Not necessarily incompetent, but less vested in our hardware, and less accountable for minor mishaps (contractually, of course, highly accountable for major ones). If we're lucky, we might be able to get back the billable hours.
But that's not the same question as whether they're reliable facilities in terms of power, cooling, and security. It's entirely possible for the DC to have acceptable uptime without the remote hands staff being similarly competent.
As for reasons, in our case, we've got a couple thousand employees scattered across 60+ locations around the country. Most of the office space is leased, and none of it has the capacity to host our primary DC, so we've outsourced that to AT&T in Chicago. The decision was originally made that it was more cost-effective to lease cage space from them than it was to purchase a new building including a DC.
(And, actually, after AT&T failed to deliver contracted cooling/power expansion for several months, we decided to roll buildout of a new space - including DC - into our continuing centralization of IT)
That's great and all - and I have to say, the iLO 2 boards are really, really nice; almost as fast as RDPing to the server - but it just doesn't cover everything. Sometimes you just have to have physical access to the machine. When a hard drive fails, for example, somebody's got to physically swap the drive. And if my experience with remote hands is anything to go by (borking an array by putting the drives back in the wrong order, most recently), doing it yourself is far preferable for some things.
Not to mention that you don't want to trust the DC's remote hands people for racking/deracking equipment, or doing proper cable management, or accurate labeling of pizza boxes, etc...
Take a look at bittorrent sites, and see how many seeds/leechers there are for popular movies. Every one of those people represents at least one lost ticket sale for theaters.
No, I haven't done a scientific study that's been published in a refereed journal. So what?
Most people I've ever met would rather pay nothing for something and own it than pay $10 to see it once.
Again, I haven't done a scientific study that's been published in a refereed journal. So what?
Occam's razor points to the ubiquity of free copies of movies being the reason people aren't paying for them.
Sources to cite? I don't need any citations, it's pretty obvious on the face of it.
Am I making an unfounded claim? Fucking right I am. But that doesn't make me wrong any more than it makes the original poster right.
It's news that dropping the price of [item] leads to more people buying [item]?
The only people this is news to are people so rabidly anti-Sony that they've convinced themselves that no one wants the PS3. Which is demonstrably false, since people continue to buy the PS3.
This might be news if it meant that the PS3 was now outselling the 360, but it doesn't.
If anything, I'm a 360 fanboy - I love me my Gears, my Dead Rising, and my Forza 2 - but it comes as no surprise to me that people are buying the PS3 (other considerations aside, it's a damn fine piece of hardware), and that means it comes as no surprise to me that a price drop leads to an increase in sales.
You don't exactly need to be Milton Friedman to have seen this one coming.
Insofar as ads provide the income stream of resources you/we value (slashdot, for example), it makes all the difference in the world.
Insofar as you consume no ad-supported goods, services, or media, then it doesn't matter to you in the slightest. In current American society, however, being a consumer who foots the entire bill for everything you consume (as opposed to having your consumption subsidized by advertising), is the exception rather than the norm.
So you may well be right, it doesn't affect you at all. There is a large group of people in the demographic to which I'm referring, however, that it does affect. Such as the group of people who would have liked to see more Firefly, as an example. Or the group of people who enjoy reading slashdot and do not bother to subscribe.
You're just as guilty as the GPP of making unfounded claims. While it's certainly possible that the increase in home theaters, the easy availability of DVDs, and the expense associated with seeing a movie in a theater are primarily responsible for the drop in ticket sales, it is also possible that file sharing is primarily responsible.
I'm unaware of any objective information that leads to anything like a definitive conclusion.
It is dishonest to blame file sharing
Yes, it is.
it's pretty obvious that recent improvements in consumer-level media technology are the real "culprit" here
In one sense, I agree with you about people today.
However, I think it's unnecessarily pejorative to refer to people as media driven sheep. Instead, what they really are is satisfied. Most people in this country enjoy a standard of living that is without historical precedent - even the most impoverished, by comparison to the most impoverished of just a few centuries prior, are stunningly well-off (this is not a claim that we shouldn't fight poverty, of course!).
We live in such luxury that we can take the time and mental energy to be emotionally invested in the propriety of when works exit copyright!
It shouldn't be surprising, then, that there aren't anywhere near enough people disgruntled enough to take on the task of rewriting the rules. In one sense, you can rail at them about being frogs in the pot, or succumbing to bread and circuses. In another, though, if a person is generally satisfied with life, it's a tough sell to get that person to give that life up for a fairly abstract good.
Is that a feature of being media driven sheep? Sure, in a way. In another way, though, it's just people being rational actors.
Your argument depends on two unsupported assumptions:
1) That the drop in ticket sales is solely, primarily, or at least in large part due to illicit file sharing. Given the existence of other possible factors - including a rise in home theater setups, the shorter turnaround time to the DVD release, and the rising ticket prices you already mention (simple economics seems to indicate that an increased price will lead to a reduced quantity demanded) - that's a bold assumption to make without supporting data.
2) That the drop in ticket sales is a reliable indicator of net income to Hollywood from movie creation. Given the increase in sales of movies on DVD, this is also a bold assumption to make without supporting date.
Really, the only safe conclusion to draw from the drop in revenue at theaters is that the theater model of movie distribution is being threatened. This may or may not correlate to "threatening the future of film."
Tangentially, it's interesting that you claim to support the free market, and yet also state that you support artificial scarcity imposed upon it. Artificial scarcity is anathema to the free market. If it's necessary for the creation of content, it's an indication that the free market is a poor mechanism for encouraging such creation. The market for creative content is completely non-competitive: that is, the copyright holder is the only person who can be the source for the copyrighted content, by definition. This is a monopoly position to whatever extent one believes that Casablanca and Armageddon are dissimilar goods.
Its long past time to toss all of them out on their ass and revamp the system like it was intended to be by our founders. ( yes i know it wont happen until the 2nd revolution, but i can still wish )
When you say "intended to be by our founders," you're talking about a second revolution. The oft-used Jefferson quote about the tree of liberty and the blood of patriots and tyrants wasn't just a clever line, it was an actual statement of belief.
There are two provisions made in the Constitution for revamping the system: the former is Article V, providing the states the ability to amend the Constitution without the assistance of the fed.gov. The latter is the second amendment.
Yes, but assuming you host the ad content, you can look at your logs to see how many page views you've got (as well as how many clickthroughs). I'm pretty sure - not certain, but pretty sure - that's how the payment structure is set up. Which, again, counts on the ad already being put out on the site, and does nothing for predicting which sites would be good bets to put the ad out on.
That's true if the person using the data is unaware that it's flawed. But an educated decision can be made to use data that's known to be flawed, if one evaluates what those flaws are, and what they'll mean to whatever it is you're doing.
In fact, as I think about it, I'm not sure "flawed" is the right word. The information is incomplete; whether that's a flaw depends on whether or not you recognize that you don't have all the information.
I think that assuming all the people using Alexa rankings to make purchasing decisions are stupid is misguided. I think it's a much safer assumption that the distribution of stupid, average, and intelligent people among that population is fairly close to that of the population at large. Many of them are making decisions based, in part, on having information that they know to be incomplete, which they judge to be preferable to making decisions based on having no information.
Sure, but that all presupposes you've already bought ad space on the site in question. When you're trying to select which web sites to purchase ad space on in the first place, you don't have access to any of those metrics. If we were talking about a handful of key sites, that wouldn't be a problem - test the waters, go with what works.
But given the huge number of web sites out there that run ads, you need some way of doing an initial selection of which ones to pay. Hence Alexa.
Of course a site could skew their own results which creates its own problem but would this not at least be more valuable than alexa data?
No, it wouldn't, and you've already stated why. Everyone knows that web site logs are the single most accurate way of measuring web site traffic. And no one uses them anyway - not because they think Alexa collects better data, but Alexa doesn't have a vested interest in making a given site look better than it is.
A system which counts on the person selling to give you an honest evaluation of the worth of their product is never going to be more accepted than one involving a third party.
You're right, however, in that what's really needed is a better way to track visits to web sites. The problem is that we can't trust the buy-in of the owners, because they're (obviously) biased. Also, we can't trust the opt-in of the visitors, because so many of them don't opt-in. So the question becomes, what sources of information do we have?
I don't have an answer to that question. And, based on the lack of third-party ratings systems other than Alexa, I don't know that anyone else has that answer, either.
That's all true, but unless someone's got a better alternative, it doesn't matter.
It isn't surprising that people who spend money on advertising want to have some metric by which to predict (estimate, guess, what-have-you) the impact of each dollar spent on web advertising. Assuming the people spending the money are, as a class, either stupid or ignorant is a mistake. Odds are good that many of them know that Alexa is flawed, but also consider any information better than nothing. If nothing else, Alexa rankings demonstrate the relative popularity of a web site among Alexa participants - which is at least a concrete demographic, and the stats are inarguable on that basis.
What's being missed is that there's a fundamental problem, here. Populations which refuse to share information with such aggregators will always self-select against representation. It's no different, really, than stating that populations who do not vote self-select against being represented in government. That doesn't stop us from using elections as a way to select people into government.
In the specific case of slashdot selecting against itself, it's debatable whether we're a demographic many organizations would even want to target (with web advertising) if they could. How many comments on how many stories have included someone claiming that he's either unaffected by or negatively affected by advertising? That he's less likely to buy a product he sees advertised? Broader yet, how do you suppose the median number of lifetime banner ad clicks for the slashdot user compares to that of the web-using population at large?
I posit that we pose a particularly galling challenge to marketers. On the one hand (if you'll allow me a bit of net-cultural hubris), we're a demographic of above-average intelligence, above-average income, with an above-average tendency to spend money on brand new technology, and who have an above-average impact on what other people will buy. On the other, we refuse to share our habits with "big brother," we're easily offended (eg, we hate proprietary formats solely because they're proprietary), comparatively hard to bamboozle, and have a cultural predisposition towards "free" (both beer and speech). That is, on the one hand, we're a fantastic demographic to succeed with, but on the other, we're a tough nut to crack.
The point is that Alexa is flawed, without a doubt. But it seems more flawed from the point of view of a group which deliberately makes itself all but impossible to measure. And frankly, if we're not willing to provide the information necessary for advertisers to make informed choices, we're going to continue to be ignored, both on the web and on television. (Yes, I do realize that Nielsen is specifically flawed with respect to DVRs - but even if they weren't, how many members of this site would voluntarily install habit-tracking software on their TiVo? How many members of this site would call for a boycott of TiVo if it installed it for them?)
First, I'd like to encourage you to get an account and post under it; this post is well-reasoned and interesting, but it's sheer chance I was bored enough to set my threshhold low enough to see +0 posts.
That aside: my limited exposure to accounting (two mandatory semesters in college) leads me to believe that, in large part, what makes public (GAAP) accounting so inscrutable to most people is that it's tightly regulated. That is, everything needs to be accounted for in a very specific way, which, if you speak the language, means that everything is perfectly transparent. That very specific way, however, is highly obfuscatory to the layman.
By contrast, private accounting (which is done by companies for internal use only, or by private companies who aren't required to maintain public accounting records), is far simpler, because its goal isn't to follow rules, but to sensibly account for everything.
All that being said, there's no doubt that within the highly specific set of rules for public accounting, companies make use of whatever wiggle-room they've got to present the best face they can. Even if they didn't, however, the results would still seem obfuscatory to the layman, because the system itself is fairly arcane.
In this case, I don't have anything like enough knowledge of either GAAP or MS to comment accurately on how close to "common sense" the statement of a $1.89b loss is.
There is an interesting side effect to the nature of accounting principles which might be what the GPP is alluding to, which you mentioned in your first sentence. Since everyone knows what the rules are, and accepts them as the way that money is accounted for, there really isn't any difference between "real" money and "accounting magic." The money you can account for having (assuming you're compliant with all appropriate regulations) is, in fact, money you actually have - since everyone will credit you with having that much money.
Yes, exactly. That's why they want to move from "one household per ZIP code" to "one household per ZIP+4," so that it's representative of actual penetration. The avantage of using ZIP+4 instead of "household" is that ZIP+4 is well-defined, while "household" is less so. As an example, is a duplex one household or two? How about a kid living in his parents' basement - but paying rent?
Where am I going to get T1s from? AT&T? I have the sneaking suspicion that they will be priced - by AT&T - at a level that makes it difficult to compete with AT&T. The problem is that internet service is inherently a non-local product, since it depends on general connectivity with the rest of the world. It is essentially impossible for your average startup to lay its own network of physical links, which means it has to contract with the owners of the existing lines. In my area, a single T1 can be leased for ~$1000/month. That's 1.544 Mbps of service (with an SLA, and not counting installation, of course). I've been trying to track down what it would cost for an OC-3 or equivalent, but all I've been able to find is AT&T's aging ATM OC-3 offering, at $4500/month (and I got that from my company's network guy, so it's the rate we, as an enterprise customer of AT&T's, would get - it's entirely possible the rate would be higher for a new entry without other leased lines), and that's still only 155.5 Mbps. Which would allow me to have a few dozen subscribers, probably, assuming I oversell the bandwidth.
The problem is that the owners of the existing lines are also the companies providing end-user services on those lines. There's an obvious conflict of interest, then, if they start leasing lines to other organizations to compete with themselves. Imagine what would happen if power companies sold light bulbs, and no one else could sell light bulbs without paying a licensing fee to the power company for use of their lines.
Let's also not forget that we have already paid taxes in support of these lines being laid; in a very real sense, we're part owners of the infrastructure in question. It isn't terribly much to ask that we're guaranteed access to the lines.
But at this point, we've strayed pretty far afield of the original issue. I don't see a problem with forcing the FCC to use accurate metrics to measure broadband penetration. I don't understand how it can possibly make the market less competitive to have a more accurate picture of the state of broadband in this country. Calling an entire ZIP code "served" because one residence in it has access to a 200 Kbps connection is obviously flawed; your argument that correcting this will lead to monopoly appears dubious to me. We would never consider an entire ZIP code to have electricity if one house had a single 15 amp circuit, would we? Or an entire ZIP code to have phone service if one house had one phone line - that didn't support tone dialing.
We're specifically not talking about federal subsidies for anything at this point*; the bill mandates accurate FCC representation of broadband in the US. And regardless of subsidies, the fact that most markets already don't have the competition you want means this bill can't make it much worse - and it doesn't matter why the competition isn't there.
In general, and on most topics, I agree with you - I think this is the first time I haven't agreed with you on any subject - but the idea that local issues should be kept local doesn't apply here. Yes, they should, but internet connectivity is non-local.
(Oh, and I should mention that I wasn't presenting Mt. Horeb as an insoluble situation, but rather as an indication that being a "small player" doesn't necessarily equate with being a "good guy.")
*Well, aside from the fact that we're supporting the existence of the FCC, but that's really not attributable to this particular bill.
I'm right with you...almost. I thought Freespace did a much better job of cranking on the tension. The story mechanic of trying to catch your technology up in a war you were steadily losing did a great job, IMHO, of putting you in the universe.
The second one did some great things, and I enjoyed it, but the "you're not authorized to use the cool weapons" mechanic to explain tech progression let me down. And, while the use of giant cap ship beam weapons was awesome, it would have been more awesome if they hadn't used it every time.
The more minimalist approach in the first game led to some awesome moments - like discovering that you had to fight these guys who had shields.
In a way, I liken it to Star Wars vs the prequels. The fact that he had less to work with made the original movies far, far better. (This is not to say the FS2 shares quality with the prequels; FS2 is a great game in its own right. I just prefer the first one)
So you're essentially saying that if you build it, they won't necessarily come. I won't argue with you; HDTV content is expensive to produce and distribute. Whether consumers want to download it on their big fat pipes isn't really material, though. The pipe is useful whether or not there's HDTV being sent down it; the fact that it would be more useful if there was HDTV content being sent down it doesn't change that fact.
I won't argue, though, that it would just be more of the same, but faster, rather than some sort of HDTV over TCP/IP revoultion.
This bill was written solely to upset the current relatively free market of broadband.
A little more "relatively," and a little less "free," in my experience. In my current location (Madison, WI - not a major metropolitan area, but not the sticks, either), I have two choices for broadband: cable or DSL. If I go with cable, I go with Charter. If I go with DSL, I go with AT&T. "Tha's it an' tha's all," as they say. I fail to see how anything can squeeze "smaller providers" out of the system more than not being in the system at all.
Beyond which, let's not maintain too idealized a picture of these "smaller providers." Mt. Horeb is a small town about 20 minutes outside of Madison. There's a phone company - a literal mom-and-pop operation (or at least, husband and wife; I don't know that they have children) - that does business in Mt. Horeb. They've managed to arrange with the city that, if you want landline phone service or DSL, they are the only choice. Period.
"Competition" in today's American broadband market generally means "if you don't like it, you can move."
Slashdot Mirror
Not necessarily incompetent, but less vested in our hardware, and less accountable for minor mishaps (contractually, of course, highly accountable for major ones). If we're lucky, we might be able to get back the billable hours.
But that's not the same question as whether they're reliable facilities in terms of power, cooling, and security. It's entirely possible for the DC to have acceptable uptime without the remote hands staff being similarly competent.
As for reasons, in our case, we've got a couple thousand employees scattered across 60+ locations around the country. Most of the office space is leased, and none of it has the capacity to host our primary DC, so we've outsourced that to AT&T in Chicago. The decision was originally made that it was more cost-effective to lease cage space from them than it was to purchase a new building including a DC.
(And, actually, after AT&T failed to deliver contracted cooling/power expansion for several months, we decided to roll buildout of a new space - including DC - into our continuing centralization of IT)
That's great and all - and I have to say, the iLO 2 boards are really, really nice; almost as fast as RDPing to the server - but it just doesn't cover everything. Sometimes you just have to have physical access to the machine. When a hard drive fails, for example, somebody's got to physically swap the drive. And if my experience with remote hands is anything to go by (borking an array by putting the drives back in the wrong order, most recently), doing it yourself is far preferable for some things.
Not to mention that you don't want to trust the DC's remote hands people for racking/deracking equipment, or doing proper cable management, or accurate labeling of pizza boxes, etc...
Oh, please.
That argument is no more valid than this one:
Take a look at bittorrent sites, and see how many seeds/leechers there are for popular movies. Every one of those people represents at least one lost ticket sale for theaters.
No, I haven't done a scientific study that's been published in a refereed journal. So what?
Most people I've ever met would rather pay nothing for something and own it than pay $10 to see it once.
Again, I haven't done a scientific study that's been published in a refereed journal. So what?
Occam's razor points to the ubiquity of free copies of movies being the reason people aren't paying for them.
Sources to cite? I don't need any citations, it's pretty obvious on the face of it.
Am I making an unfounded claim? Fucking right I am. But that doesn't make me wrong any more than it makes the original poster right.
It's news that dropping the price of [item] leads to more people buying [item]?
The only people this is news to are people so rabidly anti-Sony that they've convinced themselves that no one wants the PS3. Which is demonstrably false, since people continue to buy the PS3.
This might be news if it meant that the PS3 was now outselling the 360, but it doesn't.
If anything, I'm a 360 fanboy - I love me my Gears, my Dead Rising, and my Forza 2 - but it comes as no surprise to me that people are buying the PS3 (other considerations aside, it's a damn fine piece of hardware), and that means it comes as no surprise to me that a price drop leads to an increase in sales.
You don't exactly need to be Milton Friedman to have seen this one coming.
Insofar as ads provide the income stream of resources you/we value (slashdot, for example), it makes all the difference in the world.
Insofar as you consume no ad-supported goods, services, or media, then it doesn't matter to you in the slightest. In current American society, however, being a consumer who foots the entire bill for everything you consume (as opposed to having your consumption subsidized by advertising), is the exception rather than the norm.
So you may well be right, it doesn't affect you at all. There is a large group of people in the demographic to which I'm referring, however, that it does affect. Such as the group of people who would have liked to see more Firefly, as an example. Or the group of people who enjoy reading slashdot and do not bother to subscribe.
I'm unaware of any objective information that leads to anything like a definitive conclusion.
Yes, it is.
No, it isn't.
In one sense, I agree with you about people today.
However, I think it's unnecessarily pejorative to refer to people as media driven sheep. Instead, what they really are is satisfied. Most people in this country enjoy a standard of living that is without historical precedent - even the most impoverished, by comparison to the most impoverished of just a few centuries prior, are stunningly well-off (this is not a claim that we shouldn't fight poverty, of course!).
We live in such luxury that we can take the time and mental energy to be emotionally invested in the propriety of when works exit copyright!
It shouldn't be surprising, then, that there aren't anywhere near enough people disgruntled enough to take on the task of rewriting the rules. In one sense, you can rail at them about being frogs in the pot, or succumbing to bread and circuses. In another, though, if a person is generally satisfied with life, it's a tough sell to get that person to give that life up for a fairly abstract good.
Is that a feature of being media driven sheep? Sure, in a way. In another way, though, it's just people being rational actors.
Your argument depends on two unsupported assumptions:
1) That the drop in ticket sales is solely, primarily, or at least in large part due to illicit file sharing. Given the existence of other possible factors - including a rise in home theater setups, the shorter turnaround time to the DVD release, and the rising ticket prices you already mention (simple economics seems to indicate that an increased price will lead to a reduced quantity demanded) - that's a bold assumption to make without supporting data.
2) That the drop in ticket sales is a reliable indicator of net income to Hollywood from movie creation. Given the increase in sales of movies on DVD, this is also a bold assumption to make without supporting date.
Really, the only safe conclusion to draw from the drop in revenue at theaters is that the theater model of movie distribution is being threatened. This may or may not correlate to "threatening the future of film."
Tangentially, it's interesting that you claim to support the free market, and yet also state that you support artificial scarcity imposed upon it. Artificial scarcity is anathema to the free market. If it's necessary for the creation of content, it's an indication that the free market is a poor mechanism for encouraging such creation. The market for creative content is completely non-competitive: that is, the copyright holder is the only person who can be the source for the copyrighted content, by definition. This is a monopoly position to whatever extent one believes that Casablanca and Armageddon are dissimilar goods.
Its long past time to toss all of them out on their ass and revamp the system like it was intended to be by our founders. ( yes i know it wont happen until the 2nd revolution, but i can still wish )
When you say "intended to be by our founders," you're talking about a second revolution. The oft-used Jefferson quote about the tree of liberty and the blood of patriots and tyrants wasn't just a clever line, it was an actual statement of belief.
There are two provisions made in the Constitution for revamping the system: the former is Article V, providing the states the ability to amend the Constitution without the assistance of the fed.gov. The latter is the second amendment.
Use of neither is terribly likely.
Yes, but assuming you host the ad content, you can look at your logs to see how many page views you've got (as well as how many clickthroughs). I'm pretty sure - not certain, but pretty sure - that's how the payment structure is set up. Which, again, counts on the ad already being put out on the site, and does nothing for predicting which sites would be good bets to put the ad out on.
That's true if the person using the data is unaware that it's flawed. But an educated decision can be made to use data that's known to be flawed, if one evaluates what those flaws are, and what they'll mean to whatever it is you're doing.
In fact, as I think about it, I'm not sure "flawed" is the right word. The information is incomplete; whether that's a flaw depends on whether or not you recognize that you don't have all the information.
I think that assuming all the people using Alexa rankings to make purchasing decisions are stupid is misguided. I think it's a much safer assumption that the distribution of stupid, average, and intelligent people among that population is fairly close to that of the population at large. Many of them are making decisions based, in part, on having information that they know to be incomplete, which they judge to be preferable to making decisions based on having no information.
Sure, but that all presupposes you've already bought ad space on the site in question. When you're trying to select which web sites to purchase ad space on in the first place, you don't have access to any of those metrics. If we were talking about a handful of key sites, that wouldn't be a problem - test the waters, go with what works.
But given the huge number of web sites out there that run ads, you need some way of doing an initial selection of which ones to pay. Hence Alexa.
Of course a site could skew their own results which creates its own problem but would this not at least be more valuable than alexa data?
No, it wouldn't, and you've already stated why. Everyone knows that web site logs are the single most accurate way of measuring web site traffic. And no one uses them anyway - not because they think Alexa collects better data, but Alexa doesn't have a vested interest in making a given site look better than it is.
A system which counts on the person selling to give you an honest evaluation of the worth of their product is never going to be more accepted than one involving a third party.
You're right, however, in that what's really needed is a better way to track visits to web sites. The problem is that we can't trust the buy-in of the owners, because they're (obviously) biased. Also, we can't trust the opt-in of the visitors, because so many of them don't opt-in. So the question becomes, what sources of information do we have?
I don't have an answer to that question. And, based on the lack of third-party ratings systems other than Alexa, I don't know that anyone else has that answer, either.
That's all true, but unless someone's got a better alternative, it doesn't matter.
It isn't surprising that people who spend money on advertising want to have some metric by which to predict (estimate, guess, what-have-you) the impact of each dollar spent on web advertising. Assuming the people spending the money are, as a class, either stupid or ignorant is a mistake. Odds are good that many of them know that Alexa is flawed, but also consider any information better than nothing. If nothing else, Alexa rankings demonstrate the relative popularity of a web site among Alexa participants - which is at least a concrete demographic, and the stats are inarguable on that basis.
What's being missed is that there's a fundamental problem, here. Populations which refuse to share information with such aggregators will always self-select against representation. It's no different, really, than stating that populations who do not vote self-select against being represented in government. That doesn't stop us from using elections as a way to select people into government.
In the specific case of slashdot selecting against itself, it's debatable whether we're a demographic many organizations would even want to target (with web advertising) if they could. How many comments on how many stories have included someone claiming that he's either unaffected by or negatively affected by advertising? That he's less likely to buy a product he sees advertised? Broader yet, how do you suppose the median number of lifetime banner ad clicks for the slashdot user compares to that of the web-using population at large?
I posit that we pose a particularly galling challenge to marketers. On the one hand (if you'll allow me a bit of net-cultural hubris), we're a demographic of above-average intelligence, above-average income, with an above-average tendency to spend money on brand new technology, and who have an above-average impact on what other people will buy. On the other, we refuse to share our habits with "big brother," we're easily offended (eg, we hate proprietary formats solely because they're proprietary), comparatively hard to bamboozle, and have a cultural predisposition towards "free" (both beer and speech). That is, on the one hand, we're a fantastic demographic to succeed with, but on the other, we're a tough nut to crack.
The point is that Alexa is flawed, without a doubt. But it seems more flawed from the point of view of a group which deliberately makes itself all but impossible to measure. And frankly, if we're not willing to provide the information necessary for advertisers to make informed choices, we're going to continue to be ignored, both on the web and on television. (Yes, I do realize that Nielsen is specifically flawed with respect to DVRs - but even if they weren't, how many members of this site would voluntarily install habit-tracking software on their TiVo? How many members of this site would call for a boycott of TiVo if it installed it for them?)
What the hell is a shipper? Is this some kind of fanfic/slashfic term of art? Or am I just too damn old to understand?
Huh.
Well, they're dead to me, anyway.
First, I'd like to encourage you to get an account and post under it; this post is well-reasoned and interesting, but it's sheer chance I was bored enough to set my threshhold low enough to see +0 posts.
That aside: my limited exposure to accounting (two mandatory semesters in college) leads me to believe that, in large part, what makes public (GAAP) accounting so inscrutable to most people is that it's tightly regulated. That is, everything needs to be accounted for in a very specific way, which, if you speak the language, means that everything is perfectly transparent. That very specific way, however, is highly obfuscatory to the layman.
By contrast, private accounting (which is done by companies for internal use only, or by private companies who aren't required to maintain public accounting records), is far simpler, because its goal isn't to follow rules, but to sensibly account for everything.
All that being said, there's no doubt that within the highly specific set of rules for public accounting, companies make use of whatever wiggle-room they've got to present the best face they can. Even if they didn't, however, the results would still seem obfuscatory to the layman, because the system itself is fairly arcane.
In this case, I don't have anything like enough knowledge of either GAAP or MS to comment accurately on how close to "common sense" the statement of a $1.89b loss is.
There is an interesting side effect to the nature of accounting principles which might be what the GPP is alluding to, which you mentioned in your first sentence. Since everyone knows what the rules are, and accepts them as the way that money is accounted for, there really isn't any difference between "real" money and "accounting magic." The money you can account for having (assuming you're compliant with all appropriate regulations) is, in fact, money you actually have - since everyone will credit you with having that much money.
Well that's bullshit.
Yes, exactly. That's why they want to move from "one household per ZIP code" to "one household per ZIP+4," so that it's representative of actual penetration. The avantage of using ZIP+4 instead of "household" is that ZIP+4 is well-defined, while "household" is less so. As an example, is a duplex one household or two? How about a kid living in his parents' basement - but paying rent?
That sort of thing.
Where am I going to get T1s from? AT&T? I have the sneaking suspicion that they will be priced - by AT&T - at a level that makes it difficult to compete with AT&T. The problem is that internet service is inherently a non-local product, since it depends on general connectivity with the rest of the world. It is essentially impossible for your average startup to lay its own network of physical links, which means it has to contract with the owners of the existing lines. In my area, a single T1 can be leased for ~$1000/month. That's 1.544 Mbps of service (with an SLA, and not counting installation, of course). I've been trying to track down what it would cost for an OC-3 or equivalent, but all I've been able to find is AT&T's aging ATM OC-3 offering, at $4500/month (and I got that from my company's network guy, so it's the rate we, as an enterprise customer of AT&T's, would get - it's entirely possible the rate would be higher for a new entry without other leased lines), and that's still only 155.5 Mbps. Which would allow me to have a few dozen subscribers, probably, assuming I oversell the bandwidth.
The problem is that the owners of the existing lines are also the companies providing end-user services on those lines. There's an obvious conflict of interest, then, if they start leasing lines to other organizations to compete with themselves. Imagine what would happen if power companies sold light bulbs, and no one else could sell light bulbs without paying a licensing fee to the power company for use of their lines.
Let's also not forget that we have already paid taxes in support of these lines being laid; in a very real sense, we're part owners of the infrastructure in question. It isn't terribly much to ask that we're guaranteed access to the lines.
But at this point, we've strayed pretty far afield of the original issue. I don't see a problem with forcing the FCC to use accurate metrics to measure broadband penetration. I don't understand how it can possibly make the market less competitive to have a more accurate picture of the state of broadband in this country. Calling an entire ZIP code "served" because one residence in it has access to a 200 Kbps connection is obviously flawed; your argument that correcting this will lead to monopoly appears dubious to me. We would never consider an entire ZIP code to have electricity if one house had a single 15 amp circuit, would we? Or an entire ZIP code to have phone service if one house had one phone line - that didn't support tone dialing.
We're specifically not talking about federal subsidies for anything at this point*; the bill mandates accurate FCC representation of broadband in the US. And regardless of subsidies, the fact that most markets already don't have the competition you want means this bill can't make it much worse - and it doesn't matter why the competition isn't there.
In general, and on most topics, I agree with you - I think this is the first time I haven't agreed with you on any subject - but the idea that local issues should be kept local doesn't apply here. Yes, they should, but internet connectivity is non-local.
(Oh, and I should mention that I wasn't presenting Mt. Horeb as an insoluble situation, but rather as an indication that being a "small player" doesn't necessarily equate with being a "good guy.")
*Well, aside from the fact that we're supporting the existence of the FCC, but that's really not attributable to this particular bill.
Quality, performance, value; pick any two. Hint: Windows isn't "value"...
So...you're trying to say that Windows is quality and performance?
That seems an unlikely belief, for slashdot.
Volition. Their name was Volition, and the world mourns their passing.
I'm right with you...almost. I thought Freespace did a much better job of cranking on the tension. The story mechanic of trying to catch your technology up in a war you were steadily losing did a great job, IMHO, of putting you in the universe.
The second one did some great things, and I enjoyed it, but the "you're not authorized to use the cool weapons" mechanic to explain tech progression let me down. And, while the use of giant cap ship beam weapons was awesome, it would have been more awesome if they hadn't used it every time.
The more minimalist approach in the first game led to some awesome moments - like discovering that you had to fight these guys who had shields.
In a way, I liken it to Star Wars vs the prequels. The fact that he had less to work with made the original movies far, far better. (This is not to say the FS2 shares quality with the prequels; FS2 is a great game in its own right. I just prefer the first one)
So you're essentially saying that if you build it, they won't necessarily come. I won't argue with you; HDTV content is expensive to produce and distribute. Whether consumers want to download it on their big fat pipes isn't really material, though. The pipe is useful whether or not there's HDTV being sent down it; the fact that it would be more useful if there was HDTV content being sent down it doesn't change that fact.
I won't argue, though, that it would just be more of the same, but faster, rather than some sort of HDTV over TCP/IP revoultion.
This bill was written solely to upset the current relatively free market of broadband.
A little more "relatively," and a little less "free," in my experience. In my current location (Madison, WI - not a major metropolitan area, but not the sticks, either), I have two choices for broadband: cable or DSL. If I go with cable, I go with Charter. If I go with DSL, I go with AT&T. "Tha's it an' tha's all," as they say. I fail to see how anything can squeeze "smaller providers" out of the system more than not being in the system at all.
Beyond which, let's not maintain too idealized a picture of these "smaller providers." Mt. Horeb is a small town about 20 minutes outside of Madison. There's a phone company - a literal mom-and-pop operation (or at least, husband and wife; I don't know that they have children) - that does business in Mt. Horeb. They've managed to arrange with the city that, if you want landline phone service or DSL, they are the only choice. Period.
"Competition" in today's American broadband market generally means "if you don't like it, you can move."