The key to Ebay's success is not the pricing or the auction model, but the advertising. All the goods of a particular sort that you might be looking for, readily available in one spot, and deliverable regardless of where you are located.
Ebay cuts down the work you would normally have to do to find items to purchase on the net, and provides a "standard framework" for same.
The "standard framework" could, of course, exist without Ebay...
It looks just like the led displays on a number of mainframe memory boards from way back.
I felt so nostalgic that I hooked up my old KSR-33 to type this, but Slashdot's lameness filter kept complaining about all upper-case.
30
on soil where wheat wouldn't grow before (go check...) in order to grow the wheat, then use the straw to make ethanol to burn in the car that was originally designed to run on the oil. Not to mention the oil products it takes to run the combines, discers, etc. and the power it took to run the fertiliser plant.
While this gets an "A" for using a product that would ordinarily not have a high value, straw does rot back to its initial components and forms a major source of nutrients for upcoming wheat crops. Removing it for fuel just means you have to put more oil-based fertiliser.
Seems to me that if you shorten this chain the efficiency might go up a little...
Pushing the button on a camera is not photography, just as moving a paintbrush is not painting.
When you look at art for any length of time (commercial or fine) you begin to notice a pattern. The pieces that become popular are the ones that required much work and input.
Yes, I know imaging looks simple, but believe me, it is a true exercise in communications and planning.
True, I agree with you that most professional photographers are not the sort of artists one envisions but you have to understand exactly what their art is. They are the creators of a visual communication, be it for the purposes of media, merchandising, or memories. Not everyone works in the "fine" arts. Commercial art is much, much more difficult.
There is definitely an art to being able to pose thirty thousand school photos in a row, do them all in time, paid and delivered, and make money at it. Oh, and do it so you don't have hordes of screaming parents at the same time.
Who extended the marine rights of the US to two hundred miles off-shore for most purposes, including shipping and fishing. It was done in response to other countries who were extending marine boundaries for a variety of reasons.
Besides, it's not like the Navy doesn't know where you are. It's just that their equipment is better hidden. Oh, and as far as "rights" out on the open ocean go you don't have any, as opposed to the captain of an aircraft carrier, who obviously does...
...you must have a different sort of Starbucks near you than I have near me.
Besides, friends don't let friends drink Starbucks.
This is media. It's pretty much all this way.
on
Inside TechTV/G4
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The purpose of a media company is to make money selling product and promoting the owner's point of view. This, in turn, means that viewer share is paramount, and that if you have to "fix" the content to get more viewer share, so be it.
Viewers do not want reality. They get enough of it from work, raising children, the tax man, and the world in general. They want to associate, identify, and forget the crummy world they had to endure most of the day. The masses want Disney, okay?
You should always remember a media business truism: "The public are morons". Media types will never say this out where you can hear them, but I have sat through enough conference room discussions to know where these folks land. The reason for this is simple. In the great statistical average of the world, it's true. As much as you would have it otherwise.
It is said that only one person out of thirty creates art, literature, science, or policy. Skip media. Hang around those folks instead. Become one of them. We need all we can get.
If you cannot stop people from doing dumb things and running systems that are open to this sort of abuse, then at least they could be nice enough to not bother the rest of us.
I need a router/switch/filter that recognises worm/virus traffic for what it is and sets QOS down (or out) on such traffic. Better yet, I want my internet provider to have one. So the neighbor next door's got twelve sessions of Butt Trumpet running on his PC and more broadband in Mbps than he has brain cells to rub together, doesn't mean the pipes I use outta here need to be effected.
Niceties would be an ability to recognise interactive traffic and flag it for regular service. Not an original idea, by the by, was first mentioned in sf by John Brunner some years back.
Another project I will never get round to.
This is the end of the rant. We now return you to your regularly scheduled/. programming. Had this been of actual importance, you would have been instructed where to browse for further news and information. This is only a rant.
Re:He didn't end up owning anything anyway
on
Time Sharing Cars
·
· Score: 1
First, compare the trade-in value of any normal vehicle (not your atypical Ferrari bourgemobile, okay?) to what you spend in payment, maintenance, insurance, finance charges, registration, etc. Now add in the fact that a modern consumer-class car is engineered to wear out very shortly after the finance period. What exactly do you have left in terms of money?
Second, what I want is instant convienient transportation from one place to another, not a consumer car sitting idle most of the time. Collecting old cars is okay, I just think it's a hobby, not a lifestyle requirement.
*tenderly pats '73 Dodge camper van on front fender*
Regular rentals worked out for me....
on
Time Sharing Cars
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
When I lived in town, I realized that I was spending money on a car in order to drive it thirty minutes per day. I would drive fifteen minutes to work, let car sit for ten hours, drive fifteen minutes home, let car sit for ten hours, most weekdays. I found that I really only needed a car on the weekends.
Then one day, my beast of burden sat down on the side of the road and died. There was no cure.
So I went down to the local rental place, and made them a deal. I simply told them that I would like a car every weekend starting on Friday evening and that I would bring it back Sunday. I let them keep the deposit on file. They got steady business, I got whatever I needed (a clean, maintained car, truck, SUV, or convertible).
Sure, it was not all roses. There were times when I needed a truck but had to use an SUV. The Caddy convertible was not always available, but I got by. Low and behold, when I am totalling up the charges, it came to no more than the cost I spent on my old car. Go figure.
Now I live in the woods, so a ride is a necessity, but if I ever move back to the core, let me tell you...
... Just keep the same old principle in mind that has been in use since WWI (Yes, that's right. The early nineteen hundreds).
"Speed of motion" (as opposed to actual velocity) is apparent. When the aircraft is coming toward or away from you, it's speed of motion is less than if it was passing side to side. Just get in line with the sucker as it lines up on approach. Fire toward it.
Rifle fire has brought down military jets with this technique. It's as old as the first biplanes, and still works.
Chances are pretty good that you can do this with a proper rifle scope and a small hand LASER. As far as brightness goes, remember, the LASER (even at five milliwatts) is focused tightly. The beam is usually also parallel to a good extent. I can verify that at five miles on a bright day a five milliwatt LASER is the brightest thing on the horizon IF YOU GET LINED UP WITH IT.
No Problem. You can take back your time.
on
Life Interrupted
·
· Score: 1
This has been in use at auditoriums and high-end video projector for some time. Most of them use dye-based lasers, LCD or Kerr shutters, and some sort of moving mirror arrangement for the scanning. Difficult to get set up, and often lose sync if you thump them while thay are working.
Sure. You just have to focus it finely enough. Chip vias and leads are often soldered or cut with just five milliwatts worth of laser light, but they are focused down to dots of less than a thousandth of an inch or so in size.
A decent soldering iron is only about fifteen watts, and you lose most of that to the surroundings rather than the work.
http://www.fda.gov/cdrh/index.html for the governmental take on this sort of thing.
Aside from that, It's pretty easy to bang together anywhere from one to thirty watts or so of genuine tm00 when you need to. The laser diode bars out of high-end (real) laser printers do an pretty good job of pumping either gas or solid phase lasers. Microwave oven parts and glass tubing can be recycled into a pretty good nitrogen laser, and you don't even need a vacuum pump...
Build robot lander to deliver "slow nuke" device to asteroid surface. Melt the little bugger completely, boil off light molecules to vacuum, allow to cool (which will take some time) and then park remaining ball of heavy metals in orbit. Robotic equipment can grab it from there.
Okay, there is a little slippage technology-wise, but at least it gives us something to do with all those fissionables we have laying around. It might even be possible to but a spin on the critter and get the heavier elements into one spot, and then just keep them while putting the rest of the iron and whatnot into parking orbit at L5 until we can figure out how to use it.
Quantum Physics is Like 15th Century Astronomy
on
Subatomic Darwinism
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
I suspect that somewhere it went wrong. Modern physicists are much like the ancient astronomers.
These astronomers, believing that planetary orbits were circular, developed much arcane math and explanation as to why they couldn't completely account for the observed data. They could not imagine such a thing as an elliptical orbit.
Modern physicists, believing that wavelets acted a particular way under certain observation arrangements, developed much arcane math and explanation as to why they couldn't completely account for the observed data. They could not imagine such a thing as a (insert reason here).
I believe that somewhere along the way, a key piece of information may have been missed that would make all of this very simple. Lord knows, I could be wrong...
I agree with both of you above. The conversation thread illustrates something that is often forgotten: production cost.
Even with advances in my particular field (photos/imaging) the technical side of things was never the great expense. It was legal work, model releases, rights assignments, sets, model (human and item) fees, planning, building, etc.
As an example, take a look at any simple illustrative picture in a major magazine advert. Now really look at it. Now try to figure the costs of all those items, set walls, special effects, planning, background painting, on, and on. Try to remember that professionals at this sort of work get about forty to fifty dollars per hour on the average. When you stack it all together you will find that it often COST multiple thousands of dollars, and that is money the photograper (artist) has to come up with until he/she is paid.
This is why you don't see the sort of commercial art in the Commons that you would expect. If you want landscapes and inanimate objects, then the US government operate several repositories for nature, wildlife, space, underwater, tourist photo, etc. You've probably bought them before, as this seems to be where most postcard photos in this country derive.
It's not just imaging, either. All arts have production cost, even if it's just feeding the artist (and hopefully cleaning out his cage...) For an instructive time, just check out the price of a usable number four filbert brush, or a pound tube of good (not great) white oil paint.
Slashdot Mirror
Along with Ebay and PayPal, of course.
The key to Ebay's success is not the pricing or the auction model, but the advertising. All the goods of a particular sort that you might be looking for, readily available in one spot, and deliverable regardless of where you are located.
Ebay cuts down the work you would normally have to do to find items to purchase on the net, and provides a "standard framework" for same.
The "standard framework" could, of course, exist without Ebay...
whether to install a Foreman-huckstered product on a kitchen countertop or a tailpipe. Now I have to add network ports...
It looks just like the led displays on a number of mainframe memory boards from way back.
I felt so nostalgic that I hooked up my old KSR-33 to type this, but Slashdot's lameness filter kept complaining about all upper-case.
30
So, I download on my 1.45Mbps stream, and my outgoing is set to 128KBps. The guy who gets connected to me is going to be really hosed....
on soil where wheat wouldn't grow before (go check...) in order to grow the wheat, then use the straw to make ethanol to burn in the car that was originally designed to run on the oil. Not to mention the oil products it takes to run the combines, discers, etc. and the power it took to run the fertiliser plant.
While this gets an "A" for using a product that would ordinarily not have a high value, straw does rot back to its initial components and forms a major source of nutrients for upcoming wheat crops. Removing it for fuel just means you have to put more oil-based fertiliser.
Seems to me that if you shorten this chain the efficiency might go up a little...
Pushing the button on a camera is not photography, just as moving a paintbrush is not painting.
When you look at art for any length of time (commercial or fine) you begin to notice a pattern. The pieces that become popular are the ones that required much work and input.
Yes, I know imaging looks simple, but believe me, it is a true exercise in communications and planning.
True, I agree with you that most professional photographers are not the sort of artists one envisions but you have to understand exactly what their art is. They are the creators of a visual communication, be it for the purposes of media, merchandising, or memories. Not everyone works in the "fine" arts. Commercial art is much, much more difficult.
There is definitely an art to being able to pose thirty thousand school photos in a row, do them all in time, paid and delivered, and make money at it. Oh, and do it so you don't have hordes of screaming parents at the same time.
Who extended the marine rights of the US to two hundred miles off-shore for most purposes, including shipping and fishing. It was done in response to other countries who were extending marine boundaries for a variety of reasons.
Besides, it's not like the Navy doesn't know where you are. It's just that their equipment is better hidden. Oh, and as far as "rights" out on the open ocean go you don't have any, as opposed to the captain of an aircraft carrier, who obviously does...
...you must have a different sort of Starbucks near you than I have near me.
Besides, friends don't let friends drink Starbucks.
The purpose of a media company is to make money selling product and promoting the owner's point of view. This, in turn, means that viewer share is paramount, and that if you have to "fix" the content to get more viewer share, so be it.
Viewers do not want reality. They get enough of it from work, raising children, the tax man, and the world in general. They want to associate, identify, and forget the crummy world they had to endure most of the day. The masses want Disney, okay?
You should always remember a media business truism: "The public are morons". Media types will never say this out where you can hear them, but I have sat through enough conference room discussions to know where these folks land. The reason for this is simple. In the great statistical average of the world, it's true. As much as you would have it otherwise.
It is said that only one person out of thirty creates art, literature, science, or policy. Skip media. Hang around those folks instead. Become one of them. We need all we can get.
Yes, I consider the Internet to be media now...
everytime I need to use one I don't want to waste any time reading what's printed on it.
definitely not insightful.
I wrote it, so someone else will have to fix this.
I forsee an upswing in conductive clothing with insulated liners, and ground connections.
If you cannot stop people from doing dumb things and running systems that are open to this sort of abuse, then at least they could be nice enough to not bother the rest of us.
/. programming. Had this been of actual importance, you would have been instructed where to browse for further news and information. This is only a rant.
I need a router/switch/filter that recognises worm/virus traffic for what it is and sets QOS down (or out) on such traffic. Better yet, I want my internet provider to have one. So the neighbor next door's got twelve sessions of Butt Trumpet running on his PC and more broadband in Mbps than he has brain cells to rub together, doesn't mean the pipes I use outta here need to be effected.
Niceties would be an ability to recognise interactive traffic and flag it for regular service. Not an original idea, by the by, was first mentioned in sf by John Brunner some years back.
Another project I will never get round to.
This is the end of the rant. We now return you to your regularly scheduled
First, compare the trade-in value of any normal vehicle (not your atypical Ferrari bourgemobile, okay?) to what you spend in payment, maintenance, insurance, finance charges, registration, etc. Now add in the fact that a modern consumer-class car is engineered to wear out very shortly after the finance period. What exactly do you have left in terms of money?
Second, what I want is instant convienient transportation from one place to another, not a consumer car sitting idle most of the time. Collecting old cars is okay, I just think it's a hobby, not a lifestyle requirement.
*tenderly pats '73 Dodge camper van on front fender*
When I lived in town, I realized that I was spending money on a car in order to drive it thirty minutes per day. I would drive fifteen minutes to work, let car sit for ten hours, drive fifteen minutes home, let car sit for ten hours, most weekdays. I found that I really only needed a car on the weekends.
Then one day, my beast of burden sat down on the side of the road and died. There was no cure.
So I went down to the local rental place, and made them a deal. I simply told them that I would like a car every weekend starting on Friday evening and that I would bring it back Sunday. I let them keep the deposit on file. They got steady business, I got whatever I needed (a clean, maintained car, truck, SUV, or convertible).
Sure, it was not all roses. There were times when I needed a truck but had to use an SUV. The Caddy convertible was not always available, but I got by. Low and behold, when I am totalling up the charges, it came to no more than the cost I spent on my old car. Go figure.
Now I live in the woods, so a ride is a necessity, but if I ever move back to the core, let me tell you...
Somebody mod the parent up. This is exactly how federal security works. You don't know, and thus you can't tell.
If it came from a government source or press release, then it is smoke and mirrors.
... Just keep the same old principle in mind that has been in use since WWI (Yes, that's right. The early nineteen hundreds).
"Speed of motion" (as opposed to actual velocity) is apparent. When the aircraft is coming toward or away from you, it's speed of motion is less than if it was passing side to side. Just get in line with the sucker as it lines up on approach. Fire toward it.
Rifle fire has brought down military jets with this technique. It's as old as the first biplanes, and still works.
Chances are pretty good that you can do this with a proper rifle scope and a small hand LASER. As far as brightness goes, remember, the LASER (even at five milliwatts) is focused tightly. The beam is usually also parallel to a good extent. I can verify that at five miles on a bright day a five milliwatt LASER is the brightest thing on the horizon IF YOU GET LINED UP WITH IT.
I'll just take back your paycheck.
Depends on how you build and pump it. Sometimes you don't need no stinking mirrors, as in the case of certain gas (N2) lasers.
It's cheaper to just buy solid lasers, but they are interesting to build.
This has been in use at auditoriums and high-end video projector for some time. Most of them use dye-based lasers, LCD or Kerr shutters, and some sort of moving mirror arrangement for the scanning. Difficult to get set up, and often lose sync if you thump them while thay are working.
Sure. You just have to focus it finely enough. Chip vias and leads are often soldered or cut with just five milliwatts worth of laser light, but they are focused down to dots of less than a thousandth of an inch or so in size.
A decent soldering iron is only about fifteen watts, and you lose most of that to the surroundings rather than the work.
http://www.fda.gov/cdrh/index.html for the governmental take on this sort of thing.
Aside from that, It's pretty easy to bang together anywhere from one to thirty watts or so of genuine tm00 when you need to. The laser diode bars out of high-end (real) laser printers do an pretty good job of pumping either gas or solid phase lasers. Microwave oven parts and glass tubing can be recycled into a pretty good nitrogen laser, and you don't even need a vacuum pump...
Build robot lander to deliver "slow nuke" device to asteroid surface. Melt the little bugger completely, boil off light molecules to vacuum, allow to cool (which will take some time) and then park remaining ball of heavy metals in orbit. Robotic equipment can grab it from there.
Okay, there is a little slippage technology-wise, but at least it gives us something to do with all those fissionables we have laying around. It might even be possible to but a spin on the critter and get the heavier elements into one spot, and then just keep them while putting the rest of the iron and whatnot into parking orbit at L5 until we can figure out how to use it.
I suspect that somewhere it went wrong. Modern physicists are much like the ancient astronomers.
These astronomers, believing that planetary orbits were circular, developed much arcane math and explanation as to why they couldn't completely account for the observed data. They could not imagine such a thing as an elliptical orbit.
Modern physicists, believing that wavelets acted a particular way under certain observation arrangements, developed much arcane math and explanation as to why they couldn't completely account for the observed data. They could not imagine such a thing as a (insert reason here).
I believe that somewhere along the way, a key piece of information may have been missed that would make all of this very simple. Lord knows, I could be wrong...
I agree with both of you above. The conversation thread illustrates something that is often forgotten: production cost.
Even with advances in my particular field (photos/imaging) the technical side of things was never the great expense. It was legal work, model releases, rights assignments, sets, model (human and item) fees, planning, building, etc.
As an example, take a look at any simple illustrative picture in a major magazine advert. Now really look at it. Now try to figure the costs of all those items, set walls, special effects, planning, background painting, on, and on. Try to remember that professionals at this sort of work get about forty to fifty dollars per hour on the average. When you stack it all together you will find that it often COST multiple thousands of dollars, and that is money the photograper (artist) has to come up with until he/she is paid.
This is why you don't see the sort of commercial art in the Commons that you would expect. If you want landscapes and inanimate objects, then the US government operate several repositories for nature, wildlife, space, underwater, tourist photo, etc. You've probably bought them before, as this seems to be where most postcard photos in this country derive.
It's not just imaging, either. All arts have production cost, even if it's just feeding the artist (and hopefully cleaning out his cage...) For an instructive time, just check out the price of a usable number four filbert brush, or a pound tube of good (not great) white oil paint.