A soundtrack/score could do well this way. I may not be willing to buy an entire CD, but if I may for one or two tracks.
While the iTunes store is pretty limited, the label can find out if this is a more profitable way to handle this kind of recording. Many record companies have large libraries of tracks that are out of print - putting those tracks online could give them a new stream of revenue.
While I don't condone what Hooked on Phonics does, I wonder if they do something similar if you call their 1-800 number and you give them your mailing/shipping address. One of the big rationales behind store credit card offers and discount cards is obtaining customer information.
Actually, if you live near a good college radio station, one of these would be great. My old college station had an awesome old R&B show on Mondays from noon to 2pm along with a Reggae show from 2-5pm on Fridays. Of course, if you're not a college student and you work during the day, you miss the shows if you can't be near a radio.
Outsourcing simply reduces the cost of your man-months. Even if you achieve a high level of efficiency per man-month or function point or however you measure your IT output, the real question is are you producing income or improving efficiencies in other areas. I've worked on large (200 + man-month) projects that have produced neglible income gains (my employer is probably still paying for them). I've also worked on small projects (1-2 man-month) that paid for themselves 12 times over within a year.
Unfortunately, very few business people are good at using IT to improve their business. Moreover, few IT people bother to look outside their own domain of expertise.
My employer is looking at CDNs. I understand that they had an impressive presentation from Speedera as well. It looks like Speedera has a service specifically for downloads.
No, I didn't site through the presentation; however, our admin guys seemed impressed. Just another option.
Blame it on the GUI if you like, but most people don't buy computers so they can program anymore. All of the old computers mentioned in the article are from the days of the serious hobbyist. You either were a programmer or expected to learn how to program if you had one. While the limitations of old systems seem quaint, they actually created a barrier to most people using computers.
I don't think you can do any real programming without a year or more of Algebra - which puts most American students at 8th or 9th grade before they can write a real program. Prior to Algebra, I think kids can learn alot about creating systems through simulation type games- software like Oregon Trail that made you plan and estimate. 2D and 3D graphics programs that provide kids with open ended creativity would be helpful as well. Unfortunately, a lot of educational software for kids tends to be drill and kill.
One of the benefits of the Apollo program wasn't just the science done on the moon, but all of the technological innovations that had to be made in order for it to happen. Sure some of those innovations are relatively mundane (like Tempurpedic Mattresses). However, it also helps you build a huge amount of expertise in aerospace and electronics - industries that would help China both commercially and miliatarily.
Let's see - You're a code reviewer for the M$ Code Cleanup crew. Windows 2005 is rolling through developement and you find a security issue that'll add a man-month to the project. What kind of pressure will you encounter from Microsoft's marketing department?
Re:Return to sender's client!
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 1
Yeah, but to go after the hitmen and not go after the people who hire them is even crazier. In many palces, the penalty for hiring someone for a murder is the same as committing a murder for hire. The same should be true for spammers' clients - punish (fine, sue, imprison) people who hire spammers as well as the spammers themselves. Otherwise, you'll always have spammers.
Re:Return to sender's client!
on
I, Spammer
·
· Score: 1
and the postal address of those who hired him
An important point here is that the spammer is just doing what someone hires him to do. The real person that needs some kind of sanction is his client -whether they're selling viagra, or Norton SystemWorks or whatever. Unfortunately, companies that pay to spam are more slippery than the spammers themselves.
This would be awesome for records/document archiving. I knew a guy who worked at our State Library who had to catalog courthouse records across the state. He'd go out to some remote county where all the marriage, land and court records were on paper and try to figure out what they had. Some of the records went back to before the American Revolution. In nearly all cases, the only records were on paper.
If he could drag this robot along to a courthouse and scan the records over a couple of weeks, it would allow him digitize that information quickly. Not only would the digital copies be easier to search, they would be easier to preserve. One courthouse, where their file room was in the basement, nearly lost all of its old records to a flood.
Actually, most people who game with a keyboard and mouse are better at using a computer in general. I have a friend where I work who does a lot of customer service work, using the mouse and keyboard simultaneously to work in multiple apps. None of the other people on his team are even half as fast as he is.
So how did he learn to use the mouse and keyboard simultaneously? By playing Quake, Warcraft, and Castle Wolfenstein to name a few.
On retail and B2B sites, Monday is usually a busy day. Customers are rolling into their offices with articles to read, facts to research and stuff to buy. Out of the seven days of the week, it'd be the worst for making a change.
On the other hand, I'm not sure incremental development is that much worse than large releases. You're either releasing a bug or two a week or waiting eight weeks to release all your bugs at one time.
I've long since resigned myself to cleaning up multiple nested tables, empty font tags and extraneous attributes.
However, whenever we have a pen and paper meeting with wire frames, it eventually means one of our designers has to start from scratch to create HTML. Anything that saves our designers a couple of hours in lead time, means we can get a faster prototype to the users. Also, my having an HTML artifact from the wireframes, you can always refer back to the original sketch if a more fleshed out prototype doesn't work.
I'm all for it. The sooner the users and designers figure out what they want - the sooner I can start cleaning up their HTML.
I think there are two issues here - the ability to read and along with it people's attitudes about reading. Most Americans don't subscribe to a daily newspaper. Many don't even buy a non-fiction book once a year. If getting information from books and periodicals isn't your cup of tea, it's hard to imagine that the internet would be any more appealing.
I read through the Salon article and noticed that all of the people complaining about jobs had ridden the technology crest (typically of dot.coms) and are now stuck in a trough. I'm not sure if this is wholly a sign of a weak economy as much as a sign of how the value of certain job skills become wildly inflated then normalize.
There have been nearly twenty years of back to back innovations in computer technology that have created whole industires, including -Personal Computers -Client Server Computing -GUI -The World Wide Web
As each of these technologies took off, people stood to make large sums of money supporting/developing them. Businesses started, merged and were acquired by larger businesses. As the technology matures and supply for expertise catches up with demand, the sums become relatively smaller. The last twenty years of Information Technology have seen one innovation after another. As much as there are a few new technologies on the horizon, I'm not sure the next twenty years will be as active as the last twenty years.
I think a digital reference is great. However, I spend a lot of time actually reading technical books both to pass time and expand by job skills. Often, I'll read about some feature, tool or technique, then a couple of months later, a need for it will crop up.
My first experience doing this was with the print documentation for MS Office (10 years ago). MS Office used to come with a shelf's worth of books. I was doing end-user training back then and thumbing through those manuals gave me tons of tips and tricks for my classes. Now, all of that documentation is in the on-line help, which I believe has actually gotten worse.
Well, people are already exploiting/leveraging the Google search engine. However, having met decent consultants that seem to understand it, the key leverages are to provide a lot of text and information on your pages and label the hell out of everything - alt tags and title tags. Most previous hacks at increasing page ranking worked because only one or two people knew how page ranking worked. If everyone can fix up a highly search-optimized page, then the rankings start to level out. Most of the search engine cranks are people who sold heavily photoshoped/flashed sites to customers then proceeded to sell them a batch of spam-dexed gateway pages to make up for the fact that the previous pages ranked low.
One of the things that struck me is how much Open Source is dependent on international development. Just off of the top of my head, Linux and Python were started outside of the US. Now, both are supported by developers around the world. Historically, nations have viewed techological advances as national resources, both out of national pride as well as national security. However, Open Source software is inherently borderless.
This would appear to some to make Open Source a security risk, but it isn't necessarily so. To play in the open source game, you have to be a contributor. So you need to be a nation that develops people with strong technical skills and keeps them. You also have to allow those people access to other people around the world in order to share ideas.
Saddam Hussein may get some benefit from Open Source, in that it gives him software that is free distributable. However, I would imagine it's rather difficult attracting and retaining technical talent in a regime as oppressive as his. In short, despots may be able to use Open Source software, but they'd have a hard time leveraging it fully without free and open communication with the rest of the world.
It's also further proof of the interdependence of developed countries upon each other.
A couple of shortcomings -
on
NYT on RFID Tags
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Cordless phones, two-way radios, local wireless networks and other communications devices that are widely deployed in factories, warehouses and stores can interfere with the signals.
I wonder if these would even work in an electronics retailer - say like Best Buy. You've got a wall of TV's, cell phones, radio, etc all over the store. Unless you had a large number of distributed receivers, how would you counteract the interference.
And, although radio tag readers can, under ideal conditions, identify well over 100 tagged items every second from quite a distance, radio waves have a hard time penetrating metals and liquids
Nearly all store shelving is metal. In particular, Wal-Marts have those big 8 foot high shelves in certain sections of the store. Grocery stores are completely filled with metal shelving and refrigeration units.
Part of the attachment of any RPG/MUD/MMORPG is playing a charater. You have a persona and that persona has a story. As long as different things happen to that persona, you keep going back. The story keeps changing and the character develops and changes with the story. Moreover, most online RPG's tend to be more open ended than ones you play alone.
The bigger factor online is the interaction with other characters, whether that's actually playing together or just chatting. RPG's lend themselves to this interaction more than first person real time strategry and slightly more than first person shooters (though I admit that games like CounterStrike and Battlefiled 1942 have more of a social factor since you play on a team).
It sounds like Sovreign had neither of these things going for it.
Movies are far more expensive to make than record albums. Simply put, you need more creative talent (actors, screenwriters, directors) and more technical talent (cameramen, grips) working over a longer period of time to make a feature length (90+ minutes) product. In order to pay for the movie, you would have to sell a huge amount of records. Usually, music based movies (Purple Rain, The Wall, Glitter) make money riding on the prior success of the artist and are profitable in their own right.
While the conglomerates own both movie studios and record labels, these subsidiaries work independently of each other. Sure, occasionally you'll get overlap - such as Sony putting a Columbia records artist on the soundtrack for a Sony motion picutre. However, each groups is only concerned the profitability of its own branch. Sony Pictures has very little interest in making unprofitable movies to boost Columbia records.
Slashdot Mirror
A soundtrack/score could do well this way. I may not be willing to buy an entire CD, but if I may for one or two tracks.
While the iTunes store is pretty limited, the label can find out if this is a more profitable way to handle this kind of recording. Many record companies have large libraries of tracks that are out of print - putting those tracks online could give them a new stream of revenue.
While I don't condone what Hooked on Phonics does, I wonder if they do something similar if you call their 1-800 number and you give them your mailing/shipping address. One of the big rationales behind store credit card offers and discount cards is obtaining customer information.
This may be what you're looking for.
Actually, if you live near a good college radio station, one of these would be great. My old college station had an awesome old R&B show on Mondays from noon to 2pm along with a Reggae show from 2-5pm on Fridays. Of course, if you're not a college student and you work during the day, you miss the shows if you can't be near a radio.
Outsourcing simply reduces the cost of your man-months. Even if you achieve a high level of efficiency per man-month or function point or however you measure your IT output, the real question is are you producing income or improving efficiencies in other areas. I've worked on large (200 + man-month) projects that have produced neglible income gains (my employer is probably still paying for them). I've also worked on small projects (1-2 man-month) that paid for themselves 12 times over within a year.
Unfortunately, very few business people are good at using IT to improve their business. Moreover, few IT people bother to look outside their own domain of expertise.
My employer is looking at CDNs. I understand that they had an impressive presentation from Speedera as well. It looks like Speedera has a service specifically for downloads.
No, I didn't site through the presentation; however, our admin guys seemed impressed. Just another option.
Blame it on the GUI if you like, but most people don't buy computers so they can program anymore. All of the old computers mentioned in the article are from the days of the serious hobbyist. You either were a programmer or expected to learn how to program if you had one. While the limitations of old systems seem quaint, they actually created a barrier to most people using computers.
I don't think you can do any real programming without a year or more of Algebra - which puts most American students at 8th or 9th grade before they can write a real program. Prior to Algebra, I think kids can learn alot about creating systems through simulation type games- software like Oregon Trail that made you plan and estimate. 2D and 3D graphics programs that provide kids with open ended creativity would be helpful as well. Unfortunately, a lot of educational software for kids tends to be drill and kill.
One of the benefits of the Apollo program wasn't just the science done on the moon, but all of the technological innovations that had to be made in order for it to happen. Sure some of those innovations are relatively mundane (like Tempurpedic Mattresses). However, it also helps you build a huge amount of expertise in aerospace and electronics - industries that would help China both commercially and miliatarily.
Let's see - You're a code reviewer for the M$ Code Cleanup crew. Windows 2005 is rolling through developement and you find a security issue that'll add a man-month to the project. What kind of pressure will you encounter from Microsoft's marketing department?
Yeah, but to go after the hitmen and not go after the people who hire them is even crazier. In many palces, the penalty for hiring someone for a murder is the same as committing a murder for hire. The same should be true for spammers' clients - punish (fine, sue, imprison) people who hire spammers as well as the spammers themselves. Otherwise, you'll always have spammers.
and the postal address of those who hired him
An important point here is that the spammer is just doing what someone hires him to do. The real person that needs some kind of sanction is his client -whether they're selling viagra, or Norton SystemWorks or whatever. Unfortunately, companies that pay to spam are more slippery than the spammers themselves.
This would be awesome for records/document archiving. I knew a guy who worked at our State Library who had to catalog courthouse records across the state. He'd go out to some remote county where all the marriage, land and court records were on paper and try to figure out what they had. Some of the records went back to before the American Revolution. In nearly all cases, the only records were on paper.
If he could drag this robot along to a courthouse and scan the records over a couple of weeks, it would allow him digitize that information quickly. Not only would the digital copies be easier to search, they would be easier to preserve. One courthouse, where their file room was in the basement, nearly lost all of its old records to a flood.
Actually, most people who game with a keyboard and mouse are better at using a computer in general. I have a friend where I work who does a lot of customer service work, using the mouse and keyboard simultaneously to work in multiple apps. None of the other people on his team are even half as fast as he is.
So how did he learn to use the mouse and keyboard simultaneously? By playing Quake, Warcraft, and Castle Wolfenstein to name a few.
On retail and B2B sites, Monday is usually a busy day. Customers are rolling into their offices with articles to read, facts to research and stuff to buy. Out of the seven days of the week, it'd be the worst for making a change.
On the other hand, I'm not sure incremental development is that much worse than large releases. You're either releasing a bug or two a week or waiting eight weeks to release all your bugs at one time.
I've long since resigned myself to cleaning up multiple nested tables, empty font tags and extraneous attributes.
However, whenever we have a pen and paper meeting with wire frames, it eventually means one of our designers has to start from scratch to create HTML. Anything that saves our designers a couple of hours in lead time, means we can get a faster prototype to the users. Also, my having an HTML artifact from the wireframes, you can always refer back to the original sketch if a more fleshed out prototype doesn't work.
I'm all for it. The sooner the users and designers figure out what they want - the sooner I can start cleaning up their HTML.
Is PK'ing allowed?
and very much a part of the Internet.
I think there are two issues here - the ability to read and along with it people's attitudes about reading. Most Americans don't subscribe to a daily newspaper. Many don't even buy a non-fiction book once a year. If getting information from books and periodicals isn't your cup of tea, it's hard to imagine that the internet would be any more appealing.
Of course, there are always online casinos...
If you're 12 years old, get a Gameboy Advance SP.
If you're 32 years old, get a Canon G3.
If you're 22 years old, buy both and spend the next two years to pay off your credit card balance.
I read through the Salon article and noticed that all of the people complaining about jobs had ridden the technology crest (typically of dot.coms) and are now stuck in a trough. I'm not sure if this is wholly a sign of a weak economy as much as a sign of how the value of certain job skills become wildly inflated then normalize.
There have been nearly twenty years of back to back innovations in computer technology that have created whole industires, including
-Personal Computers
-Client Server Computing
-GUI
-The World Wide Web
As each of these technologies took off, people stood to make large sums of money supporting/developing them. Businesses started, merged and were acquired by larger businesses. As the technology matures and supply for expertise catches up with demand, the sums become relatively smaller. The last twenty years of Information Technology have seen one innovation after another. As much as there are a few new technologies on the horizon, I'm not sure the next twenty years will be as active as the last twenty years.
I think a digital reference is great. However, I spend a lot of time actually reading technical books both to pass time and expand by job skills. Often, I'll read about some feature, tool or technique, then a couple of months later, a need for it will crop up.
My first experience doing this was with the print documentation for MS Office (10 years ago). MS Office used to come with a shelf's worth of books. I was doing end-user training back then and thumbing through those manuals gave me tons of tips and tricks for my classes. Now, all of that documentation is in the on-line help, which I believe has actually gotten worse.
Well, people are already exploiting/leveraging the Google search engine. However, having met decent consultants that seem to understand it, the key leverages are to provide a lot of text and information on your pages and label the hell out of everything - alt tags and title tags. Most previous hacks at increasing page ranking worked because only one or two people knew how page ranking worked. If everyone can fix up a highly search-optimized page, then the rankings start to level out. Most of the search engine cranks are people who sold heavily photoshoped/flashed sites to customers then proceeded to sell them a batch of spam-dexed gateway pages to make up for the fact that the previous pages ranked low.
One of the things that struck me is how much Open Source is dependent on international development. Just off of the top of my head, Linux and Python were started outside of the US. Now, both are supported by developers around the world. Historically, nations have viewed techological advances as national resources, both out of national pride as well as national security. However, Open Source software is inherently borderless.
This would appear to some to make Open Source a security risk, but it isn't necessarily so. To play in the open source game, you have to be a contributor. So you need to be a nation that develops people with strong technical skills and keeps them. You also have to allow those people access to other people around the world in order to share ideas.
Saddam Hussein may get some benefit from Open Source, in that it gives him software that is free distributable. However, I would imagine it's rather difficult attracting and retaining technical talent in a regime as oppressive as his. In short, despots may be able to use Open Source software, but they'd have a hard time leveraging it fully without free and open communication with the rest of the world.
It's also further proof of the interdependence of developed countries upon each other.
I wonder if these would even work in an electronics retailer - say like Best Buy. You've got a wall of TV's, cell phones, radio, etc all over the store. Unless you had a large number of distributed receivers, how would you counteract the interference.
Nearly all store shelving is metal. In particular, Wal-Marts have those big 8 foot high shelves in certain sections of the store. Grocery stores are completely filled with metal shelving and refrigeration units.
Part of the attachment of any RPG/MUD/MMORPG is playing a charater. You have a persona and that persona has a story. As long as different things happen to that persona, you keep going back. The story keeps changing and the character develops and changes with the story. Moreover, most online RPG's tend to be more open ended than ones you play alone.
The bigger factor online is the interaction with other characters, whether that's actually playing together or just chatting. RPG's lend themselves to this interaction more than first person real time strategry and slightly more than first person shooters (though I admit that games like CounterStrike and Battlefiled 1942 have more of a social factor since you play on a team).
It sounds like Sovreign had neither of these things going for it.
She just turns on the power and *blam* instant usable system.
So, would that be AOL TV (defunct) or MSN TV (evil)?
Two problems -
Movies are far more expensive to make than record albums. Simply put, you need more creative talent (actors, screenwriters, directors) and more technical talent (cameramen, grips) working over a longer period of time to make a feature length (90+ minutes) product. In order to pay for the movie, you would have to sell a huge amount of records. Usually, music based movies (Purple Rain, The Wall, Glitter) make money riding on the prior success of the artist and are profitable in their own right.
While the conglomerates own both movie studios and record labels, these subsidiaries work independently of each other. Sure, occasionally you'll get overlap - such as Sony putting a Columbia records artist on the soundtrack for a Sony motion picutre. However, each groups is only concerned the profitability of its own branch. Sony Pictures has very little interest in making unprofitable movies to boost Columbia records.