Seriously. As long as the tech is doubling in capacity every few weeks, the last thing we want is a standard. Just a couple of years ago, you used to put 700MB on a CD. For the moment you can put 8GB on a dual-layer DVD. There is really no point in another standard until you get another order of magnitude increase in capacity when the technology is moving this fast.
There is no fundamental difference between calculating risk and trading cleverly. If the people doing the trading have access to a good risk management science, that science will crumble beneath them as they act to second-guess how others will apply it.
There is absolutely a great deal of value to be had in this sort of research -- I don't dispute that. But the value is there for the people who can interpret how others will interpret how it should be interpreted by others. Somebody is still going to end up losing his shirt, because the markets have winners and losers.
Sorry, Benoit, but this is just crap. The whole point of the markets is that those who have knowledge end up with the money of those who are ignorant. No matter how good your study is, the markets will change and adapt in response to its conclusions. You won't stop any people losing their livelihoods with such a study unless you give the results to them and nobody else (and then, others will lose their livelihoods instead). Economics is not hard mathematics. It is not hard science. There are absolutely no axiomatic truths to be had; you cannot even build a wooden shithouse of logic on the foundations that are available, because the foundations shift with every new insight -- and the advantage goes to those who can predict how long that insight will be valuable for; when the uninformed will still believe in it but the cognoscenti will have abandoned it.
...is just precisely the fact that it's a $10 part. I mean, for the price of a couple of beers you can insure yourself against the increasingly unlikely (but still not nil) possibility that someone will hand you something useful on a floppy. Why go without, even if it is an increasingly irrelevant legacy part?
The banner at the top of this page has an ALT text tag with "Click Here!". That's it. *Why?* Why on earth would I click on that?
If it said "IBM 75GXP. 7200rpm. ATA/100. $200." I'd click. But if it said "Click here for great savings on hardware", I would NOT click.
See the pattern here? Give me information that actually makes me interested, and I might follow up. Give me a teaser and I won't be bothered, because they almost always lead to something lame. Advertise what you're selling! That's what you want me to buy, isn't it? If it's not good enough or cheap enough, I'm not going to buy it even if I do click through.
And on the issue of popups and redirects: for crying out loud, don't advertisers realise they have competitors? Competitors who have the same goods at the same prices and *didn't* waste 30 seconds of my precious time! Who will I buy from? Some moron apparently did a study and discovered that annoying ads are remembered best by viewers. No kidding. We remember them in the same way that we hold a grudge.
(And gee I'm glad people are starting to use Flash for ads. It means I can now load all the images on a page and still not have to see the ads.)
If you get the impression that I think advertisers are morons and their own worst enemies... well I guess that would be just about right.
But the question was more about innovative features. So here's my idea. When you're surfing, you're interested in something else than the ads. But you might see something that interests you and you might check out later. But how do you get that link back later on? Figure out a technology where I can flag ads as interesting and return to them later on, without interrupting my browsing experience at the time. Obviously this can't involve re-loading the page after indicating interest; that's too obtrusive and time-consuming. It can't add the link to my personal bookmarks for every ad; that would just be a PITA. But it could add a single link (if it didn't already exist) to a page that has all the links from ads I was interested in; something cookie-based I guess. I don't know how this might be done, but that's something I would actually use.
It might be that a fool and his money are easily parted, but it's time advertisers realised the true implication of this: there aren't many fools who have money.
Wow, paraphrasing the pigs from Animal Farm. Does Bob not remember that they started with the mantra "Four legs good, two legs bad" but ended up with, "Four legs good, two legs better"? Rather an unfortunate choice of paraphrase, I would've thought...;)
Here in Australia, a new-release CD costs about $30; the same album on cassette $10. Presumably both are profitable, and the cost of manufacturing each would have to be pretty close ($1-2 I'd think). I guess $30 is the "profit-maximising" price for CDs; probably the profit profile would have a large peak at around the $10 mark and a slightly larger one at $30 with a dip in between. That profile would fail to take piracy into consideration, however -- if half the people who pirate music would pay for it at $10, the peak there would be much higher than the one at $30.
I think the music industry believes that people who pirate music would do so at any price, and although this is true for some, I suspect that most people say to themselves, "This disc is worth $30 to me; I'd like that one, but I couldn't justify $30 for it... I guess I'll fire up Napster."
Most people are not fundamentally stupid enough to wish that the musicians they like should starve. Nor are they fundamentally stupid enough to believe that they are not being taken advantage of with current prices. They simply make the compromise that their finances allow.
I've got a list as long as my arm of CDs I would like to get; unfortunately it keeps getting longer... for every CD I buy another two seem to end up on the list... there's that 30:10 ratio again.
2) In both cases the user had to voluntarily *choose* to run the virus with their own permissions. For goodness sake, the email says, "take a look at these zip files" but the attachment is an exe! Only a clod would fall for such as obvious imposture.
But you obviously think your users are clods who don't know what exe files are, because every time they try to delete an exe file in Windoze they have to answer yes to a dialog box, which cannot be turned off, ever. For a new user, this might be helpful the first time, but after that it's just condescending. So what do they do? Of course, they get in the habit of clicking OK on any dialog box that says "This file is a program...blah blah blah... are you sure... blah blah blah". Life's too short to read the same crap again and again.
If you go someplace where the tapwater is full of nasty bugs that'll give you the squits, you'll pay for bottled water. Netscape 4 gives me the squits. I've seen Opera in action, and it's sweet; it's Evian; it's god's own holy water -- at least compared to Netscape and IE. Whether people will pay for Linux Opera will depend solely on whether Mozilla delivers on its promises, since they'll both probably be ready at about the same time.
Web browsers are not a commodity. Slow, inflexible, bloated, non-standards-compliant browsers are a commodity. Under Linux, we can hope that Mozilla will change that, but if it fails, I'll be glad there's an Opera port, and willing to pay.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously. As long as the tech is doubling in capacity every few weeks, the last thing we want is a standard. Just a couple of years ago, you used to put 700MB on a CD. For the moment you can put 8GB on a dual-layer DVD. There is really no point in another standard until you get another order of magnitude increase in capacity when the technology is moving this fast.
(I thought this was going to be a joke but someone's about to reply that they've already hacked this into GarageBand aren't they?)
There is no fundamental difference between calculating risk and trading cleverly. If the people doing the trading have access to a good risk management science, that science will crumble beneath them as they act to second-guess how others will apply it.
There is absolutely a great deal of value to be had in this sort of research -- I don't dispute that. But the value is there for the people who can interpret how others will interpret how it should be interpreted by others. Somebody is still going to end up losing his shirt, because the markets have winners and losers.
Sorry, Benoit, but this is just crap. The whole point of the markets is that those who have knowledge end up with the money of those who are ignorant. No matter how good your study is, the markets will change and adapt in response to its conclusions. You won't stop any people losing their livelihoods with such a study unless you give the results to them and nobody else (and then, others will lose their livelihoods instead).
Economics is not hard mathematics. It is not hard science. There are absolutely no axiomatic truths to be had; you cannot even build a wooden shithouse of logic on the foundations that are available, because the foundations shift with every new insight -- and the advantage goes to those who can predict how long that insight will be valuable for; when the uninformed will still believe in it but the cognoscenti will have abandoned it.
Umm... read the article. "It also produces water and carbon dioxide"...
I guess Microsoft must be planning on getting into the micropayments business?
... like the narcotics squad is actually the anti-narcotics squad, the vice squad is really the anti-vice squad, and the privacy czar, well...
...is just precisely the fact that it's a $10 part. I mean, for the price of a couple of beers you can insure yourself against the increasingly unlikely (but still not nil) possibility that someone will hand you something useful on a floppy. Why go without, even if it is an increasingly irrelevant legacy part?
The banner at the top of this page has an ALT text tag with "Click Here!". That's it. *Why?* Why on earth would I click on that?
If it said "IBM 75GXP. 7200rpm. ATA/100. $200." I'd click. But if it said "Click here for great savings on hardware", I would NOT click.
See the pattern here? Give me information that actually makes me interested, and I might follow up. Give me a teaser and I won't be bothered, because they almost always lead to something lame. Advertise what you're selling! That's what you want me to buy, isn't it? If it's not good enough or cheap enough, I'm not going to buy it even if I do click through.
And on the issue of popups and redirects: for crying out loud, don't advertisers realise they have competitors? Competitors who have the same goods at the same prices and *didn't* waste 30 seconds of my precious time! Who will I buy from? Some moron apparently did a study and discovered that annoying ads are remembered best by viewers. No kidding. We remember them in the same way that we hold a grudge.
(And gee I'm glad people are starting to use Flash for ads. It means I can now load all the images on a page and still not have to see the ads.)
If you get the impression that I think advertisers are morons and their own worst enemies... well I guess that would be just about right.
But the question was more about innovative features. So here's my idea. When you're surfing, you're interested in something else than the ads. But you might see something that interests you and you might check out later. But how do you get that link back later on? Figure out a technology where I can flag ads as interesting and return to them later on, without interrupting my browsing experience at the time. Obviously this can't involve re-loading the page after indicating interest; that's too obtrusive and time-consuming. It can't add the link to my personal bookmarks for every ad; that would just be a PITA. But it could add a single link (if it didn't already exist) to a page that has all the links from ads I was interested in; something cookie-based I guess. I don't know how this might be done, but that's something I would actually use.
It might be that a fool and his money are easily parted, but it's time advertisers realised the true implication of this: there aren't many fools who have money.
Wow, paraphrasing the pigs from Animal Farm. Does Bob not remember that they started with the mantra "Four legs good, two legs bad" but ended up with, "Four legs good, two legs better"? Rather an unfortunate choice of paraphrase, I would've thought... ;)
Here in Australia, a new-release CD costs about $30; the same album on cassette $10. Presumably both are profitable, and the cost of manufacturing each would have to be pretty close ($1-2 I'd think). I guess $30 is the "profit-maximising" price for CDs; probably the profit profile would have a large peak at around the $10 mark and a slightly larger one at $30 with a dip in between. That profile would fail to take piracy into consideration, however -- if half the people who pirate music would pay for it at $10, the peak there would be much higher than the one at $30.
I think the music industry believes that people who pirate music would do so at any price, and although this is true for some, I suspect that most people say to themselves, "This disc is worth $30 to me; I'd like that one, but I couldn't justify $30 for it... I guess I'll fire up Napster."
Most people are not fundamentally stupid enough to wish that the musicians they like should starve. Nor are they fundamentally stupid enough to believe that they are not being taken advantage of with current prices. They simply make the compromise that their finances allow.
I've got a list as long as my arm of CDs I would like to get; unfortunately it keeps getting longer... for every CD I buy another two seem to end up on the list... there's that 30:10 ratio again.
But you obviously think your users are clods who don't know what exe files are, because every time they try to delete an exe file in Windoze they have to answer yes to a dialog box, which cannot be turned off, ever. For a new user, this might be helpful the first time, but after that it's just condescending. So what do they do? Of course, they get in the habit of clicking OK on any dialog box that says "This file is a program...blah blah blah... are you sure... blah blah blah". Life's too short to read the same crap again and again.
If you go someplace where the tapwater is full of nasty bugs that'll give you the squits, you'll pay for bottled water. Netscape 4 gives me the squits. I've seen Opera in action, and it's sweet; it's Evian; it's god's own holy water -- at least compared to Netscape and IE. Whether people will pay for Linux Opera will depend solely on whether Mozilla delivers on its promises, since they'll both probably be ready at about the same time.
Web browsers are not a commodity. Slow, inflexible, bloated, non-standards-compliant browsers are a commodity. Under Linux, we can hope that Mozilla will change that, but if it fails, I'll be glad there's an Opera port, and willing to pay.