Update June 10, 11:31AM: Last week, we launched the ability to set an image of users’ choosing as the background for the Google homepage. Today, we ran a special “doodle” that showcased this functionality by featuring a series of images as the background for our homepage. We had planned to run an explanation of the showcase alongside it—in the form of a link on our homepage. Due to a bug, the explanatory link did not appear for most users. As a result, many people thought we had permanently changed our homepage, so we decided to stop today’s series early. We appreciate your feedback and patience as we experiment and iterate.
Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience
For the record, they sell access to the web site for $5 per week, while they sell the paper for $4.50 including access to the web site. Basically those 35 subscribers are paying 50 cents per day to not get the paper delivered. They also give free access to all people who subscribe to the local cable provider -- which is a lot of people for the local paper.
If you want people to use less electricity charge more for it and use the tax to fund something good like public transit
The difficulty is people don't know how they're using that energy. Most consumers probably don't think of their energy bill when buying a TV (they're thinking picture quality and price.) Moreover, even if they are, it's pretty difficult for a normal consumer to figure how how much energy a television will use and exactly what the additional cost of that energy usage is over the life of the TV.
Oh, there's also one other trick. The cost of building new power plants has gotten pretty expensive in recent years. Lots of commodity costs (steel, energy... and now debt) went way up. Thus, if lots of new inefficient TVs come online and require a new power plant, that more expensive power plant will raise the base cost of electricity for everyone. Even people who are just trying to use it to run some basic necessities.
1. Spend lots of money to invent the mousetrap 2. Spend more money to make it better 3. Allow cable/satellite to build 80% of your ideas into their own equipment and cut you out of any revenues 4. Profit
$18 million to redesign a website? WTF are they doing with it?
From TFA, they're going to spend $9.5 million over the next 6 months or so. Assuming $75k salaries for the web developers/DBAs/etc (generous), they'd be hiring 250 people to design a website.
And Americans wonder why they have such a big deficit.
I'm guessing this isn't just build the web site, it's to build and run it through January 2014 (See the GSA press release). Remember, they have to buy equipment and bandwidth too, although I'm betting the biggest issue is collecting, entering and sorting the massive amounts of data related to all the projects. Still sounds like a lot of money.
I find this extremely ironic because today a columnist from _Reuters_ broke the big news story about the Goldman Sachs arrest. And Reuters has a very informative web site. While NY and Chicago papers (who should have broken the story because it happened in their cities) were snoozing.
Controlling the aggregator won't making papers profitable. Delivering a service people _want to pay for_ (like Flickr, or WSJ, or the Economist) will make them profitable. And so far, local papers (even in bigger cities like Boston) are just not doing that.
.... Reuters has several thousand journalists. Why would they not break major stories?
...Because the market isn't always particularly good at giving customers what they want. I know this is heresy in some circles, but the truth is that a market for taxi's doesn't really give the consumer a whole lot of power. If you want a cab, you usually have to accept the cab that happens to be within a block or two... or wait a whole lot of time to call your favored cab company and have them drive over.
Both of these options suck.
As a result, cities developed regulatory agencies with the authority to set rates (do you want to negotiate the rate from point A to B every single time) and set a basic minimum requirement for what level of service should be provided.
The pure free marketer might say that the market would supply this if people wanted it, but it's just not true. The market will only supply it if the guy who makes his cab smell fresh and have a automated CC machine (or whatever people want) makes more money... and since a huge portion of the business in NYC is street pickups, people don't often get to choose the nicer cab. So, since he has a slightly higher cost of business, he goes out of business... or makes less money.
Honestly, I thought Cringely's decision to try and tie TMI to the current financial crisis was a bit of a stretch, but it applies perfectly here. TMI officials took a huge risk [coulda wiped out a bunch of the Northeast] and only avoided catastrophe because of luck (the reactor had a strong than normal containment vessel.)
Wall Street basically did the same the mortgage boom -- they just lost the bet. Now we're all paying.
Where both failed was properly planning for what happened when something really went wrong. Wall Street was prepared for the failure for X% of people to stop paying mortgages because the values of homes "always" went up. I.E. A foreclosure just meant selling a house that was more valuable than when it was bought. This worked great, until home values fell and the taxpayers now get to fill that hole.
At TMI operators were ready for one thing to go wrong and to fix it, but they weren't ready for when something really went wrong because their IT systems couldn't process the results of a real crisis.
I get it that most engineers seem to be pro nuke, but forgive the public if they're a bit skeptical. Guess what, doctors always seem ready to operate, your stock broker always wants you in the market and your lawyer is willing to sue at the drop of a hat. People tend to have confidence in their own competencies.
The job of the nuclear industry is to prove that their equipment will be safe -- even when operated poorly by greedy executives who might be willing to take the risk of huge amounts of wealth vs. a 1 in 10,000 year chance of a failure. That's a reasonable risk for the head of a nuke, but a terrible risk for a country with 100 reactors. (I.E. you will have a breach in the next 100 years.)
It's not that all such employees will have such an attitude, but that at somepoint, someone will.
Uh, your emphasis proves he's exactly right. The EXISTING infrastructure can handle 84% of passenger car needs. Well, as he clearly states, 84% of passenger cars aren't going to be all electric tomorrow, meaning that the electric power industry would have time to react and build some new infrastructure (or increase efficiency of existing customer base... although there's not as much profit in that for most utilities under existing regulations).
Now, no one can prove that there aren't complications or it won't work, but DOE clearly thinks it won't be a huge problem. For one, supplying the necessary power and supplying the power in a cost effective manner are two very different things. Generally these studies look at feasibility, but don't get much into how it will play with the economics of power generation.
The same way IE7, IE6, IE5 and I'm pretty sure lesser IEs did? IE has long allowed different security settings for intranet vs. internet pages.
As I hinted about above, the dynamics of Intranet and internet are very different.
Change on the Internet is very difficult because site developers must develop towards the most common denominator and this is rarely the cutting edge. Even if it's better for everyone to move towards the standards, there is a disincentive for anyone to move first.
An intranet is completely different. If a company finds there is an advantage to moving off of IE6/7 and on to IE8, well they just need some guy in IT to sign off on redeveloping any things that would be broken.
MS is "breaking" that promise only for intranet pages and, honestly, intranet pages are a very different. If you think corporations are going to be updating all these internal applications when all they have to do is switch on compatibility mode, well you've got another thing coming.
And, if intranet pages stop working I'd wager a whole lot of users and corporations would just turn on compatibility mode for EVERYTHING and be done with it. One could argue even more people will use the regular IE8 mode if this is left as default.
Wait, I don't know what I was thinking. M$ IS EVIL LIAR!
Just playing devils advocate as from a environmental point of view how could this be a bad thing. First off the US needs to do something like Germany and give economic incentives, ie a fixed price on energy. This way your not competing dollar for dollar with oil and coal.
Wait, so you think that developers are building these without incentives and that's a bad thing? Sadly, wind still does need incentives -- and gets it in the U.S. -- but the whole idea is for incentives to jump start the technology to where it becomes competitive without the incentives.
And these turbines, at least, aren't really gobbling land -- a lot of them get placed on ranch land, so it's essentially multi-use.
Because China is trying to figure out a "balance".... they want foreigners to be able to come in and communicate home, but don't want the general population getting too much unfiltered information.
It's about controlling the politics, not maintaing some information purity.
And, simply by blocking these sites, the government is able to mark them as bad or dangerous, which has weight with a lot of the population.... usually at least until the blocking hits too close to home. (As in all free speech issues).
Guess what they're anonymous and they're basically worthless, consider the lack of any meaningful moderation system ala Slashdot. Comments in articles quickly become long, barely threaded and filled with idotic or worse comments.
It's the rule of internet forums, without some party moderating the debate, the troll wins and the comments suck.
Slashdot's answer is to allow the mob (users) to moderate, but Brady, since he's from the more traditional media, is wary of the mob. The mob has all sorts of biases and tends to reinforce its beliefs. It may be interesting discourse, but it can be difficult to get a balanced discourse -- and this is something the Post is committed to, for better or/and worse.
End result: The Post has moved slowly on user moderation and tried to keep moderation in the hands of a limited number of editors, which becomes overwhelming with so many posts and so many trolls.
His answer, is to require require people's ID to post on his company's web site. Throw in a little potential shame of trolling and see worthless comments decrease -- certainly people will think about them more.
Honestly, I think Brady's wrong on this point, I think the right answer is closer to Slashdot than what he envisions, but it's silly to try to slur the man as an enemy of free speech. Remember he's talking about the policies of the Washington Post on the Washington Post web site, not for the internet as a whole.
The biggest enemy to free speech can sometimes simply be too much noise.
"Hard" and "soft" money has nothing to do with opting out of public funding. In fact, the record amounts of money raised in the primaries HAS been "hard" money -- or money raised under the ~$2,000 per person limit to candidates.
Soft money refers to ulimited donations to interest groups that, because of free speech laws, are able to run ads and perform other activities to support particular ideas and parties (which may just happen to align perfectly with one candidate).
The reason the candidates aren't accepting public funding is that while it gives candidates a bonus per dollar raised, it also limits how much they can spend. The amounts a major national figure can raise today is actually larger than the most they can collect under public funding plus the government subsidy.
The two figures you're comparing (watts and watt hours) are very different figures. One is based on the i>capacity of the energy generation unit and one is based on the cost of the actually energy produced by a generation unit.
For example Duke Energy has proposed an 800 MW coal plant at a price of about $2,250/kW, which if you talk watt terms is $2.25 per watt. This compares well with the $1/watt that the company is claiming they could sell profitably at $1 per watt.
Of course there are some small print in these figures that matters, the most problematic for Nanosolar being that solar panels can only reach their full capacity during the middle of sunny days in favorable regions. Thus, while I certainly don't have the tools to do it, one would have to discount the amount of capacity one could actually count on depending on the climate the panels were in. As a result, that means either more solar or backup natural gas capacity, which would increase the real cost per watt.
Of course you don't have to pay for fuel (just maintenance), so that would help solar technology.
If they really can produce at that cost, it's quite impressive and hopefully solar can be a much bigger part of the electricity generation mix.
Google buying LexisNexis wouldn't really do you much good. If Google bought -- and opened up to the public -- LexisNexis, most of the content providers would quickly drop out of the service (or significantly hike their rates) since Google would essentially be selling their content to their audience.
In other words, Google now has to come up with and payo ut the revenues of LexisNexis' 32,000 sources to keep the service together.
Get some good, worthwhile rural rail systems in place, and then we'll talk. Right now it's a non-starter.
Rail, doesn't make sense for rural areas. This it the entire problem with Amtrak, which has a lot of rail stuck out in the middle of nowhere (http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom/2005/12/10/amtrakMap.gif) based on the idea that we needed a national system... mostly because they could get funding by getting services into a congressman's district.
Our cities are in decline because we won't invest any money in them, which has encouraged people to leave to the burbs, leaving the cities with lots of old rickety infrastructure they have to maintain on a reduced tax base, which thus encourages more people to leave. Now, here's the rub, it's so "cheap" out in the rural and particularly suburban areas because the feds and the states tend to be pretty open with the wallet to build new infrastructure for new housing and industry developments. Politicians love saying they opened a new school, but spending $5 million on roof repairs for the school district doesn't really win the hearts and minds. Worse, funding rules are tilted towards new construction instead of maintenance.
As a result, we essentially subsidize the creation of the suburbs, which will get old and will get overcrowded, and will eventually require the the construction of the infrastructure we already built in the cities. Of course, you know what's coming, that infrastructure will get old and require funds for a major revamp, taxes will go up, while services will go down so everyone will start moving to new areas, which will get all the money.
Slashdot Mirror
Update June 10, 11:31AM: Last week, we launched the ability to set an image of users’ choosing as the background for the Google homepage. Today, we ran a special “doodle” that showcased this functionality by featuring a series of images as the background for our homepage. We had planned to run an explanation of the showcase alongside it—in the form of a link on our homepage. Due to a bug, the explanatory link did not appear for most users. As a result, many people thought we had permanently changed our homepage, so we decided to stop today’s series early. We appreciate your feedback and patience as we experiment and iterate.
Posted by Marissa Mayer, VP Search Products & User Experience
For the record, they sell access to the web site for $5 per week, while they sell the paper for $4.50 including access to the web site. Basically those 35 subscribers are paying 50 cents per day to not get the paper delivered. They also give free access to all people who subscribe to the local cable provider -- which is a lot of people for the local paper.
Plus it's Newsday.....
Thread over in one, good job.
They were the majority owner previously. Way to be a day late AND wrong.
If you want people to use less electricity charge more for it and use the tax to fund something good like public transit
The difficulty is people don't know how they're using that energy. Most consumers probably don't think of their energy bill when buying a TV (they're thinking picture quality and price.) Moreover, even if they are, it's pretty difficult for a normal consumer to figure how how much energy a television will use and exactly what the additional cost of that energy usage is over the life of the TV.
Oh, there's also one other trick. The cost of building new power plants has gotten pretty expensive in recent years. Lots of commodity costs (steel, energy... and now debt) went way up. Thus, if lots of new inefficient TVs come online and require a new power plant, that more expensive power plant will raise the base cost of electricity for everyone. Even people who are just trying to use it to run some basic necessities.
It's probably a better business model than
1. Spend lots of money to invent the mousetrap
2. Spend more money to make it better
3. Allow cable/satellite to build 80% of your ideas into their own equipment and cut you out of any revenues
4. Profit
$18 million to redesign a website? WTF are they doing with it?
From TFA, they're going to spend $9.5 million over the next 6 months or so. Assuming $75k salaries for the web developers/DBAs/etc (generous), they'd be hiring 250 people to design a website.
And Americans wonder why they have such a big deficit.
I'm guessing this isn't just build the web site, it's to build and run it through January 2014 (See the GSA press release). Remember, they have to buy equipment and bandwidth too, although I'm betting the biggest issue is collecting, entering and sorting the massive amounts of data related to all the projects. Still sounds like a lot of money.
I find this extremely ironic because today a columnist from _Reuters_ broke the big news story about the Goldman Sachs arrest. And Reuters has a very informative web site. While NY and Chicago papers (who should have broken the story because it happened in their cities) were snoozing.
Controlling the aggregator won't making papers profitable. Delivering a service people _want to pay for_ (like Flickr, or WSJ, or the Economist) will make them profitable. And so far, local papers (even in bigger cities like Boston) are just not doing that.
.... Reuters has several thousand journalists. Why would they not break major stories?
...Because the market isn't always particularly good at giving customers what they want. I know this is heresy in some circles, but the truth is that a market for taxi's doesn't really give the consumer a whole lot of power. If you want a cab, you usually have to accept the cab that happens to be within a block or two... or wait a whole lot of time to call your favored cab company and have them drive over.
Both of these options suck.
As a result, cities developed regulatory agencies with the authority to set rates (do you want to negotiate the rate from point A to B every single time) and set a basic minimum requirement for what level of service should be provided.
The pure free marketer might say that the market would supply this if people wanted it, but it's just not true. The market will only supply it if the guy who makes his cab smell fresh and have a automated CC machine (or whatever people want) makes more money... and since a huge portion of the business in NYC is street pickups, people don't often get to choose the nicer cab. So, since he has a slightly higher cost of business, he goes out of business... or makes less money.
Honestly, I thought Cringely's decision to try and tie TMI to the current financial crisis was a bit of a stretch, but it applies perfectly here. TMI officials took a huge risk [coulda wiped out a bunch of the Northeast] and only avoided catastrophe because of luck (the reactor had a strong than normal containment vessel.)
Wall Street basically did the same the mortgage boom -- they just lost the bet. Now we're all paying.
Where both failed was properly planning for what happened when something really went wrong. Wall Street was prepared for the failure for X% of people to stop paying mortgages because the values of homes "always" went up. I.E. A foreclosure just meant selling a house that was more valuable than when it was bought. This worked great, until home values fell and the taxpayers now get to fill that hole.
At TMI operators were ready for one thing to go wrong and to fix it, but they weren't ready for when something really went wrong because their IT systems couldn't process the results of a real crisis.
I get it that most engineers seem to be pro nuke, but forgive the public if they're a bit skeptical. Guess what, doctors always seem ready to operate, your stock broker always wants you in the market and your lawyer is willing to sue at the drop of a hat. People tend to have confidence in their own competencies.
The job of the nuclear industry is to prove that their equipment will be safe -- even when operated poorly by greedy executives who might be willing to take the risk of huge amounts of wealth vs. a 1 in 10,000 year chance of a failure. That's a reasonable risk for the head of a nuke, but a terrible risk for a country with 100 reactors. (I.E. you will have a breach in the next 100 years.)
It's not that all such employees will have such an attitude, but that at somepoint, someone will.
There are millions of patient records, but they do not reside in millions of databases. Let's be generous and say there are thousands of databases.
Uh, they don't reside in millions of databases, they reside in millions of paper filing cabinets managed by "DBAs" with the skills to match.
Blah blah blah, you and your facts. ;-)
Sorry, it appears the parent you replied to got labeled flamebait, so I thought you were replying to the grandparent.
Uh, your emphasis proves he's exactly right. The EXISTING infrastructure can handle 84% of passenger car needs. Well, as he clearly states, 84% of passenger cars aren't going to be all electric tomorrow, meaning that the electric power industry would have time to react and build some new infrastructure (or increase efficiency of existing customer base... although there's not as much profit in that for most utilities under existing regulations).
Now, no one can prove that there aren't complications or it won't work, but DOE clearly thinks it won't be a huge problem. For one, supplying the necessary power and supplying the power in a cost effective manner are two very different things. Generally these studies look at feasibility, but don't get much into how it will play with the economics of power generation.
The same way IE7, IE6, IE5 and I'm pretty sure lesser IEs did? IE has long allowed different security settings for intranet vs. internet pages.
As I hinted about above, the dynamics of Intranet and internet are very different.
Change on the Internet is very difficult because site developers must develop towards the most common denominator and this is rarely the cutting edge. Even if it's better for everyone to move towards the standards, there is a disincentive for anyone to move first.
An intranet is completely different. If a company finds there is an advantage to moving off of IE6/7 and on to IE8, well they just need some guy in IT to sign off on redeveloping any things that would be broken.
MS is "breaking" that promise only for intranet pages and, honestly, intranet pages are a very different. If you think corporations are going to be updating all these internal applications when all they have to do is switch on compatibility mode, well you've got another thing coming.
And, if intranet pages stop working I'd wager a whole lot of users and corporations would just turn on compatibility mode for EVERYTHING and be done with it. One could argue even more people will use the regular IE8 mode if this is left as default.
Wait, I don't know what I was thinking. M$ IS EVIL LIAR!
Just playing devils advocate as from a environmental point of view how could this be a bad thing. First off the US needs to do something like Germany and give economic incentives, ie a fixed price on energy. This way your not competing dollar for dollar with oil and coal.
Wait, so you think that developers are building these without incentives and that's a bad thing? Sadly, wind still does need incentives -- and gets it in the U.S. -- but the whole idea is for incentives to jump start the technology to where it becomes competitive without the incentives.
And these turbines, at least, aren't really gobbling land -- a lot of them get placed on ranch land, so it's essentially multi-use.
Because China is trying to figure out a "balance" .... they want foreigners to be able to come in and communicate home, but don't want the general population getting too much unfiltered information.
It's about controlling the politics, not maintaing some information purity.
And, simply by blocking these sites, the government is able to mark them as bad or dangerous, which has weight with a lot of the population.... usually at least until the blocking hits too close to home. (As in all free speech issues).
Ever read washingtonpost.com's comments?
Guess what they're anonymous and they're basically worthless, consider the lack of any meaningful moderation system ala Slashdot. Comments in articles quickly become long, barely threaded and filled with idotic or worse comments.
It's the rule of internet forums, without some party moderating the debate, the troll wins and the comments suck.
Slashdot's answer is to allow the mob (users) to moderate, but Brady, since he's from the more traditional media, is wary of the mob. The mob has all sorts of biases and tends to reinforce its beliefs. It may be interesting discourse, but it can be difficult to get a balanced discourse -- and this is something the Post is committed to, for better or/and worse.
End result: The Post has moved slowly on user moderation and tried to keep moderation in the hands of a limited number of editors, which becomes overwhelming with so many posts and so many trolls.
His answer, is to require require people's ID to post on his company's web site. Throw in a little potential shame of trolling and see worthless comments decrease -- certainly people will think about them more.
Honestly, I think Brady's wrong on this point, I think the right answer is closer to Slashdot than what he envisions, but it's silly to try to slur the man as an enemy of free speech. Remember he's talking about the policies of the Washington Post on the Washington Post web site, not for the internet as a whole.
The biggest enemy to free speech can sometimes simply be too much noise.
Oh, and on a related note, you may be interested in reading an article Brady wrote on the event that CNET describes as a "notable history." It's available here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/02/11/AR2006021100840.html
"Hard" and "soft" money has nothing to do with opting out of public funding. In fact, the record amounts of money raised in the primaries HAS been "hard" money -- or money raised under the ~$2,000 per person limit to candidates.
Soft money refers to ulimited donations to interest groups that, because of free speech laws, are able to run ads and perform other activities to support particular ideas and parties (which may just happen to align perfectly with one candidate).
The reason the candidates aren't accepting public funding is that while it gives candidates a bonus per dollar raised, it also limits how much they can spend. The amounts a major national figure can raise today is actually larger than the most they can collect under public funding plus the government subsidy.
The two figures you're comparing (watts and watt hours) are very different figures. One is based on the i>capacity of the energy generation unit and one is based on the cost of the actually energy produced by a generation unit.
For example Duke Energy has proposed an 800 MW coal plant at a price of about $2,250/kW, which if you talk watt terms is $2.25 per watt. This compares well with the $1/watt that the company is claiming they could sell profitably at $1 per watt.
Of course there are some small print in these figures that matters, the most problematic for Nanosolar being that solar panels can only reach their full capacity during the middle of sunny days in favorable regions. Thus, while I certainly don't have the tools to do it, one would have to discount the amount of capacity one could actually count on depending on the climate the panels were in. As a result, that means either more solar or backup natural gas capacity, which would increase the real cost per watt.
Of course you don't have to pay for fuel (just maintenance), so that would help solar technology.
If they really can produce at that cost, it's quite impressive and hopefully solar can be a much bigger part of the electricity generation mix.
"The Device NASA Is Leaving Behind" into context. (It being the last Slashdot story in the Space section.)
Google buying LexisNexis wouldn't really do you much good. If Google bought -- and opened up to the public -- LexisNexis, most of the content providers would quickly drop out of the service (or significantly hike their rates) since Google would essentially be selling their content to their audience.
In other words, Google now has to come up with and payo ut the revenues of LexisNexis' 32,000 sources to keep the service together.
If you're not aware, that's a lot.
Get some good, worthwhile rural rail systems in place, and then we'll talk. Right now it's a non-starter.
Rail, doesn't make sense for rural areas. This it the entire problem with Amtrak, which has a lot of rail stuck out in the middle of nowhere (http://images.scripting.com/archiveScriptingCom/2005/12/10/amtrakMap.gif) based on the idea that we needed a national system... mostly because they could get funding by getting services into a congressman's district.
Our cities are in decline because we won't invest any money in them, which has encouraged people to leave to the burbs, leaving the cities with lots of old rickety infrastructure they have to maintain on a reduced tax base, which thus encourages more people to leave.
Now, here's the rub, it's so "cheap" out in the rural and particularly suburban areas because the feds and the states tend to be pretty open with the wallet to build new infrastructure for new housing and industry developments. Politicians love saying they opened a new school, but spending $5 million on roof repairs for the school district doesn't really win the hearts and minds. Worse, funding rules are tilted towards new construction instead of maintenance.
As a result, we essentially subsidize the creation of the suburbs, which will get old and will get overcrowded, and will eventually require the the construction of the infrastructure we already built in the cities. Of course, you know what's coming, that infrastructure will get old and require funds for a major revamp, taxes will go up, while services will go down so everyone will start moving to new areas, which will get all the money.
mod up!
It doesn't even include putting the parts together let alone, shipping, marketing, R&D, sales or Steve Job's jet.