Hey, AC -- we've heard your song before. Problem is, Microsoft spoke to exactly that point in the conference call: MS sold 900K units in North America, 500K units in Europe, and about 100K units in Japan. That's 1.5M units.
Umm...no. The center of gravity of the Solar system is slightly outside the stellar body in the system, a yellow dwarf with eight known planets in stable near-circular orbits, as well as several large icy objects of near-planetary size in eccentric orbits at significantly greater distance.
That's shortsighted. He'll spend more time explaining the difficulties/benefits of compatability than the benefits the company will get.
I don't know how many times I've gotten a geeky project OK'ed by virtue of spending the time to cost it out so that I could show we'd either make money or not.
The key to being a successful geek, I think, is trusting your own intuitions far enough to challenge them by testing them against other people's goals. If you can't do that, then you're stuck in the back corner of engineering forever.
His analysis is sound, insofar as it goes, but it misses a key fact by assuming that advertising the web site is the purpose of advertising. Sure, making sales through a web site is a good thing, but the important part is "making sales", not the mechanism through which they're made.
So what? Well, if advertising my products through AdWords becomes more expensive per unit dollar solde than a competing medium (the paper, the yellow pages, television, radio), then...I'll use that competing medium. In fact, FTD is reducing its spend on Google in order to pursue other media, precisely because those media are more cost effective.
Google is not a monopoly in the advertising market yet, and doesn't have pricing power. Neilson ignores that.
Great question.
The answer is "the unknown part". When I make a phone call, I hand the packet off to a trusted intermediary, who controls the routing and the intermediate servers. When I hand a packet to a server aimed at port 12345 on some four-byte remote site, I don't have any say on the route taken to that port.
Many times activity on the internet is exactly like a phone call, a communicatin between friends/colleagues/etc. For instance, email or instant messaging
Um...no.
Unencrypted electronic mail is quite clearly not "private" in the legal sense of the word. (a) SMTP is a store and forward protocol, in which copies are made of each message at each intermediate point. You can't care very much about the contents of a message if you allow an unknown and anonymous intermediate to copy it, now can you? (b) TCP/IP itself works by packet relay through unknown computers. Same applies.
The only way in which you can assert a reasonable expectation of privacy is if you send all packets encrypted. In any other case, no, you are doing the equivalent of playing telephone with packets.
I have never used Ghost, so I can't speak to this particular case, but I have some expertise in the more general case.
Exchange 2000 and 2003 shipped with an interesting feature: a virtualized file system that pointed into the store. (Think WinFS or the BeOS file system backwards, if you will. Instead of exposing a hierarchical file system as a set of tables, it exposed a set of tables as a file system.) It was a cool feature, making possible some awesome speed hacks, so they exposed it to users as the M: drive.
It worked like a dream, as long as nobody ever ran a virus scanner against it. Users being users, however, some would routinely ignore that warning and run a virus scanner against the M: drive. They had a ticking time bomb; sooner or later, the their internal CRC's would be rendered invalid by a direct rewrite, and their store would dismount violently. Disaster recovery time, baby!
What does this have to do with spybot? Well, it's very likely that the Ghost corruptions, if they happen at all, are a one in a million occurence. In that case, Symantec may well not be able to figure out exactly what happened to cause the corruption, but may only be able to say, "Look, this is a corrupt image." If that is the case, then not only is Symantec no libelling spybot, but, in fact, the slandar is in the other direction.
1 bug per 10K lines of code is pretty good, but by no means remarkable. The teams which actually write avionics software for jets routinely reach levels of no more than 3 defects per 1M lines of code.
Couldn't find the data at Gates, although I'm certain it's there. For second-best, though, here's the UN's numbers -- I was wrong, by the way, it's 80% of the world lives on less than $2/day. Only about 60% of the world lives on less than $1/day.
GDP certainly does include products produced for export, by the way. It doesn't include imports.
Yes, they are as skewed as the US; in fact, they're considerably more skewed than the US'. That's common in emerging economies; whatever we in the west may think of what labor unions and minimum wage laws actually achieve, they make things better.
Since I didn't go to CERT, but to secunia, I don't see what your post has anything to do with anything except your inability to find a way to wriggle out of the simple fact that IIS is currently much more secure than Apache.
In the Real World[TM], the decision about which language to use is very often made by managers who aren't programmers and don't have a clue about the real issues.
No. The decision is made be a manager who needs to balance the business issues of long-term supportability and cost within the current infrastructure against other technical benefits. That decision is not as simple as, say, vi versus Emacs, much less C versus Java versus C# versus Python.
You're looking at "mean GDP". That fails to measure individual income in two ways: first, it looks at gross domestic product, which includes things which are produced in the country on behalf of a foreign beneficiary (think out-sourcing), and, second, it's a mean, not a median. Both China, and, to a lesser extent, India, have very skewed income distributions: a fea people are extraordinarily wealthy, while others starve.
A better source for figures about actual income would be the Gates Foundation.
Count the number of IIs exploits vs Apache and correlate to the number of installations. If your logic held, there should be many many more exploits out there for Apache.
IID 6 has had all of two vulneratbilities reported in the last two years, neither of which was exploitable -- that means zero exploits for IIS 6. During the same period, Apache 1.3.x has had fourteen, at least one of which was actually exploited by a worm, and Apache 2.0.x has done even better, with twenty-seven.
You should only be sarcastic when you're describing something that isn't real. 80% of the human race lives on an income of less than a dollar a day.
So, yes, the world is divided into places like Madagascar, and then a tiny fraction of really really lucky places.
Hell, tell it to Microsoft or Sony, for heaven's sake! There's this thing called "Everquest"...some kind of MMORPG...which I hear is almost breaking even for Sony, for instance.
This reads like a "trash the competition" press release from traditional single player vendors.
You're changing your story. Originally, it was that they were selling for cost -- they aren't. Now it's "look at the ones which don't have bids" -- which means you're not looking at the last two minutes before the auctions close.
A premium means that the items aren't available at retail where the purchaser is. More than that, the end of the pre-christmas rush for eBay was the 22nd, so this is not desperate parents. Given the steady stream of bids, that means there's a significant unmet demand.
Finally, I did decide to go to Target for a present for my wife. Maybe yours has 360'sm but ours certainly does not.
If you look at closing auction prices, the core system is currently closing at about $500, with shipping additional. That's a 60% price premium to the system itself, which is strong evidence that the thing is still in short supply in at least some places.
Hmm.
Well, our local Fry's is sold out. Our local Target is out. I haven't called the local Best Buy -- I'm not interested in buying a box, just in knowing how many have sold, though, so I probably won't. I've been watching the mainstream analyst reports carefully, and I've seen a steady stream of reports from big box retailers that they're out, even in a season which has been (overall) abysmal. I've seen one describing the XBox 360 as one of the "few bright spots" in an otherwise dark year for retail.
OTOH, I may run out to get my wife an extra present, in which case I'll check at Target again.
360s are in stores everywhere. People are talking about piles of 360s. I don't know about Best Buy, but Walmart, Targets, and other big retailers have piles of 360s in stores right now.
Really? I did some calling around here, and that doesn't seem to fit the local profile. I'd love to see some citations to "people talking about piles of 360s".
Tom -- go back and read the history of AJAX in, say, Wikipedia. You'll find that Microsoft invented AJAX, incorporating it into IE 5.5 to support OWA. There's a cool article in the Exchange Blog by Jim van Eaton which talks about the history, too. (Yes, the people in the story he tells are real. I've met all of them at one time or another.)
Then, go look at Microsoft's financials for last quarter. You'll find that of the seven product units, only three are not wildly profitable. (And MED, while not wildly profitable, is basically break even.) Of the four profitable units, Server and Tools breaks out into several large groups, including Exchange (which is profitable), SQL Server (which is profitable), Windows Server (which is a version of Windows, and so is covered by your "windows and office" meme), and Developer Division (which is profitable). MSN is profitable. So, what was that about "only two profitable products"?
As long as Google remains a publically traded company they're going to have to keep the stock holders happy.
Actually, in Google's case, no.
In a typically Googlish piece of brilliance, the triumvirate reached back to techniques from the Gilded Age when they IPO'ed. Google has a two-tiered stock offering. Class A shares are held entirely by company insiders, and have ten times the voting power of the Class B shares which were offered to the public. As a result, those $400+ shares of GOOG not only pay no dividends, they offer no control. The only use they have as shares of stock is for luring in greater fools.
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Hey, AC -- we've heard your song before. Problem is, Microsoft spoke to exactly that point in the conference call: MS sold 900K units in North America, 500K units in Europe, and about 100K units in Japan. That's 1.5M units.
Lah-te-ch (where the last "ch" is a gutteral that sprays mucus from your throat onto your audience. It's not a phoneme used in English.)
Umm...no. The center of gravity of the Solar system is slightly outside the stellar body in the system, a yellow dwarf with eight known planets in stable near-circular orbits, as well as several large icy objects of near-planetary size in eccentric orbits at significantly greater distance.
His analysis is sound, insofar as it goes, but it misses a key fact by assuming that advertising the web site is the purpose of advertising. Sure, making sales through a web site is a good thing, but the important part is "making sales", not the mechanism through which they're made. So what? Well, if advertising my products through AdWords becomes more expensive per unit dollar solde than a competing medium (the paper, the yellow pages, television, radio), then...I'll use that competing medium. In fact, FTD is reducing its spend on Google in order to pursue other media, precisely because those media are more cost effective. Google is not a monopoly in the advertising market yet, and doesn't have pricing power. Neilson ignores that.
I have never used Ghost, so I can't speak to this particular case, but I have some expertise in the more general case. Exchange 2000 and 2003 shipped with an interesting feature: a virtualized file system that pointed into the store. (Think WinFS or the BeOS file system backwards, if you will. Instead of exposing a hierarchical file system as a set of tables, it exposed a set of tables as a file system.) It was a cool feature, making possible some awesome speed hacks, so they exposed it to users as the M: drive. It worked like a dream, as long as nobody ever ran a virus scanner against it. Users being users, however, some would routinely ignore that warning and run a virus scanner against the M: drive. They had a ticking time bomb; sooner or later, the their internal CRC's would be rendered invalid by a direct rewrite, and their store would dismount violently. Disaster recovery time, baby! What does this have to do with spybot? Well, it's very likely that the Ghost corruptions, if they happen at all, are a one in a million occurence. In that case, Symantec may well not be able to figure out exactly what happened to cause the corruption, but may only be able to say, "Look, this is a corrupt image." If that is the case, then not only is Symantec no libelling spybot, but, in fact, the slandar is in the other direction.
Two Words: Morris Worm Two more words: Cuckoo's Egg
1 bug per 10K lines of code is pretty good, but by no means remarkable. The teams which actually write avionics software for jets routinely reach levels of no more than 3 defects per 1M lines of code.
Couldn't find the data at Gates, although I'm certain it's there. For second-best, though, here's the UN's numbers -- I was wrong, by the way, it's 80% of the world lives on less than $2/day. Only about 60% of the world lives on less than $1/day. GDP certainly does include products produced for export, by the way. It doesn't include imports. Yes, they are as skewed as the US; in fact, they're considerably more skewed than the US'. That's common in emerging economies; whatever we in the west may think of what labor unions and minimum wage laws actually achieve, they make things better.
Since I didn't go to CERT, but to secunia, I don't see what your post has anything to do with anything except your inability to find a way to wriggle out of the simple fact that IIS is currently much more secure than Apache.
You're looking at "mean GDP". That fails to measure individual income in two ways: first, it looks at gross domestic product, which includes things which are produced in the country on behalf of a foreign beneficiary (think out-sourcing), and, second, it's a mean, not a median. Both China, and, to a lesser extent, India, have very skewed income distributions: a fea people are extraordinarily wealthy, while others starve. A better source for figures about actual income would be the Gates Foundation.
You should only be sarcastic when you're describing something that isn't real. 80% of the human race lives on an income of less than a dollar a day. So, yes, the world is divided into places like Madagascar, and then a tiny fraction of really really lucky places.
That's not entirely surprising, given that John and Nicholas Negroponte are fullbrothers.
Hell, tell it to Microsoft or Sony, for heaven's sake! There's this thing called "Everquest"...some kind of MMORPG...which I hear is almost breaking even for Sony, for instance. This reads like a "trash the competition" press release from traditional single player vendors.
You're changing your story. Originally, it was that they were selling for cost -- they aren't. Now it's "look at the ones which don't have bids" -- which means you're not looking at the last two minutes before the auctions close. A premium means that the items aren't available at retail where the purchaser is. More than that, the end of the pre-christmas rush for eBay was the 22nd, so this is not desperate parents. Given the steady stream of bids, that means there's a significant unmet demand. Finally, I did decide to go to Target for a present for my wife. Maybe yours has 360'sm but ours certainly does not.
If you look at closing auction prices, the core system is currently closing at about $500, with shipping additional. That's a 60% price premium to the system itself, which is strong evidence that the thing is still in short supply in at least some places.
Hmm. Well, our local Fry's is sold out. Our local Target is out. I haven't called the local Best Buy -- I'm not interested in buying a box, just in knowing how many have sold, though, so I probably won't. I've been watching the mainstream analyst reports carefully, and I've seen a steady stream of reports from big box retailers that they're out, even in a season which has been (overall) abysmal. I've seen one describing the XBox 360 as one of the "few bright spots" in an otherwise dark year for retail. OTOH, I may run out to get my wife an extra present, in which case I'll check at Target again.
Tom -- go back and read the history of AJAX in, say, Wikipedia. You'll find that Microsoft invented AJAX, incorporating it into IE 5.5 to support OWA. There's a cool article in the Exchange Blog by Jim van Eaton which talks about the history, too. (Yes, the people in the story he tells are real. I've met all of them at one time or another.) Then, go look at Microsoft's financials for last quarter. You'll find that of the seven product units, only three are not wildly profitable. (And MED, while not wildly profitable, is basically break even.) Of the four profitable units, Server and Tools breaks out into several large groups, including Exchange (which is profitable), SQL Server (which is profitable), Windows Server (which is a version of Windows, and so is covered by your "windows and office" meme), and Developer Division (which is profitable). MSN is profitable. So, what was that about "only two profitable products"?