All that tells us is that (in New York at least), the vast majority of consumers want cheap pizza more than they want "good" pizza. But the fact that you can still find good pizza in New York also tells us that there is also a market for more expensive, nicer pizza. A smart entrepreneur might target that market rather than join the race to the lowest price.
Recenly in my town, the curry restauranteurs complained to the council. Many restaurants were allowed to open on the same street, and they complained that the competition had pushed prices so low that they couldn't make money.
My reaction to this was: "compete on something other than price". Curry houses attract repeat custom. Surely there are plenty of people who'd happily pay £5 for a delicious curry in pleasant surroundings, rather than £2.50 for a crappy one at a plastic table. Competition need not result in a race to the bottom, unless that's actually what consumers want.
As for the cloud, again, I want to be able to "Save as... " to my hard drive. Google MAY JUST HAVE the very best application on earth for any given purpose, but if I can't move my data to wherever, whenever, in any given format, then it's worth about ten pounds of shit in a five pound sack.
"Casual people" will learn. Once bitten, twice shy. Just as anyone who bought DRM'd AAC files from iTunes learned, the first time they tried to play them on a non-Apple device.
Yes, it's about user stupidity. And that's exactly what Google is going for (and MS too).
Google is going out of its way to make exporting easy - http://www.dataliberation.org/. I haven't looked at MS's offerings.
You're right that an unethical provider of cloud services could lock its customers in. I don't believe Google is doing that.
Most electricity is used during peak hours where you need electricity produced from sources than can be turned on and off during the day. Currently only oil and coal have that ability.
And hydro. Which can also store surplus base power (by pumping water uphill).
At a guess - and it is just a guess - there are probably species that thrive in the environments where salt water and fresh water mix. They may rely on a heterogenous mix of salt water and fresh water at various concentrations.
A plant such as this would reduce that habitat, by replacing it with a homogenous brackish water. Quite obviously, you can't get energy for free.
Whether this matters or not, well that will take research.
I wasn't talking about Little Venice. What I stumbled upon was one street, containing the Venezuelan embassy, several restaurants with Venezuelan flags, and lots of people talking to each other in Spanish.
IDL seems like an ideal candidate for conversion into a cloud application. Your GB of data lives spread across cloud storage. Your code does too. If you're lucky, your analysis code is amenable to distributed execution with mapreduce. To it may run much faster.
The only thing that has to touch your local machine is your edits to the code, and your view of the results.
Advertisers don't want clicks from users of what would be "welfarebooks".
Since you imply you've worked for the search industry, I'll take your word for it. But I'm surprised.
The poor are a lucrative market for certain products, and many successful businesses made their fortunes by taking small amounts of money from large numbers of poor people. Simple and not-unethical example: discount supermarkets.
Yeah, pushing Lexus adverts at them isn't going to work out. Pushing cornflakes ads at them might.
A netbook that requires internet access in order for it to function in any useful manner? What's the point of a netbook if you can't use it to type up a quick memo/article when you're flying coach on a 4 hour flight? Gah. I am not a fan.
They're going to need to make offline mode a priority. OTOH I have offline mode enabled in my GMail, and used it offline exactly once.
"I don't have anything to hide" is an extremely common and misguided attitude towards privacy. I won't rehash the problems with it here
I don't think that's the point made though. Rather than "I have nothing to hide", it's "The people who can see this data don't find me (or anyone else) interesting enough to investigate (except in aggregate)"
The machine are supposed to be locked to prevent custom OS
... I heard something about a "developer" switch which would disable the lock. Whether this would make it to free handout machines, I don't know.
and to have no hard drive. No hard drive implies no data which implies useless in offline mode.
No hard drive, but possibly an SSD.
And how do you do [games], [IDE developent] through a webbrowser ? The machine is supposed to only run a webbrowser...
Games: Flash, DHTML, and in future, in-browser 3D engines. IDE: Something akin to https://bespin.mozilla.com/ - maybe not ready for prime time now, but we're talking about the future.
Just do your compiles on a remote google-hosted developer box with 12 CPUs.
I very much doubt that even on the hypothetical free box, you'd be restricted to Google services. You could do your compiles on Amazon hosted developer boxes, or even your own server.
It might not feel all that different to using a desktop IDE, Bespin won't be the only browser based IDE.
A typical economy sausage recipe might look like: 30% pork fat, 20% recovered meat, 30% rusk and soya, 15% water and 5% assorted e-numbers, flavourings, sugar, flavour enhancer, preservatives and colourings.
Premium sausages look hand made. Good sausages use joints of meat, minced; you'll be able to see the granules of fat and meat through the skin.
At the top end, the ingredients list is much shorter; something like 40% belly pork, 40% boned shoulder of pork, 10% breadcrumbs, 5% water and 5% herbs and spices.
Of course, some people like the taste of cheap sausages. You can train yourself to like any old crap. Hence the success of McDonalds.
Dartmoor on a dull wintry day... Or the Cornish coast in a storm (very Daphne du Maurier) Or a seaside resort, out of season (as in Morrissey's 'Every Day is Like Sunday').
As nice as it is to think that advertisements will cover everything, a single user isn't worth a $150+ netbook. Actually single user is worth a lot less for Google and other companies.
I agree with this, although I think the hardware could be *much* cheaper than $150. Say $50, in time. But still advertising couldn't cover 100% of it.
But what do you advertise on a spreadsheet app? Users aren't looking for any info or such - they're working on their spreadsheet.
I have a Google Docs spreadsheet right here entitled "Warwick office Christmas Lunch 2009".
Along with the column headings, there's a good chance Google's systems could guess it's a good place to advertise restaurants and pubs near Warwick.
How many spreadsheets contain the name of a product, with the price alongside it? That's a signal to advertise that product.
It may be different in other parts of the country, but it doesn't tally with my (admittedly anecdotal) observations in Leamington and Warwick.
"Vertical drinking" (loud music, identikit lagers, far fewer seats than drinkers) establishments seem to be much emptier than they used to be.
Scummy boozers - the ones with no pretentions of being trendy, but that don't sell any decent bitter either - they seem to be doing worst of all. And that's because they were never pleasant places to be.
Decent boozers - the places CAMRA members would hang out - are doing very nicely as far as I can tell. Indeed, I recently attended a talk by the head brewer from the Wye Valley Brewery, who said that the premium Real Ale sector was the only part of the brewing industry that was growing.
I think it might be that the profit on a pint of this stuff is more than on the megaswill lager. You spend more, to drink less. The pub needs fewer people - and less drunk people - to turn a profit - making for a more pleasant atmosphere and a positive feedback mechanism for continuing to do well.
Absolutely do not hire a car. Firstly, the steering wheel and handbrake will be on the wrong side of the car, secondly it's expensive, thirdly the roads are significantly more crowded and more wiggly than you are used to, and fourthly we have lots and lots of roundabouts which are entirely different to four-way stops in ways which you can probably not even imagine.
Plus it's likely to be a stick-shift, unless you specifically ask for an automatic and they happen to have one available.
(Note: Americans do have a few roundabouts)
However, as long as you understand all this, by all means hire a car. It can be the only sensible way of reaching certain destinations.
You certainly don't need a car in London, and would be wise not to attempt to drive in or out. Collect one on the outskirts.
Motorways are more or less straight and have a limit of 70MPH. Off the motorways, remember that the roads can be windy. It's only 120 miles from Birmingham to Aberystwyth, but it takes 3 hours.
I'm struck that nobody mentioned Tower Bridge, and I assume that's because few know about the geek joy within.
Most people will recognise the bridge - it's one of London's archetypal images. Many will walk over it, or admire it when they visit the Tower of London itself.
What few realise is that beneath the faux-baroque brickwork, is a marvel of Industrial Revolution engineering. If you pay to go inside, you can go on the walkway, but most importantly, you can see the original steam driven mechanisms that opened and closed the bridge. The bridge was steam powered until 1974!
It's a terrific exhibition, and fairly cheap. £6 I think?
Football. Catch a soccer match, perhaps not at the bigger clubs which will be sold out but at a place like QPR / Loftus Road (White City Tube stop) where you can get an intimate close feel of a game and sing along with the fans. A fun experience.
You could even go further down the Football Association pyramid. The lower a league it is, the cheaper it gets. Even in what's confusingly called "non-league", you get an entertaining couple of hours, and a slice of life, among a crowd of 1000 or so.
True, but declining sharply as people stay in to watch TV:-(
My observation is that good pubs are doing OK, while the crap pubs are suffering.
This is actually good news for the discerning drinker. For a while, there were so many punters out and about, that a pub could rely on getting customers however terrible it was. Now you have to excel to survive.
The pubs that still have customers today, generally do good food (if they serve food), well kept ale (along with lager for the proles), have friendly, competent staff etc.
(For foreign readers: it's generally understood that the recession, combined with the smoking ban, drove customers away from pubs)
Slashdot Mirror
It gets pretty cumbersome if you have 1000s of files ... exporting them one at a time. Hence the lock-in.
Again with the assuming you can't do something.
I'm not providing the link again. Several people have done so within this thread.
Suffice to say, you can select multiple Google Docs and export them all at once. You can even get at them through an API.
All that tells us is that (in New York at least), the vast majority of consumers want cheap pizza more than they want "good" pizza. But the fact that you can still find good pizza in New York also tells us that there is also a market for more expensive, nicer pizza. A smart entrepreneur might target that market rather than join the race to the lowest price.
Recenly in my town, the curry restauranteurs complained to the council. Many restaurants were allowed to open on the same street, and they complained that the competition had pushed prices so low that they couldn't make money.
My reaction to this was: "compete on something other than price". Curry houses attract repeat custom. Surely there are plenty of people who'd happily pay £5 for a delicious curry in pleasant surroundings, rather than £2.50 for a crappy one at a plastic table. Competition need not result in a race to the bottom, unless that's actually what consumers want.
As for the cloud, again, I want to be able to "Save as ... " to my hard drive. Google MAY JUST HAVE the very best application on earth for any given purpose, but if I can't move my data to wherever, whenever, in any given format, then it's worth about ten pounds of shit in a five pound sack.
Fortunately you can.
http://docs.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=49115
I honestly don't know why people assume this obviously necessary functionality isn't there.
"Casual people" will learn. Once bitten, twice shy. Just as anyone who bought DRM'd AAC files from iTunes learned, the first time they tried to play them on a non-Apple device.
Yes, it's about user stupidity. And that's exactly what Google is going for (and MS too).
Google is going out of its way to make exporting easy - http://www.dataliberation.org/. I haven't looked at MS's offerings.
You're right that an unethical provider of cloud services could lock its customers in. I don't believe Google is doing that.
So when you're choosing a cloud app, you make a point of using "how easy is it to get my data out of this thing" as one of your criteria.
Just like when you're choosing a local app. You do that, right?
Most electricity is used during peak hours where you need electricity produced from sources than can be turned on and off during the day. Currently only oil and coal have that ability.
And hydro. Which can also store surplus base power (by pumping water uphill).
At a guess - and it is just a guess - there are probably species that thrive in the environments where salt water and fresh water mix. They may rely on a heterogenous mix of salt water and fresh water at various concentrations.
A plant such as this would reduce that habitat, by replacing it with a homogenous brackish water. Quite obviously, you can't get energy for free.
Whether this matters or not, well that will take research.
I wasn't talking about Little Venice. What I stumbled upon was one street, containing the Venezuelan embassy, several restaurants with Venezuelan flags, and lots of people talking to each other in Spanish.
It's near Fitzroy Square.
I'd use GMail more if I could pay a reasonable annual fee to skip the ads and have a nice, clean web UI.
Google Apps. $50 per user per year.
You don't have to be an 'enterprise'.
http://www.google.com/apps/
Me, I'll tolerate GMail's very unobtrusive ads to save $50 a year.
IDL seems like an ideal candidate for conversion into a cloud application. Your GB of data lives spread across cloud storage. Your code does too. If you're lucky, your analysis code is amenable to distributed execution with mapreduce. To it may run much faster.
The only thing that has to touch your local machine is your edits to the code, and your view of the results.
Advertisers don't want clicks from users of what would be "welfarebooks".
Since you imply you've worked for the search industry, I'll take your word for it. But I'm surprised.
The poor are a lucrative market for certain products, and many successful businesses made their fortunes by taking small amounts of money from large numbers of poor people. Simple and not-unethical example: discount supermarkets.
Yeah, pushing Lexus adverts at them isn't going to work out. Pushing cornflakes ads at them might.
A netbook that requires internet access in order for it to function in any useful manner? What's the point of a netbook if you can't use it to type up a quick memo/article when you're flying coach on a 4 hour flight? Gah. I am not a fan.
They're going to need to make offline mode a priority. OTOH I have offline mode enabled in my GMail, and used it offline exactly once.
"I don't have anything to hide" is an extremely common and misguided attitude towards privacy. I won't rehash the problems with it here
I don't think that's the point made though. Rather than "I have nothing to hide", it's "The people who can see this data don't find me (or anyone else) interesting enough to investigate (except in aggregate)"
The machine are supposed to be locked to prevent custom OS
... I heard something about a "developer" switch which would disable the lock. Whether this would make it to free handout machines, I don't know.
and to have no hard drive. No hard drive implies no data which implies useless in offline mode.
No hard drive, but possibly an SSD.
And how do you do [games], [IDE developent] through a webbrowser ? The machine is supposed to only run a webbrowser...
Games: Flash, DHTML, and in future, in-browser 3D engines.
IDE: Something akin to https://bespin.mozilla.com/ - maybe not ready for prime time now, but we're talking about the future.
Just do your compiles on a remote google-hosted developer box with 12 CPUs.
I very much doubt that even on the hypothetical free box, you'd be restricted to Google services.
You could do your compiles on Amazon hosted developer boxes, or even your own server.
It might not feel all that different to using a desktop IDE, Bespin won't be the only browser based IDE.
http://www.channel4.com/food/features/what-s-in-your-banger-09-01-23_p_1.html
A typical economy sausage recipe might look like: 30% pork fat, 20% recovered meat, 30% rusk and soya, 15% water and 5% assorted e-numbers, flavourings, sugar, flavour enhancer, preservatives and colourings.
Premium sausages look hand made. Good sausages use joints of meat, minced; you'll be able to see the granules of fat and meat through the skin.
At the top end, the ingredients list is much shorter; something like 40% belly pork, 40% boned shoulder of pork, 10% breadcrumbs, 5% water and 5% herbs and spices.
Of course, some people like the taste of cheap sausages. You can train yourself to like any old crap. Hence the success of McDonalds.
Bleak can be good :D
Dartmoor on a dull wintry day...
Or the Cornish coast in a storm (very Daphne du Maurier)
Or a seaside resort, out of season (as in Morrissey's 'Every Day is Like Sunday').
That's the real Britain ;)
As nice as it is to think that advertisements will cover everything, a single user isn't worth a $150+ netbook. Actually single user is worth a lot less for Google and other companies.
I agree with this, although I think the hardware could be *much* cheaper than $150. Say $50, in time. But still advertising couldn't cover 100% of it.
But what do you advertise on a spreadsheet app? Users aren't looking for any info or such - they're working on their spreadsheet.
I have a Google Docs spreadsheet right here entitled "Warwick office Christmas Lunch 2009".
Along with the column headings, there's a good chance Google's systems could guess it's a good place to advertise restaurants and pubs near Warwick.
How many spreadsheets contain the name of a product, with the price alongside it? That's a signal to advertise that product.
It may be different in other parts of the country, but it doesn't tally with my (admittedly anecdotal) observations in Leamington and Warwick.
"Vertical drinking" (loud music, identikit lagers, far fewer seats than drinkers) establishments seem to be much emptier than they used to be.
Scummy boozers - the ones with no pretentions of being trendy, but that don't sell any decent bitter either - they seem to be doing worst of all. And that's because they were never pleasant places to be.
Decent boozers - the places CAMRA members would hang out - are doing very nicely as far as I can tell. Indeed, I recently attended a talk by the head brewer from the Wye Valley Brewery, who said that the premium Real Ale sector was the only part of the brewing industry that was growing.
I think it might be that the profit on a pint of this stuff is more than on the megaswill lager. You spend more, to drink less. The pub needs fewer people - and less drunk people - to turn a profit - making for a more pleasant atmosphere and a positive feedback mechanism for continuing to do well.
Absolutely do not hire a car. Firstly, the steering wheel and handbrake will be on the wrong side of the car, secondly it's expensive, thirdly the roads are significantly more crowded and more wiggly than you are used to, and fourthly we have lots and lots of roundabouts which are entirely different to four-way stops in ways which you can probably not even imagine.
Plus it's likely to be a stick-shift, unless you specifically ask for an automatic and they happen to have one available.
(Note: Americans do have a few roundabouts)
However, as long as you understand all this, by all means hire a car. It can be the only sensible way of reaching certain destinations.
You certainly don't need a car in London, and would be wise not to attempt to drive in or out. Collect one on the outskirts.
Motorways are more or less straight and have a limit of 70MPH. Off the motorways, remember that the roads can be windy. It's only 120 miles from Birmingham to Aberystwyth, but it takes 3 hours.
I'm struck that nobody mentioned Tower Bridge, and I assume that's because few know about the geek joy within.
Most people will recognise the bridge - it's one of London's archetypal images. Many will walk over it, or admire it when they visit the Tower of London itself.
What few realise is that beneath the faux-baroque brickwork, is a marvel of Industrial Revolution engineering. If you pay to go inside, you can go on the walkway, but most importantly, you can see the original steam driven mechanisms that opened and closed the bridge. The bridge was steam powered until 1974!
It's a terrific exhibition, and fairly cheap. £6 I think?
AVOID SAUSAGES!!
You'd be missing out.
Yes, if you eat somewhere cheap you'll get a tube of mechanically recovered meat, rusk and lard.
But look for clues on the menu such as "gourmet", "hand reared", "locally sourced" etc. and you're likely to get some bloody good sausage.
Most British people believe that Monopoly is a classic British creation, and that the London version is the original and best.
The fact is, the original version was American, based on Atlantic City.
This doesn't detract from the appeal of a Monopoly pub crawl, at least for Britons. Best stick to halves though...
Football. Catch a soccer match, perhaps not at the bigger clubs which will be sold out but at a place like QPR / Loftus Road (White City Tube stop) where you can get an intimate close feel of a game and sing along with the fans. A fun experience.
You could even go further down the Football Association pyramid. The lower a league it is, the cheaper it gets. Even in what's confusingly called "non-league", you get an entertaining couple of hours, and a slice of life, among a crowd of 1000 or so.
(Pubs)
True, but declining sharply as people stay in to watch TV :-(
My observation is that good pubs are doing OK, while the crap pubs are suffering.
This is actually good news for the discerning drinker. For a while, there were so many punters out and about, that a pub could rely on getting customers however terrible it was. Now you have to excel to survive.
The pubs that still have customers today, generally do good food (if they serve food), well kept ale (along with lager for the proles), have friendly, competent staff etc.
(For foreign readers: it's generally understood that the recession, combined with the smoking ban, drove customers away from pubs)