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It is interesting to note that as the political races keep rising in cost, there is a corresponding rise in the R&D budgets for covering the news surrounding those races. This 2008 election season cost a record-breaking $5.3 billion.In other words, if we nuke the political machine, then (in addition to all the other advantages) we get to save $5.3 billion that would otherwise have been wasted on simply reporting a single election. The sad thing is, if you offered the average American an extra $15 in the bank in exchange for no TV during the election season, he'd take his TV and slam the door in your face. People like to think they somehow matter. Eh, I'd take an extra 3.5 gallons of ice cream (especially the cookie dough stuff) with a buck left in my pocket over fancy schmancy election coverage, any day. The worthless hours-worth of empty promises don't even come close to making up for the lost ice cream. Oh, and as an added bonus, I can eat 3.5 gallons of ice cream in far less time than the time required to watch $5.3 billion-worth of election coverage, leaving me with additional work hours, which translate into even more (cookie dough) ice cream 8-)
LOL ... see, the problem with a centralized proprietary service to manage your stolen laptop is that (a) as Snipe pointed out, you're stuck with whatever the service supports, and without whatever it doesn't, (b) as you yourself pointed out in your funny sig, you're stuck with whatever features the service decides to add by user request, and without whatever features the service doesn't feel like adding for whatever reason, (c) if the service goes out of business, so does your protection, and (d) if Microsoft injects SQL bugs into the servers powering the service, the thief might get away without having his new laptop locked down, and/or the service might shut down a non-stolen laptop in the middle of an important presentation, perhaps with some trademark blue screen of death or something, possibly as a result of bugginess in the closed-source application that the service required you to install with admin privileges on your laptop. I dunno, maybe Windows people have just gotten used to giving closed-source apps admin privileges and praying for the best; I'd be scared stiff to trust something without source even in my own user account, much less as root.
Hey, don't get me wrong, I can understand why you're promoting your own junk; you have a vested interest. (I promote my own junk for the same reason.) Just don't be surprised when some of the obvious flaws are pointed out. (Snipe is a lot more diplomatic than I am, simply pointing out why your service doesn't meet the basic requirements she pointed out in the first couple of sentences of her original blog post.)
Take care,BTW - As it turns out, my original comment got through, somehow. Whatever. . .
- Dave
Tropicana is 100% orange and pineapple. All natural orange juice with no sugar added and never made from concentrate. The naturally delicious, sweet taste of Tropicana comes from our unique blend of oranges, selected from the pick of the crop and squeezed at their height of goodness, plus a splash of pineapple. Our pure, natural blend of fresh-tasting juice wakes up your morning and your body so you can face the day with a healthy start and a positive attitude.Now, here's the ingredient list, from the other side of the same carton:
Tropicana 100% orange and pineapple.
Ingredients: 100% Pure orange juice, pineapple juice concentrate, peach puree concentrate and natural flavors.The first obvious lesson is, don't believe the hype. Not only is the "never from concentrate" extremely misleading there, but it's not even 100% orange and pineapple, since they threw in peach (peach puree concentrate), too. The second lesson is that orange juice is not a low calorie food, nor would it be easy to make it one, since most of the calories come from the natural sugars in the fruit involved (but then again, you're losing weight by playing ping pong, not cutting out your breakfast, anyway, right?). The third lesson is that after all this, the stuff should still be plenty good for you. Finally, the fourth lesson is that the stuff tastes great (at least to me), regardless :-)
Not a low calorie food.
The suspects fled in the van down Delafield Street and crashed into a security gate at the back of St. Peter's University Hospital, Caputo said. All four suspects then jumped from the van and shots were fired.and
Three suspects sustained gunshot wounds, though none was life-threatening, Caputo said. They were taken to Robert Wood Johnson University Hospital.I guess the obvious question is, why weren't they just taken straight to St. Peter's University Hospital for treatment?
I find it ridiculous that people blindly install software, and expect it to just work.Eh, I don't know what the big deal is, here. My wife and I have been using junk mail, store sales brochures, various pieces of printed paper, paper instant oatmeal bags, and various other paper, ever since we got the cats (a couple of months ago), with no special processing recipe. We just pass it through the shredder (the "Tough Guy" - about $30, from Staples), and dump it in the litter box (a large plastic tote with built-in covering flaps - about $10, from Lowe's). None of our three cats seem to have any problem with it. I read some interesting stuff about toilet training cats, though, and I'm thinking about giving it a whirl. Why use _any_ litter at all, if you don't have to? Enjoy, - Dave
Shower Drain: A year or two ago many visitors had a shower drain issue and a "gurgling toilet" issue. As the desk person so helpfully explained to me, there was a $1+ million dollar renovation on the bar...not quite sure what the two have to do with each other...but perhaps she meant that the bar no longer gets you as drunk as might be necessary to think the toilet is gurgling at you.), the shower drains were very slow, and nobody bothered to fix them. (When you take a shower, it starts feeling like a standing bath, after a while.) As my brother pointed out, the hotel tried to avoid the question by putting the best spin on things. (I'd probably conclude that the additional $1M in the bar would probably make you more drunk, so you might not notice it gurgling at you. Unfortunately for them, (a) I don't drink, and (b) I'm a perfectionist, so I noticed the shower drain falling behind the showerhead, even though they were using reduced flow showerheads. I suppose they kept the reduced flow showerheads quiet rather than trumpeting their "green" policy, for fear of people putting two and two together and calling them out on trying to cover up their subpar plumbing job on the drain.) While there were certainly some bright spots, overall, I wasn't terribly impressed with this Pesach program. The whole program stank of underhanded marketing tactics, and a general attitude of not really caring much about the guests. I guess honest businessmen have become an incredibly rare find, these days. I mean, if you're trying to save yourself money, tell me the truth straight out, so I can make an informed decision. If you must spin something, give me back a portion of your increased profits in the form of lower pricing, and trumpet that around as a partial lie. Please don't try to make yourself sound all caring and everything when the only thing you care about is your profit margins; it's just false advertising. If you really care about making our world a better place, forget about combating global warming, and focus on making the world a warmer place, one person at a time. The former will come naturally once we've achieved the latter.
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Yeah, I've noticed the Express Checkout thing. I think the main reason they put those lanes in is to speed up the other lanes. (That's also why they don't really complain much when you go over the number of items allowed, as long as other customers don't get all annoyed: they know you're really just slowing yourself down.) Remember: most of a supermarket's revenues come from the guys with the shopping carts full of stuff, not from the guys with a couple of handheld items on their way to a movie.
However, I do find it interesting that after asking all those questions, the blogger just walks away without actually answering his central question. To add insult to injury, his CSV has way too little data to be able to run any type of meaningful statistical analysis.
Finally, I find it rather ridiculous that after all this time, no supermarket has bothered to put together an assembly line approach to checking out. If you want to speed things up, have people put their stuff on a conveyor belt, where a worker can scan the items and pass them on to another conveyor belt either to a guy who bags the stuff, or to a self-bagging area for each customer. After you're done having your stuff bagged, you then head over to one of the checkout lines, where you simply show your receipt, pay, and walk out. Sure, the best-case latency (time between going on the first line and walking out of the store) is marginally worse than the best-case latency in the current system, but the average case and particularly the worst case latencies are both orders of magnitude better, because of the better overall efficiency of the system. This reminds me of the old Token Ring vs. Ethernet race, where a 4Mbps Token Ring network would routinely outrun a 10Mbps Ethernet network as soon as the load went up. The Ethernet camp responded with 100Mbps Fast Ethernet, which is the rough equivalent of increasing the speed of the conveyor belt tenfold, hoping to avoid gridlock. IBM's 16Mbps flavor of Token Ring beat out 100Mbps Fast Ethernet on a regular basis until switches became common (solving the collision problem, once and for all ... at least for wired Ethernet ... 802.11[abgn] all have the same problem, since APs work like hubs, rather than switches ... curiously, WiMAX solves the problem almost exactly the same way that IBM solved it a couple of decades ago, by essentially passing a token around a ring). The point I'm getting at is that in the network race, throwing more hardware at the problem was a cost-effective solution, allowing Ethernet to beat Token Ring on cost. In the supermarket race, on the other hand, there's more than a marginal one-shot cost to keeping additional lanes open, turbocharging conveyor belts, putting cashiers on steroids, etc., and so the best solution is to get more out of the existing infrastructure rather than simply throwing more infrastructure at the problem, and the mechanics of that solution were shown by Mr. Ford, about a century ago, to be an assembly line. (In a modern CPU, we call it "pipelining," because apparently it offends computer people to call something an "assembly line." When somebody finally goes ahead and implements an assembly line for supermarkets, I'm sure he'll invent more terminology to make something old seem new, yet again, and he'll be applauded for his outstanding "innovation" to the supermarket checkout lane problem. Parenthetically, it's worth noting that Mr. Ford wasn't the first to think of an assembly line, either; we know that well into the BC period, there were already Mathematicians exploring the advantages of the assembly line approach to solving certain classes of problems, and I'm betting that the basic concepts were already put to good use by our ancestors even before organized written communication came to our species.)
Enjoy :-)Here's my take on this whole business: http://www.bigfatdave.com/to_www_or_not_to_www.html If you'd like to have some fun, try doing this: http://bigfatdave.com/ or this: http://bigfatdave.com/blog.php BTW - IO Error: in case you're wondering where all your visitors have gone, they're all seeing server not found errors, because you've got a DNS error. Peace, - Dave
1) Connect to Microsoft's server.
2) Grab some file.
3) Execute it.
4) Shred all traces of it.
5) Exit.
1) Connect to Microsoft's server.
2) Tell it what the user wants you to do.
3) Read the result from the server.
4) Feed (the user-visible portion of) the result to the user.
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It solved part of my problem (running on Slackware-current),
here. I'm still working on figuring out what else is wrong on my
installation. (I'm trying to put together tagfiles for a minimal
Apache+PHP+APC+MySQLClient system.)
BTW - coyote: I don't check this page often (in fact, it's my first time
here), so if you notice anything here that you think I might want to
read, I'd appreciate a ping by email. (If there's a way for the system
to automatically email me when somebody posts a further comment, feel
free to ask it to do so. Also, just in case it's not obvious, anybody
is more than welcome to email me, for any reason or no reason at all.
My homepage explains how to email me [1].)
[1] http://www.bigfatdave.com/emailme.html
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In the event of a succesful ping, the server MUST return a response in
the following format:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<response>
<error>0</error>
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In the event of an unsuccessful ping, the server MUST return an HTTP
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ROAD CLOSED
to everyone but YOU!
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The First prize is a Ferrari F430,
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What makes a billion dollar company is really just half of #2: a monopoly in a big market. Look at the profit center (measured by profit margins, not by absolute profits) for any large company, and you'll find that it's in the places where the company has least competition. Now, induction allows us to see that expanding the "no competition" zone leads to greater profits in absolute terms. Expanding your profits to the point that you can create a billion dollar company is simply a matter of expanding the "no competition" zone enough. (Remember, the "no competition" zone is the market(s) where you're able to translate investment into profit most efficiently. If you want to grow big fast, you need efficiency.) Microsoft did it with operating systems, and then abused ("leveraged") its monopoly there to jump-start and then subsidize an office software monopoly, to steal a Web browser monopoly (although I don't think they were counting on Netscape rising from the ashes with a new name, and nipping away at IE's market share ever since), and to attempt half a zillion more monopolies, some more successful than others. Google did it with WWW search, leveraging its monopoly there to jump-start a monopoly for WWW search ad-space, which it used to attempt a general ad-space monopoly. What happened to IBM? It refused to protect its monopoly, because when the DoJ started investigating, IBM quickly changed its ways. Once you lose your monopoly, you're dead meat. IBM continues to survive today by turning to consulting and brand-recognition for revenues. Where will it be tomorrow? Viewed through these glasses, a billion dollar company is a company that doesn't aim to compete in an eco-system: it aims to _be_ the eco-system. Once it's done conquering one market, it uses that monopoly to expand out to nearby markets (the markets formerly known as "partner space"). With these glasses on straight, we're now also able to explain plenty of other billion dollar companies, even from yester-year. AT&T, for example, makes its money in wireless, which should not be surprising, since it monopolized the wireless market by extending its preexisting landline monopoly. (Feel free to repeat the last sentence with s/AT&T/Verizon/g: a cartel is operationally equivalent to a monopoly.) How about a company like GE? Did it get that big making refrigerators? No, it got that big by participating in the financial services and media cartels. For that matter, take a look at the other media companies: they've all grown through cooperative monopolization of the information flows in our country. Why aren't AT&T and Verizon replaced by some new startup? They've insulated their profit center from startups by convincing the government to sell them monopolies over electromagnetic waves for purposes of cellular communication on your property, my property, and everywhere else in the country, and already before that, they'd already gained a virtual monopoly on "rights of passage" for landlines, DSL lines, fiber optics, etc. (You think you own your own property? Think again.) Note that their only real competition comes from a company called Qwest, which was only able to compete by taking advantage of rail rights of way to lay its own networks. How about the media giants? Well, they've conned Washington into selling them equivalent rights for purposes of television and radio broadcasting, including the right to lay cables in neighborhoods everywhere. (Viewed from this angle, the DSL vs. Cable war is a clash of titans: telecoms vs. media companies.) Now, you might ask, where does such a company get its start? If markets everywhere are protected by incumbent monopolists, how does a new company get its butt in edgewise? You have to take advantage of a strategic blunder by all monopolists in nearby markets. Microsoft took advantage of a strategic blunder by IBM: rather than seeking to monopolize the desktop OS market, IBM made the mistake of ceding it to a "partner." Google took advantage of a strategic blunder by Yahoo!: rather than keeping search ads separated from search itself, Yahoo! chose to charge businesses $250 for listing in the search engine, and then started altering search result order based on additional payments by interested parties. To add insult to injury, they changed their search homepage from a search page to a portal, angering their userbase further. Microsoft took advantage of its break by building its own brand and retaining its own copyrights, while planning for the eventual monopolization of the desktop operating system market. Google took advantage of its break by being "the old Yahoo!" that everybody missed. Facebook tries to be "what MySpace should've been," and only time will tell if it's ultimately successful, or if it ends up losing by a strategic blunder and going the way of Friendster. In the same breath, it's imperative to note that a company, after getting its break, needs to work tirelessly to prevent another company from getting its own break in a nearby market. Microsoft has turned monopoly protection into a science, by carefully targetting (for buyout or elimination) any company in a nearby market that takes advantage of a strategic blunder by Microsoft, before it becomes too late to squish it. This systematic vigilance has allowed Microsoft to get away with a lot of blunders that would've killed nearly any other company in its shoes. Finally, the age-old question comes back: what happened to "from rags to riches?" Why is it so hard to find new goliaths? The answer is pretty simple: as more markets become monopolized by "better fit" companies (i.e., companies that are highly aggressive at grabbing market share, and strongly intent on avoiding its loss through strategic blunders), it becomes harder and harder to hit upon a strategic blunder by _all_ nearby monpolists, that _none_ of them decide to cover for by squishing the original bug as well as its fallout. Remember, today's giant empolys an entire department for the sole purpose of waking it up if a strategic blunder results in a forecast for strategic trouble. These departments are normally equipped with all the tactical weapons necessary to conduct large-scale battles against the offender, as well as a direct line upstairs to call in the big guns, if necessary.