It need to be available as an aggregator or automatic service, too. I didn't realize how much this mattered until I had DirecTV, Hulu+, iTunes, and Netflix all at the same time. It's a royal PITA to find your stuff and then download it and watch it (or pray that the streaming service will work).
Then I got Sickbeard and none of it matters any more - who, what, where - I just tell it the shows I want, it passes them to sabnzbd, sorts and saves them into Plex-friendly folders, and when I want to watch something I go to one place. Would I pay a subscription price for that (I'm already paying for usenet, though it's a pittance)? Yeah, if it were cheap. $1 a show isn't going to cut it. Maybe $0.50 a show as a single, $1-2 a month (weekly vs daily content) while it's running. And I want it on my computer where I control it. Not streamed, so I can't see it if I'm someone else is surfing the net. Not time limited - there are times when I may not get to see TV for 2-3 weeks (or longer) at a time. Not DRM'd so I can't re-code it for a portable device to take with me.
I still say they should go to each representative in the house and senate and require that they eliminate $2B/yr of Federal funds that flow into their district. That's just a bit over $1T/yr, which is most of the way to a balanced budget. Now, that's going to hurt some of the President's priorities, but remember that that same rep is going to have to account for those cuts in the next election. That's when you see just how popular your ideas really are.
It's easy to cut money from other peoples programs, much harder when it comes out of your own backside.
In social networking, as with many things, there can be only one premier service. Sure, there can be products which cater to a special niche, or as an alternate, but few people are going to keep two Facebook like sites going at once. Google+ offers no real compelling reason to leave the #1 player, Facebook, for the majority of users (hint: if you're reading slashdot, you're not one of those people).
Until everyone moves, nobody will. Google was jerking off with Wave and Buzz while Facebook was getting everybody and their brother on. Most people just want a social site, and Google tried to make it "more" and didn't realize that my mother, and the 13 year old kid down the street don't want "more."
Google is too late to the party, and there's too much momentum right now. In 3-4 years, if facebook starts to decline (as MySpace did), then there will be an opportunity again. Right now, though, I think it's Facebook's market to keep or screw up and it's going be difficult and take a long time to make enough people switch so that it gains momentum.
creating videos, doing market research, developing branding and strategy
That's where the money is going, I'm certain. market research and online branding is a large undertaking, even if the heavy lifting has already been done by the marketing firm that has the marketing budget for the main line.
I'd also assume $50k/year is WAY under the actual cost/employee once you figure in benefits and salaries.
Not only are they about double that, but since they are probably using outside marketing firms, you have to add another 50-100% on top of that for the firm overhead and profit. I wouldn't be surprised to see billing rates from $60-200/hr ($120k-400k/yr) for the range of people who might be working on this stuff for a national account like GM. Sure, the ground level employees are still making $35-75k, but that's nowhere near what they cost to GM.
That's interesting. I am considering a Facebook push for a local organization (an a cappella chorus) in hopes of targeting a specific demographic (location, age, sex, interest in vocal/a cappella music). The people we tend to find aren't looking for us; our best recruitment has been in direct contact with people we run into that happen to enjoy singing. They don't know they want to join a vocal group until they try it. Putting general advertising out there is pretty spotty (and expensive, even in our small market), and most of the younger people I know don't even read traditional print anymore.
I'm hoping that FB can help find the people who don't know they need to be found. If we could get 2% of active click-throughs to come out for a night as a guest, it would be a rousing success.
I think for continuous email marketing by people for events is great, but for me there's a limit to the number of times I can see an advertiser show up in email and it's much lower than a facebook status. I'm okay with 1-2 updates a month on facebook, whereas if I get an email from a business more than once every 2-3 months, I'm likely to relegate it to the auto-sweep for advertising (I keep it around for 2 months in case I need it, but normally I don't even look at the folder).
I think photographers will become luxury services, even moreso than they were a decade or two ago. When the barriers to entry get too low, you see a flood of poorly trained practicioners who don't have anything better to do with their time. It degrades the median quality significantly and pushes people to do it themselves. The top will always exist, but the middle and lower market may start to fail, leaving nothing but $10,000/day jobs and hobbiests.
Maybe. I have a family of iDevices, all of which can throw content onto my TVs via airplay/AppleTV pucks. We rarely do that. Having a dedicated remote in the room that's always with the TV is nice, as is a common front end.
Of course, my ATVs are jailbroken and run Plex to access all of our server-based movie storage (DVD/BR rips) and tv content (via sickbeard). Maybe if I didn't have that I'd wish for a phone interface, but probably not.
With the total market cap if iTV being 3%-4% of Apple's current value - yes, I believe the can. If Zuck dropped $1E9 on instagram, i think Apple can do 3x that on a company with actual revenue.
Though it will probably be an Apple TV, not an iTV.
We can double your bandwidth overnight. You will all agree to use the following, single communication type on all headsets. You all share identical spectrum and there shall be no more than one carrier will be allowed per tower.
You shall separate your infrastructure operations from your carrying operations and form state specific operation from your disperse groups. You will be required to have basic coverage over the entire landmass except where geographical features make it impracticable. Your infrastructure groups will be regulated by each state with the caveat that they shall provide identical billing prices to all carriers and that the total annual profit shall be limited to a range of 4-7% of gross operating funds, with a budget and rate setting amount between 5 and 6%. Excess profit shall be carried over for inclusion in the budget and used for infrastructure buildout or rate reductions.
All of the carrier groups, which are now wholly and permanently independent of the infrastructure no longer need worry about bandwidth internally.
I should say that my wife is actually doing research on a school from 1962 for a special event later this year, and all the things I recommend to reduce costs are what they actually did in 1962. We have lowered class sizes, made community schools, mainstreamed special ed, added K, PreK, Football and Baseball stadia, and put computers in nearly every classroom. We do it because it provides the opportunity for our kids to do more and learn more. And the kids with active parents are doing fabulous. The other 80+% are missing all that value.
It's easy to go back to that level. Double the class sizes, eliminate local schools, eliminate "special ed", Kindergarten, preschool, eliminate most sports, and get rid of all technology expenses. That will get you back to about 1.5-2x the 1962 rate (8-12x actual increase), which coincidentally is the increase in US average wages (factor of ~10.x between 1962 and today).
I suspect if you gave today's standardized tests to 1962 students, you'd find a passing rate of less than half of what it is today. Better yet, give today's test to people who were in grade school in 1962 and see how they do. I can almost guarantee you that, even with an extra 8 years of schooling past these kids, you'd still find barely a 10% pass rate.
Until you have parents willing to (a) help their kids outside of school (b) become involved in helping their local school succeed and (c) make their children accountable for learning it won't matter what the curriculum is, how much teachers get paid, or what the facilities of the school system are like. You simply cannot spend 3-4 instructional hours a day spread over a class of students for half the year (180 days), then give them no assistance outside of that and expect any significant fraction of them to succeed.
Yes, there are motivated students. Yes, there are fabulous teachers. Yes, coming to an open, inviting, and technologically advanced facility makes for a positive atmosphere.
We help my daughter every night with her homework. She's just at the end of 4th grade, but there are parts of her math that my wife knows how to do, but doesn't know well enough to teach. I'm pretty lousy at my local history (I didn't grow up here, but I was never a history buff anyway). Between the two of us, she has all the tools she needs to succeed. I cringe at a couple of the kids in her class that don't get any help on their homework; it makes me feel awful for them because I know how difficult some of the concepts were for my daughter, and how we might have spent an extra hour (or three) working though problems so that she understood them. For a 9 or 10 year old confronted with a completely foreign concept and nothing but a 30 minute class discussion and two (sometimes poor) examples it's got to be frustrating beyond belief. In two years time, I expect those kids will be in the bottom groups, failing these national tests, and not caring any more because they don't have the resources to be able to make it. Don't even get me started on the kids who parents take them on mini-vacations when they get out-of-school suspension because the parents figure if they have to take off work they may as well have some fun. Or the ones who blame the teacher when their kids get poor grades.
The problem isn't the system, or the money, or the tests...it's the parents. All the money and great teachers and fabulous facilities do is set the stage for learning. If the parents can't do their part, it will - by and large - be wasted.
Who spends that kind of time setting up downloads. That's what Couch Potato is for - when I find a movie is coming out that I want to see, I just cue it up. Plex then shows me all the new movies that the system has downloaded. It's like a new releases bar for my TV.
Oh, sure, we buy the discs from time to time - it's both legal and makes for a nice backup. Very few of the DVDs and BRs we have purchased in the past 2 years area even out of their shrink wrap.
If you provide a defective product in the marketplace, you can be held accountable regardless of any shrinkwrap text you provide with it. It is still subject to law with regard to the sale of goods (and/or services).
More importantly, if you bought CS5 for $2000 just three months ago, you have to pay to upgrade. It's like your iPhone 4 warranty running out when the 4s was released, even if you just purchased a v4 a couple weeks before hand.
In 2005 in the US, in the age group 15-24 including both males and females, the TOTAL mortality is 80 per 100,000 or 0.08%.
It doesn't take many deaths in this group to be a large statistic.
Here's a stat for you: "The mortality rate associated with anorexia nervosa is 12 times higher than the death rate associated with all causes of death for females 15-24 years old." source: American Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 152 (7), July 1995, p. 1073-1074, Sullivan, Patrick F. (from http://www.anad.org/get-information/about-eating-disorders/eating-disorders-statistics/) I haven't read the article, so they may have just made it up.
Given 100,000 people age 15-24, 3-4 of those 100,000 will both die and be female. Is it hard to imagine that 2 of them will die of eating-disorder related issues?
I find significant dissonance with their two statements:
"ways to make the developer experience as powerful and simple as possible" and "what better way to do that than beginning with a laptop that is both highly mobile and extremely stylish"
I was unaware that web designers did most of their work "in the field" away from modern conveniences like desks and dual monitors. I am also surprised that "stylish" is equated with "powerful and simple".
By the look of their press release, I'd say they are trying to convert all of the metrosexual Apple users to Dell brand users with shiny and an OSX-esque GUI. Function and capability don't appear to play into the equation much.
Slashdot Mirror
It need to be available as an aggregator or automatic service, too. I didn't realize how much this mattered until I had DirecTV, Hulu+, iTunes, and Netflix all at the same time. It's a royal PITA to find your stuff and then download it and watch it (or pray that the streaming service will work).
Then I got Sickbeard and none of it matters any more - who, what, where - I just tell it the shows I want, it passes them to sabnzbd, sorts and saves them into Plex-friendly folders, and when I want to watch something I go to one place. Would I pay a subscription price for that (I'm already paying for usenet, though it's a pittance)? Yeah, if it were cheap. $1 a show isn't going to cut it. Maybe $0.50 a show as a single, $1-2 a month (weekly vs daily content) while it's running. And I want it on my computer where I control it. Not streamed, so I can't see it if I'm someone else is surfing the net. Not time limited - there are times when I may not get to see TV for 2-3 weeks (or longer) at a time. Not DRM'd so I can't re-code it for a portable device to take with me.
I still say they should go to each representative in the house and senate and require that they eliminate $2B/yr of Federal funds that flow into their district. That's just a bit over $1T/yr, which is most of the way to a balanced budget. Now, that's going to hurt some of the President's priorities, but remember that that same rep is going to have to account for those cuts in the next election. That's when you see just how popular your ideas really are.
It's easy to cut money from other peoples programs, much harder when it comes out of your own backside.
In social networking, as with many things, there can be only one premier service. Sure, there can be products which cater to a special niche, or as an alternate, but few people are going to keep two Facebook like sites going at once. Google+ offers no real compelling reason to leave the #1 player, Facebook, for the majority of users (hint: if you're reading slashdot, you're not one of those people).
Until everyone moves, nobody will. Google was jerking off with Wave and Buzz while Facebook was getting everybody and their brother on. Most people just want a social site, and Google tried to make it "more" and didn't realize that my mother, and the 13 year old kid down the street don't want "more."
Google is too late to the party, and there's too much momentum right now. In 3-4 years, if facebook starts to decline (as MySpace did), then there will be an opportunity again. Right now, though, I think it's Facebook's market to keep or screw up and it's going be difficult and take a long time to make enough people switch so that it gains momentum.
creating videos, doing market research, developing branding and strategy
That's where the money is going, I'm certain. market research and online branding is a large undertaking, even if the heavy lifting has already been done by the marketing firm that has the marketing budget for the main line.
I'd also assume $50k/year is WAY under the actual cost/employee once you figure in benefits and salaries.
Not only are they about double that, but since they are probably using outside marketing firms, you have to add another 50-100% on top of that for the firm overhead and profit. I wouldn't be surprised to see billing rates from $60-200/hr ($120k-400k/yr) for the range of people who might be working on this stuff for a national account like GM. Sure, the ground level employees are still making $35-75k, but that's nowhere near what they cost to GM.
That's interesting. I am considering a Facebook push for a local organization (an a cappella chorus) in hopes of targeting a specific demographic (location, age, sex, interest in vocal/a cappella music). The people we tend to find aren't looking for us; our best recruitment has been in direct contact with people we run into that happen to enjoy singing. They don't know they want to join a vocal group until they try it. Putting general advertising out there is pretty spotty (and expensive, even in our small market), and most of the younger people I know don't even read traditional print anymore.
I'm hoping that FB can help find the people who don't know they need to be found. If we could get 2% of active click-throughs to come out for a night as a guest, it would be a rousing success.
I think for continuous email marketing by people for events is great, but for me there's a limit to the number of times I can see an advertiser show up in email and it's much lower than a facebook status. I'm okay with 1-2 updates a month on facebook, whereas if I get an email from a business more than once every 2-3 months, I'm likely to relegate it to the auto-sweep for advertising (I keep it around for 2 months in case I need it, but normally I don't even look at the folder).
I think photographers will become luxury services, even moreso than they were a decade or two ago. When the barriers to entry get too low, you see a flood of poorly trained practicioners who don't have anything better to do with their time. It degrades the median quality significantly and pushes people to do it themselves. The top will always exist, but the middle and lower market may start to fail, leaving nothing but $10,000/day jobs and hobbiests.
Maybe. I have a family of iDevices, all of which can throw content onto my TVs via airplay/AppleTV pucks. We rarely do that. Having a dedicated remote in the room that's always with the TV is nice, as is a common front end.
Of course, my ATVs are jailbroken and run Plex to access all of our server-based movie storage (DVD/BR rips) and tv content (via sickbeard). Maybe if I didn't have that I'd wish for a phone interface, but probably not.
Why would you have so many other devices, when the AppleTV will do all of that and more? You only need one port when you have an AppleTV!
(please don't take this post seriously, I just wondered what it would be like if I worked for Apple marketing.)
With the total market cap if iTV being 3%-4% of Apple's current value - yes, I believe the can. If Zuck dropped $1E9 on instagram, i think Apple can do 3x that on a company with actual revenue.
Though it will probably be an Apple TV, not an iTV.
We can double your bandwidth overnight. You will all agree to use the following, single communication type on all headsets. You all share identical spectrum and there shall be no more than one carrier will be allowed per tower.
You shall separate your infrastructure operations from your carrying operations and form state specific operation from your disperse groups. You will be required to have basic coverage over the entire landmass except where geographical features make it impracticable. Your infrastructure groups will be regulated by each state with the caveat that they shall provide identical billing prices to all carriers and that the total annual profit shall be limited to a range of 4-7% of gross operating funds, with a budget and rate setting amount between 5 and 6%. Excess profit shall be carried over for inclusion in the budget and used for infrastructure buildout or rate reductions.
All of the carrier groups, which are now wholly and permanently independent of the infrastructure no longer need worry about bandwidth internally.
"With a few billion, I would purchase a ton of bonds/stock/etc and live off the f'n interest with excess interest going to charity."
Mitt, stop posting on slashdot.
I should say that my wife is actually doing research on a school from 1962 for a special event later this year, and all the things I recommend to reduce costs are what they actually did in 1962. We have lowered class sizes, made community schools, mainstreamed special ed, added K, PreK, Football and Baseball stadia, and put computers in nearly every classroom. We do it because it provides the opportunity for our kids to do more and learn more. And the kids with active parents are doing fabulous. The other 80+% are missing all that value.
It's easy to go back to that level. Double the class sizes, eliminate local schools, eliminate "special ed", Kindergarten, preschool, eliminate most sports, and get rid of all technology expenses. That will get you back to about 1.5-2x the 1962 rate (8-12x actual increase), which coincidentally is the increase in US average wages (factor of ~10.x between 1962 and today).
I suspect if you gave today's standardized tests to 1962 students, you'd find a passing rate of less than half of what it is today. Better yet, give today's test to people who were in grade school in 1962 and see how they do. I can almost guarantee you that, even with an extra 8 years of schooling past these kids, you'd still find barely a 10% pass rate.
Until you have parents willing to (a) help their kids outside of school (b) become involved in helping their local school succeed and (c) make their children accountable for learning it won't matter what the curriculum is, how much teachers get paid, or what the facilities of the school system are like. You simply cannot spend 3-4 instructional hours a day spread over a class of students for half the year (180 days), then give them no assistance outside of that and expect any significant fraction of them to succeed.
Yes, there are motivated students. Yes, there are fabulous teachers. Yes, coming to an open, inviting, and technologically advanced facility makes for a positive atmosphere.
We help my daughter every night with her homework. She's just at the end of 4th grade, but there are parts of her math that my wife knows how to do, but doesn't know well enough to teach. I'm pretty lousy at my local history (I didn't grow up here, but I was never a history buff anyway). Between the two of us, she has all the tools she needs to succeed. I cringe at a couple of the kids in her class that don't get any help on their homework; it makes me feel awful for them because I know how difficult some of the concepts were for my daughter, and how we might have spent an extra hour (or three) working though problems so that she understood them. For a 9 or 10 year old confronted with a completely foreign concept and nothing but a 30 minute class discussion and two (sometimes poor) examples it's got to be frustrating beyond belief. In two years time, I expect those kids will be in the bottom groups, failing these national tests, and not caring any more because they don't have the resources to be able to make it. Don't even get me started on the kids who parents take them on mini-vacations when they get out-of-school suspension because the parents figure if they have to take off work they may as well have some fun. Or the ones who blame the teacher when their kids get poor grades.
The problem isn't the system, or the money, or the tests...it's the parents. All the money and great teachers and fabulous facilities do is set the stage for learning. If the parents can't do their part, it will - by and large - be wasted.
Yeah, that's what Hong Kong mail order is for. Any domestic per-piece, pre-carded flat cell is going to cost a fortune.
Don't blame me, I voted for Bill and Opus.
Who spends that kind of time setting up downloads. That's what Couch Potato is for - when I find a movie is coming out that I want to see, I just cue it up. Plex then shows me all the new movies that the system has downloaded. It's like a new releases bar for my TV.
Oh, sure, we buy the discs from time to time - it's both legal and makes for a nice backup. Very few of the DVDs and BRs we have purchased in the past 2 years area even out of their shrink wrap.
The Japanese.
I can't believe you even had to ask.
or maybe it was the last week of February. That's a mighty short support cycle for an expensive product. Perhaps a class action would be nice.
(note: I did not pay retail, but having essentially a 3 month supported period on a major software suite is pretty crappy)
If you provide a defective product in the marketplace, you can be held accountable regardless of any shrinkwrap text you provide with it. It is still subject to law with regard to the sale of goods (and/or services).
More importantly, if you bought CS5 for $2000 just three months ago, you have to pay to upgrade. It's like your iPhone 4 warranty running out when the 4s was released, even if you just purchased a v4 a couple weeks before hand.
I wonder if they will work on your mobile devices.
They'll be all like, "Yo Dawg, I put an app in your app so you can facebook while you facebook."
Dead horse, stick, go.
That statistic is meaningless. Go here: http://www.disastercenter.com/cdc/Leading%20Cause%20of%20Death%201999-2005.html
In 2005 in the US, in the age group 15-24 including both males and females, the TOTAL mortality is 80 per 100,000 or 0.08%.
It doesn't take many deaths in this group to be a large statistic.
Here's a stat for you:
"The mortality rate associated with anorexia nervosa is 12 times higher than the death rate associated with all causes of death for females 15-24 years old." source: American Journal of Psychiatry, Vol. 152 (7), July 1995, p. 1073-1074, Sullivan, Patrick F. (from http://www.anad.org/get-information/about-eating-disorders/eating-disorders-statistics/) I haven't read the article, so they may have just made it up.
Given 100,000 people age 15-24, 3-4 of those 100,000 will both die and be female. Is it hard to imagine that 2 of them will die of eating-disorder related issues?
And let me fuck your wife and any daugheters. And your grandmother. I kindda like your aunt too.
That's how all of IT marketing works, after all
Hmm...learn something new every day.
I find significant dissonance with their two statements:
"ways to make the developer experience as powerful and simple as possible" and
"what better way to do that than beginning with a laptop that is both highly mobile and extremely stylish"
I was unaware that web designers did most of their work "in the field" away from modern conveniences like desks and dual monitors. I am also surprised that "stylish" is equated with "powerful and simple".
By the look of their press release, I'd say they are trying to convert all of the metrosexual Apple users to Dell brand users with shiny and an OSX-esque GUI. Function and capability don't appear to play into the equation much.