It's my understanding that many older films, though locked away in studio vaults, are starting to rot away because the physical film itself was not designed to last so long. Though digital may brijng with it locks of its own, perhaps the movies will fare a bit better from a longevity stand-point.
In response to that, I performed the following experiment. I took your list of companies and then added a few big-names from the NASDAQ index. With that list, I ran each as a search on Google and counted the number of hits. Assuming hits correlates to recognition, we get the following results (all numbers in millions):
72 Yahoo 35 Sun 28 Microsoft 27 Amazon 23 HP 21.1 Dell 15.9 IBM 10.7 Palm 8.9 Sony 8.5 Apple 8.5 Intel 7.2 Adobe 6 Sharp 5.9 NEC 5.8 RedHat <--- 5.4 Compaq 5.1 Cisco 4.9 Nokia 4.9 eBay 3.8 Suse 3.6 Siemens 3.5 Motorola 2.6 Ericsson 2.4 AT&T 2.3 Mandrake 1.5 Electronic Arts 1.5 Symantec 1.3 Lucent
First thing to point out is that RedHat did come in close to 12th (not even considering common words like Sun and Apple up there at the top). What is more important to note, however, is this. How many commercials have you seen for the companies on this list? A damn lot. How many commercials have you EVER seen for RedHat? I can't say I have seen a single one. Yet they are still up there on the list.
Ok, so the whole statistical validity of this is questionable, and I stole the experiment from Kuroshin (http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/4/3/23216/9746 6). Take it with a grain of salt.
Being a student at NCSU, home to RedHat's new corporate offices, I had the privelege yesterday of sitting in on a presentation by Matthew Szulik, CEO of RedHat. Though his presentation was on entreprenuership in NC, the talk quickly diverged into discussions of Open Source and how in the heck they plan on making money. I took the following things away from the lecture:
1) Szulik is a decent guy. His message of measuring entrepreneurial success in social terms instead of the quarterly shareholder statement was quite refreshing. He honestly seems to embrace the ideals of Open Source.
2) He stated during the lecture that despite having spent less than $1 million on advertising, RedHat is the 12th most recognized brand name in technology. Though the N&O article may suggest that 90% of their staff is in marketing, it probably suggests instead that they are simply working at making RedHat a better replacement for Unix (this takes marketing AND coders).
3) A number of skeptical members of the audience asked how they would ever make money. There were two answers: subscriptions and services. IBM is the best example of the tremendous market value of services, however Matthew spent more time on the subscription side. Let's be honest. Your average sysadmin doesn't want to have to deal with package management and keeping a system up-to-date. The RHN is a step in the right direction for managing the herculean task... it worked for me. I paid them $60 for a priority membership and I'm most pleased with it.
Would they have been stopped? I think the point of the previous post was that face-recognition only works if the face had been entered into the system previously. These terrorists had commited no previous crimes, so their faces wouldn't be in the system. Thus, the attack would have still taken place.
Therefore, I doubt this will effect Ellison's book sales in the slightest.
I must apologize to Mr. Ellison that I've never bought a single one of his works. Instead, I read em for free at the library. I've enjoyed them lots but never paid a dime (except maybe in late fees).
I think this is an intriguing idea, but I agree that choosing the N dimensionality would be difficult. Perhaps it would be best to think it polar?
Everyone would start at the origin. When the first user in your system mods a comment, it would establish the first relation. If they agreed with each other, they would both move to 1
Each user would come to have a polar coordinate assigned to them as they moded other users up and other users down. Say you really agree with someone's post? You would add their vector * 10 to yours. Say you kind of agreed? Their vector * 5. If you disagreed, negative values would be used.
I'm not sure whether you moderating their comment should change their vector as well. I'm inclined to say no. Just because you agree with them doesn't mean they would agree with you...
The only complexity I see to this problem is when things get started. Say you have four users (A,B,C, & D). A mods B and C mods D, establishing two relationships. However, we can't compare these two relationships until somebody from the one group mods somebody from the other. It would be tricky but doable.
So finally, you just set your threshold by setting an angle and maybe a magnitude and seeing who is close by.
I'm not exactly sure where trolls would fall into this... and maybe it would be cool if you used 3D vectors instead. You could print a globe of your user set!
The moral here, BTW, is to define a system that doesn't use landmarks, but, rather, one that allows you to look at the map when you are done a see the landmarks that establish themselves.
Me thinks I might go find my 3D Calc book and write a moderation system of my own.
I disagree. I have a T1-connection at my apartment that I share with everyone else in the building, through NAT. While NAT may be less painless with "one-time config," having others connect to me from the outside world will always be broken.
Yes, if I controlled the router, I could use portforwarding to make Napster work for me and my buddies. But what about when everyone in the building wants to use Napster? And send files over AIM? And maybe run their own web-servers? NAT becomes extremely ineffective!
NAT is a creative hack to a lack of addresses. What's the neccessary solution? IPv6? Time and end-user complaints will force the issue.
SDMI never had a chance. Though there are many things wrong with the concept, the biggest seems to me that it is no big deal to hack SDMI once an SDMI-compliant players come out. If the player can read the watermark, YOU can read the watermark and figure out how to remove it. Technically, there is nothing stopping you from going crazy Napster style. Thus, the only thing to protect SDMI is the fact that hacking it is illegal. Drugs, gambling, and listening to MP3s you didn't pay for are also illegal. RIP SDMI.
Which is great until you have a couple million people all decide to turn on their TVs to watch the final episode of "Survivor IV: New Jersey". Everybody grabs their key at the same time, every piece of content has to be encoded seperately. Network screams to halt as millions of slightly different video feeds are pumped to the dull eyes of the waiting consumer.
Granted, no one would be copying anything... but only because no one would be getting anything.
I assume they're referring to some of Faye's more "tangible assets". Obviously, Ed doesn't have quite the same pull with male audience. As for myself, I didn't realize for a few episodes that Ed was a girl in the first place! Of course, Ed is beyond classification anyways.
However, I agree with you. Faye just tends to annoy me.
Microsoft has addressed the installation problems by forcing OEMs to not include installation media with a new computer. Now when Windows gets out of whack, the user should just buy a new computer. Everyone wins!
Much agreed. When I listen to music on the radio or the computer, it is just sort of sound to fill the void. Granted, I like music just as much as the next guy, but years of ever increasing information overload has left my senses dulled to the world around me. I hear the music but I'm just not listening.
And then there was This American Life. Granted, NPR redefines the art of radio every day with great shows like Car Talk, What do you know?, and All Things Considered. This American Life, however, clears the senses like when your friends trick you into eating a big chunk of wasabi for the first time. Ira Glass knows how to tell a story such that the sound coming out of your radio is all that you hear. He is a master.
Plus all the shows are up on the web. So close up Napster for a little bit and go listen to what free sound is all about. Do it now.
I agree that a Internet sales tax is coming and there will be no stopping it. This is not neccissarily a bad thing.
In North Carolina, we have a 6% sales tax on all items. That is a lot of money that pays to keep my state running, so when Internet sales start eroding that tax base, problems abound. Factor in the unfair advantage e-tailers get over their brick-n-mortar brethen, and you can see that non-taxation of Internet sales is a major threat.
North Carolina has taken an interesting approach to this problem. We have had on the books for many years something called a use tax. Basically, this says that any goods or services purchased out of state are subject to the same tax rate as items sold in-state. Granted, this law is impossible to enforce but the powers that be could try so thus, in NC, we already have an Internet tax.
Taxes such as these are not the answer, however, as they are logistically nightmarish and impossible to enforce. The answer lies in a national sales tax, or at least a national system such that it is easier for retailers to deal with the varieties of sales taxes in the US. A national sales tax system is a long way off, but it is coming and justifiably so.
Slashdot Mirror
It's my understanding that many older films, though locked away in studio vaults, are starting to rot away because the physical film itself was not designed to last so long. Though digital may brijng with it locks of its own, perhaps the movies will fare a bit better from a longevity stand-point.
In response to that, I performed the following experiment. I took your list of companies and then added a few big-names from the NASDAQ index. With that list, I ran each as a search on Google and counted the number of hits. Assuming hits correlates to recognition, we get the following results (all numbers in millions):
6 6). Take it with a grain of salt.
72 Yahoo
35 Sun
28 Microsoft
27 Amazon
23 HP
21.1 Dell
15.9 IBM
10.7 Palm
8.9 Sony
8.5 Apple
8.5 Intel
7.2 Adobe
6 Sharp
5.9 NEC
5.8 RedHat <---
5.4 Compaq
5.1 Cisco
4.9 Nokia
4.9 eBay
3.8 Suse
3.6 Siemens
3.5 Motorola
2.6 Ericsson
2.4 AT&T
2.3 Mandrake
1.5 Electronic Arts
1.5 Symantec
1.3 Lucent
First thing to point out is that RedHat did come in close to 12th (not even considering common words like Sun and Apple up there at the top). What is more important to note, however, is this. How many commercials have you seen for the companies on this list? A damn lot. How many commercials have you EVER seen for RedHat? I can't say I have seen a single one. Yet they are still up there on the list.
Ok, so the whole statistical validity of this is questionable, and I stole the experiment from Kuroshin (http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/4/3/23216/974
Being a student at NCSU, home to RedHat's new corporate offices, I had the privelege yesterday of sitting in on a presentation by Matthew Szulik, CEO of RedHat. Though his presentation was on entreprenuership in NC, the talk quickly diverged into discussions of Open Source and how in the heck they plan on making money. I took the following things away from the lecture:
1) Szulik is a decent guy. His message of measuring entrepreneurial success in social terms instead of the quarterly shareholder statement was quite refreshing. He honestly seems to embrace the ideals of Open Source.
2) He stated during the lecture that despite having spent less than $1 million on advertising, RedHat is the 12th most recognized brand name in technology. Though the N&O article may suggest that 90% of their staff is in marketing, it probably suggests instead that they are simply working at making RedHat a better replacement for Unix (this takes marketing AND coders).
3) A number of skeptical members of the audience asked how they would ever make money. There were two answers: subscriptions and services. IBM is the best example of the tremendous market value of services, however Matthew spent more time on the subscription side. Let's be honest. Your average sysadmin doesn't want to have to deal with package management and keeping a system up-to-date. The RHN is a step in the right direction for managing the herculean task... it worked for me. I paid them $60 for a priority membership and I'm most pleased with it.
Would they have been stopped? I think the point of the previous post was that face-recognition only works if the face had been entered into the system previously. These terrorists had commited no previous crimes, so their faces wouldn't be in the system. Thus, the attack would have still taken place.
Therefore, I doubt this will effect Ellison's book sales in the slightest.
I must apologize to Mr. Ellison that I've never bought a single one of his works. Instead, I read em for free at the library. I've enjoyed them lots but never paid a dime (except maybe in late fees).
Everyone would start at the origin. When the first user in your system mods a comment, it would establish the first relation. If they agreed with each other, they would both move to 1 Each user would come to have a polar coordinate assigned to them as they moded other users up and other users down. Say you really agree with someone's post? You would add their vector * 10 to yours. Say you kind of agreed? Their vector * 5. If you disagreed, negative values would be used.
I'm not sure whether you moderating their comment should change their vector as well. I'm inclined to say no. Just because you agree with them doesn't mean they would agree with you...
The only complexity I see to this problem is when things get started. Say you have four users (A,B,C, & D). A mods B and C mods D, establishing two relationships. However, we can't compare these two relationships until somebody from the one group mods somebody from the other. It would be tricky but doable.
So finally, you just set your threshold by setting an angle and maybe a magnitude and seeing who is close by.
I'm not exactly sure where trolls would fall into this... and maybe it would be cool if you used 3D vectors instead. You could print a globe of your user set!
The moral here, BTW, is to define a system that doesn't use landmarks, but, rather, one that allows you to look at the map when you are done a see the landmarks that establish themselves.
Me thinks I might go find my 3D Calc book and write a moderation system of my own.
I was gonna mod this up, but you didn't get any replies yet.
Yes, if I controlled the router, I could use portforwarding to make Napster work for me and my buddies. But what about when everyone in the building wants to use Napster? And send files over AIM? And maybe run their own web-servers? NAT becomes extremely ineffective!
NAT is a creative hack to a lack of addresses. What's the neccessary solution? IPv6? Time and end-user complaints will force the issue.
SDMI never had a chance. Though there are many things wrong with the concept, the biggest seems to me that it is no big deal to hack SDMI once an SDMI-compliant players come out. If the player can read the watermark, YOU can read the watermark and figure out how to remove it. Technically, there is nothing stopping you from going crazy Napster style. Thus, the only thing to protect SDMI is the fact that hacking it is illegal. Drugs, gambling, and listening to MP3s you didn't pay for are also illegal. RIP SDMI.
Which is great until you have a couple million people all decide to turn on their TVs to watch the final episode of "Survivor IV: New Jersey". Everybody grabs their key at the same time, every piece of content has to be encoded seperately. Network screams to halt as millions of slightly different video feeds are pumped to the dull eyes of the waiting consumer. Granted, no one would be copying anything... but only because no one would be getting anything.
I assume they're referring to some of Faye's more "tangible assets". Obviously, Ed doesn't have quite the same pull with male audience. As for myself, I didn't realize for a few episodes that Ed was a girl in the first place! Of course, Ed is beyond classification anyways. However, I agree with you. Faye just tends to annoy me.
Microsoft has addressed the installation problems by forcing OEMs to not include installation media with a new computer. Now when Windows gets out of whack, the user should just buy a new computer. Everyone wins!
And then there was This American Life. Granted, NPR redefines the art of radio every day with great shows like Car Talk, What do you know?, and All Things Considered. This American Life, however, clears the senses like when your friends trick you into eating a big chunk of wasabi for the first time. Ira Glass knows how to tell a story such that the sound coming out of your radio is all that you hear. He is a master.
Plus all the shows are up on the web. So close up Napster for a little bit and go listen to what free sound is all about. Do it now.
In North Carolina, we have a 6% sales tax on all items. That is a lot of money that pays to keep my state running, so when Internet sales start eroding that tax base, problems abound. Factor in the unfair advantage e-tailers get over their brick-n-mortar brethen, and you can see that non-taxation of Internet sales is a major threat.
North Carolina has taken an interesting approach to this problem. We have had on the books for many years something called a use tax. Basically, this says that any goods or services purchased out of state are subject to the same tax rate as items sold in-state. Granted, this law is impossible to enforce but the powers that be could try so thus, in NC, we already have an Internet tax.
Taxes such as these are not the answer, however, as they are logistically nightmarish and impossible to enforce. The answer lies in a national sales tax, or at least a national system such that it is easier for retailers to deal with the varieties of sales taxes in the US. A national sales tax system is a long way off, but it is coming and justifiably so.