Try learning some history. The decisive force in Europe in WWII was the Soviet Union, pure and simple. The invasion of France was a sideshow when compared to the fighting on the Eastern Front, as any competent historian will point out but USA textbooks happily ignore. Similarly, those textbooks conveniently downplay the large-scale fighting between Japan and China, which was quite significant. A classic comment with more than a bit of truth to it is that WWII was really two wars, one between Germany and Russia and one between Japan and China, and that the United States won both.
The reason that you're not anonymous (when trading files) is because you do actually have a name or persistent identifier attached to you. This is like the difference between being an Anonymous Coward on/. and being a regular poster. The AC is, as the name suggests, truly anonymous;/. has taken some steps to make it so that even they can't identify ACs some time after the fact. Regular posters, though, are pseudonymous- hiding behind a false name. You can track what an individual poster does, but you can't necessarily connect them to a particular flesh and blood person without help from/. Even if the poster deliberately puts identifying information on his user page, that information could be fraudulent, so you'd actually need to ask the/. staff to uncover the information in their records to have a good chance of proving who they are to a court.
Yeah, the fourth amendment only restricts the government.
It's not 100% clear that's true. The Fourth Amendment says:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
It doesn't say that the right to be protected from unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated by the government, but that it shall not be violated. That at least suggests that private entities shouldn't be able engage in unreasonable searches and seizures, either.
Even if it applies only the government, you have to remember that the courts are also part of the government. That means that private entities should not be able to use government power in the form of court orders to perform searches that would be rejected were a government agency to try them. That may leave it open for private agencies to snoop in ways that the government isn't allowed to, so long as they don't use court orders to do so and they obey relevant laws against trespass, unauthorized computer access, etc.
Little startups figure out ways to make money off the new technology, because they're not so entrenched.
Yeah, like patenting everything they can think of, original or not, and then suing everyone who violates their patents. How many of the companies engaging in patent abuse as their sole source of income are startups vs. entrenched companies?
This is not fundamentally a big company vs. little company issue. Yes, it's true that the companies that are trying to legislate their current business model are frequently large, old, entrenched ones, but it's also sometimes the case that startups will try to get laws passed to enable their businesses. Similarly, it's frequently true that the companies trying innovative things are small, but sometimes they're large companies, too. This should be obvious to anyone who reads the article, which mentions that two of the companies arguing in this case are AT&T and Sprint- a pair of old, entrenched companies.
For instance: the Library of Congress, in order to conserve space on their shelves, orders their books by size. (No, I'm not kidding. Look it up.) The directory is computerized, of course, so aside from the inconvenience of having same-topic volumes wildly separated in space, it's not a big deal for them.
And this works just fine because they have closed stacks, so the only people who have to worry about that particular detail are professionals who know how to find things there. All that you need to know when you're trying to get a book is enough information for them to find it in their computer, like the author and title, ISBN, or the like, and then they do the hard work of finding the physical volume. In many ways this is very similar to the idea being presented in Storage. You, the user, don't need to understand exactly how the file is categorized on the disk. Instead you only need to provide enough information to be able to specify the file- or a list of similar files that you can then look through to find the exact one you want- and the computer then does the heavy work of actually figuring out where the thing is.
At the very least, you would only have to give it the filename, and it could find the details via imdb.org.
And, in fact, the system is capable of doing exactly this, which is mentioned in this article about the system:
For example, importing a movie into the information store breaks the movie's internal metadata apart to determine the date, author, and title, as well as the type, length, width, height, etc. This information is then used to leverage additional information from the Internet Movie Database (imdb.org) about the director, actors, etc.
It seems pretty obvious that you could do the same general kind of thing for any type of file for which there's likely to be a searchable record on the internet. That actually covers a lot of possibilities; you just need to know who's keeping the information and how to get at it.
One of the articles on the storage web page mentions that it has some very cool built in features for dealing with movies. When you import a movie, it's able to extract enough information about it (like the title and release date) that it can then look it up in the Internet Movie Database and get a huge amount more (like the director, starring actors, etc.). From that point forward, you'll be able to search your movies based on all of the metadata that it dredged up from IMDB without you having to input it all yourself. If there is a similar knowledge base about other files of interest, it should be possible to create a similar system to gather and use information about them, too.
Generally not. Most of the time a contingency case is run on a strict percentage basis. If the plaintiff wins, the lawyer gets to keep something like 1/4 to 1/3 of the total proceeds. That's an awfully large amount in some cases, but on the other hand they get nothing if they lose, and next to nothing if they fail to get a big judgment or settlement. Lawyers working on contingency have every motivation to keep their costs down as much as they can without risking losing the case. Effectively, every extra dollar they spend comes out of their own pocket, win or lose, and every extra lawyer they bring on board is one more way that the money will have to be split. You could argue that this makes contingency a good thing, because it means that the lawyers' and clients' interests are perfectly aligned.
I'll bet that none of these expensive studies ever include the cost of cleaning up after the virus/worm of the week that comes with running Microsoft NT/2000/XP. Having everyone in your company having 2 or 3 days a year when their desktop/laptop/server/whatever is unavailable because of cleanup activity should have a definite negative impact on TCO or ROI.
That is something to consider, but a well managed Windows system shouldn't have this problem. My workplace runs just about everything on 2000, yet I don't remember losing a single day to a virus outbreak even going back to the days of NT. A lot of that is because we have properly paranoid people in charge of security, who insist on controls like a tightly configured firewall and a virus scanner on the mail server and every desktop. Admittedly those things do increase the system cost upfront, but they seem to do a very effective job of keeping the system clean. Our systems were not patched against the vulnerability that the Blaster worm exploited (at least until well after it hit), yet we didn't lose any time to it because Blaster couldn't get by our firewall easily, and one case I know of where a system seems to have been infected the virus software caught it.
Note that I'm not endorsing Windows. I'm writing this from Galeon on RH9 on my home machine, and I'm one of the few people at work who take advantage of the fact that our IT department will give you a Mac running OSX if you specifically ask for it. It's just to point out that a well run Windows system can avoid problems with worms, viruses, etc.
Wouldn't that be a good PR move? Not if the journalist hasn't tried it, and certainly not if they have to install it themselves, and write an article bitching about how hard it is to partition disks.
Which is where the idea of a specialized distribution comes in. You've identified one feature that any such distribution would have to have- easy installation. You might do that with a Unix-on-DOS filesystem (so they don't even have to partition) or with a smart partitioning system. Of course both of those things are likely to be popular with Joe user, too, so it's not as though developing them will be 100% waste, either. Now you just need to figure out what other highly specific software a journalist might want and then package them up so that they're all installed automatically. Suddenly you'll have a one-click distribution that will impress journalists. That's the whole idea behind application specific distributions.
I think that you missed the really important quote in there:
But many IT managers whose companies don't already use SCO Unix said in telephone interviews or via e-mail that SCO's legal assault on Linux--which includes a lawsuit against IBM and threats to sue users of the open-source operating system--have left them unwilling to even consider the company's technology.
"I have no intentions of ever doing business with SCO," said Chad Wilson, a computer support analyst at an Ohio-based hospital that runs Windows servers as well as some Linux and IBM AIX systems. "Basically, with their tactics, they hurt their chance of getting a future customer."
Ronald Edge, manager of information systems at Indiana University's Intercollegiate Athletics Department in Bloomington, was even more blunt. "I feel a harsh, bitter Norwegian cold equivalent to hell toward SCO," Edge said.
It sounds as though SCO has done quite a thorough job of shooting itself in the foot on the issue. Even if they do somehow manage to improve their current UNIX line to the point that it can compete with Linux, they've pissed off the people they might have sold it to to the point that they're not going to be able to close the deal. Great going, Darl!
It's the imperfections and other trace elements that give earth-mined diamonds their appealing sparkle.
In a word, no. The thing that gives diamonds their impressive sparkle is that diamond has an unreasonably high refractive index, which means that it is very good at bending light. The high refractive index gives diamonds their "fire", which sets them apart from other gems. Imperfections are one of the things that gemologists look for in diamonds largely because those that have detectable flaws are less valuable than those without.
The business of giving an expensive engagement ring is one of the most ridiculously sexist and outdated customs in American culture. The original idea was that after getting engaged, a couple was allowed to start having sex even though they weren't married yet. To prevent men from promising to marry women in order to get sex and then dumping them, the men were required to give their prospective brides an expensive gift that they'd forfeit if they broke off the engagement. So the tradition of giving the expensive engagement ring is basically saying that a woman's virginity is worth two months' salary. I just don't understand how this hasn't become a big feminist issue.
Also on the LED front, the city where I currently reside (champaign, IL) recently passed funding and a proposal to replace all of the old incandescent traffic signals with LED arrays.
A lot of cities in California did this during the power crisis, largely because it turns out that the cost savings are big enough to pay for the switch very quickly (especially when your electical rates are going through the roof). They're great, and I can't imagine going back.
1 Million kWh and nearly $70,000 per year per 100 intersections!
And that may not even be the biggest savings. I've been told that the cost of physically replacing burned out bulbs in traffic lights is at least as expensive as powering them. Since the LEDs hardly ever need changing, there's a big cost savings on top of the reduced electrical bill.
Re:Use Compact Flourescents for Lighting!
on
Light Bulb Replacements
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Absolutely. I've replaced almost all of my incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents, and they're great. I still use incandescents in a few places where I don't leave the lights on for long and I want their instant-on capability, but I'm mostly using CFs now. They've come down in price a lot recently, an places like IKEA are now selling them for as little as $2.50 apiece.
Different story of course for people who deal with traffic lights, and hence the move to LEDs
There's an additional efficiency advantage to using LEDs in traffic lights, which is the kind of light you're trying to make. With a traffic light, you're trying to make light that's all one color. With an incandescent bulb, that means making whitish light and then filtering out the colors you don't want, which is even more inefficient than incandescents naturally are. With LEDs, though, it actually easier to make monochromatic light than whitish light, so there's no filtering loss.
Featured Sites are links that MSN Search editors believe are likely to be particularly relevant and useful. These sites are chosen from ones published by MSN affiliates, partners, sponsors, and advertisers, as well as other sites proven to be especially popular among our users. Featured Sites that best match your search words are drawn from:
The top sites for news in entertainment, sports, business, and politics.
The most popular musical artist sites for biographies and song samples.
MSN Encarta for encyclopedia information.
MSN content.
MSN content partners.
MSN advertising partners. (Microsoft accepts payment for listings from these.)
So the very top sites are not necessarily advertizing driven. It appears to me that they're heavily driven by Microsoft's own interests. They want to drive you to other Microsoft owned content, like Encarta, MSN, and some businesses (including advertizers) who already do business with MSN.
Speaking from experience, I can assure you that Caltech is a very good value. They believe that anyone who gets in should be able to afford to graduate, so they meet 100% of demonstrated need. I knew plenty of people who couldn't have afforded to go to a state school but who could afford Tech because of its financial aid policy. And it's hard to argue with the quality of education you get there.
Old IBMers all over the world are all misty-eyed at the sight of all these Linux-loving Communist hippies siding with the Company instead of deriding and hating it.
And based on a bunch of the comments I've seen here on/., it seems that a whole lot of those Linux-loving Communist hippies are getting misty-eyed about IBM siding with them instead of with the other business. It's like The Man is fighting against himself, dude.
Not according to The Elements of Style. This is actually the first rule in the book:
1. Form the possessive singluar of nouns by adding 's
Follow this rule no matter what the final consonant. Thus write:
Charles's friend
Burns's poems
the witch's malice
Exceptions are the possessives of ancient proper names in -es and -is, the possessive Jesus', and such forms as for concience' sake, for righteousness' sake.
So the correct form would be Linus's or Torvalds's, not Linus' or Torvalds'.
Torvalds: They are smoking crack. Their slides said there are [more than] 800,000 lines of SMP code that are "infringing," and they are just off their rocker.
Come on Linus, stop dancing around the issue. Tell us what you really think about their claims.
I'm not sure how relevant either of your complaints are to the question that Microsoft is trying to answer, which is which posters to a newsgroup are really valuable and which ones aren't. It doesn't take very long for somebody to become a valuable regular- I've seen people establish themselves in a month or two- and it's possible to fall out of being a regular almost as fast, so a comparatively close time horizong doesn't necessarily hurt their efforts.
That also means that identity switching is much less of an issue, since the new identity can establish itself quite quickly. I'm also not sure exactly how they're supposed to tell when somebody has changed identities. I suppose that they could try tracking signature files or something similar, but it just isn't practical to try to figure out continuity between posters with different names for every group on USENET.
In fact, the time sensitivity of their measures might very well make the system more useful. I've seen plenty of people who join a group as a troll (or at least as an overly argumentative person) but gradually get into the swing of the group and become a valuable contributor. In a case like that it's very useful to be able to figure out that the poster had different posting habits at different times, so that you can apply different weights to his contributions accordingly. And some posters have very different habits for different groups. There's one poster I know of who is a terrible, long-term troll on one of my favorite newsgroups (rec.sport.baseball). When I checked his posting history in a different area (Linux newsgroups) he appears to be a helpful regular. Being able to track that is a very valuable feature.
It's also interesting to see what their analysis shows. I really like both of the measures that they use, the "new thread:: followup" and their "responses:: threads touched". I hadn't consciously thought about either of those things, but now that somebody else has mentioned them it seems to me that both of them are good measures and that they do seem to correspond to what the guy says they do. Of course part of the reason that I like the measures is that I think that they'd rank me as a big contributor on the newsgroups where I participate, but it's clear that the other people who I like on those groups have a similar pattern.
Another way of putting that is that advertising changes the entire nature of the market; instead of producing goods for end use, they have to be produced for sale, which may or may not actually coincide with the needs of customers.
I'm not sure if that's correct. The problem is that companies get their money as soon as you've purchased a product, rather than after you're satisfied with it. That means that producers make money by producing products that will sell well (the profitable part of the transaction) rather than ones than satisfy customers. But that would be true regardless of whether advertizing existed or not. Absent advertizing companies would just focus on price, with consequent drop in quality, rather than specific features that make advertizing interesting. But the focus would still be on getting people to buy the product, rather than on making a product that makes the customer happy.
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Try learning some history. The decisive force in Europe in WWII was the Soviet Union, pure and simple. The invasion of France was a sideshow when compared to the fighting on the Eastern Front, as any competent historian will point out but USA textbooks happily ignore. Similarly, those textbooks conveniently downplay the large-scale fighting between Japan and China, which was quite significant. A classic comment with more than a bit of truth to it is that WWII was really two wars, one between Germany and Russia and one between Japan and China, and that the United States won both.
The reason that you're not anonymous (when trading files) is because you do actually have a name or persistent identifier attached to you. This is like the difference between being an Anonymous Coward on /. and being a regular poster. The AC is, as the name suggests, truly anonymous; /. has taken some steps to make it so that even they can't identify ACs some time after the fact. Regular posters, though, are pseudonymous- hiding behind a false name. You can track what an individual poster does, but you can't necessarily connect them to a particular flesh and blood person without help from /. Even if the poster deliberately puts identifying information on his user page, that information could be fraudulent, so you'd actually need to ask the /. staff to uncover the information in their records to have a good chance of proving who they are to a court.
It's not 100% clear that's true. The Fourth Amendment says:
It doesn't say that the right to be protected from unreasonable searches and seizures shall not be violated by the government, but that it shall not be violated. That at least suggests that private entities shouldn't be able engage in unreasonable searches and seizures, either.
Even if it applies only the government, you have to remember that the courts are also part of the government. That means that private entities should not be able to use government power in the form of court orders to perform searches that would be rejected were a government agency to try them. That may leave it open for private agencies to snoop in ways that the government isn't allowed to, so long as they don't use court orders to do so and they obey relevant laws against trespass, unauthorized computer access, etc.
Yeah, like patenting everything they can think of, original or not, and then suing everyone who violates their patents. How many of the companies engaging in patent abuse as their sole source of income are startups vs. entrenched companies?
This is not fundamentally a big company vs. little company issue. Yes, it's true that the companies that are trying to legislate their current business model are frequently large, old, entrenched ones, but it's also sometimes the case that startups will try to get laws passed to enable their businesses. Similarly, it's frequently true that the companies trying innovative things are small, but sometimes they're large companies, too. This should be obvious to anyone who reads the article, which mentions that two of the companies arguing in this case are AT&T and Sprint- a pair of old, entrenched companies.
And this works just fine because they have closed stacks, so the only people who have to worry about that particular detail are professionals who know how to find things there. All that you need to know when you're trying to get a book is enough information for them to find it in their computer, like the author and title, ISBN, or the like, and then they do the hard work of finding the physical volume. In many ways this is very similar to the idea being presented in Storage. You, the user, don't need to understand exactly how the file is categorized on the disk. Instead you only need to provide enough information to be able to specify the file- or a list of similar files that you can then look through to find the exact one you want- and the computer then does the heavy work of actually figuring out where the thing is.
And, in fact, the system is capable of doing exactly this, which is mentioned in this article about the system:
It seems pretty obvious that you could do the same general kind of thing for any type of file for which there's likely to be a searchable record on the internet. That actually covers a lot of possibilities; you just need to know who's keeping the information and how to get at it.
One of the articles on the storage web page mentions that it has some very cool built in features for dealing with movies. When you import a movie, it's able to extract enough information about it (like the title and release date) that it can then look it up in the Internet Movie Database and get a huge amount more (like the director, starring actors, etc.). From that point forward, you'll be able to search your movies based on all of the metadata that it dredged up from IMDB without you having to input it all yourself. If there is a similar knowledge base about other files of interest, it should be possible to create a similar system to gather and use information about them, too.
Generally not. Most of the time a contingency case is run on a strict percentage basis. If the plaintiff wins, the lawyer gets to keep something like 1/4 to 1/3 of the total proceeds. That's an awfully large amount in some cases, but on the other hand they get nothing if they lose, and next to nothing if they fail to get a big judgment or settlement. Lawyers working on contingency have every motivation to keep their costs down as much as they can without risking losing the case. Effectively, every extra dollar they spend comes out of their own pocket, win or lose, and every extra lawyer they bring on board is one more way that the money will have to be split. You could argue that this makes contingency a good thing, because it means that the lawyers' and clients' interests are perfectly aligned.
That is something to consider, but a well managed Windows system shouldn't have this problem. My workplace runs just about everything on 2000, yet I don't remember losing a single day to a virus outbreak even going back to the days of NT. A lot of that is because we have properly paranoid people in charge of security, who insist on controls like a tightly configured firewall and a virus scanner on the mail server and every desktop. Admittedly those things do increase the system cost upfront, but they seem to do a very effective job of keeping the system clean. Our systems were not patched against the vulnerability that the Blaster worm exploited (at least until well after it hit), yet we didn't lose any time to it because Blaster couldn't get by our firewall easily, and one case I know of where a system seems to have been infected the virus software caught it.
Note that I'm not endorsing Windows. I'm writing this from Galeon on RH9 on my home machine, and I'm one of the few people at work who take advantage of the fact that our IT department will give you a Mac running OSX if you specifically ask for it. It's just to point out that a well run Windows system can avoid problems with worms, viruses, etc.
Which is where the idea of a specialized distribution comes in. You've identified one feature that any such distribution would have to have- easy installation. You might do that with a Unix-on-DOS filesystem (so they don't even have to partition) or with a smart partitioning system. Of course both of those things are likely to be popular with Joe user, too, so it's not as though developing them will be 100% waste, either. Now you just need to figure out what other highly specific software a journalist might want and then package them up so that they're all installed automatically. Suddenly you'll have a one-click distribution that will impress journalists. That's the whole idea behind application specific distributions.
I think that you missed the really important quote in there:
It sounds as though SCO has done quite a thorough job of shooting itself in the foot on the issue. Even if they do somehow manage to improve their current UNIX line to the point that it can compete with Linux, they've pissed off the people they might have sold it to to the point that they're not going to be able to close the deal. Great going, Darl!
In a word, no. The thing that gives diamonds their impressive sparkle is that diamond has an unreasonably high refractive index, which means that it is very good at bending light. The high refractive index gives diamonds their "fire", which sets them apart from other gems. Imperfections are one of the things that gemologists look for in diamonds largely because those that have detectable flaws are less valuable than those without.
The business of giving an expensive engagement ring is one of the most ridiculously sexist and outdated customs in American culture. The original idea was that after getting engaged, a couple was allowed to start having sex even though they weren't married yet. To prevent men from promising to marry women in order to get sex and then dumping them, the men were required to give their prospective brides an expensive gift that they'd forfeit if they broke off the engagement. So the tradition of giving the expensive engagement ring is basically saying that a woman's virginity is worth two months' salary. I just don't understand how this hasn't become a big feminist issue.
A lot of cities in California did this during the power crisis, largely because it turns out that the cost savings are big enough to pay for the switch very quickly (especially when your electical rates are going through the roof). They're great, and I can't imagine going back.
And that may not even be the biggest savings. I've been told that the cost of physically replacing burned out bulbs in traffic lights is at least as expensive as powering them. Since the LEDs hardly ever need changing, there's a big cost savings on top of the reduced electrical bill.
Absolutely. I've replaced almost all of my incandescent bulbs with compact fluorescents, and they're great. I still use incandescents in a few places where I don't leave the lights on for long and I want their instant-on capability, but I'm mostly using CFs now. They've come down in price a lot recently, an places like IKEA are now selling them for as little as $2.50 apiece.
There's an additional efficiency advantage to using LEDs in traffic lights, which is the kind of light you're trying to make. With a traffic light, you're trying to make light that's all one color. With an incandescent bulb, that means making whitish light and then filtering out the colors you don't want, which is even more inefficient than incandescents naturally are. With LEDs, though, it actually easier to make monochromatic light than whitish light, so there's no filtering loss.
Not exactly. MSN says that:
So the very top sites are not necessarily advertizing driven. It appears to me that they're heavily driven by Microsoft's own interests. They want to drive you to other Microsoft owned content, like Encarta, MSN, and some businesses (including advertizers) who already do business with MSN.
Speaking from experience, I can assure you that Caltech is a very good value. They believe that anyone who gets in should be able to afford to graduate, so they meet 100% of demonstrated need. I knew plenty of people who couldn't have afforded to go to a state school but who could afford Tech because of its financial aid policy. And it's hard to argue with the quality of education you get there.
Because it's based on a quote from Cerebus the Ardvark.
And based on a bunch of the comments I've seen here on /., it seems that a whole lot of those Linux-loving Communist hippies are getting misty-eyed about IBM siding with them instead of with the other business. It's like The Man is fighting against himself, dude.
Not according to The Elements of Style. This is actually the first rule in the book:
So the correct form would be Linus's or Torvalds's, not Linus' or Torvalds'.
Come on Linus, stop dancing around the issue. Tell us what you really think about their claims.
I'm not sure how relevant either of your complaints are to the question that Microsoft is trying to answer, which is which posters to a newsgroup are really valuable and which ones aren't. It doesn't take very long for somebody to become a valuable regular- I've seen people establish themselves in a month or two- and it's possible to fall out of being a regular almost as fast, so a comparatively close time horizong doesn't necessarily hurt their efforts.
That also means that identity switching is much less of an issue, since the new identity can establish itself quite quickly. I'm also not sure exactly how they're supposed to tell when somebody has changed identities. I suppose that they could try tracking signature files or something similar, but it just isn't practical to try to figure out continuity between posters with different names for every group on USENET.
In fact, the time sensitivity of their measures might very well make the system more useful. I've seen plenty of people who join a group as a troll (or at least as an overly argumentative person) but gradually get into the swing of the group and become a valuable contributor. In a case like that it's very useful to be able to figure out that the poster had different posting habits at different times, so that you can apply different weights to his contributions accordingly. And some posters have very different habits for different groups. There's one poster I know of who is a terrible, long-term troll on one of my favorite newsgroups (rec.sport.baseball). When I checked his posting history in a different area (Linux newsgroups) he appears to be a helpful regular. Being able to track that is a very valuable feature.
It's also interesting to see what their analysis shows. I really like both of the measures that they use, the "new thread :: followup" and their "responses :: threads touched". I hadn't consciously thought about either of those things, but now that somebody else has mentioned them it seems to me that both of them are good measures and that they do seem to correspond to what the guy says they do. Of course part of the reason that I like the measures is that I think that they'd rank me as a big contributor on the newsgroups where I participate, but it's clear that the other people who I like on those groups have a similar pattern.
I'm not sure if that's correct. The problem is that companies get their money as soon as you've purchased a product, rather than after you're satisfied with it. That means that producers make money by producing products that will sell well (the profitable part of the transaction) rather than ones than satisfy customers. But that would be true regardless of whether advertizing existed or not. Absent advertizing companies would just focus on price, with consequent drop in quality, rather than specific features that make advertizing interesting. But the focus would still be on getting people to buy the product, rather than on making a product that makes the customer happy.