Hedge fund takes company that has too much debt across to many creditors private. Strikes a deal with the creditors that sees them take a huge haircut to get anything at all. Then they take a massive super sharp machete to the business carving every piece of non-today-essential flesh off. What you are left with is an extremely lean, profitable business which they then list again.
Considerations, all, and I do mean ALL, non essential stuff has been removed. This means there is no investment or plan for change in the future. Perfect for utilities type companies. Awful for IT segment companies that have to move fast. These is no slack in a relisted business. They can go on to be very successful, or have no capability to meet a sudden market change.
But that is what I am saying. Neither system is perfect. The reason I think Slashdot's system is better though is there is only a -1. Nothing more than that. Which means that it is possible to come back from that (though unlikely).
Also I have posted before things that have polarised people and been marked combinations of troll, flamebait, insightful and interesting all on the same comment.
I think slashdot's decision to have randomly allocated mod points and an inability to comment and moderate the same thread works well. It's far from perfect but it's about the best I have come across.
But that only works if the restaurants are in the same food / experience group. How would you rate your favourite sushi train against your favourite French Restaurant vs your favourite theme restaurant show.
You would have to have so many relationships set up that the raw numbers of comparisons in each case would be tiny.
The major problem to this that I can see is your critical mass of reviews becomes very high and you would almost need people to be professional reviewers. Unlike movies and TV I don't think restaurants or hotels quite create the same level of fandom that will see people review them in detail.
It's like looking for reviews of a dishwasher. Basically people only put a review online if the machine broke.
I agree. Google and Facebook are probably the only entities that would come close to being able to achieve this. But if Google or Facebook started sharing ratings about people across broader networks I think they would get hammered. Both in people leaving them and potentially privacy lawsuits.
That said though I think that could be a very flawed system. If you take Reddit for example (and slashdot to a lesser degree) a non-confirming post can get you downmodded to oblivion. Quite often there isn't anything wrong with what you said you just are not following the groups preference. Think how many people here get called shills here or the weird moderation that happens in anything apple v android.
No reason you cannot sell ads. You just need to disclaim on a particular review if you have received money (or other benefit) from the subject of the review, and not in fine print.
It is a difficult line to walk as you have two masters but there are many sites that have managed to be a review site with ads. Anandtech is one that immediately comes to mind.
If you are in a position where you are able to push customers in the direction of a business, you have the ability to say I am not going to give you a biased review for advertising.
Personally I love the slashdot moderation system but it cannot work in a review system. It works because there is a single topic piece that people then comment on and everyone has the same baseline information. When you are looking at reviews of hotels or restaurants you have almost nothing to judge the comments against.
The closest anyone has come up with is the "was this review helpful?" but that gets abused easily. With restaurants it is hard to even decide if someone should be a trusted reviewer and hence promote their reviews as they will tend to be geographically limited.
I have actually given this problem some thought for a website idea I have been working on and I haven't been able to solve it. Every system I come up with is simply too easy to game.
I work from home and have always kept my work machines and my home machines seperate.
Work 2 x dual quad xenon intel 2ru servers with 64gb ram - running proxmox and all systems virtualised 1 x 2ru quad xenon intel with 128gb ram running Nexenta acting as nfs target for the server and the two work stations.
Home Rack 21tb Freenas Media box - consumer grade X4 amb with 16gb ram and lots of hdd. XBMC Core server - shuttle xs35 atom box - also runs mysql (for xbmc), deluge, usenet grabber, dans guardian, squid, etc etc Gaming rig - 8 core amd with dual nvidia cards - set to wake on lan and boot steam - I then stream to my laptop
You are right about historical reasons but I believe wrong about the ones you have supplied. I believe the primary reasons are more likely to do with distance and communication.
When you were a factory in the 40s and 50s pumping out cars you were focussed on the manufacturing aspects and your business was located in a single location - ie Detroit. The idea of trying to manage a network of stores across the country when communication was by post or expensive phone calls just simply didn't make sense. It was more cost effective to outsource that work, in exactly the same way it makes more sense to outsource things like accountancy, IT services and legal in many organisations.
Selling cars is a different business to making cars. And there is no guarantee that if you are good at making cars you will be good at selling them. The original idea was that these dealer were to be your customer interface, and ideally do a better job than you could.
The fact that manufacturers obviously decided that wasn't working at some point in the past and tried to open dealer owned stores is a sign that that system broke down.
Today, communication is almost instant, manufacturing processes and methodologies are more flexible than ever before and there is far more information available to your average consumer. A lot of what were "meant" to be the value adds of dealers are gone. Dealing directly with the customer allows you better control of your brand and if done well will increase profitability by removing a stage in the process.
But it can't work for every product. You still won't be buying your softdrinks direct from Coke or your shampoo from Unilever. Because in these situations the dealers (ie supermarkets) still make more sense.
Because, as I understand it, the Oculus is able to track your head movement which means your perspective can change. If all you are watching it a teacher on the screen then absolutely use a tv. But if you have a 3d mapped model the ability to naturally shift your head to change perspective would, I believe, be very useful.
In addition to this a lot of the rules are centred around clean up operations later. It's one of the reasons for the discussions around cluster munitions. In 2010 about 100 countries agreed to stop the use, manufacture and delivery of cluster munitions - about 35 have ratified that I think.
It has nothing to do with them being inhumane and everything to do with cleaning up the un-exploded bomblets later.
The other is the ban on anti-personnel land mines. It is the cleanup costs later.
By referring to Expo88 I'm guessing dbill is another Aussie like me and Distance Education in Australia means kids sitting at home listening to a radio because they live on a farm 400km from the nearest neighbour.
From their website "The Alice Springs School of the Air provides an educational service for about 120 children living on properties or settlements covering over 1 million square kilometers of Central Australia."
Agreed bandwidth will be a major problem for the school of the air type kids. But if we do see some of those smaller towns connected with better internet then maybe it becomes feasible for some of them.
Actually though I was thinking more for tertiary education than primary and secondary. For example if you want to study a Masters in Petroleum Engineering the number of universities that offer that course is relatively small.
This could be excellent for distance education. A virtual classroom for those people who simply cannot get there.
Or in the situation where the teacher has the best view and you and everyone to see that. Imagine being able to watch, from the exact perspective, in stereoscopic a master surgeon at work.
That would surely depend on whether the platform was closed to content. I could be very wrong here but I thought the Occulus was merely a way of viewing content not in anyway controlling what the content is.
In the same way that an iPod can be filled with MP3s directly or via the itunes store means Apple doesn't control the content. It can control whats on iTunes but that is a different thing to controlling what is on your iPod.
I guess I see it as someone having the patent on LCD screens (which I'm sure there is). They don't control what you see on the LCD.
I think you missed what I meant. I'm not saying it's not interesting in a "news for nerds way" I'm saying I don't believe this will have any impact on someone using google glass or equivalent, hence they wouldn't care. I don't actually believe this is any form of a counter measure baby step or otherwise.
Also, don't know about the states, but I would be very surprised if jamming wasn't illegal no mater whether it is a private residence or not. I would almost take a stab at being 100% sure that it would be illegal inside a restaurant or a store.
Finally lets say that you could take these types of devices offline. There is nothing particularly unique about the hardware in them so you would have to make your approach such that it would carpet bomb heaps of innocent devices. Virus that attack the glass will attack phones. Approaches that can break the pairing or wifi connections will disrupt all those networks everywhere.
In addition it kinda depends on what it is that you are doing. If we take this facility what is it actually doing? Is it assembly, which takes a relatively small amount of energy, or is it full fabrication, which obviously uses a lot more.
I have no idea what is in these batteries but lets say they look like lead acid batteries internally for the sake of this. Are they taking in lumps of lead, heating them, moulding them and then placing them into plastic containers which were shaped and formed in a different part of the site. Or do they bring in sourced preformed sheets of lead which they cut to size and insert into pre-formed containers manufactured in China?
I've played with google glass and they aren't interesting enough for me to bother with. But I simply can't imagine walking into a starbucks and faffing around with connecting my glasses to the wifi in starbucks. If would be paired with my phone in my pocket. If I was taking photos it would go out through the phone.
To me there is no point to this. This seems like the equivalent of your neighbour putting a wifi password on their network to stop you getting access to the internet. Ignoring the cable connection directly into your house and the fact you have never once connected to their network.
The whole region is contested. Every party from Russia down to Vietnam and the Philippines is squabbling over bits of dirt so they can claim the huge oil & gas reserves that are under the sea bed there.
We saw an escalation a couple of months ago when China towed a drilling platform out into contested water and got into a dust up with so local coast guard ships (I can't remember who the other country was - Vietnam I think).
Destabilisation in the middle east is sharpening the focus on finding secondary supplies of energy. ISIS has the potential to take out huge areas of oil producing land with Iraq unstable, Syria in civil war, Lebannon screwed, Libya in civil war, Egypt under military rule and most of the other countries being split on Sunni or Shiite lines there is a real risk of an energy crisis is ISIS cannot be stopped and stopped soon.
Ok so the google glass or what ever doesn't connect to your local wifi.... Um and the google glass wearer with their paired LTE phone in their pocket cares why exactly????
And as for a drone connecting to your wifi - i'm assuming we are looking at war-driving (flying I suppose) drones?
Pointless devices that is probably illegal looking for a situation that doesn't exist.
The nitrogen will still form a blanket of gas independent of the quantity or flow rate and this is what keeps you safe. The problem occurs if the liquid nitrogen pools or is otherwise forced into direct contact (like you could do with a suitably high enough pressure stream or immersion). That is when people get hurt.
Probably would have made sense to have started there but I started with noscript instead. I got it to stop audio and videos on websites and now it is on just about everywhere.
We covered this when I was about 15, which is Grade 10 in Australia. We also watched our teacher set fire to his hand after dipping it in methylated spirits. This was, depressingly, 20 years ago now so maybe things have changed.
The Nitrogen on the hand was only done by the teacher. We dropped water droplets on a hot plate to create the same effect.
Slashdot Mirror
The more information we as a species can gather about other planets and travelling through space can only help us all in the future.
To have achieved this at the cost they have means far more experiments performed and more sensors launched.
Congratulations.
Because that isn't what happens.
Hedge fund takes company that has too much debt across to many creditors private. Strikes a deal with the creditors that sees them take a huge haircut to get anything at all. Then they take a massive super sharp machete to the business carving every piece of non-today-essential flesh off. What you are left with is an extremely lean, profitable business which they then list again.
Considerations, all, and I do mean ALL, non essential stuff has been removed. This means there is no investment or plan for change in the future. Perfect for utilities type companies. Awful for IT segment companies that have to move fast. These is no slack in a relisted business. They can go on to be very successful, or have no capability to meet a sudden market change.
But that is what I am saying. Neither system is perfect. The reason I think Slashdot's system is better though is there is only a -1. Nothing more than that. Which means that it is possible to come back from that (though unlikely).
Also I have posted before things that have polarised people and been marked combinations of troll, flamebait, insightful and interesting all on the same comment.
I think slashdot's decision to have randomly allocated mod points and an inability to comment and moderate the same thread works well. It's far from perfect but it's about the best I have come across.
But that only works if the restaurants are in the same food / experience group. How would you rate your favourite sushi train against your favourite French Restaurant vs your favourite theme restaurant show.
You would have to have so many relationships set up that the raw numbers of comparisons in each case would be tiny.
The major problem to this that I can see is your critical mass of reviews becomes very high and you would almost need people to be professional reviewers. Unlike movies and TV I don't think restaurants or hotels quite create the same level of fandom that will see people review them in detail.
It's like looking for reviews of a dishwasher. Basically people only put a review online if the machine broke.
I agree. Google and Facebook are probably the only entities that would come close to being able to achieve this. But if Google or Facebook started sharing ratings about people across broader networks I think they would get hammered. Both in people leaving them and potentially privacy lawsuits.
That said though I think that could be a very flawed system. If you take Reddit for example (and slashdot to a lesser degree) a non-confirming post can get you downmodded to oblivion. Quite often there isn't anything wrong with what you said you just are not following the groups preference. Think how many people here get called shills here or the weird moderation that happens in anything apple v android.
No reason you cannot sell ads. You just need to disclaim on a particular review if you have received money (or other benefit) from the subject of the review, and not in fine print.
It is a difficult line to walk as you have two masters but there are many sites that have managed to be a review site with ads. Anandtech is one that immediately comes to mind.
If you are in a position where you are able to push customers in the direction of a business, you have the ability to say I am not going to give you a biased review for advertising.
Personally I love the slashdot moderation system but it cannot work in a review system. It works because there is a single topic piece that people then comment on and everyone has the same baseline information. When you are looking at reviews of hotels or restaurants you have almost nothing to judge the comments against.
The closest anyone has come up with is the "was this review helpful?" but that gets abused easily. With restaurants it is hard to even decide if someone should be a trusted reviewer and hence promote their reviews as they will tend to be geographically limited.
I have actually given this problem some thought for a website idea I have been working on and I haven't been able to solve it. Every system I come up with is simply too easy to game.
I work from home and have always kept my work machines and my home machines seperate.
Work
2 x dual quad xenon intel 2ru servers with 64gb ram - running proxmox and all systems virtualised
1 x 2ru quad xenon intel with 128gb ram running Nexenta acting as nfs target for the server and the two work stations.
Home Rack
21tb Freenas Media box - consumer grade X4 amb with 16gb ram and lots of hdd.
XBMC Core server - shuttle xs35 atom box - also runs mysql (for xbmc), deluge, usenet grabber, dans guardian, squid, etc etc
Gaming rig - 8 core amd with dual nvidia cards - set to wake on lan and boot steam - I then stream to my laptop
I run a 22tb Nas server and am running out of space. I'm about to replace all the 1.5tbs in it with 4tb drives.
You are right about historical reasons but I believe wrong about the ones you have supplied. I believe the primary reasons are more likely to do with distance and communication.
When you were a factory in the 40s and 50s pumping out cars you were focussed on the manufacturing aspects and your business was located in a single location - ie Detroit. The idea of trying to manage a network of stores across the country when communication was by post or expensive phone calls just simply didn't make sense. It was more cost effective to outsource that work, in exactly the same way it makes more sense to outsource things like accountancy, IT services and legal in many organisations.
Selling cars is a different business to making cars. And there is no guarantee that if you are good at making cars you will be good at selling them. The original idea was that these dealer were to be your customer interface, and ideally do a better job than you could.
The fact that manufacturers obviously decided that wasn't working at some point in the past and tried to open dealer owned stores is a sign that that system broke down.
Today, communication is almost instant, manufacturing processes and methodologies are more flexible than ever before and there is far more information available to your average consumer. A lot of what were "meant" to be the value adds of dealers are gone. Dealing directly with the customer allows you better control of your brand and if done well will increase profitability by removing a stage in the process.
But it can't work for every product. You still won't be buying your softdrinks direct from Coke or your shampoo from Unilever. Because in these situations the dealers (ie supermarkets) still make more sense.
Because, as I understand it, the Oculus is able to track your head movement which means your perspective can change. If all you are watching it a teacher on the screen then absolutely use a tv. But if you have a 3d mapped model the ability to naturally shift your head to change perspective would, I believe, be very useful.
In addition to this a lot of the rules are centred around clean up operations later. It's one of the reasons for the discussions around cluster munitions. In 2010 about 100 countries agreed to stop the use, manufacture and delivery of cluster munitions - about 35 have ratified that I think.
It has nothing to do with them being inhumane and everything to do with cleaning up the un-exploded bomblets later.
The other is the ban on anti-personnel land mines. It is the cleanup costs later.
By referring to Expo88 I'm guessing dbill is another Aussie like me and Distance Education in Australia means kids sitting at home listening to a radio because they live on a farm 400km from the nearest neighbour.
From their website "The Alice Springs School of the Air provides an educational service for about 120 children living on properties or settlements covering over 1 million square kilometers of Central Australia."
Agreed bandwidth will be a major problem for the school of the air type kids. But if we do see some of those smaller towns connected with better internet then maybe it becomes feasible for some of them.
Actually though I was thinking more for tertiary education than primary and secondary. For example if you want to study a Masters in Petroleum Engineering the number of universities that offer that course is relatively small.
This could be excellent for distance education. A virtual classroom for those people who simply cannot get there.
Or in the situation where the teacher has the best view and you and everyone to see that. Imagine being able to watch, from the exact perspective, in stereoscopic a master surgeon at work.
That would surely depend on whether the platform was closed to content. I could be very wrong here but I thought the Occulus was merely a way of viewing content not in anyway controlling what the content is.
In the same way that an iPod can be filled with MP3s directly or via the itunes store means Apple doesn't control the content. It can control whats on iTunes but that is a different thing to controlling what is on your iPod.
I guess I see it as someone having the patent on LCD screens (which I'm sure there is). They don't control what you see on the LCD.
I think you missed what I meant. I'm not saying it's not interesting in a "news for nerds way" I'm saying I don't believe this will have any impact on someone using google glass or equivalent, hence they wouldn't care. I don't actually believe this is any form of a counter measure baby step or otherwise.
Also, don't know about the states, but I would be very surprised if jamming wasn't illegal no mater whether it is a private residence or not. I would almost take a stab at being 100% sure that it would be illegal inside a restaurant or a store.
Finally lets say that you could take these types of devices offline. There is nothing particularly unique about the hardware in them so you would have to make your approach such that it would carpet bomb heaps of innocent devices. Virus that attack the glass will attack phones. Approaches that can break the pairing or wifi connections will disrupt all those networks everywhere.
In addition it kinda depends on what it is that you are doing. If we take this facility what is it actually doing? Is it assembly, which takes a relatively small amount of energy, or is it full fabrication, which obviously uses a lot more.
I have no idea what is in these batteries but lets say they look like lead acid batteries internally for the sake of this. Are they taking in lumps of lead, heating them, moulding them and then placing them into plastic containers which were shaped and formed in a different part of the site. Or do they bring in sourced preformed sheets of lead which they cut to size and insert into pre-formed containers manufactured in China?
Makes a pretty huge difference.
But how exactly is it a counter-measure?
I've played with google glass and they aren't interesting enough for me to bother with. But I simply can't imagine walking into a starbucks and faffing around with connecting my glasses to the wifi in starbucks. If would be paired with my phone in my pocket. If I was taking photos it would go out through the phone.
To me there is no point to this. This seems like the equivalent of your neighbour putting a wifi password on their network to stop you getting access to the internet. Ignoring the cable connection directly into your house and the fact you have never once connected to their network.
The whole region is contested. Every party from Russia down to Vietnam and the Philippines is squabbling over bits of dirt so they can claim the huge oil & gas reserves that are under the sea bed there.
We saw an escalation a couple of months ago when China towed a drilling platform out into contested water and got into a dust up with so local coast guard ships (I can't remember who the other country was - Vietnam I think).
Destabilisation in the middle east is sharpening the focus on finding secondary supplies of energy. ISIS has the potential to take out huge areas of oil producing land with Iraq unstable, Syria in civil war, Lebannon screwed, Libya in civil war, Egypt under military rule and most of the other countries being split on Sunni or Shiite lines there is a real risk of an energy crisis is ISIS cannot be stopped and stopped soon.
Ok so the google glass or what ever doesn't connect to your local wifi.... Um and the google glass wearer with their paired LTE phone in their pocket cares why exactly????
And as for a drone connecting to your wifi - i'm assuming we are looking at war-driving (flying I suppose) drones?
Pointless devices that is probably illegal looking for a situation that doesn't exist.
The nitrogen will still form a blanket of gas independent of the quantity or flow rate and this is what keeps you safe. The problem occurs if the liquid nitrogen pools or is otherwise forced into direct contact (like you could do with a suitably high enough pressure stream or immersion). That is when people get hurt.
Probably would have made sense to have started there but I started with noscript instead. I got it to stop audio and videos on websites and now it is on just about everywhere.
We covered this when I was about 15, which is Grade 10 in Australia. We also watched our teacher set fire to his hand after dipping it in methylated spirits. This was, depressingly, 20 years ago now so maybe things have changed.
The Nitrogen on the hand was only done by the teacher. We dropped water droplets on a hot plate to create the same effect.