"Affiliate" programs also drive up the cost of the books (or Rolexes), both because the affiliate must be paid off, and to cover the administrative costs of the affiliate program.
Conflict of interest I'll give you, and perhaps the others as well, but not cost increase. What I think you have to look at is how affiliate payouts relate to other marketing dollars, and there's one important thing about affiliate marketing: you only pay out when you make a sale. Any other impressions or clickthroughs you get before that point is just free advertising... in many cases, per sale generated, affiliates are cheaper than other methods. And money spent on affiliate marketing is probably just a sub-portion of a total marketing budget. If they didn't spend that money on affiliate marketing, it's only marginally probable that they'd try discounts on the price of the book as another tactic. An ad campaign, product placement, review angling, other kinds of media mention... these are all just as likely.
I've barely begun to investigate Python, but this article is the one that convinced me it was worth a look. That, and anecdotes from half a dozen acquaintences who said essentially the same thing Eric Raymond did...
A few years ago I wrote a fairly complex spreadsheet (a simulation of the Monty Hall problem) with some Excel Macro/VBA functionality. My memory on this is a bit fuzzy, so I could be wrong, but I believe I tested it under Star Office and possibly Gnumeric as well to see if it ran, and I seem to recall it did.
Some background can be found here, if you're not familiar with the problem. The Workbook has one sheet for playing individual rounds of the game yourself, which you do by selecting an initial guess and then a second guess (one button for each option under each door). The next two sheets let the computer simulate playing 1, 10, or 100 rounds at a time, one uses the "switch" strategy and one uses the "stay" strategy. If it's confusing (probably is), email me. I'm curious.
Something which seems to get lost in the Mac/PC debates *sometimes* is the cost factor. I looked those graphs and thought "Wow - mac is faster at this benchmark". Then I looked up pricing - minimum I can get that mac for would be $1999.
Something which often gets lost? My friend, this particular point, while being a better one than the Phillip Glass Sonata cry of "one mouse button," is pointed out exactly as often. Probably more.
I'm going to guess that the submitter actually knew that 90 light years isn't quick by any sort of standards we have for travel here on earth, but rather said that as a mix of tongue-in-cheek-humor, and some somewhat well-deserved optimism. It really could have been much, much farther, as far away as 90 light years really is.
Although or blind and deaf, you're still out of luck.
Which brings up a point... what're the only other senses left? Well, touch, taste, and smell. Taste and smell are probably not well suited to the interpretation of data... but we already know that touch can be. Braille and raised lettering on important signs is generally considered one mark of an accessible building. There's braille terminals even, as anyone who'se seen the movie Sneakers knows.
So... why isn't there a tactile "braille" image renderer available? You've seen those toys with thousands of little small rods that you impress an object into, and the rods are displaced by it and on the other side you see (or feel!) an "image" of the object. Hook something like this up to an electromechanical device for lowering and raising the rods based on the intensity of a grayscaled image, and you've got a tactile image display. Accessibility problem solved. Even for blind/deaf folks.
Now, once the smell-o-vision is invented, we can take it futher...
Using Netscape 7.1 for Windows (I am at work, ok?) I still can't vote in a poll properly (pop-up appears, but the vote data is loaded in main window, leaving pop-up blank).
I agree that this is unreasonable, and furthermore, I don't understand why this is so hard to get right. I'm sure that 95% of all annoying popups come _only_ from abuse of the "onload" event handler applied to the body tag. Block all popups steming from that method applied on the body tag, put a pane in the preferences for exceptions, and you're set.
This is so odd, I just finished writing about this today. Years, ago, a friend of mine had a dream that a bunch of us were in a grad math class... topology or analysis or something and we'd been working on a proof for days and gotten to a point where we couldn't get any farther without "proof by mutilation" -- somebody had to cut off an arm. And the scary/funny thing was, we had all decided to do it, the only remaining debate was about whose arm it was going to be.
Crazy mathematicians. But less soul-destroying than I/T, that's for sure.
google is good = about 1,820,000 results google is a search engine = about 1,630,000 results google sucks = about 137,000 results google is Shiva = about 9,440 results google is a tuna fish sandwich = about 851
Somewhat circular, but that aside, I think Google's nature is reasonably clear.
Re:OK.... Is this Balanced?
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 1
I'm still entitled to KEEP what I earn rather than donate it to some crack addict who can't keep his dick in his pants...
Classic. All of the working poor -- all of the 25% of America that doesn't break $20,000 per year -- are a bunch of sexually compulsive crack addicts, right? Or if they're not, they're just poor because they're lazy or not as smart as you, huh?
In terms of natural brilliance, of the top of my head I can think of half a dozen individuals I'd be willing to bet a Ben Franklin are smarter than you -- if nothing else, because they don't engage in unfounded sweeping generalizations like the one you just used -- but aren't doing quite so hot at the moment. For some of them it's been the breaks with I/T. Some have seen just plain bad luck. Some have chosen careers like education or academia that aren't quite so renumerative. But they're well-educated sharp cookies. And I'd be willing to bet a Ben Franklin that if you were to match up with them on some sort of standard metric, you'd have your cerebral cortex handed back to you in a fast-food salad box. Extra lettuce.
On a better natured note, I think *nobody* earning less than six figures should be required to work unpaid overtime (or I should say, uncompensated overtime, because sometimes you're the business owner or you own equity and you may not get it back in $x per hour, but hopefully in increased value for your stake). There's no other resource a business owner should expect to get for free -- power, square feet of office/operations space, extra funding, whatever. Why in the world they expect it should be different for the costs of labor is beyond me. Unless somehow, they buy into the idea that their employees are inferior, and therefore don't deserve their wages.
OK.... Is this Balanced?
on
Working Hard?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
The proposed changes, which were first introduced in March, will be implemented by the Labor Department after a "public comment" period, which expires on Monday.
Their implementation is already a foregone conclusion? Isn't the purpose of the public comment period to evaluate?
But...
The good news is that the regulations would raise that cut-off amount to $425 a week -- about $22,100 per year -- actually adding about 1.3 million lower-wage workers to the ranks of people eligible for overtime, according to the Labor Department.
All right. So more super-low wage workers -- we're talking people making under $10/hr here -- will be guaranteed overtime. That's a very, very good thing.
For one thing, many workers earning a salary of more than $65,000 a year will now be excluded from overtime -- at least 1.3 million workers, according to the EPI study.
And it's really hard for me to feel too sorry for those making $65,000+. Yeah, I know, it's not easy to support a family of 6 on...
But...
n another example, "executives" ineligible for overtime, according to the old rules, were people who hired and fired workers, set wages and assigned work. The new rules broaden the definition of "executives" to include any workers who occasionally supervise other workers, even if they spend most of their time doing manual labor.
This kind of change is insane. Meanwhile, real execs are collecting bonuses and kickbacks in record amounts.
"Once employers are not required to pay for overtime work, they will schedule more of it," the study said.
Exactly. I'd like to request a few things from my government and future employers while we're at it:
A ceiling for my utility bills. Once I pay a certain amount of money for electricity in a month, I don't want to pay a cent more. Same thing for phone and water.
Cell phone bill, too.
How about a ceiling on my taxes?
Hey, unlimited free food from the cafeteria?
Oh. What's that? You mean you can't afford to give out and unlimited amount of finite resources at a fixed cost?
We are building on advanced work at Microsoft Research in fields such as machine learning â" the design of systems that learn from data and grow smarter over time. This kind of technology is vital to the fight against spam because every defensive action causes spammers to change their attack. Technology, to be effective, must continuously adapt, without requiring a team of people to examine messages one by one. With machine learning, a "smart" spam filter can automatically adjust to spammers' shifting tactics.
Translation: We've noticed that other people are already incorporating these features into their products (Apple's Mail.app) and that you can get good Bayesian filters pretty much free, so we guess we'll embrace and maybe extend that.
To help, we have assembled a massive and still growing database of spam, collected from volunteers among our millions of MSN and Hotmail subscribers. This database will prove invaluable later this year when we release Outlook 2003, which will include a new, smart filter that will access the database to recognize and block spam more effectively. The filter in Outlook 2003 also will be updated frequently and easily, as with Windows Update today.
Translation: Hotmail is a honeypot for spam.
Our proposal is to create a regulatory "safe harbor" status for senders who comply with guidelines.
Translation: Maybe we can create the "trusted computing" equivalemt of electronic mail.
You do, however, increase the number of roads to relieve congestion. (I know you were trying to say that increasing roads is as wrong for relieving traffic as buying a belt would be to fight obesity. I'm simply correcting you. More roads = less congestion. Belt != less obesity)
There's a simple reason why increasing the number of roads rarely decreases congestion. The traffic grid can't be abstracted into a single pipe with a certain load bearing capacity -- becausee it's a network of pipes, and with each connection in that network, you have to do proper queuing and traffic management to get optimal flow. We're already pretty bad at that, but the complexity of that problem gets worse: in order to be useful, those roads have to intersect other roads, and the more
the more intersections/nodes you have in a given system.... well, you get the picture.
It's somewhat accurate to say that congestion along a given corridor tends to decrease (or at least hold steady) if its carrying capacity is increased relative to other corridors and no new nodes are added.
IIRC, Portland put this theory to the test sometime in the last decade or two, and actually ripped out a few large thoroughfares running through downtown... and the traffic in that area got better....
Also, have you noticed that for a site on usability, -- or for that matter, for one that isn't -- his site is really quite hard to read and navigate...
This seems like it's already in their domain. Don't they already have the authority to intercept and monitor electronic communications? Have jurisdiction over interstate transfers/transactions/deliveries? Can prosecute cases with more than $5,000 damage (which, thanks to inflated estimates, copyright infringement cases are)? And hey, it's a feature of most p2p apps that they essentially open up your computer for inspection for the potentially offending material, so it's not like they need to legislate around unreasonable search/seizure laws.
I really don't see what extra powers the FBI needs here.
Recent thought that occured to me: mass market tactics are generally designed to appeal to young consumers. You could argue that the high water point for the median target age of that demographic happened when the children of the baby boomers, the largest demographic wave to hit the scene in a while, peaked sometime in the late 80s and early 90s. Put plainly, there are fewer kids to pick up the trends.
Buyouts (why MS or anyone hasn't done it yet)
on
My Visit to SCO
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I can't help thinking that as of this writing SCO has a market cap of around $130 million and Red Hat has nearly $300 million in cash and investments. Even at an inflated price, Red Hat could afford to buy SCO and free up Unix once and for all. Live the dream.
And IBM could afford to do it and might even still have enough money to buy a G8 country. OK, that's an exaggeration, but if Red Hat could afford it, IBM certainly could. Apple could. And Microsoft could.
And this leads one to ask: why haven't they? If MS really thought SCO had a smoking gun to put straight through Linux's heart, don't you think they'd do it in a second? They're willing to dump millions on software licensing and lobbying not to lose to Linux in the public sector and large coroporate installations. A cool $130 Million that could knock Linux development flat for 5-10 years would be an easy investment for them.
But they don't do it. Very curious. So how compelling is that case again?
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone know what solutions exist for quick/diry embedding python inside HTML, ala embPerl?
I seem to recall from somewhere that Apple actually purchased what later became Final Cut from Adobe. Can anyone verify this?
"Affiliate" programs also drive up the cost of the books (or Rolexes), both because the affiliate must be paid off, and to cover the administrative costs of the affiliate program.
Conflict of interest I'll give you, and perhaps the others as well, but not cost increase. What I think you have to look at is how affiliate payouts relate to other marketing dollars, and there's one important thing about affiliate marketing: you only pay out when you make a sale. Any other impressions or clickthroughs you get before that point is just free advertising... in many cases, per sale generated, affiliates are cheaper than other methods. And money spent on affiliate marketing is probably just a sub-portion of a total marketing budget. If they didn't spend that money on affiliate marketing, it's only marginally probable that they'd try discounts on the price of the book as another tactic. An ad campaign, product placement, review angling, other kinds of media mention... these are all just as likely.
I've barely begun to investigate Python, but this article is the one that convinced me it was worth a look. That, and anecdotes from half a dozen acquaintences who said essentially the same thing Eric Raymond did...
Are there downloads available or packages available for sale? I can't seem to find so much as a mention of such products on their site....
Is anyone aware of any spreadsheet apps that will run in the terminal?
Other more off-the-radar spreadsheeting projects?
A few years ago I wrote a fairly complex spreadsheet (a simulation of the Monty Hall problem) with some Excel Macro/VBA functionality. My memory on this is a bit fuzzy, so I could be wrong, but I believe I tested it under Star Office and possibly Gnumeric as well to see if it ran, and I seem to recall it did.
o wF inal2.xls
Interested parties could test:
http://weston.canncentral.org/misc/Monty/GameSh
Some background can be found here, if you're not familiar with the problem. The Workbook has one sheet for playing individual rounds of the game yourself, which you do by selecting an initial guess and then a second guess (one button for each option under each door). The next two sheets let the computer simulate playing 1, 10, or 100 rounds at a time, one uses the "switch" strategy and one uses the "stay" strategy. If it's confusing (probably is), email me. I'm curious.
Something which seems to get lost in the Mac/PC debates *sometimes* is the cost factor. I looked those graphs and thought "Wow - mac is faster at this benchmark". Then I looked up pricing - minimum I can get that mac for would be $1999.
Something which often gets lost? My friend, this particular point, while being a better one than the Phillip Glass Sonata cry of "one mouse button," is pointed out exactly as often. Probably more.
a quick 90 light years away
I'm going to guess that the submitter actually knew that 90 light years isn't quick by any sort of standards we have for travel here on earth, but rather said that as a mix of tongue-in-cheek-humor, and some somewhat well-deserved optimism. It really could have been much, much farther, as far away as 90 light years really is.
Actually, I think that might be the "fatality"....
Although or blind and deaf, you're still out of luck.
Which brings up a point... what're the only other senses left? Well, touch, taste, and smell. Taste and smell are probably not well suited to the interpretation of data... but we already know that touch can be. Braille and raised lettering on important signs is generally considered one mark of an accessible building. There's braille terminals even, as anyone who'se seen the movie Sneakers knows.
So... why isn't there a tactile "braille" image renderer available? You've seen those toys with thousands of little small rods that you impress an object into, and the rods are displaced by it and on the other side you see (or feel!) an "image" of the object. Hook something like this up to an electromechanical device for lowering and raising the rods based on the intensity of a grayscaled image, and you've got a tactile image display. Accessibility problem solved. Even for blind/deaf folks.
Now, once the smell-o-vision is invented, we can take it futher...
Welcome to... GhandiCon! You can do anything at GhandiCon! The impossible is unknown at GhandiCon!
(with apologies to Zombo)
Using Netscape 7.1 for Windows (I am at work, ok?) I still can't vote in a poll properly (pop-up appears, but the vote data is loaded in main window, leaving pop-up blank).
I agree that this is unreasonable, and furthermore, I don't understand why this is so hard to get right. I'm sure that 95% of all annoying popups come _only_ from abuse of the "onload" event handler applied to the body tag. Block all popups steming from that method applied on the body tag, put a pane in the preferences for exceptions, and you're set.
This is so odd, I just finished writing about this today. Years, ago, a friend of mine had a dream that a bunch of us were in a grad math class... topology or analysis or something and we'd been working on a proof for days and gotten to a point where we couldn't get any farther without "proof by mutilation" -- somebody had to cut off an arm. And the scary/funny thing was, we had all decided to do it, the only remaining debate was about whose arm it was going to be.
Crazy mathematicians. But less soul-destroying than I/T, that's for sure.
google is good = about 1,820,000 results
google is a search engine = about 1,630,000 results
google sucks = about 137,000 results
google is Shiva = about 9,440 results
google is a tuna fish sandwich = about 851
Somewhat circular, but that aside, I think Google's nature is reasonably clear.
I'm still entitled to KEEP what I earn rather than donate it to some crack addict who can't keep his dick in his pants...
Classic. All of the working poor -- all of the 25% of America that doesn't break $20,000 per year -- are a bunch of sexually compulsive crack addicts, right? Or if they're not, they're just poor because they're lazy or not as smart as you, huh?
In terms of natural brilliance, of the top of my head I can think of half a dozen individuals I'd be willing to bet a Ben Franklin are smarter than you -- if nothing else, because they don't engage in unfounded sweeping generalizations like the one you just used -- but aren't doing quite so hot at the moment. For some of them it's been the breaks with I/T. Some have seen just plain bad luck. Some have chosen careers like education or academia that aren't quite so renumerative. But they're well-educated sharp cookies. And I'd be willing to bet a Ben Franklin that if you were to match up with them on some sort of standard metric, you'd have your cerebral cortex handed back to you in a fast-food salad box. Extra lettuce.
On a better natured note, I think *nobody* earning less than six figures should be required to work unpaid overtime (or I should say, uncompensated overtime, because sometimes you're the business owner or you own equity and you may not get it back in $x per hour, but hopefully in increased value for your stake). There's no other resource a business owner should expect to get for free -- power, square feet of office/operations space, extra funding, whatever. Why in the world they expect it should be different for the costs of labor is beyond me. Unless somehow, they buy into the idea that their employees are inferior, and therefore don't deserve their wages.
If this invention doesn't wipe out handwriting, nothing will...
Their implementation is already a foregone conclusion? Isn't the purpose of the public comment period to evaluate?
But...
The good news is that the regulations would raise that cut-off amount to $425 a week -- about $22,100 per year -- actually adding about 1.3 million lower-wage workers to the ranks of people eligible for overtime, according to the Labor Department.
All right. So more super-low wage workers -- we're talking people making under $10/hr here -- will be guaranteed overtime. That's a very, very good thing.
For one thing, many workers earning a salary of more than $65,000 a year will now be excluded from overtime -- at least 1.3 million workers, according to the EPI study.
And it's really hard for me to feel too sorry for those making $65,000+. Yeah, I know, it's not easy to support a family of 6 on...
But...
n another example, "executives" ineligible for overtime, according to the old rules, were people who hired and fired workers, set wages and assigned work. The new rules broaden the definition of "executives" to include any workers who occasionally supervise other workers, even if they spend most of their time doing manual labor.
This kind of change is insane. Meanwhile, real execs are collecting bonuses and kickbacks in record amounts.
"Once employers are not required to pay for overtime work, they will schedule more of it," the study said.
Exactly. I'd like to request a few things from my government and future employers while we're at it:
Oh. What's that? You mean you can't afford to give out and unlimited amount of finite resources at a fixed cost?
Yeah. Me too.
Well, it explains why the machines think we're an inferior life form and want to kill us all...
We are building on advanced work at Microsoft Research in fields such as machine learning â" the design of systems that learn from data and grow smarter over time. This kind of technology is vital to the fight against spam because every defensive action causes spammers to change their attack. Technology, to be effective, must continuously adapt, without requiring a team of people to examine messages one by one. With machine learning, a "smart" spam filter can automatically adjust to spammers' shifting tactics.
Translation: We've noticed that other people are already incorporating these features into their products (Apple's Mail.app) and that you can get good Bayesian filters pretty much free, so we guess we'll embrace and maybe extend that.
To help, we have assembled a massive and still growing database of spam, collected from volunteers among our millions of MSN and Hotmail subscribers. This database will prove invaluable later this year when we release Outlook 2003, which will include a new, smart filter that will access the database to recognize and block spam more effectively. The filter in Outlook 2003 also will be updated frequently and easily, as with Windows Update today.
Translation: Hotmail is a honeypot for spam.
Our proposal is to create a regulatory "safe harbor" status for senders who comply with guidelines.
Translation: Maybe we can create the "trusted computing" equivalemt of electronic mail.
You do, however, increase the number of roads to relieve congestion. (I know you were trying to say that increasing roads is as wrong for relieving traffic as buying a belt would be to fight obesity. I'm simply correcting you. More roads = less congestion. Belt != less obesity)
There's a simple reason why increasing the number of roads rarely decreases congestion. The traffic grid can't be abstracted into a single pipe with a certain load bearing capacity -- becausee it's a network of pipes, and with each connection in that network, you have to do proper queuing and traffic management to get optimal flow. We're already pretty bad at that, but the complexity of that problem gets worse: in order to be useful, those roads have to intersect other roads, and the more
the more intersections/nodes you have in a given system.... well, you get the picture.
It's somewhat accurate to say that congestion along a given corridor tends to decrease (or at least hold steady) if its carrying capacity is increased relative to other corridors and no new nodes are added.
IIRC, Portland put this theory to the test sometime in the last decade or two, and actually ripped out a few large thoroughfares running through downtown... and the traffic in that area got better....
Also, have you noticed that for a site on usability, -- or for that matter, for one that isn't -- his site is really quite hard to read and navigate...
This seems like it's already in their domain. Don't they already have the authority to intercept and monitor electronic communications? Have jurisdiction over interstate transfers/transactions/deliveries? Can prosecute cases with more than $5,000 damage (which, thanks to inflated estimates, copyright infringement cases are)? And hey, it's a feature of most p2p apps that they essentially open up your computer for inspection for the potentially offending material, so it's not like they need to legislate around unreasonable search/seizure laws.
I really don't see what extra powers the FBI needs here.
Recent thought that occured to me: mass market tactics are generally designed to appeal to young consumers. You could argue that the high water point for the median target age of that demographic happened when the children of the baby boomers, the largest demographic wave to hit the scene in a while, peaked sometime in the late 80s and early 90s. Put plainly, there are fewer kids to pick up the trends.
I can't help thinking that as of this writing SCO has a market cap of around $130 million and Red Hat has nearly $300 million in cash and investments. Even at an inflated price, Red Hat could afford to buy SCO and free up Unix once and for all. Live the dream.
And IBM could afford to do it and might even still have enough money to buy a G8 country. OK, that's an exaggeration, but if Red Hat could afford it, IBM certainly could. Apple could. And Microsoft could.
And this leads one to ask: why haven't they? If MS really thought SCO had a smoking gun to put straight through Linux's heart, don't you think they'd do it in a second? They're willing to dump millions on software licensing and lobbying not to lose to Linux in the public sector and large coroporate installations. A cool $130 Million that could knock Linux development flat for 5-10 years would be an easy investment for them.
But they don't do it. Very curious. So how compelling is that case again?