If you're thinking of duplication costs; they're low, but certainly not zero. However, until somebody puts forth effort into producing an original work, there's nothing to duplicate.
That takes us back to production: somebody had to pay for the engineering time and resources. Skilled engineering labor is expensive and most decent software projects require teams of people writing the software, docs, distro scripts and doing the QA. Even if this work is done "after hours" the worker could be working at a job that paid or be doing some other activity.
The product is a "gourmet latte" which means the poor quality and taste of the coffee will be overwhelmed by the high sugar/corn syrup/fake cream. Add flavoring (mocha, caramel) and the coffee taste will be but a rumor.
Try W (Walmart, 2nd), S (Sears, 2nd), B (BestBuy, 1st), L (Lowes, 2nd), and for I Ikea beat Ipod. You can't buy advertising like that, or maybe somebody did.
Interesting how many of the first letters point to shopping sites.
Accoona World Women's Chess Championship Series Accoona French-American Women's Chess... States is presented with the... Accoona Championship Trophy by Accoona Corp. Executive Director Jonathan McCann...
The above text doesn't appear on the Accoona page and doesn't give any hint you're about to land on a search engine page.
Looks like Google has fresher data. All The Web does a bit better job too.
It's still defaced. Yeah, it's 5:30 on the west coast, but somebody working for SCO on the NY time should have noticed and called HQ for heaven's sake.
>> The value of cash is tied to many different "tangiable" assets In the US, at least, our currency is fiat based. It has no "real" value, the gov't holds nothing tangible that you can lay claim to with your dollars. Dollars are valuable because you think they are.
The US went off the gold system for good with the Bretton Woods accord under Nixon.
The expensive part when shipping scheduled drugs is having a pharmacist on hand to monitor the delivery. Before shipping scheduled drugs, a pharmacist must seal and sign off the shipment container and only a pharmacist can break the seal at delivery and count the drugs before they're locked away in inventory. Pharmacist labor is very expenisve ($50 - $70/hour) so being able to account for the contents of a sealed box would result in big cost savings.
>> This will still not prevent the pharmacist from "diluting" the drug Tampering with a drug in this way would result the removal of your pharmacy license in a NY second. For injectable drugs, the pharmacy keeps very careful logs to prove how much medicine goes into each IV bag: who calculated the dose and how, who checked the calculations, who filled the order, who checked the order before filling (different than the person who does the filling) and who checked the bag before it went out. The system exists to minimize the possibility for error, an incorrect chemo dose could kill somebody. Besides, you couldn't get insurance for your pharmacy unless you kept these records.
Epcot in FL isn't that much different. More space between the buildings, that's about it. Buildings are very dated. The Land building, IMHO, is the worst of the lot. The GM Test Track ride is just OK, but you're better off visting 6 flags if you want thrill rides. The whole Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow concept has been abandoned, you don't go to Epcot to see what World of Tomorrow will look like, instead it's a door mat for the World Shopping Mall^w^w Showcase.
You feel like you're on a very Brady vacation; the 70's style inflation stuck around too as the prices for nearly anything are 3x the real-world.
>> When you say "conforming," do you mean "conforming to my system's ABI"?
Good point.:-) What happens before main() is left to the implementation, so it is a matter of the system's ABI as to the entry point's actual name. IIRC, Windows expects _mainCRTStartup as the entry point, which then calls main().
For GCC, at least, the entry point as far as Linux is concerned is _init, defined in/usr/lib/crti.o.
_init opens the standard file descriptors, gathers the command line arguments and does a but of housekeeping before calling main, your program's entry point. GCC links to this by default; but you can change this if necessary, for instance an embedded project running without an OS would need very different initialization code, and for that matter it could define the entry point of the application as something other than main().
If you want to see what GCC is doing for a compilation, try
gcc =### x.c
And you'll be able to see what gcc passes to the underlying tools to pre-process, compile, assemble and link.
LLBean (a clothing & outdoor gear retailer) accepts returns at anytime if you're not satisfied with the merchandise. I bought a pair of pants from them that I returned something like a year later because I didn't like how they wore. They were exchanged with an appology. I'm a loyal customer.
This is just smart marketing on the part of these companies. LLBean and Costco (CDW too) don't sell to cusotmers who want the lowest price, they sell to customers who want the best value. Part of a good value is after-sale service.
>> I actually aways wanted to visit the united states By all means, stop over!
If you're comming to the US for a visit, I can recommend NYC or Boston (expensive!), Chicago, D.C., but there's some other places that I'd guess you'd like too:
If you visit a big city, stay our of town, within walking distance to a rail link. The hotel room will be 1/2 - 2/3 less than staying downtown. For smaller cities, you'll need to rent a car.
>> treat me like a criminal The last thing you're treated like is a criminal in the US. In fact, leave the airport and you'll probably not have another interaction with somebody from law enforcement until your return flight; 95% of police here are nice guys, more so when you get out of the major urban areas, so don't fear the police.
They fit the definition of a robot per the article:
"Robot" refers to any machine that operates automatically to perform tasks in a human-like way, often replacing the human workers who did the job previously. In most cases, robots move under their own propulsion and do not need to be controlled by a human operator after they have been programmed
Myself, I'm looking forward to an affordable robot that I can put in charge of sweeping the pool.
I know that the nifty thing to do for netflix is to deliver the movie and not have to pay the post, but the existing netflix business model still has a lot of other long hanging fruit that could be picked by partnering with TiVo
For example, why couldn't my TiVo:
- Recommend movies for me based on my viewing ordering patterns I could see what TiVo recommends and just order from my TiVo.
- Offer me the ability to order movies based that I'm currently watching So I could see a movie commercial-free and uncut if I don't like the way the network has edited it or I don't like the pan and scan. Or recommend a movie related to what I'm currently watching.
- Let me search/browse the NetFlix database and order. The TiVo has the capacity to keep a NetFlix inventory. Ordering from the TV seems more comfortable way to interact with NetFlix.
- Let me manage my NetFlix account What movies to I have, how many more could I request, what I've ordered.
most people support abortion rights, gay rights, more universalized health care, seperation of church and state, public schools, gun control etc which are all "liberal" views
These are not liberal views, they're (for the most part) Marxist views. A self-respecting liberal would entrust thier health care, education or safety to the government no more than they would to any other monopoly. The liberal you're talking about would be nearly identical to what one would call a "conservative" in the US today. Also, there's no "seperation of church and state". The first amendment reads:
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
This means the US government or states can't start the First Federal Church of the United States of America, a Good Thing. What it does not mean is that religion must be removed from public life.
Why liberalism has become to mean more involement and control by the goverment in daily life escapes me. It is, however, delightfully Orwellian.
I was. In fact, I worked at a company that sold to the CLEC market. The collapse of the CLEC market had nothing to do with who was in oval office; CLECs, like many other new companies, failed for legitimate business reasons.
Starting a CLEC means a huge capital investment before booking the first sale, think 50 - 100 million. You need ATM switches, DSLAMs, premise equipment, billing and equipment management systems, 911 systems, service huts, trucks, office space, trained employees, etc.
These companies were competing with ILECs, (incumbent local exchange carriers, think US West) that already made the bulk of investment to service customers, and did so at a lower cost because they could access capital markets at a much lower rate. Bigger companies have a higher marginal efficiency of capital, and in a capital intense industry like telcom this made all of the difference. Pair with the expectation of big returns when investing in a start-up, and the CLECs were paying quite a bit to access the capital markets.
Furthermore, much of this investment was occurring in a market with large excess capacity. Given the low marginal cost of servicing customers, the ILECs could easily compete with the CLECs on price and frequently offered better service. I'm not saying the ILEC service was good in an absolute sense, just better than most CLECs.
A shortage means there's not enough to go around no matter what the price At this point, it does not make much sense to bid up the price, as you'll be paying existing suppliers more, without an increase in the number of suppliers.
True shortages are very rare. They are usually short run as well, as the incentive to find substitutes is very great.
The nursing market can encounter a shortage, because the supply is constricted (you need a license) and laws/regulations prohibit substitution. However, you can induce supply by getting more out of the existing labor pool. The hospital is discovering the best price for getting this extra labor via a Dutch Auction-ish scheme.
I couldn't agree more. The "war on drugs" has resulted market distortions that make more problems than the fix.
The drugs themselves are *very* cheap to grow and produce. A free market would result in lower priced drugs, so even if you were a listless addict, you'd need to steal less in order to support your habit. I'm also betting that most casual users would pay for the better quality of a branded product, resulting in a decent market for companies wanting to supply the average user.
I also don't like how personal liberties have been eroded by the need to enforce current drug laws. The bar for searching your person and property has decreased and the rules reporting certain banking transactions shouldn't be tolerated. Plus, the ability for the government to impound your property just for suspecting you're involved in something illegal is shameful.
Although, if somebody's reporting on the status and doesn't say what it is, the reader can safely assume it's not good news. You'd never see a disclaimer like this if the remainder of the story reported on his 100th win.
Itel inside was a clever marketing/cobranding scheme cooked up by Intel so consumers wouldn't view computers as a commodity. When vendors sold Intel merch, some of the dollars went into a pool the vendor could use for advertising, but only it if the ads contained the "Intel inside" logo and met some other requirements. The book Marketing High Technology: An Insider's View goes over this concept in detail. IIRC, the author was one of the people who put together the Intel Inside program. The plan also gets a bit of razzing from an equally good book In Search of Supidity
I don't see any of the kick-back elements in the plan discussed in the article. I think Sun charges a royalty for certain run time Java components, so there's a revenue stream to work with for getting program started. The controlled advertising fund is what made the Intel Inside concept work, so I hope that's part of the program.
Would it be that difficult/expensive to put two processors in the box and have the boot loader figure out what processor to hand control over to when reading the CD? By the time this XBox ships, the CPU in the original XBox could hardly be that expensive, compared to the cost of the other components, or is there enough difference between the chips that this would be too hard/expensive?
Seems like lack of backward compatibility is one of those things that causes people to think twice before buying. My kids still play PS1 games on the PS2, like FF and Spyro.
I use Groceries to you and the service is great. I pay about 10% more for my food and a $35 monthly fee for weekly deiveries. For my $600/month grocery bill, I'm shelling out ~$100 for this service. My wife and I save at least 2 hours a week each, as we shop together, not a bad trade-off. The extra money we're paying for this service is well worth having a few extra hours a week to goof-off with the kids, instead of grocery shopping.
I don't see this as an internet business, but as a business that uses the internet to make communcation easier. I couldn't imagine running this type of company with hand written or e-mailed lists from customers.
As for the quality, the meats, fruits and veggies are as good as what I pick for myself. For things like bananas, you can request green, yellow or brownish and they'll get what you want.
Here's the scoop from the PA Milk Marketing Board the agency that regulates the dairy industry. My sons also drink more milk than I want to think about, we're running low if we have only 2 gallons in the fridge.
Min Wholesale Price for whole Milk, per gallon:
2000 2.48 2003 2.64 2004 2.78
2% Milk is a bit higher, probably to pay for the extra refinement costs.
I quick check showed that retail prices are usually.02 to.05 higher, not much of a mark-up. At the retail level, I didn't see any price controls, so the grocer can sell it for much more. There's data in there for butter, cream, cheese, ice-cream and the like, I'm not motivated enough to dig any deeper for other pricing trends.
I would say the inflation rate for milk looks pretty reasonable, about 10% over 4 years. The prices are ahead of general price inflation, or dollar deflation depending on your point of view, but not that much. Think about the price inflation of educational or medical services by comparison
>> The DeLorean time machine is a licensed, registered vehicle in the state of California.
I was at a trade show (Embedded Systems Conference) and they had what looked to be the prop from the movie, Mr. Fusion and all. They even had the hook thingy from the second movie attached to the car. It had GA plates, as I thought it would be registered in CA as well.
I asked the guy at the booth if it was the actual prop and he wasn't sure. Considering the detail, it even had those LED panels for entering the date and time, I wouldn't be surprised if it was the Real Thing. I was surprised on the wear level and amount of grime in the interior/exterior, it looked like this thing hadn't been cleaned since the mid 80's.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no free lunch. Ever.
If you're thinking of duplication costs; they're low, but certainly not zero. However, until somebody puts forth effort into producing an original work, there's nothing to duplicate.
That takes us back to production: somebody had to pay for the engineering time and resources. Skilled engineering labor is expensive and most decent software projects require teams of people writing the software, docs, distro scripts and doing the QA. Even if this work is done "after hours" the worker could be working at a job that paid or be doing some other activity.
The product is a "gourmet latte" which means the poor quality and taste of the coffee will be overwhelmed by the high sugar/corn syrup/fake cream. Add flavoring (mocha, caramel) and the coffee taste will be but a rumor.
This is coffee like Yohoo is chocolate milk.
Next, first letter hacking for google suggest.
Try W (Walmart, 2nd), S (Sears, 2nd), B (BestBuy, 1st), L (Lowes, 2nd), and for I Ikea beat Ipod. You can't buy advertising like that, or maybe somebody did.
Interesting how many of the first letters point to shopping sites.
Here's what it returned as the page description:
... States is presented with the ... Accoona Championship Trophy by Accoona Corp. Executive Director Jonathan McCann ...
Accoona World Women's Chess Championship Series Accoona French-American Women's Chess
The above text doesn't appear on the Accoona page and doesn't give any hint you're about to land on a search engine page.
Looks like Google has fresher data. All The Web does a bit better job too.
It's still defaced. Yeah, it's 5:30 on the west coast, but somebody working for SCO on the NY time should have noticed and called HQ for heaven's sake.
>> The value of cash is tied to many different "tangiable" assets
In the US, at least, our currency is fiat based. It has no "real" value, the gov't holds nothing tangible that you can lay claim to with your dollars. Dollars are valuable because you think they are.
The US went off the gold system for good with the Bretton Woods accord under Nixon.
The expensive part when shipping scheduled drugs is having a pharmacist on hand to monitor the delivery. Before shipping scheduled drugs, a pharmacist must seal and sign off the shipment container and only a pharmacist can break the seal at delivery and count the drugs before they're locked away in inventory. Pharmacist labor is very expenisve ($50 - $70/hour) so being able to account for the contents of a sealed box would result in big cost savings.
>> This will still not prevent the pharmacist from "diluting" the drug
Tampering with a drug in this way would result the removal of your pharmacy license in a NY second. For injectable drugs, the pharmacy keeps very careful logs to prove how much medicine goes into each IV bag: who calculated the dose and how, who checked the calculations, who filled the order, who checked the order before filling (different than the person who does the filling) and who checked the bag before it went out. The system exists to minimize the possibility for error, an incorrect chemo dose could kill somebody. Besides, you couldn't get insurance for your pharmacy unless you kept these records.
Epcot in FL isn't that much different. More space between the buildings, that's about it. Buildings are very dated. The Land building, IMHO, is the worst of the lot. The GM Test Track ride is just OK, but you're better off visting 6 flags if you want thrill rides. The whole Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow concept has been abandoned, you don't go to Epcot to see what World of Tomorrow will look like, instead it's a door mat for the World Shopping Mall^w^w Showcase.
You feel like you're on a very Brady vacation; the 70's style inflation stuck around too as the prices for nearly anything are 3x the real-world.
>> When you say "conforming," do you mean "conforming to my system's ABI"?
:-) What happens before main() is left to the implementation, so it is a matter of the system's ABI as to the entry point's actual name. IIRC, Windows expects _mainCRTStartup as the entry point, which then calls main().
Good point.
For GCC, at least, the entry point as far as Linux is concerned is _init, defined in /usr/lib/crti.o.
_init opens the standard file descriptors, gathers the command line arguments and does a but of housekeeping before calling main, your program's entry point. GCC links to this by default; but you can change this if necessary, for instance an embedded project running without an OS would need very different initialization code, and for that matter it could define the entry point of the application as something other than main().
If you want to see what GCC is doing for a compilation, try
gcc =### x.c
And you'll be able to see what gcc passes to the underlying tools to pre-process, compile, assemble and link.
LLBean (a clothing & outdoor gear retailer) accepts returns at anytime if you're not satisfied with the merchandise. I bought a pair of pants from them that I returned something like a year later because I didn't like how they wore. They were exchanged with an appology. I'm a loyal customer.
This is just smart marketing on the part of these companies. LLBean and Costco (CDW too) don't sell to cusotmers who want the lowest price, they sell to customers who want the best value. Part of a good value is after-sale service.
>> I actually aways wanted to visit the united states
By all means, stop over!
If you're comming to the US for a visit, I can recommend NYC or Boston (expensive!), Chicago, D.C., but there's some other places that I'd guess you'd like too:
- Portland, ME
- Asheville, NC
- Billings, MN
- Boulder, CO
- Philadelphia, PA
If you visit a big city, stay our of town, within walking distance to a rail link. The hotel room will be 1/2 - 2/3 less than staying downtown. For smaller cities, you'll need to rent a car.
>> treat me like a criminal
The last thing you're treated like is a criminal in the US. In fact, leave the airport and you'll probably not have another interaction with somebody from law enforcement until your return flight; 95% of police here are nice guys, more so when you get out of the major urban areas, so don't fear the police.
- Washing machine
- Dryer
- Dishwasher
- Food processor, coffee maker, standing blender, bread machine, ice maker
- VCR/TiVo
- Stereo with CD auto-changer/jukebox
- Alarm Clock
- Snow thrower
They fit the definition of a robot per the article:
Myself, I'm looking forward to an affordable robot that I can put in charge of sweeping the pool.
I know that the nifty thing to do for netflix is to deliver the movie and not have to pay the post, but the existing netflix business model still has a lot of other long hanging fruit that could be picked by partnering with TiVo
For example, why couldn't my TiVo:
- Recommend movies for me based on my viewing ordering patterns
I could see what TiVo recommends and just order from my TiVo.
- Offer me the ability to order movies based that I'm currently watching
So I could see a movie commercial-free and uncut if I don't like the way the network has edited it or I don't like the pan and scan. Or recommend a movie related to what I'm currently watching.
- Let me search/browse the NetFlix database and order.
The TiVo has the capacity to keep a NetFlix inventory. Ordering from the TV seems more comfortable way to interact with NetFlix.
- Let me manage my NetFlix account
What movies to I have, how many more could I request, what I've ordered.
These are not liberal views, they're (for the most part) Marxist views. A self-respecting liberal would entrust thier health care, education or safety to the government no more than they would to any other monopoly. The liberal you're talking about would be nearly identical to what one would call a "conservative" in the US today.
Also, there's no "seperation of church and state". The first amendment reads:
This means the US government or states can't start the First Federal Church of the United States of America, a Good Thing. What it does not mean is that religion must be removed from public life.
Why liberalism has become to mean more involement and control by the goverment in daily life escapes me. It is, however, delightfully Orwellian.
>> Are you in the telecomm industry?
I was. In fact, I worked at a company that sold to the CLEC market. The collapse of the CLEC market had nothing to do with who was in oval office; CLECs, like many other new companies, failed for legitimate business reasons.
Starting a CLEC means a huge capital investment before booking the first sale, think 50 - 100 million. You need ATM switches, DSLAMs, premise equipment, billing and equipment management systems, 911 systems, service huts, trucks, office space, trained employees, etc.
These companies were competing with ILECs, (incumbent local exchange carriers, think US West) that already made the bulk of investment to service customers, and did so at a lower cost because they could access capital markets at a much lower rate. Bigger companies have a higher marginal efficiency of capital, and in a capital intense industry like telcom this made all of the difference. Pair with the expectation of big returns when investing in a start-up, and the CLECs were paying quite a bit to access the capital markets.
Furthermore, much of this investment was occurring in a market with large excess capacity. Given the low marginal cost of servicing customers, the ILECs could easily compete with the CLECs on price and frequently offered better service. I'm not saying the ILEC service was good in an absolute sense, just better than most CLECs.
A shortage means there's not enough to go around no matter what the price At this point, it does not make much sense to bid up the price, as you'll be paying existing suppliers more, without an increase in the number of suppliers.
True shortages are very rare. They are usually short run as well, as the incentive to find substitutes is very great.
The nursing market can encounter a shortage, because the supply is constricted (you need a license) and laws/regulations prohibit substitution. However, you can induce supply by getting more out of the existing labor pool. The hospital is discovering the best price for getting this extra labor via a Dutch Auction-ish scheme.
I couldn't agree more. The "war on drugs" has resulted market distortions that make more problems than the fix.
The drugs themselves are *very* cheap to grow and produce. A free market would result in lower priced drugs, so even if you were a listless addict, you'd need to steal less in order to support your habit. I'm also betting that most casual users would pay for the better quality of a branded product, resulting in a decent market for companies wanting to supply the average user.
I also don't like how personal liberties have been eroded by the need to enforce current drug laws. The bar for searching your person and property has decreased and the rules reporting certain banking transactions shouldn't be tolerated. Plus, the ability for the government to impound your property just for suspecting you're involved in something illegal is shameful.
Bet you didn't know the US as once "dope fiend's paradise"
Although, if somebody's reporting on the status and doesn't say what it is, the reader can safely assume it's not good news. You'd never see a disclaimer like this if the remainder of the story reported on his 100th win.
I never heard about sets. I'm not sure how it works, but they got this (mom & apple pie) right.
Itel inside was a clever marketing/cobranding scheme cooked up by Intel so consumers wouldn't view computers as a commodity. When vendors sold Intel merch, some of the dollars went into a pool the vendor could use for advertising, but only it if the ads contained the "Intel inside" logo and met some other requirements. The book Marketing High Technology: An Insider's View goes over this concept in detail. IIRC, the author was one of the people who put together the Intel Inside program. The plan also gets a bit of razzing from an equally good book In Search of Supidity
I don't see any of the kick-back elements in the plan discussed in the article. I think Sun charges a royalty for certain run time Java components, so there's a revenue stream to work with for getting program started. The controlled advertising fund is what made the Intel Inside concept work, so I hope that's part of the program.
Dumb question from a software guy:
Would it be that difficult/expensive to put two processors in the box and have the boot loader figure out what processor to hand control over to when reading the CD? By the time this XBox ships, the CPU in the original XBox could hardly be that expensive, compared to the cost of the other components, or is there enough difference between the chips that this would be too hard/expensive?
Seems like lack of backward compatibility is one of those things that causes people to think twice before buying. My kids still play PS1 games on the PS2, like FF and Spyro.
I use Groceries to you and the service is great. I pay about 10% more for my food and a $35 monthly fee for weekly deiveries. For my $600/month grocery bill, I'm shelling out ~$100 for this service. My wife and I save at least 2 hours a week each, as we shop together, not a bad trade-off. The extra money we're paying for this service is well worth having a few extra hours a week to goof-off with the kids, instead of grocery shopping.
I don't see this as an internet business, but as a business that uses the internet to make communcation easier. I couldn't imagine running this type of company with hand written or e-mailed lists from customers.
As for the quality, the meats, fruits and veggies are as good as what I pick for myself. For things like bananas, you can request green, yellow or brownish and they'll get what you want.
Here's the scoop from the PA Milk Marketing Board the agency that regulates the dairy industry. My sons also drink more milk than I want to think about, we're running low if we have only 2 gallons in the fridge.
.02 to .05 higher, not much of a mark-up. At the retail level, I didn't see any price controls, so the grocer can sell it for much more. There's data in there for butter, cream, cheese, ice-cream and the like, I'm not motivated enough to dig any deeper for other pricing trends.
Min Wholesale Price for whole Milk, per gallon:
2000 2.48
2003 2.64
2004 2.78
2% Milk is a bit higher, probably to pay for the extra refinement costs.
I quick check showed that retail prices are usually
I would say the inflation rate for milk looks pretty reasonable, about 10% over 4 years. The prices are ahead of general price inflation, or dollar deflation depending on your point of view, but not that much. Think about the price inflation of educational or medical services by comparison
>> The DeLorean time machine is a licensed, registered vehicle in the state of California.
I was at a trade show (Embedded Systems Conference) and they had what looked to be the prop from the movie, Mr. Fusion and all. They even had the hook thingy from the second movie attached to the car. It had GA plates, as I thought it would be registered in CA as well.
I asked the guy at the booth if it was the actual prop and he wasn't sure. Considering the detail, it even had those LED panels for entering the date and time, I wouldn't be surprised if it was the Real Thing. I was surprised on the wear level and amount of grime in the interior/exterior, it looked like this thing hadn't been cleaned since the mid 80's.