Of all of the courses I took over the years, my college Statistics course stands out. The teacher was the kind of guy who would spend an evening at his kitchen table flipping pennies just to prove to himself that yes, ultimately they would trend towards a 50/50 distribution. For fun.
What stuck with me though we a couple of ideas:
What happened in the past has no influence over what will happen in the future. You may have flipped seventy-five heads, but the odds of the next penny landing head or tails is still 50/50.
The decision whether to make a bet in any game is based on a variety of factors - the size of the bet, the size of the possible prize, and the odds of winning. No one of those three is enough to make a decision, you need to know all three.
In life, as in games, you have to make decisions based on real odds, not of conjecture or media speculation. Where's the bigger risk? A falling meteor, or getting hit by a city bus? Food poisoning or a terrorist attack?
Yes,because the buyers are really going to be expecting the best hardware avaiable for $200. They will expect something that works reasonably and is good value for a bottom end price.
Joe Wal-mart shopper figures a computer is a computer is a computer. They just figure it's cheap 'cause it's Wal-Mart. He or she expects it to work just like his neighbour's PC.
Given how pretty Enlightenment looks, and given the public's liking for eye-candy, most buyers are going to think"hey, this is cool".
Joe Wal-Mart shopper will just get confused because it's not the same as every other computer he has sat in front of. Think "VCR flashing 12:00" type of user.
$200 hardware is obviously aimed at gamers
Joe Wal-Mart shopper buys games at Costco and Staples from a big bin in the aisle. Wal-mart Linux box won't run it. He or she doesn't know or care why, just knows that his neighbour's PC runs it fine.
I have never had a problem opening and MS Word document on any Linux distro I have tried, click on it in the file manager.
OK, refine that. It opens the Word doc from work, but all of the formatting is screwed up. Or someone e-mails him a Powerpoint that won't work.
In a Windows centric world you simply cannot drop an underpowered, low spec Linux box on a not tech savvy group and expect them to do anything but return it. It's not a question of whether or not Linux is good, or better, it's a question of whether it does what they expect it to do.
if it doesn't do what the end user wants, in a way that they know how to use, then it's broken.
Normally, this would simply mark it as unacceptably low-end for use with modern software. By using the fast Enlightenment desktop manager (instead of heavier-duty alternatives like Gnome or KDE), the makers say it's more responsive than Vista is, even on more powerful computers.
You're taking an underpowered machine, with a non-standard desktop, OS and software, and selling it to what is likely the least tech knowledgeable market that you can find.
a) Sell crappy Linux box to unsupecting mark.
b) Mark can't figure out why it isn't like every other computer
c) Mark can't make $9.99 computer game install
d) Mark can't make MS Word document open.
e) Profit?
Ever consider that there was a reason why Wal-Mart's last cheapo Linux PC has been "out of stock" for so long? It's because they can't sell them without having them returned.
In anyone's life there are hundreds or thousands of people that know you, but with whom your relationship doesn't rank quite high enough to merit weekly or even monthly e-mails or phone calls. That doesn't mean you wouldn't like to keep track of them, where they are, or what they're doing.
A small business may have a similar group of people who they would like to keep track of as potential customers, or who would want to know what the business is up to. Again, not your prime customers, but that second tier of interested people that a sole proprietor doesn't have time to keep in touch with.
With Facebook you can add two or three hundred "friends" and with no further effort see on a daily basis what at least some of them are doing in their lives. They choose to Opt-in, so you can e-mail them your news without worries about backlash, and since they choose what information to display to you, you get a pretty nice picture of what matters in their lives.
Probably two thirds of the friends that I have in Facebook are people (including relatives) that I would never otherwise be in touch with.
Plus, you can turn all of these people into Vampires. br
More important though, there is one thing that vinyl lacks - error correction. A couple of scratches on a CD don't make that much difference usually because the CD player will compensate, but once you've gouged a vinyl record that pop or click is there forever.
Sigh... from the US TREASURY PAGE that is LINKED from THE SUMMARY above:
Question: I thought that United States currency was legal tender for all debts. Some businesses or governmental agencies say that they will only accept checks, money orders or credit cards as payment, and others will only accept currency notes in denominations of $20 or smaller. Isn't this illegal?
Answer: The pertinent portion of law that applies to your question is the Coinage Act of 1965, specifically Section 31 U.S.C. 5103, entitled "Legal tender," which states: "United States coins and currency (including Federal reserve notes and circulating notes of Federal reserve banks and national banks) are legal tender for all debts, public charges, taxes, and dues."
This statute means that all United States money as identified above are a valid and legal offer of payment for debts when tendered to a creditor. There is, however, no Federal statute mandating that a private business, a person or an organization must accept currency or coins as for payment for goods and/or services. Private businesses are free to develop their own policies on whether or not to accept cash unless there is a State law which says otherwise. For example, a bus line may prohibit payment of fares in pennies or dollar bills. In addition, movie theaters, convenience stores and gas stations may refuse to accept large denomination currency (usually notes above $20) as a matter of policy.
Of course, perhaps you just don't believe what the US Government would write on their own web site. Which raises the question of why you would trust their currency enough to use it.
Wow, this will have about thirty-five seconds before it's modded "flamebait" by the fanboys, but I'd argue that this surpasses "good business" on the part of Apple and crosses into barefaced greed.
With practices like this why would anyone want to do business with Apple?
"With Time Machine making it easier to back up for all users, especially individuals not already protected by some corporate backup system, Apple is doing more to improve security than any upgrades to firewalls or Safari ever could."
Although I am a fan of backups, this is really silly. Even if we assume that users have Time Machine turned on, that they have external media on which to back up, that they manage to actually have everything turned on and hooked up to do the automated backup, there's still one hole in this argument.
In order for a backup to offer protection you need to know that there is something that needs to be restored from the backup. If most security attacks are by nature silent then you won't realize that you have been compromised and will not preserve a recent backup much less restore it.
Unless there is unlimited storage space for backups there will come a point when Good Data Set A will be replaced on your backup by Corrupted Data Set B. Time Machine likely has no way of knowing that the data it has just backed up is not your good current file, but one that has been damaged. All that it knows is that the file changed.
The idea of Google or Facebook pulling data from my mobile phone and adding it to some on-line profile seems a bit much, although really it's a small and logical step from what places like Facebook do already.
If anyone can pull this off it will be Google precisely because despite some bad press the vast majority of people outside of Slashdot still trust the company to "do no evil."
As we move from Web 2.0 to Web 3.whatever, companies will increasingly need to be able ensure that user data is both respected and protected, and will need to offer Facebook-like tools that will let users decide what data will be available for what uses. Very soon we will all demand the option of saying "My regular phone number is available to everyone, but my cel number is restricted to people on buddy list #1, and my MSN handle to people on buddy list #2."
The real seller would be one unified contact list that could be used across e-mail, Facebook, Myspace, and whatever other systems we access regularly. Kind of like what Google already does with their Gmail/Blogger/groups etc ID, or what Microsoft probably hoped for with Passport.
Boy, I am pissed. I have submitted Funwall as a Slashdot story FIVE times, and Vampires SIX times, and have been rejected every time. Who do you have to sleep with around here to get Facebook apps posted as stories??
FWIW the wikipedia entry for "Protection Racket" has been edited to remove the term "non-governmental" from the first line. That phrase has a fairly specific and widely accepted definition which is significantly different from its usage above.
A non-governmental organization (NGO) is a legally constituted organization created by private persons or organizations with no participation or representation of any government. In the cases in which NGOs are funded totally or partially by governments, the NGO maintains its non governmental status as far as no government representatives are part of the organization.
It's telling that Comcast refuses to even ackowledge how bad they screwed up, and in no way suggests that they could improve their service. I think the lesson to be learned is that one woman with a hammer can be ignored.
What would happen though if a thousand, or tens of thousands of unhappy customers walked into Comcast offices across the country and hammered computers and phones into pieces? Would police really arrest a dozen people a day? Would Comcast continue to piss on customers and ignore complaints? Would regulators keep on pretending that there's nothing wrong?
The whole goal of the 800 number, hours on hold, pass the buck, blame the customer routine is to ensure that a company never has to take responsibility for their actions. A voice on the phone can be ignored indefinitely, even cut off with no real repercussions. If customers stop accepting crappy phone service and instead start showing up at Comcast offices for every single problem, perhaps with a hammer or pitchfork in hand, I think that we would see a change. Real live people, especially armed people, cannot be ignored, cannot be hung up on.
Of course, all of this assumes that said terrorist will book the ticket in his or her real name. I guess the only real danger is that we may run into a terrorist that's smarter than the average TSA or DHS employee....
It's along weekend up here in Canada, the perfect time to try something fun. After hearing endless praise of Ubuntu I decided to download an ISO and try it out on my G4 Powerbook.
I spent close to a half hour on the Ubuntu web site, on the download page, the Ubuntu home page, the FAQ, and anywhere else that seemed likely and couldn't for life of me find a download link. Searches for PowerPC and Powerbook turned up nothing.
Finally in the Ubuntu forums I discovered that Ubuntu no longer formally supports the PowerPC architecture, that PPC is "community supported", and that judging by the forum comments there some issues even though Apple hardware is pretty much standard from one machine to the next.
Is it too much to ask that Ubuntu add a comment and link on their download page directing PPC users elsewhere?
Really it's stupid things like this that seem to crop up every time I decide to try out Linux.
"OS 5 is ahead of schedule, and we will be making public announcements concerning the product in the 4th quarter of this year."
So what have here is a Press release announcing that in a couple of months they'll issue a Press Release.
You know, given the dissatisfaction with Vista*, the hardware constraints associated with OS X**, and the usual limitations of Linux***, there could be a place for a new OS. Whether Amiga can make the jump though is entirely another question, one largely to be answered by the eternal question: can it run MS Office?.
* No-one wants to buy it
** only runs on Apple hardware
*** still too geeky for most people, and yes I know about Ubuntu
The Appalachian News Express began their life on the 'net as newsexpress.com and it took at least year before they finally understood why a hyphen in the URL was good thing.
A rather thin article to be sure, but this machine does offer something appealing - less of everything.
More and more, after years of Windows, then a Mac, then dabbling with various Linux distros, I find myself questioning just how much of the junk on my computers is essential or even useful.
Less moving parts, simpler and fewer applications, and limited capabilities, all sound like positives, not negatives, if only because it could slow the endless stream of updates and fixes, each of which seems to introduce other problems.
I can see an OLPC machine as really good daily machine for e-mail, browsing, and some everyday tasks like word processing, at least with a bigger hard drive. With the option of maintaining a desktop PC, even a generation older, to handle the heavy lifting of Adobe and similar tools, I could probably get by nicely with this little unit.
God. My question is who would want to attribute their name to juvenile mis-spellings of common words like that. Really, there's no secret why commercial operators would keep their code secret, no need for speculation. It's a business! If you can do it, and your competitor can't, then you make money and win.
Surely there are significant issues with both Microsoft and product validation in general, but this really isn't it. He bought MS products knowing that they required validation, and now is whining because he can't install a added feature that would work with his unvalidated Visio install.
The author admits that the only obstacle he faces is running the validation wizard for Visio, after which he can happily download and install the add-in. What would that take? two minutes?
Slashdot Mirror
What stuck with me though we a couple of ideas:
- What happened in the past has no influence over what will happen in the future. You may have flipped seventy-five heads, but the odds of the next penny landing head or tails is still 50/50.
- The decision whether to make a bet in any game is based on a variety of factors - the size of the bet, the size of the possible prize, and the odds of winning. No one of those three is enough to make a decision, you need to know all three.
In life, as in games, you have to make decisions based on real odds, not of conjecture or media speculation. Where's the bigger risk? A falling meteor, or getting hit by a city bus? Food poisoning or a terrorist attack?Yes,because the buyers are really going to be expecting the best hardware avaiable for $200. They will expect something that works reasonably and is good value for a bottom end price.
Joe Wal-mart shopper figures a computer is a computer is a computer. They just figure it's cheap 'cause it's Wal-Mart. He or she expects it to work just like his neighbour's PC.
Given how pretty Enlightenment looks, and given the public's liking for eye-candy, most buyers are going to think"hey, this is cool".
Joe Wal-Mart shopper will just get confused because it's not the same as every other computer he has sat in front of. Think "VCR flashing 12:00" type of user.
$200 hardware is obviously aimed at gamers
Joe Wal-Mart shopper buys games at Costco and Staples from a big bin in the aisle. Wal-mart Linux box won't run it. He or she doesn't know or care why, just knows that his neighbour's PC runs it fine.
I have never had a problem opening and MS Word document on any Linux distro I have tried, click on it in the file manager.
OK, refine that. It opens the Word doc from work, but all of the formatting is screwed up. Or someone e-mails him a Powerpoint that won't work.
In a Windows centric world you simply cannot drop an underpowered, low spec Linux box on a not tech savvy group and expect them to do anything but return it. It's not a question of whether or not Linux is good, or better, it's a question of whether it does what they expect it to do.
if it doesn't do what the end user wants, in a way that they know how to use, then it's broken.
Normally, this would simply mark it as unacceptably low-end for use with modern software. By using the fast Enlightenment desktop manager (instead of heavier-duty alternatives like Gnome or KDE), the makers say it's more responsive than Vista is, even on more powerful computers.
You're taking an underpowered machine, with a non-standard desktop, OS and software, and selling it to what is likely the least tech knowledgeable market that you can find.
a) Sell crappy Linux box to unsupecting mark.
b) Mark can't figure out why it isn't like every other computer
c) Mark can't make $9.99 computer game install
d) Mark can't make MS Word document open.
e) Profit?
Ever consider that there was a reason why Wal-Mart's last cheapo Linux PC has been "out of stock" for so long? It's because they can't sell them without having them returned.
In anyone's life there are hundreds or thousands of people that know you, but with whom your relationship doesn't rank quite high enough to merit weekly or even monthly e-mails or phone calls. That doesn't mean you wouldn't like to keep track of them, where they are, or what they're doing.
A small business may have a similar group of people who they would like to keep track of as potential customers, or who would want to know what the business is up to. Again, not your prime customers, but that second tier of interested people that a sole proprietor doesn't have time to keep in touch with.
With Facebook you can add two or three hundred "friends" and with no further effort see on a daily basis what at least some of them are doing in their lives. They choose to Opt-in, so you can e-mail them your news without worries about backlash, and since they choose what information to display to you, you get a pretty nice picture of what matters in their lives.
Probably two thirds of the friends that I have in Facebook are people (including relatives) that I would never otherwise be in touch with.
Plus, you can turn all of these people into Vampires.
br
Ah yes, the centre groove.....
More important though, there is one thing that vinyl lacks - error correction. A couple of scratches on a CD don't make that much difference usually because the CD player will compensate, but once you've gouged a vinyl record that pop or click is there forever.
Wow, this will have about thirty-five seconds before it's modded "flamebait" by the fanboys, but I'd argue that this surpasses "good business" on the part of Apple and crosses into barefaced greed.
With practices like this why would anyone want to do business with Apple?
"With Time Machine making it easier to back up for all users, especially individuals not already protected by some corporate backup system, Apple is doing more to improve security than any upgrades to firewalls or Safari ever could."
Although I am a fan of backups, this is really silly. Even if we assume that users have Time Machine turned on, that they have external media on which to back up, that they manage to actually have everything turned on and hooked up to do the automated backup, there's still one hole in this argument.
In order for a backup to offer protection you need to know that there is something that needs to be restored from the backup. If most security attacks are by nature silent then you won't realize that you have been compromised and will not preserve a recent backup much less restore it.
Unless there is unlimited storage space for backups there will come a point when Good Data Set A will be replaced on your backup by Corrupted Data Set B. Time Machine likely has no way of knowing that the data it has just backed up is not your good current file, but one that has been damaged. All that it knows is that the file changed.
The idea of Google or Facebook pulling data from my mobile phone and adding it to some on-line profile seems a bit much, although really it's a small and logical step from what places like Facebook do already.
If anyone can pull this off it will be Google precisely because despite some bad press the vast majority of people outside of Slashdot still trust the company to "do no evil."
As we move from Web 2.0 to Web 3.whatever, companies will increasingly need to be able ensure that user data is both respected and protected, and will need to offer Facebook-like tools that will let users decide what data will be available for what uses. Very soon we will all demand the option of saying "My regular phone number is available to everyone, but my cel number is restricted to people on buddy list #1, and my MSN handle to people on buddy list #2."
The real seller would be one unified contact list that could be used across e-mail, Facebook, Myspace, and whatever other systems we access regularly. Kind of like what Google already does with their Gmail/Blogger/groups etc ID, or what Microsoft probably hoped for with Passport.
Oh yeah!.....
Boy, I am pissed. I have submitted Funwall as a Slashdot story FIVE times, and Vampires SIX times, and have been rejected every time. Who do you have to sleep with around here to get Facebook apps posted as stories??
It's telling that Comcast refuses to even ackowledge how bad they screwed up, and in no way suggests that they could improve their service. I think the lesson to be learned is that one woman with a hammer can be ignored.
What would happen though if a thousand, or tens of thousands of unhappy customers walked into Comcast offices across the country and hammered computers and phones into pieces? Would police really arrest a dozen people a day? Would Comcast continue to piss on customers and ignore complaints? Would regulators keep on pretending that there's nothing wrong?
The whole goal of the 800 number, hours on hold, pass the buck, blame the customer routine is to ensure that a company never has to take responsibility for their actions. A voice on the phone can be ignored indefinitely, even cut off with no real repercussions. If customers stop accepting crappy phone service and instead start showing up at Comcast offices for every single problem, perhaps with a hammer or pitchfork in hand, I think that we would see a change. Real live people, especially armed people, cannot be ignored, cannot be hung up on.
Lick a stamp or march - that's harder to ignore.
Tee hee, yeah, for sure..... that's why there's no war happening in Iraq right now.
Real change doesn't happen at the end of a picket sign, it happens at the end of a six figure check written to a politician's campaign fund.
Of course, all of this assumes that said terrorist will book the ticket in his or her real name. I guess the only real danger is that we may run into a terrorist that's smarter than the average TSA or DHS employee....
Oh oh. Now I'm worried.
"Windows XP SP3 build 3205 ... has been made available to testers as a part of the ...Windows Vista SP1 beta program."
God, I love this company!
It's along weekend up here in Canada, the perfect time to try something fun. After hearing endless praise of Ubuntu I decided to download an ISO and try it out on my G4 Powerbook.
I spent close to a half hour on the Ubuntu web site, on the download page, the Ubuntu home page, the FAQ, and anywhere else that seemed likely and couldn't for life of me find a download link. Searches for PowerPC and Powerbook turned up nothing.
Finally in the Ubuntu forums I discovered that Ubuntu no longer formally supports the PowerPC architecture, that PPC is "community supported", and that judging by the forum comments there some issues even though Apple hardware is pretty much standard from one machine to the next.
Is it too much to ask that Ubuntu add a comment and link on their download page directing PPC users elsewhere?
Really it's stupid things like this that seem to crop up every time I decide to try out Linux.
"OS 5 is ahead of schedule, and we will be making public announcements concerning the product in the 4th quarter of this year."
So what have here is a Press release announcing that in a couple of months they'll issue a Press Release.
You know, given the dissatisfaction with Vista*, the hardware constraints associated with OS X**, and the usual limitations of Linux***, there could be a place for a new OS. Whether Amiga can make the jump though is entirely another question, one largely to be answered by the eternal question: can it run MS Office?.
* No-one wants to buy it ** only runs on Apple hardware *** still too geeky for most people, and yes I know about Ubuntu
Ye Gawds.... Facebook apps are news worthy? Then again, maybe Slashdot also needs opportunities for me to turn Taco into a Vampire.
The Appalachian News Express began their life on the 'net as newsexpress.com and it took at least year before they finally understood why a hyphen in the URL was good thing.
Macs are really going to stink if Apple changes their default operating system to ZFS. ZFS is a file system.
Yes, but the fanboys will still rave about how superior the whole thing is the Windows....
two words: photos and music
A rather thin article to be sure, but this machine does offer something appealing - less of everything.
More and more, after years of Windows, then a Mac, then dabbling with various Linux distros, I find myself questioning just how much of the junk on my computers is essential or even useful.
Less moving parts, simpler and fewer applications, and limited capabilities, all sound like positives, not negatives, if only because it could slow the endless stream of updates and fixes, each of which seems to introduce other problems.
I can see an OLPC machine as really good daily machine for e-mail, browsing, and some everyday tasks like word processing, at least with a bigger hard drive. With the option of maintaining a desktop PC, even a generation older, to handle the heavy lifting of Adobe and similar tools, I could probably get by nicely with this little unit.
God. My question is who would want to attribute their name to juvenile mis-spellings of common words like that. Really, there's no secret why commercial operators would keep their code secret, no need for speculation. It's a business! If you can do it, and your competitor can't, then you make money and win.
Surely there are significant issues with both Microsoft and product validation in general, but this really isn't it. He bought MS products knowing that they required validation, and now is whining because he can't install a added feature that would work with his unvalidated Visio install.
The author admits that the only obstacle he faces is running the validation wizard for Visio, after which he can happily download and install the add-in. What would that take? two minutes?
Sheesh....