"With the IPO, Google will have huge pockets. This could put Google in the market to buy a much larger player, such as AskJeeves or even AOL," he said.
I don't think the person who wrote this really understands Google's business. Google for the most part has been buying up innovative technologies which require relativley low overhead to run or integrate. I don't view AskJeeves as innovative, and don't view AOL as low overhead by any means.
I know this is nitpicking a small relativly not important part of the article, but it lept out at me as a "huh?" section.
Many "2 in 1 devices" offer either a poor version of both components, or at least one of them.
This is a great step in improving the tv on computer experience.
That being said, I don't understand why they say "near tv quality" when the laptop screen is so much better than a normal TV. Does it have to do with the scaling?
While most of the article and comments here seem to focus on upgrades and the US (developed world) market, I don't think that is where most of this growth is expected to come from.
The article mentions PC growth the the developing world. The potential for growth there is huge, and I can see how they can come up with the 600k -> 1 billion number once that is factored in.
That being said, will windows catch on as much as they think it will in counties without a pre-established windows bias? That remains to be seen. Looks like China may already be able to be counted as a loss.
Read the article. They are complaining that one user may read the content from work and from home, and so count as two users. One might also point out that sometimes two people may use the same computer, and only count as one person.
My wife and I both read the same article/section in the newspaper we got yesterday, even though we only got a single paper. (We "logged" 1 impression even though 2 were made.)
I understand that is the opposite of what you suggest, so...
Not only that, but we had some sections delivered to us that we (gasp!) threw out without even reading even though we may have been part of the target demographic. (We "logged" 1 impression even though 0 were made.)
Tracking unique visitors? Not that hard if small margin of error is ok.
Charging for ads when you don't know how many page views you will get? What about CPM (cost per 1k impression) rates? Want 10k impressions? Pay for 10k impressions.
Target demographics? How about track what article topics are popular, how many return readers per topic, etc?
These are not that hard to do with the right people. The guy who writes the "techie column" in many cases is not the right person.
I guess if you think like a newspaper, you end up with these problems seeming impossible to figure out.
Have I lost my marbles, or is this really not that hard?
My not knowing the area is an understatement, but here's an idea.
Wi-Fi at (or around) each stop. Have a device, old laptop etc on the bus that sends out a "here I am" type ping through Wi-Fi and the internet which is received by a central server which can identify the access point of origin (by IP address maybe?). As the bus drives around, a "location" will be sent at each stop to the central server, which then can be used to calculate and transmit an ETA to the other stops.
As a bonus, you may be able to provide "open" Wi-Fi at the stops for the customers, although your market may not be tech savy enough to take advantage of the service.
No reason you could not have other "hotspots" along the route if you need additional tracking points, as long as the bus is in range long enough to "handshake" and send the signal.
Co-Lo hotspots with local businesses or residents.
Do I really know what I am talking about here? No, but it may work.
The phone companies were a day late and a dollar short in rolling out DSL. Time Warner came out with Road Runners years before the phone company would sell DSL for residential use.
In the years between the Road Runner roll out and the start of DSL roll-out, everyone that wanted broadband signed up for a cable modem. So (very) recently, Verizon started trying to roll out DSL and guess what; most of their potential market no longer needed their service, as their Cable modem was great. The residential DSL around here seems to have taken the lower bandwidth, lower price and cable, but still faster than dial-up approach.
Where as Time Warner only needed to announce they could deliver broadband to get potential customers (literally) calling them begging for service, DSL providers are begging for customers to sign up.
DSL is dropping prices (and bandwith.) Cable just raised their rates ($5) and doubled the speed of their pipe and modem connections.
Ma' Bell missed the boat big time. The slashdot summary talks about lowering rates. That's only the ugly step-sister. Cable prices (and service) are going up where I live.
I am guessing this has been done without google's permission. That being said, I wonder if he is doing a "native" call to google on his server to get the reading, or if it's some type of hack to a win32 toolbar.
I heave already heard the reading is really a graphic that comes off of Nick's site, and not a direct call to Google from the toolbar. If it's a Win32/IE toolbar reader hack, it may have scalability problems...not to mention Nick's bandwith and server being a bottleneck.
Anyone know if these things have been taken into account? I'm worried this is still a beta/hack level project that is about to get a slashdotting of it's own.
WHAT WG was created not because a specific developer wanted to do it's own thing, but because the majority of W3C members aren't browser developers. They're plug-in developers. Some people within the W3C have even stated that the browser is dead. This kind of environment is openly hostile to the further development of existing browser-based standards. The only logical course of action in this situation would be for the various browser developers to form their own standards group, which is what happened.
I am no w3c expert by any means, but that's an interesting statement and strong point. Too bad Microsoft won't jump ship as well, as I don't feel Opera and Mozilla have the marketshare and clout to pull this off in terms of setting defacto standards.
It's already been mentioned a little, but a second server kept up to date with rsync may be a cheap way to go depending on how big your server is. While I don't know how much data you are talking about, I would expect rsync could sync a few times a day easily via a cron job.
I would suggest springing an extra $90 to get two extra gigabit ethernet cards and a crossover cable for a dedicated connection for rsync which doesn't compete with office traffic.
Using rsync as a basis, the solution could be made as low tech and simple or automated complex as you feel is needed.
Why not start blocking IP addresses for SMTP from China? Also start some sort of whitelist of known good STMP servers to help the legit email users in China. If the country can get (or doesn't care to) get spammers under control, like has happened in other counties, then the rest of the world should take matters into their own hands.
If China is really the source of much of it, we would see a dramatic decrease.
Intel's apparent willingness to forego such enhancements in favor of adding ever-larger on-chip caches to the Xeon is puzzling"
Why is it puzzling? In their historic "Intel Inside" world, they were basically competing against themselves. Adding a bigger cache is not only easy, but a cheap way to rake in more cash without doing much R&D work.
It's not until recently that AMD has starting "schooling them" on what improvement really means. Just look at how Intel is going to use the AMD x86-64 method in the upcoming Intel 64bit platform. And now "If I were building (or, implausibly perhaps, buying) my ultimate workstation right now, I'd want a pair of Opteron 250s beating at the heart of it. The benchmarks speak volumes. For single-processor systems, the Opteron 150 looks like the fastest x86 CPU on the planet..." And this is at much lower mhz!
I believe Intel had thought they had reached monopoly status, which really they had, and the culture had become complacent. This did not happen at the underdog AMD, who has recently been able to quickly leapfrog Intel's offerings.
The company's legal assaults on IBM and Linux users dominated 2003's tech headlines and shook up the open-source community. No other IT topic inspires such fervent debate, fear, uncertainty and doubt.
And what about software that adds value but itself is available without charge?
I would think this has to be executed as a sales tax, where the tax is applied to the billed amount on the invoice. Value but no charge would be next to impossible to implement and audit.
All the while, ebay offers something no bricks and motar person to person broker can offer. (Is there even such a business!?)
Feedback.
It's priceless. Any of the larger sellers have loads of honest feeback from purchasers. You can guage your own risk. It a model that works well when you understand it. Not only does it help the buyer, but it motivates the seller knowing that public feedback about the transaction will be left by the buyer.
It's a system that works quite well, regarless of a lack of a bricks and motar parallel.
I was awakened recently to the posibilities of these flash drives. When they first came out, the small sizes limited their practicality. Now with the larger size devices, they are actually very useful. While not cheap, you can get them in sizes of at least 2gb.
At 2gb, it's getting close to carrying around a DVD which acts like a floppy, and is just as portable.
This concert thing is a great use of the technology. I think these are going to eventually be wildly popular for many different uses.
While not great for finding up to date computer related books, the public library system is a great place to get other (sometimes computer related) books.
At the going rate for a hardcover book nearing $30US, finding just a few books there instead of purchasing can save a decent amount of money.
The computer terminals are not really of value for people that would be reading here, but they are of significant value for many people without computers or of low income.
Computer terminals in public libraries are a greate way for lower income people to search the online job sites or do other related tasks. I believe this significantly helps the community and country at large but may need better marketing, which the (at least US) public library system has never been very good at (or well funded.)
While it is nice that it is free this year, I have a hard time seeing a lot of people willing to pay $8/day or $20/month next season to have wireless access at only one location; especially a baseball stadium.
Maybe I'm just short sighted or unable to comprehend the demographic they expect, but I don't see a big market for this once che charges kick in.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh how interesting things would be if the likes of Vonage added "Federal Wiretap Fee" as a lineitem on the bill.
I bet some federal officials would get an earfull. If the general population will have to pay for this feature, they should at least know.
"With the IPO, Google will have huge pockets. This could put Google in the market to buy a much larger player, such as AskJeeves or even AOL," he said.
I don't think the person who wrote this really understands Google's business. Google for the most part has been buying up innovative technologies which require relativley low overhead to run or integrate. I don't view AskJeeves as innovative, and don't view AOL as low overhead by any means.
I know this is nitpicking a small relativly not important part of the article, but it lept out at me as a "huh?" section.
-Pete
People are making the 640k connection a few times so far in the comments I have read so far. How about something a little bit closer to today?
Bill Gates published "The Road Ahead" in 1996. The Intenet was not mentioned.
Will DVD's still be for sale/popular in 10 years? Maybe not. That being said, a prediction from Bill should not be given much weight on it's own.
-Pete
I need to have something in the message field to post...
Many "2 in 1 devices" offer either a poor version of both components, or at least one of them.
This is a great step in improving the tv on computer experience.
That being said, I don't understand why they say "near tv quality" when the laptop screen is so much better than a normal TV. Does it have to do with the scaling?
-Pete
While most of the article and comments here seem to focus on upgrades and the US (developed world) market, I don't think that is where most of this growth is expected to come from.
The article mentions PC growth the the developing world. The potential for growth there is huge, and I can see how they can come up with the 600k -> 1 billion number once that is factored in.
That being said, will windows catch on as much as they think it will in counties without a pre-established windows bias? That remains to be seen. Looks like China may already be able to be counted as a loss.
-Pete
Read the article. They are complaining that one user may read the content from work and from home, and so count as two users. One might also point out that sometimes two people may use the same computer, and only count as one person.
My wife and I both read the same article/section in the newspaper we got yesterday, even though we only got a single paper. (We "logged" 1 impression even though 2 were made.)
I understand that is the opposite of what you suggest, so...
Not only that, but we had some sections delivered to us that we (gasp!) threw out without even reading even though we may have been part of the target demographic. (We "logged" 1 impression even though 0 were made.)
And the web is different how?
-Pete
Tracking unique visitors?
Not that hard if small margin of error is ok.
Charging for ads when you don't know how many page views you will get?
What about CPM (cost per 1k impression) rates? Want 10k impressions? Pay for 10k impressions.
Target demographics?
How about track what article topics are popular, how many return readers per topic, etc?
These are not that hard to do with the right people. The guy who writes the "techie column" in many cases is not the right person.
I guess if you think like a newspaper, you end up with these problems seeming impossible to figure out.
Have I lost my marbles, or is this really not that hard?
-Pete
My not knowing the area is an understatement, but here's an idea.
Wi-Fi at (or around) each stop. Have a device, old laptop etc on the bus that sends out a "here I am" type ping through Wi-Fi and the internet which is received by a central server which can identify the access point of origin (by IP address maybe?). As the bus drives around, a "location" will be sent at each stop to the central server, which then can be used to calculate and transmit an ETA to the other stops.
As a bonus, you may be able to provide "open" Wi-Fi at the stops for the customers, although your market may not be tech savy enough to take advantage of the service.
No reason you could not have other "hotspots" along the route if you need additional tracking points, as long as the bus is in range long enough to "handshake" and send the signal.
Co-Lo hotspots with local businesses or residents.
Do I really know what I am talking about here? No, but it may work.
-Pete
Who knows. Maybe someday we'll need anti-virus software for our cell-phones. Oh wait...
You live in New York too?
The phone companies were a day late and a dollar short in rolling out DSL. Time Warner came out with Road Runners years before the phone company would sell DSL for residential use.
In the years between the Road Runner roll out and the start of DSL roll-out, everyone that wanted broadband signed up for a cable modem. So (very) recently, Verizon started trying to roll out DSL and guess what; most of their potential market no longer needed their service, as their Cable modem was great. The residential DSL around here seems to have taken the lower bandwidth, lower price and cable, but still faster than dial-up approach.
Where as Time Warner only needed to announce they could deliver broadband to get potential customers (literally) calling them begging for service, DSL providers are begging for customers to sign up.
DSL is dropping prices (and bandwith.) Cable just raised their rates ($5) and doubled the speed of their pipe and modem connections.
Ma' Bell missed the boat big time. The slashdot summary talks about lowering rates. That's only the ugly step-sister. Cable prices (and service) are going up where I live.
-Pete
I am guessing this has been done without google's permission. That being said, I wonder if he is doing a "native" call to google on his server to get the reading, or if it's some type of hack to a win32 toolbar.
I heave already heard the reading is really a graphic that comes off of Nick's site, and not a direct call to Google from the toolbar. If it's a Win32/IE toolbar reader hack, it may have scalability problems...not to mention Nick's bandwith and server being a bottleneck.
Anyone know if these things have been taken into account? I'm worried this is still a beta/hack level project that is about to get a slashdotting of it's own.
-Pete
WHAT WG was created not because a specific developer wanted to do it's own thing, but because the majority of W3C members aren't browser developers. They're plug-in developers. Some people within the W3C have even stated that the browser is dead. This kind of environment is openly hostile to the further development of existing browser-based standards. The only logical course of action in this situation would be for the various browser developers to form their own standards group, which is what happened.
I am no w3c expert by any means, but that's an interesting statement and strong point. Too bad Microsoft won't jump ship as well, as I don't feel Opera and Mozilla have the marketshare and clout to pull this off in terms of setting defacto standards.
-Pete
It's already been mentioned a little, but a second server kept up to date with rsync may be a cheap way to go depending on how big your server is. While I don't know how much data you are talking about, I would expect rsync could sync a few times a day easily via a cron job.
I would suggest springing an extra $90 to get two extra gigabit ethernet cards and a crossover cable for a dedicated connection for rsync which doesn't compete with office traffic.
Using rsync as a basis, the solution could be made as low tech and simple or automated complex as you feel is needed.
-Pete
Do woodworking? 50 Router Bits
Why not start blocking IP addresses for SMTP from China? Also start some sort of whitelist of known good STMP servers to help the legit email users in China. If the country can get (or doesn't care to) get spammers under control, like has happened in other counties, then the rest of the world should take matters into their own hands.
If China is really the source of much of it, we would see a dramatic decrease.
Or am I missing something?
Intel's apparent willingness to forego such enhancements in favor of adding ever-larger on-chip caches to the Xeon is puzzling"
Why is it puzzling? In their historic "Intel Inside" world, they were basically competing against themselves. Adding a bigger cache is not only easy, but a cheap way to rake in more cash without doing much R&D work.
It's not until recently that AMD has starting "schooling them" on what improvement really means. Just look at how Intel is going to use the AMD x86-64 method in the upcoming Intel 64bit platform. And now "If I were building (or, implausibly perhaps, buying) my ultimate workstation right now, I'd want a pair of Opteron 250s beating at the heart of it. The benchmarks speak volumes. For single-processor systems, the Opteron 150 looks like the fastest x86 CPU on the planet..." And this is at much lower mhz!
I believe Intel had thought they had reached monopoly status, which really they had, and the culture had become complacent. This did not happen at the underdog AMD, who has recently been able to quickly leapfrog Intel's offerings.
-Pete
The company's legal assaults on IBM and Linux users dominated 2003's tech headlines and shook up the open-source community. No other IT topic inspires such fervent debate, fear, uncertainty and doubt.
And what about software that adds value but itself is available without charge?
I would think this has to be executed as a sales tax, where the tax is applied to the billed amount on the invoice. Value but no charge would be next to impossible to implement and audit.
-Pete
All the while, ebay offers something no bricks and motar person to person broker can offer. (Is there even such a business!?)
Feedback.
It's priceless. Any of the larger sellers have loads of honest feeback from purchasers. You can guage your own risk. It a model that works well when you understand it. Not only does it help the buyer, but it motivates the seller knowing that public feedback about the transaction will be left by the buyer.
It's a system that works quite well, regarless of a lack of a bricks and motar parallel.
-Pete
Since the 10k server number was first floated, I believe google has added quite a few, meaning 6 to 10 whole new datacenters around the world.
It would only make sense that the server count would now be in the ballpart of what is mentioned here.
Google hasn't been standing still, and I've heard the "Google has 10k servers" for 1-2 years now.
-Pete
I was awakened recently to the posibilities of these flash drives. When they first came out, the small sizes limited their practicality. Now with the larger size devices, they are actually very useful. While not cheap, you can get them in sizes of at least 2gb.
At 2gb, it's getting close to carrying around a DVD which acts like a floppy, and is just as portable.
This concert thing is a great use of the technology. I think these are going to eventually be wildly popular for many different uses.
While not great for finding up to date computer related books, the public library system is a great place to get other (sometimes computer related) books.
At the going rate for a hardcover book nearing $30US, finding just a few books there instead of purchasing can save a decent amount of money.
The computer terminals are not really of value for people that would be reading here, but they are of significant value for many people without computers or of low income.
Computer terminals in public libraries are a greate way for lower income people to search the online job sites or do other related tasks. I believe this significantly helps the community and country at large but may need better marketing, which the (at least US) public library system has never been very good at (or well funded.)
-Pete
No, problems in terms on idea ownership, Patents etc.
While it is nice that it is free this year, I have a hard time seeing a lot of people willing to pay $8/day or $20/month next season to have wireless access at only one location; especially a baseball stadium.
Maybe I'm just short sighted or unable to comprehend the demographic they expect, but I don't see a big market for this once che charges kick in.
-Pete