I have to agree. I have yet to meet anyone who has taken a "year off" and has actually done something productive with her life -- especially right after high school.
Mind you, this is from a small sample of about four individuals, so it's not really all encompassing, but my guess is the odds are against you.
"If you want to reach the whole population, you have to make sure it can scale up."
What that means to you, MBAs, is that it sounds like by i-deploying its cross-market and granular mix of best-of-breed technologies for today's e-enterprise, the interweb will finally be scalable!
It's a very good point. $250 is sort of the upper range of the "nifty gadget" price point. Want an mp3 player, iPod even? They're cheaper.
Want to play games? DS is cheaper.
Want a cool digital camera? Also, cheaper.
Even portable DVD players are cheaper, considering you don't need to buy extra media. (For example).
Had this come out in November... maybe it would've sold in a similar manner to hot cakes. I don't think this is going to take over Nintendo's throne in that market. When I first heard the price, I immediately thought, "What parent is getting this damn thing for their kids?" $250 is ridiculous for something which your daughter/son can drop in a puddle and break.
I have that too, but found it annoying if I wanted to read at night. Have to turn on the lamp, then leave it on, reset the timer, etc... too much hassle.
Except they don't really walk off with your hard earned money. I worked at XYZ credit card bank in their inward fraud department and it was usually something as simple as saying "These charges aren't mine." I say, "OK", tag them as such, and the merchant needs to come up with proof otherwise they pay. Usually, if we suspected it is a family member (say, calls to 900#s originating from their home), we ask them if they are willing to prosecute. That's the tough choice usually, if they know their $relative has been using their card.
But usually the maximum you are responsible under federal law is $50 for any fraud (not per charge, for all the fraud). A lot of places will waive that and pay it themselves so you don't get pissed off.
One time, I got a call in from someone who suspected this person was using a stolen card. They were at an electronics store buying a big screen TV and the teller said the guy looked suspicious. Well, we get the card info while the manager acts like he's "processing the order", we call the number associated with the account, and I ask, "Sir, are you in a store right now buying a big screen TV?"
He says, "No, I am not."
"Do you have your XYS Visa on you?"
"Yeah, it's right her--- where'd it go?"
We called the cops while the guy was waiting around for his TV to get prepared.
Anyway, long story short,the article is not about "identity theft" since the guy just stole the guy's credit card number / mail somehow, just regular fraud. It is an interesting article though. And what he described is pretty common. Figure we havd a group of about 50 people working full-time just talking on the phone with people who suspected fraud. This was not counting the people who called customers who may have fraud, nor the people investigating the fraud either.
And the intro to the presentation for SIGGRAPH2004:
Current display devices can display a limited range of contrast and colors, which is one of the main reasons that most image acquisition, processing, and display techniques use no more than eight bits per color channel. This course outlines recent advances in high-dynamic-range imaging, from capture to display, that remove this restriction, thereby enabling images to represent the color gamut and dynamic range of the original scene rather than the limited subspace imposed by current monitor technology. This hands-on course teaches how high-dynamic-range images can be captured, the file formats available to store them, and the algorithms required to prepare them for display on low-dynamic-range display devices. The trade-offs at each stage, from capture to display, are assessed, allowing attendees to make informed choices about data-capture techniques, file formats, and tone-reproduction operators. The course also covers recent advances in image-based lighting, in which HDR images can be used to illuminate CG objects and realistically integrate them into real-world scenes. Through practical examples taken from photography and the film industry, it shows the vast improvements in image fidelity afforded by high-dynamic-range imaging. [more]
This was going to be my advice too. There's a much cheaper way to do it, though, if the effect isn't exactly 100% the same. It involves a beside lamp and one of those clip-on lights for reading. Make sure it's one with a nice bright bulb. I got one at Linens and Things for $15. I'm sure online you can find one for a nominal cost.
When the alarm rings, turn on your bedside lamp. Hit the snooze button.
When it rings again, turn on that light, which should be pointed right at your eyes, which are closed. It will feel very similar to being on a beach. Wakes you right up.
Beta Customers Applaud Higher-Value Uses of Adobe PDF
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- Jan. 5, 2005 -- Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the immediate availability of Adobe® Acrobat® 7.0 software, a family of desktop applications that enables workgroups to manage a range of essential business activities. Acrobat 7.0, the latest update to the Adobe Intelligent Document Platform, provides users the ability to assemble documents from multiple sources, create intelligent forms, and collaborate on projects inside and outside the firewall, among other capabilities....
Adobe also announced the immediate availability of Adobe Reader® 7.0, including a public beta version for the Linux® operating system. The company's free client software can be downloaded at www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html. In addition to the ability to reliably view and print Adobe PDF files, Adobe Reader 7.0 now offers more powerful capabilities. Users can participate in document reviews, have Yahoo! Search capabilities at their fingertips and can interact with 3D objects placed in PDF. Adobe has distributed over half-a-billion copies of Adobe Reader since its 1993 introduction.
I don't know about the download, but I remember going to Adobe.com right around tha time and seeing a huge headline "Reader 7 for Linux" -- I didn't download it because it didn't apply to me. Now I look at the download page and it only lets you get 5.x.
That's a bit extreme. I think for most people this helps as a social icebreaker to get them to do something that they haven't done before, sort of like a trainer to help you tell jokes (as opposed to being funny*).
It's a way to kill some time or be entertained. I don't think most people will derive meaning and self-worth from being able to recycle some old Billy Crystal routine.
* Anyone who is regularly funny, for the most part, will not need a machine to want to do a joke in front of a small crowd. I like my quips in small company and have my own sense of humor. I don't know if doing someone's schtick in front of a bar is my idea of fun.
Free (stock) photography. A lot of is just OK, some of it is not really stock photography, but the site is one of those can't live without them sites. Especially considering the cost of paying for Corbis, etc.
Not even a Creative Commons License... Just completely free*. I almost am shamed to provide the link as their servers are constantly overloaded.
* As in beer-speech. Some have their worked marked "for non-commercial use only" but sending a friendly email of "Can I have this on my site?" usually ends in a reply with approval.
My only issue is that this fails to play any of the other open standards for multimedia, like Sony's MiniDisc, or Sony's Betamax, or Sony's SACD, or Sony's...
I'm sure your phD friend must know that you cannot create a trendline from two statistical points.
However, it does lead to some interesting sales date. For example, you mentioned the drop in releases, and the subsequent drop in unit sales. It would be nice to know how many of the sales were of current releases. For example, Year 1 had 3,000 releases and 1,000,062 sales, let's say it had 600,000 sales from new releases. Then Year 2 had 2,000 releases and 1,000,000 sales, let's say 500,000 sales from new releases. Each "new release" previously sold 200 copies, this year each new release sold 250 copies.
However, I still see these problem points with your assertion:
There is no publicly available data to back anything up
A trend was created from two years worth of data (I would look at 1990-2004 as a minimum)
ARIA != RIAA,.au !=.us
Addressing the first two points would make the third less relevant, but at this point it seems more like conjecture. Sorry.
Is that what is? I don't know if it's my theme (Aaron Spuler's sexy Smoke) but I have no idea what that is, or what it represents. To use a terrible 1996-era analogy, it looks like a bug on the windshield of my PC (as I was driving on the super infohighway or whatever).
Honestly, I have a Yahoo! email address, I guess, since I have a MyYahoo! page and everything, but there's no reason for me to use it. At this point I have over 7 email addresses (3 for work/business, 1 personal, 1 almuni.edu, 1 from my ISP, 1 GMail, plus more). Why would I need more? I have a friend of mine who has distinct online "personalities" (IM, email, perhaps even different Friendster/Myspace pages). She says she uses the other ones to spy/stalk others, or put people in different "buckets". That I know of, she has at least three. (Mind you, this might be necessary considering her circle of acquaintances, which is large).
Me? I'm happy with my gmail. I only use it as a utility to read/send emails that I get to my regular addresses. I don't need Yahoo or anything else, and until I got a Gmail invite, I didn't even have a webmail account anymore (as I had not logged into Hotmail for years).
(not to mention the number of new CDs released is dramatically falling)
Care to back that up with any statistics? The past couple of months has seen releases numbered in the hundreds. Has there been a significant decrease in the number of titles released? If anything it seems like more are being released, because more and more reissues are coming out, both of old-stuff already on LP (The Talking Heads' The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads) and of old-stuff already on CD (NIN's expanded edition of The Downward Spiral).
If including DVDs stops piracy...
Did people still pirate Dave Matthews Band's Busted Stuff? Or Les Savy Fav's Inches? Or Coldplay's Live?
If including shirts stops piracy...
Did people still pirate Gwen Stefani's Love Angel Music Baby?* Or Rancid's Indestructible?*
If including video clips stops piracy...
Did people still pirate Fiona Apple's Tidal? Or Dizzee Rascal's Boy in Da Corner? Or Madvillain's Madvillainy?
If including video clips AND a bonus disc of B-sides stop piracy...
Did people still pirate Royksopp's Melody A.M.?
If including free poster stops piracy...
Did people still pirate Björk's Medulla?*
If including a $20 off coupon for Reebok sneakers on a $10 CD stops piracy...
Did people still pirate 50 Cent's The Massacre?
If an album is of staggering artistic achievement...
Did people still pirate the Stone's Exile on Main Street?
Nothing, and I will repeat, nothing will stop piracy. Fugazi is one of the most anti-RIAA, anti-high-priced-CD bands out there, with their MSRP / list price being a mere $10.98, and you can still find their stuff on file-sharing networks.
Piracy != Bad Piracy != Lost Profits
Piracy will always exist. Have a good product, have good value-added stuff on your CDs, don't gouge your consumers, don't expect to make millions and millions just because you have a CD, and you'll be OK.
--- * This was done, regretably, at a premium price.
I personally enjoy studying these small creatures. Sure, to most they seem small and benign, to others monstrous and foreign, but what fun it is to have a culture of them! I keep a lot of them in my lab --- sure it's against authority rules but how else would you have scientific advancement? It's amazing how many of them can sustain themselves on agar -- and even like it!
Yes, these stupid organisms truly are one of Nature's wonders....
I listen to NPR almost exclusively as far as radio goes. Usually BBC World news in the morning, by the drive home they always have interesting interviews with people from the world of arts or politics. Sometimes they have the bad habit of going into one topic too heavily (tsunami) and you get sick and tired of hearing about it 3 hours a day, every day.
Berkeley Groks Science Radio - a weekly radio science program broadcasting on KALX 90.7 FM in Berkeley, CA. Each week, your hosts, Charles Lee and Frank Ling, take an in depth look at recent events in the world of science and technology, and examine the effects of recent discoveries on our daily lives.
Conference Proceedings - This audio collection features a selection of spoken-word speeches and lectures from (often tech-oriented) conferences, stored for posterity here in a wide range of audio formats. The Internet Archive is indebted to O'Reilly & Associates for their permission to archive the ETCON 2004 and Digital Democracy 2004 recordings, the Zap Your PRAM 2003 conference organizers for uploading their recordings, the Wizards Of OS 3 organizers and uploaders, the speakers themselves for their excellent talks, and Doug Kaye at IT Conversations for his O'Reilly-related excellent recording, uploading, and metadata work.
Failing that, just wget en.wikipedia.org and have BonziBuddy read it to you.
Interesting. I might as well give stats on some of the sites I have access to stats to:
1. My site has IE usage below 25%, mostly because I link to it from here. It actually has an entry for Galeon, which until I searched, I had no idea what it was.
2. A NY musician's site registers as 18% Firefox/Mozilla/Netscape.
3. A financial services site (which from experience caters to the most mom-and-pop audience you can imagine) has only 2.9% Firefox usage. A similar site on the west coast of the US has about 4.5% Firefox usage.
Mind you, the total hits between these sites is about 1m, so we're not talking about anything fool-proof.
This basically backs up what we already knew: The more young and tech-oriented an audience is, the more likely it is they are going to be using Firefox. Which is great, because that will make it spill over into the general public.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to agree. I have yet to meet anyone who has taken a "year off" and has actually done something productive with her life -- especially right after high school.
Mind you, this is from a small sample of about four individuals, so it's not really all encompassing, but my guess is the odds are against you.
Christopher Walken and Michael Jackson are sending you 'Thank You' bouquets.
What that means to you, MBAs, is that it sounds like by i-deploying its cross-market and granular mix of best-of-breed technologies for today's e-enterprise, the interweb will finally be scalable!
It's a very good point. $250 is sort of the upper range of the "nifty gadget" price point. Want an mp3 player, iPod even? They're cheaper.
Want to play games? DS is cheaper.
Want a cool digital camera? Also, cheaper.
Even portable DVD players are cheaper, considering you don't need to buy extra media. (For example).
Had this come out in November... maybe it would've sold in a similar manner to hot cakes. I don't think this is going to take over Nintendo's throne in that market. When I first heard the price, I immediately thought, "What parent is getting this damn thing for their kids?" $250 is ridiculous for something which your daughter/son can drop in a puddle and break.
If it's anything like my Outlook PST file, it will be able to hold about 1000 documents, then not work as well.
Sounds fun!
I have that too, but found it annoying if I wanted to read at night. Have to turn on the lamp, then leave it on, reset the timer, etc... too much hassle.
Except they don't really walk off with your hard earned money. I worked at XYZ credit card bank in their inward fraud department and it was usually something as simple as saying "These charges aren't mine." I say, "OK", tag them as such, and the merchant needs to come up with proof otherwise they pay. Usually, if we suspected it is a family member (say, calls to 900#s originating from their home), we ask them if they are willing to prosecute. That's the tough choice usually, if they know their $relative has been using their card.
But usually the maximum you are responsible under federal law is $50 for any fraud (not per charge, for all the fraud). A lot of places will waive that and pay it themselves so you don't get pissed off.
One time, I got a call in from someone who suspected this person was using a stolen card. They were at an electronics store buying a big screen TV and the teller said the guy looked suspicious. Well, we get the card info while the manager acts like he's "processing the order", we call the number associated with the account, and I ask, "Sir, are you in a store right now buying a big screen TV?"
He says, "No, I am not."
"Do you have your XYS Visa on you?"
"Yeah, it's right her--- where'd it go?"
We called the cops while the guy was waiting around for his TV to get prepared.
Anyway, long story short,the article is not about "identity theft" since the guy just stole the guy's credit card number / mail somehow, just regular fraud. It is an interesting article though. And what he described is pretty common. Figure we havd a group of about 50 people working full-time just talking on the phone with people who suspected fraud. This was not counting the people who called customers who may have fraud, nor the people investigating the fraud either.
Paul Debevec Executive Producer, Graphics Research Research Assistant Professor, USC, who has a LOT of information on the subject.
And the intro to the presentation for SIGGRAPH2004:
Come si our loveli byttørrents...
This was going to be my advice too. There's a much cheaper way to do it, though, if the effect isn't exactly 100% the same. It involves a beside lamp and one of those clip-on lights for reading. Make sure it's one with a nice bright bulb. I got one at Linens and Things for $15. I'm sure online you can find one for a nominal cost.
When the alarm rings, turn on your bedside lamp. Hit the snooze button.
When it rings again, turn on that light, which should be pointed right at your eyes, which are closed. It will feel very similar to being on a beach. Wakes you right up.
I think an easy way to get a Japanese perspective would be to ask this same question on Slashdot Japan. Then at least you can compare expectations.
I don't know about the download, but I remember going to Adobe.com right around tha time and seeing a huge headline "Reader 7 for Linux" -- I didn't download it because it didn't apply to me. Now I look at the download page and it only lets you get 5.x.
Odd.
That's a bit extreme. I think for most people this helps as a social icebreaker to get them to do something that they haven't done before, sort of like a trainer to help you tell jokes (as opposed to being funny*).
It's a way to kill some time or be entertained. I don't think most people will derive meaning and self-worth from being able to recycle some old Billy Crystal routine.
* Anyone who is regularly funny, for the most part, will not need a machine to want to do a joke in front of a small crowd. I like my quips in small company and have my own sense of humor. I don't know if doing someone's schtick in front of a bar is my idea of fun.
The last chaos theorist we kept around wandered into the teleporation lab and turned into a half-man half-fly.
What about Stock XChange?
Free (stock) photography. A lot of is just OK, some of it is not really stock photography, but the site is one of those can't live without them sites. Especially considering the cost of paying for Corbis, etc.
Not even a Creative Commons License... Just completely free*. I almost am shamed to provide the link as their servers are constantly overloaded.
* As in beer-speech. Some have their worked marked "for non-commercial use only" but sending a friendly email of "Can I have this on my site?" usually ends in a reply with approval.
My only issue is that this fails to play any of the other open standards for multimedia, like Sony's MiniDisc, or Sony's Betamax, or Sony's SACD, or Sony's...
However, it does lead to some interesting sales date. For example, you mentioned the drop in releases, and the subsequent drop in unit sales. It would be nice to know how many of the sales were of current releases. For example, Year 1 had 3,000 releases and 1,000,062 sales, let's say it had 600,000 sales from new releases. Then Year 2 had 2,000 releases and 1,000,000 sales, let's say 500,000 sales from new releases. Each "new release" previously sold 200 copies, this year each new release sold 250 copies.
However, I still see these problem points with your assertion:
Addressing the first two points would make the third less relevant, but at this point it seems more like conjecture. Sorry.
Is that what is? I don't know if it's my theme (Aaron Spuler's sexy Smoke) but I have no idea what that is, or what it represents. To use a terrible 1996-era analogy, it looks like a bug on the windshield of my PC (as I was driving on the super infohighway or whatever).
But, yes, that works... if it is lit up.
Honestly, I have a Yahoo! email address, I guess, since I have a MyYahoo! page and everything, but there's no reason for me to use it. At this point I have over 7 email addresses (3 for work/business, 1 personal, 1 almuni .edu, 1 from my ISP, 1 GMail, plus more). Why would I need more? I have a friend of mine who has distinct online "personalities" (IM, email, perhaps even different Friendster/Myspace pages). She says she uses the other ones to spy/stalk others, or put people in different "buckets". That I know of, she has at least three. (Mind you, this might be necessary considering her circle of acquaintances, which is large).
/.ers having 5 email addresses or more.
Me? I'm happy with my gmail. I only use it as a utility to read/send emails that I get to my regular addresses. I don't need Yahoo or anything else, and until I got a Gmail invite, I didn't even have a webmail account anymore (as I had not logged into Hotmail for years).
But my issue with ALL email is that it is inherently not safe. You can lose domains, accounts with ISPs, even webmail services go down or go to pay. I guess that's one advantage of having like so many addresses, and it explains, why wildly inaccurate polls show almost half of
Other poll of interest: I've had my current email address for...
"Indian self-taught math genius Srinivasa Ramanujan" works for me.
Care to back that up with any statistics? The past couple of months has seen releases numbered in the hundreds. Has there been a significant decrease in the number of titles released? If anything it seems like more are being released, because more and more reissues are coming out, both of old-stuff already on LP (The Talking Heads' The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads) and of old-stuff already on CD (NIN's expanded edition of The Downward Spiral).
If including DVDs stops piracy...
Did people still pirate Dave Matthews Band's Busted Stuff?
Or Les Savy Fav's Inches?
Or Coldplay's Live?
If including shirts stops piracy...
Did people still pirate Gwen Stefani's Love Angel Music Baby?*
Or Rancid's Indestructible?*
If including video clips stops piracy...
Did people still pirate Fiona Apple's Tidal?
Or Dizzee Rascal's Boy in Da Corner?
Or Madvillain's Madvillainy?
If including video clips AND a bonus disc of B-sides stop piracy...
Did people still pirate Royksopp's Melody A.M.?
If including free poster stops piracy...
Did people still pirate Björk's Medulla?*
If including a $20 off coupon for Reebok sneakers on a $10 CD stops piracy...
Did people still pirate 50 Cent's The Massacre?
If an album is of staggering artistic achievement...
Did people still pirate the Stone's Exile on Main Street?
Nothing, and I will repeat, nothing will stop piracy. Fugazi is one of the most anti-RIAA, anti-high-priced-CD bands out there, with their MSRP / list price being a mere $10.98, and you can still find their stuff on file-sharing networks.
Piracy != Bad
Piracy != Lost Profits
Piracy will always exist. Have a good product, have good value-added stuff on your CDs, don't gouge your consumers, don't expect to make millions and millions just because you have a CD, and you'll be OK.
---
* This was done, regretably, at a premium price.
I personally enjoy studying these small creatures. Sure, to most they seem small and benign, to others monstrous and foreign, but what fun it is to have a culture of them! I keep a lot of them in my lab --- sure it's against authority rules but how else would you have scientific advancement? It's amazing how many of them can sustain themselves on agar -- and even like it!
...
Yes, these stupid organisms truly are one of Nature's wonders.
Bacteria are cool too, I guess.
Q. How long have you been working here?
A. Ever since they threatened to fire me!
I listen to NPR almost exclusively as far as radio goes. Usually BBC World news in the morning, by the drive home they always have interesting interviews with people from the world of arts or politics. Sometimes they have the bad habit of going into one topic too heavily (tsunami) and you get sick and tired of hearing about it 3 hours a day, every day.
Otherwise, you can find some stuff on Internet Archive's Audio section. They have some interesting bits, namely:
Berkeley Groks Science Radio - a weekly radio science program broadcasting on KALX 90.7 FM in Berkeley, CA. Each week, your hosts, Charles Lee and Frank Ling, take an in depth look at recent events in the world of science and technology, and examine the effects of recent discoveries on our daily lives.
Conference Proceedings - This audio collection features a selection of spoken-word speeches and lectures from (often tech-oriented) conferences, stored for posterity here in a wide range of audio formats. The Internet Archive is indebted to O'Reilly & Associates for their permission to archive the ETCON 2004 and Digital Democracy 2004 recordings, the Zap Your PRAM 2003 conference organizers for uploading their recordings, the Wizards Of OS 3 organizers and uploaders, the speakers themselves for their excellent talks, and Doug Kaye at IT Conversations for his O'Reilly-related excellent recording, uploading, and metadata work.
Failing that, just wget en.wikipedia.org and have BonziBuddy read it to you.
Interesting. I might as well give stats on some of the sites I have access to stats to:
1. My site has IE usage below 25%, mostly because I link to it from here. It actually has an entry for Galeon, which until I searched, I had no idea what it was.
2. A NY musician's site registers as 18% Firefox/Mozilla/Netscape.
3. A financial services site (which from experience caters to the most mom-and-pop audience you can imagine) has only 2.9% Firefox usage. A similar site on the west coast of the US has about 4.5% Firefox usage.
Mind you, the total hits between these sites is about 1m, so we're not talking about anything fool-proof.
This basically backs up what we already knew: The more young and tech-oriented an audience is, the more likely it is they are going to be using Firefox. Which is great, because that will make it spill over into the general public.