As the article notes, it won't be sold at the retail level. The drive is specifically designed to be a component designed into a board, and not replacable. I suppose if you want to do your own soldering and surface mount, you could use just one, but that's not much of a market.
"In my office I have to deal with four different companies. One company installed the internal system, SBC owns the lines, our "value added reseller" uses SBC's lines, plus we have another company for data and long distance."
That's YOUR CHOICE. If you wanted, you could deal with your RBOC (or AT&T, or Sprint, or MCI, or several others) for everything, and have single point of contact. You're splitting up the business, presumably to save money, and risks come with that. Also, it sounds like you need a new VAR/SI.
Simple: the Nielsen families. TiVo owners are about as representative of America as Slashdotters; in other words, not very. Tivo owners are reasonably prosperous technophiles. Face it, this is still a gadget, and there's a reason why 99% of American households don't own one. Tivo data might be useful for advertisers who want to target young technophiles, but it's not much help for advertisers who want to get the 18-49 male macrosegment that matters so much.
If you're driving on a public road, you have to assume that individuals or the government might be (gasp!) reading your license plate. This is functionally no different from having a cop sitting by the side of the road, taking notes, just more efficient.
I met these guys back when Digital Angel was their push, and the market (as they saw it) broke down into two ares:
1. Kids tracked by their parents 2. Elderly folks who are mobile, but with limited mental capacity (read Alzheimers), tracked by family members. With this, some elderly folks might be able to live at home (and not in A home)longer than otherwise possible, since the concern about them wandering off is lower
Including VAT in the price is definitely is more convenient. It does, however, serve to mask the amount of tax you're paying (~15% for most of Europe, IIRC), something that governments generally like to do.
Back in the mid-late 90s, a couple of the Hollywood studios put some serious dollars into trying to build a predictive model of film success. Problem is, they couldn't make it work. They could make the model match _prior_ outcomes, but getting it to correctly forecast the success of _future_ films was well-nigh impossible. The project was scrapped, I believe. Given how incredibly valuable a working model like this would be, though, I wouldn't be surprised if the idea keeps making a comeback.
Au contraire. There's no universal state health care, but Medicaid (state and federally-funded health insurance for the poor and disabled) serves 40MM people and will cost $280BN in 2003, while Medicare (federally-funded health insurance for the elderly) serves an additional 40MM people at an annual cost of $230BN. So, that's 80MM people, (about 30% of the US population), and $510BN (about 5% of US GDP) in taxpayer-funded health care.
Your consulting firm's name reminded me of something that made me chuckle. Way back when, when I was doing consulting, WAGNER was a popular acronym. You've probably heard SWAG (Some Wild-Ass Guess), right? Well, we were always toying with the idea of citing WAGNER Research somewhere in a report, hoping nobody would make us admit that it stood for Wild-Ass Guess Not Easily Refuted.
Interesting POV. From the financial side of things, it's pretty clear why Best Buy and Circuit City push these add-ons so hard: they don't make any money on the merchandise. It's a bit of a simplification (but not much of one) to say that, for the Big Box electronic stores:
1. The music is a loss leader to get you into the store (margins -10% to 0%) 2. The electronics are breakeven, and contribute almost nothing to fixed costs like rent, heat, and staff (margin ~0%) 3. The store stays in business by selling extended warranties (margin 80-90%)
You're rather missing the point here. For the vast majority of Slashdotters, computers are valuable for their own sake. For the vast majority of the rest of the world, computers are just tools that are there to help people do their jobs. Just as Fedex would want to prevent their drivers from tinkering with the fuel injectors of the delivery trucks (might be an occasional benefit, where a package gets there sooner, but a lot of negatives, where people need tows), most of the changes that individuals might make to their corporate machines will _reduce_ the ability of those machines to act as effective tools, not increase them.
Come on everybody, say it with me, "Slashdot is NOT like the real world!"
FYI, the 4th Amendment is a restriction on _government_ action, not private individuals, much in the same way that the 1st Amendment prohibits government from locking you up for saying that you think abortion is wrong, but doesn't prevent me from boycotting your business based on your beliefs.
Folks, this isn't a constitutional issue; people get subpoenas for civil suits all the time. Verizon isn't fighting it because they want to protect privacy, or anything like that; they're fighting it because the costs of complying with all these subpoenas in terms of time and effort will be huge!
Not true, or at least not anymore. You need your Verizon userid and password to authenticate with the SMTP server, but it will let you use any email address you wish.
If memory serves, the service providers (Boingo, T-mobile, etc.) use a client on your PC to authenticate you (probably MAC-based, but I'm not sure). Their concern isn't just security, of course, but making sure that you actually pay for the service.
There's a nice little plaque at Harvard Biz School, in the classroom where Dan Bricklin first developed the VisiCalc idea (Aldrich 108). He came to my Managing Product Development class while I was at HBS, really cool guy. Tells a great story about doing a calculation in a very roundabout way, and then getting asked by the professor in class the next day "right answer, but why didn't you just use a ratio?" Dan said "well, this way will be more accurate." Truth of the matter was, he hadn't gotten the divide function working yet.:)
Re:Sigh...the only tech needed.
on
Snooping on VOIP
·
· Score: 1
It's much harder to stop someone who's willing to die for their cause - does that mean we shouldn't even try? That's sort of like saying that some people are going to die in traffic accidents anyway, so why bother with seatbelts and airbags?
Lucky Wander Boy - Sounds Familiar
on
Lucky Wander Boy
·
· Score: 1
I wonder if this name has any link (in either direction) to Lupus Yonderboy, in _Neuromancer_?
Nope, pretty much anyone can get permitting, so long as they prove business viability (if you grabbed your shovel and started digging up main st, the city would be a little pissed. The ILECs (aka Baby Bells) do have existing right of way permits, but they're by no means the only ones. The reason other ISPs are so desperate to sublease copper circuits from the ILECs is that installing new ones is incredibly expensive. Legal, but really pricey.
I remember back when I was in college, I kept on getting letters from the US Navy, asking me to apply for jobs as a reactor tech on nuclear subs, so you might want to try that. (Unless you're a big fan of daylight and regular bathing...nah, this is Slashdot.) Scary thing is, I was an econ/poli sci major.
It's not just impulse buys, it's search costs, and more particularly the expected cost/benefit of searches. I used to spend quite a bit of time using similar sites (i.e. pricewatch, dealtime) for smaller purchases, but I gradually discovered that the best price rarely varied much from Amazon's, and the savings I realized didn't justify the time I spent looking for them. Eventually, I just stuck with Amazon. On a bigger ticket purchase, sure, I'll shop around, but if it's $40 worth of books or a few CD's, the $5 I might save isn't worth the 15-30 mins required to search, enter my info for a new site, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
As the article notes, it won't be sold at the retail level. The drive is specifically designed to be a component designed into a board, and not replacable. I suppose if you want to do your own soldering and surface mount, you could use just one, but that's not much of a market.
"In my office I have to deal with four different companies. One company installed the internal system, SBC owns the lines, our "value added reseller" uses SBC's lines, plus we have another company for data and long distance."
That's YOUR CHOICE. If you wanted, you could deal with your RBOC (or AT&T, or Sprint, or MCI, or several others) for everything, and have single point of contact. You're splitting up the business, presumably to save money, and risks come with that. Also, it sounds like you need a new VAR/SI.
>>
Simple: the Nielsen families. TiVo owners are about as representative of America as Slashdotters; in other words, not very. Tivo owners are reasonably prosperous technophiles. Face it, this is still a gadget, and there's a reason why 99% of American households don't own one. Tivo data might be useful for advertisers who want to target young technophiles, but it's not much help for advertisers who want to get the 18-49 male macrosegment that matters so much.
If you're driving on a public road, you have to assume that individuals or the government might be (gasp!) reading your license plate. This is functionally no different from having a cop sitting by the side of the road, taking notes, just more efficient.
I met these guys back when Digital Angel was their push, and the market (as they saw it) broke down into two ares:
1. Kids tracked by their parents
2. Elderly folks who are mobile, but with limited mental capacity (read Alzheimers), tracked by family members. With this, some elderly folks might be able to live at home (and not in A home)longer than otherwise possible, since the concern about them wandering off is lower
Including VAT in the price is definitely is more convenient. It does, however, serve to mask the amount of tax you're paying (~15% for most of Europe, IIRC), something that governments generally like to do.
Back in the mid-late 90s, a couple of the Hollywood studios put some serious dollars into trying to build a predictive model of film success. Problem is, they couldn't make it work. They could make the model match _prior_ outcomes, but getting it to correctly forecast the success of _future_ films was well-nigh impossible. The project was scrapped, I believe. Given how incredibly valuable a working model like this would be, though, I wouldn't be surprised if the idea keeps making a comeback.
>>
Au contraire. There's no universal state health care, but Medicaid (state and federally-funded health insurance for the poor and disabled) serves 40MM people and will cost $280BN in 2003, while Medicare (federally-funded health insurance for the elderly) serves an additional 40MM people at an annual cost of $230BN. So, that's 80MM people, (about 30% of the US population), and $510BN (about 5% of US GDP) in taxpayer-funded health care.
Your consulting firm's name reminded me of something that made me chuckle. Way back when, when I was doing consulting, WAGNER was a popular acronym. You've probably heard SWAG (Some Wild-Ass Guess), right? Well, we were always toying with the idea of citing WAGNER Research somewhere in a report, hoping nobody would make us admit that it stood for Wild-Ass Guess Not Easily Refuted.
Interesting POV. From the financial side of things, it's pretty clear why Best Buy and Circuit City push these add-ons so hard: they don't make any money on the merchandise. It's a bit of a simplification (but not much of one) to say that, for the Big Box electronic stores:
1. The music is a loss leader to get you into the store (margins -10% to 0%)
2. The electronics are breakeven, and contribute almost nothing to fixed costs like rent, heat, and staff (margin ~0%)
3. The store stays in business by selling extended warranties (margin 80-90%)
Of course, before 1918, Austria (or, more accurately, the Austro-Hungarian Empire) wasn't landlocked.
Wow, do I feel awful. I'm about to CORRECT the nerdiest post ever made. It's lawful evil, not orderly evil, right?
You're rather missing the point here. For the vast majority of Slashdotters, computers are valuable for their own sake. For the vast majority of the rest of the world, computers are just tools that are there to help people do their jobs. Just as Fedex would want to prevent their drivers from tinkering with the fuel injectors of the delivery trucks (might be an occasional benefit, where a package gets there sooner, but a lot of negatives, where people need tows), most of the changes that individuals might make to their corporate machines will _reduce_ the ability of those machines to act as effective tools, not increase them.
Come on everybody, say it with me, "Slashdot is NOT like the real world!"
>>
Because it's important for them to know that they've antagonized an illiterate!
FYI, the 4th Amendment is a restriction on _government_ action, not private individuals, much in the same way that the 1st Amendment prohibits government from locking you up for saying that you think abortion is wrong, but doesn't prevent me from boycotting your business based on your beliefs.
Folks, this isn't a constitutional issue; people get subpoenas for civil suits all the time. Verizon isn't fighting it because they want to protect privacy, or anything like that; they're fighting it because the costs of complying with all these subpoenas in terms of time and effort will be huge!
Not true, or at least not anymore. You need your Verizon userid and password to authenticate with the SMTP server, but it will let you use any email address you wish.
If memory serves, the service providers (Boingo, T-mobile, etc.) use a client on your PC to authenticate you (probably MAC-based, but I'm not sure). Their concern isn't just security, of course, but making sure that you actually pay for the service.
There's a nice little plaque at Harvard Biz School, in the classroom where Dan Bricklin first developed the VisiCalc idea (Aldrich 108). He came to my Managing Product Development class while I was at HBS, really cool guy. Tells a great story about doing a calculation in a very roundabout way, and then getting asked by the professor in class the next day "right answer, but why didn't you just use a ratio?" Dan said "well, this way will be more accurate." Truth of the matter was, he hadn't gotten the divide function working yet. :)
It's much harder to stop someone who's willing to die for their cause - does that mean we shouldn't even try? That's sort of like saying that some people are going to die in traffic accidents anyway, so why bother with seatbelts and airbags?
I wonder if this name has any link (in either direction) to Lupus Yonderboy, in _Neuromancer_?
Nope, pretty much anyone can get permitting, so long as they prove business viability (if you grabbed your shovel and started digging up main st, the city would be a little pissed. The ILECs (aka Baby Bells) do have existing right of way permits, but they're by no means the only ones. The reason other ISPs are so desperate to sublease copper circuits from the ILECs is that installing new ones is incredibly expensive. Legal, but really pricey.
Huh??? You just attacked his point that wholesale access is expensive, and then quoted prices that are _higher_ than he noted!
T1=1.5Mbps, $350/1.5 = $233 per Mbps, while he was quoting $75/Mbps-$200Mbps!
He's not talking about $75/MBYTE of traffic passed through, he's talking $75/MBIT/SEC of capacity - that's how wholesale ISP access is priced.
Calling someone as clueless as they come, when you don't even understand how bandwidth is priced, is pretty damn silly.
I remember back when I was in college, I kept on getting letters from the US Navy, asking me to apply for jobs as a reactor tech on nuclear subs, so you might want to try that. (Unless you're a big fan of daylight and regular bathing...nah, this is Slashdot.) Scary thing is, I was an econ/poli sci major.
2/3 ain't bad, but no gold star for you. Southwest and JetBlue are making money, but America West is pretty far in the red.
It's not just impulse buys, it's search costs, and more particularly the expected cost/benefit of searches. I used to spend quite a bit of time using similar sites (i.e. pricewatch, dealtime) for smaller purchases, but I gradually discovered that the best price rarely varied much from Amazon's, and the savings I realized didn't justify the time I spent looking for them. Eventually, I just stuck with Amazon. On a bigger ticket purchase, sure, I'll shop around, but if it's $40 worth of books or a few CD's, the $5 I might save isn't worth the 15-30 mins required to search, enter my info for a new site, etc.