and as a result the performance was terrible. But it's surprising that nobody has revived the idea of a source database.
Sorry, the link goes to our horrible, PeopleWare-powered recruiting site that you have to access over port 8291. If you're behind any kind of firewall, it probably won't work.
