I live in Manhattan KS at the moment. Bush came in today to speak about how he plans to run the nation (poorly, as usual). But I used to live in KC. Yes, there's a lot of dentists in KC. But how often do you notice them advertising? At least in my neck of the woods, never. Should you stick around abusive dentists? No! In fact, I suggested that you'd be right to leave the practice and find a new one.
However, I think your righteous indignation spilled over into your retelling of the story, and I don't think it's inappropriate to conclude from your writing that you, at the least, matched the aggression the secretary presented you. I think its stupid for a practice to threaten a customer, and then yell at them, and the relative market demand doesn't justify that kind of behavior. The letter made it clear that they either wanted you to change or stop service; you made your choice and they got upset-- no human being deserves that kind of irrational treatment. If you're really the vindictive sort, a brief and politely written letter to the appropriate professional association should suffice to turn the screws;)
More importantly, I'd suggest that perhaps you've cherry picked an business to make the point about customers vs serf. At the very least, your needs are not the sort of clients their practice had in mind, and most of dentistry operates as I've described, sans the passive-aggressive secretary. You can't say that about retail, food, passenger airlines, auto sales, or software development contracting, or a myriad of other american businesses.
GOOD DENTISTS are usually booked for months, being in high demand. Making an appointment is basicaly an unstated promise to arrive and do business, and if they're not in the habit of double booking that's a waste of resources. Lost money. However you want to look at it, it's a waste. I've not heard of dentists charging for missed appointments, but I suppose it's one way of deterring this sort of waste. Usually making an appointment for a month later is punishment enough to people, I'd imagine.
More importantly, good dentists usually aren't looking for new clients, being booked for months and all. Sure, you can work your way through every shitty unscroupulus dentist who can't keep clients in town by "firing" the previous one, but you can't exactly do the same thing with dentists who know what's up. Finding new clients is expensive compared to servicing the same clients (and their children) over and over again.
The fact that you were able to reschedule for a week later kind of indicates you're not the only person having troubles with the dentist. So you're perhaps justified in leaving, but maybe abusing the secretary is overboard. However, if you repeatedly have to reschedule appointments days or hours before they occur, you're simply going to have to do a lot of shopping around and keep the attidude in check. Since you apparently make quite a bit of money, perhaps you can find a doctor who specializes in keeping a far more open schedule in exchange for a higher fee. At least, I've read about doctors who only take in perhaps 10 clients and offer a far higher level of service; how useful this would be in dentistry is unclear to me.
"The officers suggest a list of Healthy Titles for players to enjoy. The list includes titles such as 'Whack-A-Coon', 'Which Towelhead Is The Terrorist' (the answer is all of them) and the highly controversial 'MLK Assassination Simulator.'"
It's not like he's putting that money in a money market fund (that's a travesty of a whole 'nother sort that ought to be a crime against humanity, whether you're alive or dead!); presumably the money is being invested on his behalf by someone in charge of his estate. In such a manner this money still serves to lower interest rates, create wealth etc as it would if his already well to do child inherited it. The big question is if and when government gets a cut, and if his children can successfully sue to invalidate the will or whatever have you that directs his estate. I don't see it working, if only because unthawing someone frozen incorrectly successfully is probably harder than curing whatever disease ailed them.
Even the article suggests that Ebay lost to Yahoo! because they were late getting to market in Japan. Metcalf's law really applies in ebay style auctioneering. In the absense of software interoperable with ALL auction sites, the largest site will have huge advantages over competitors identical in operations. If bidders have to use the website to find auctions and bid, then they'll gravitate to one or two sites, the ones with the largest selection. The primary function of this is the number of people visiting, so early gains over competitors aren't just important, they're vital. It would appear that marketplaces are one area that gravitate towards a natural monopoly.
The problem here is that the technology "capable of saving small town America" is also available to everyone NOT in small town America as well. In fact, the same advantages that make large towns work better than small towns make the Internet work better for large towns than small towns. How many small towns have cheap and widely available broadband Internet access? Geography and demographics play an important role in availablity here. Sure, the cost of living and real estate may be cheaper, but the prices to bring high speed internet to Colby, Kansas might not be attractive. The theory is that even better technology can help fix this, but so far I haven't seen anything worthy of mention.
Another problem is the attitudes frequently found in small town america. There are people who worry that success will drasticaly change the atmosphere, either through large jumps in population, building and the likes, or that prosperity itself will destroy the values and way of life they appreciate. There's even a few who worry that prosperity will bring an increase in taxes. You can see the influence taxes wield in small town america just by looking at the local school district budget. Expecting entrepeneurs to spring forth from this environment is silly. For most of the guys I know that come from small towns, they'd just as soon live in a large metropolitian area and make a million dollars a year than do the same in their hometown. And even if there was a couple entrepeneurs thinking of a product on the national level, there simply aren't enough local human resources compared with the suburbs a few hours drive away. Try finding a competent graphic designer for hire. Or webmaster. Better yet, try finding an unemployed network engineer that lives locally. And you'd really have troubles convincing a potential hire with a family of three to move.
Napster was successful because he saw a common problem and came up with a fairly common solution. Napster didn't invent mp3 trading; he took the already prevailant method of ratio uploading and FTPs and mp3 search engines and combined them all, removing the designations between client and server. And he couldn't have done it without access to subsized internet from his University dorm room. Furthermore, all the guy did was invent a better way to steal things; there wasn't even a profit motive! Universities are the one place small america can look to for a pooling of young mobile talent; but Uni towns rarely resemble the small town america we know. Firstly, they're not exactly small. 30 thousand students alone means we're starting to break the definition, and doubly so once you figure in people in jobs serving those students etc. Manhattan, KS for example, has about 40 thousand people living in it. Sadly, the cost of living is almost the same as the suburbs of KC in Johnson County. If you've got an idea that needs a lot of part time people though, Manhattan's your place.
First off, the state of radio: ClearChannel is reducing (or has reduced) the number of ads they run, XM and Sirius are making fast gains. The future of radio advertising is looking bleak. A lot of radio ads are sold by salesmen, with high costs. Radio basically consists of pop music and a lot of fractured markets like country, rock and rap. Every day, more of those fractured markets change to pop hoping to get more listeners and consequently more advertisers. If your goal is to make a market out of the sale and purchase of advertising, the last thing you want to see is consolidation, shrinking supplies and fewer buyers.
Secondly, the state of internet; Google has shown an immense capability to compete in internet advertising systems. They've basically automated the sales process, and have a stellar program that can take text pages and generate a degree of relevance to a given ad. Their internet ad division brings in more and more money each quarter. Even their competitors are growing at 50 to 100 percent quarter to quarter.
All the analysts appear to think that Google is going to expand their current services into radio. Expanding there doesn't make sense. Nobody's listening to radio, and the size of that nobody gets smaller every day. The technology needed to create a context and compare it to a given advertiser is ridiculusly hard. Google almost certainly knows this (to call contextualizing digital streams Google's "core competancy" is a foolish oversimplification); what I don't know is if Google plans to try anyways. To give an example, I doubt lining up an ad about Mutual Funds following a song about flashing bling is likely to do well, despite some similarities. Google's text ads work better here because the Internet is a very big place. Most of the advertising that AdSense runs is put on informative articles rather than entertainment, which means they generally don't have to translate content into interest. It's possible that dMarc has a huge and valuable technology that can already come up with some of this demographics information, but I don't expect to see anything out of google that will improve or create new information of this sort. I don't think they do either: look at the conditional terms. Google might have to pay ten times as much for dMarc depending on things like ad inventory growth (pretty much out of their hands if the market continues to contract), integration and revenue growth targets are met. Of these three, I'd only expect the integration one to have a decent chance at paying off.
Instead, its pretty obvious this acquisition is more about what dMarc did BEFORE it was spun off into a radio advertising firm: it sold more internet ads than doubleclick. Many of the key people are still there. Maybe they'll start buying and selling digital radio ads, but I don't see that being a very good game (Yahoo!'s already tried it and they just missed earnings expectations) and there's some complexities revolving around the broadcast of ads over digital radio streams. What makes a lot more sense is video.google.com. Huge inventory of pre-existing content, and they've already got the functionality to take payments from advertisers and to pay video holders. The obvious tactic would be to put the ad in front of video clips, but this probably requires a change in the EULA to let google do that, which may or may not construe an affront of their goodwill. The less obvious strategy is to build an opt in system whereby the content authors get paid a bit for putting in their targeted ads. The benefit here is that part of the effort (determining when and how many ads to introduce) is removed from google and placed into the hands of the content producers.
If this is the case, it provides dMarc with a way into an expanding market and provides google with a good way for Google to expand their revenue growth outside of a narrowly defined market. The downside is that this is still yet another form of advertising, not the kind of diversity of earnings that I'd like to see from a company now worth more than Berkshire-Hathaway.
Of course the vast majority aren't gold farmers. The thing is, most of the Chinese play on Chinese servers where they can talk and play with other Chinese using a Chinese localized client. Most of the little I know about WoW comes from my roommate, but I do read on occasion about WoW and if what I've read is correct there are tons of people playing WoW (and paying by the hour) in China. I suppose it's entirely possible that there are tons of farmers in Mexico, or the US as well. Hell, it could be some people pretending to be foreign so they have an excuse to ninja the loot.
I do have an interesting story to tell where in my roommate had sort of brokered an agreement with a "gold farmer" to simply buy the farmer's produced materials with in game gold, and would easily sell it for like 5 times as much on the auction house. I guess the fact that these people either don't have the money or time to learn how to play the auction house for more money speaks to something, but I'm not sure what. Perhaps the authortarian nature or the overwhelming poverty combined with slaving demands of their employers, I donno. Maybe it points to corrupt morality of Western society, but on the other hand, when was the morality of your actions an overriding concern within a fucking video game?!
Honestly, the number I mentioned was simply to place the idea that it wasn't simply feasible, and maybe bring up the notion that there's more to the equation than civil liberties, such as the economy. The administration is doing an okay job there, although undoing years of communist regime naturally times time (though the numbers coming from Beijing are likely fraudulent, I believe them to be only overstating an already good number). The rest of arguments can be equally applied at the margins of immigration. Why dont more people leave China? Because France is already in deep(er) shit reguarding immigration after the riots recently. Moreover, none of the countries surrounding China are friendly enough to accept immigrants on any serious basis. Or maybe you think Australia is better equipped? They're certainly doing an okay job of it, but they may already be close to the locally tolerable limits.
On a side topic, maybe traditional Chinese wisdom is wrong. Should I close the blinds when my neighbors beat their wife and children? Or turn the volume on my ipod up when passing beggars? Does free speech not apply when the majority dissents with the opinion? Would anything have been done about the birth gaps if other societies hadn't noticed, and verbally complained? If Taiwan or a border state suddenly found itself under attack, are we to maintain a neutral position at all costs? If Mississippi wants to attack blacks with water hoses and dogs, is it rude to suggest they stop?
As best I can decipher the logic, the chinese administration feels its population incapable of distinguishing truth from lies, even in the long run. If they believed differently, then the widespread dissemination of information on all topics would be a positive societal gain obstructed by the administration. Alternatively, it wouldn't be difficult to imagine that the administration is afraid that allowing free global communication would quickly lead to their own undoing, despite the economic progress they've made. I can't say I like governments lying to the people they're charged with protecting, domestic or abroad.
Well, I'll take on your bear of a question. Keep in mind that I don't particularly favor China's administration or its policies.
First off, according to the CIA World factbook, China's population is about 1.5 billion. This is out of about 6.5 billion world wide. Their unemployment rate is about ten percent nationally, with a reported "unemployment and underemployment rate" at twice that. I think its safe to say that very few of these people have the weath required to simply leave. Also remember that few Chinese have the kind of means access to the internet you have in the first place. I don't just mean unfiltered content, but a physical computer and stable and affordable electricity to power it. Of course, this isn't the only means of censoring dissent. Newspapers are frequently accused of whitewashing and publishing only approved content. But even if 1 billion Chinese who felt oppressed and/or unserved by the current authorities wanted and could afford to migrate, it would be difficult to accomodate them. Putting these people to work, in say France, would be difficult since few would have the language skills nessecary, among other things. Shifting that many people is simply untenable in the short term.
Furthermore, even if nations had the available housing and whatnot to accomodate this, many are unwilling to accept large numbers of immigrants. The nation most able to accommodate Chinese immigrants is probably the US, as we've got plenty of land and are a next exporter of food. But I'm sure you've witnessed the backlash to border patrolling and outsourcing lately. Protectionist laws favoring the current labor pool are a large force to recon with and would quickly moblize to squash any such mass immigration bill in Congress. Additionally, the current administration seems paralyzed, in a way, by the terrorist attacks on the WTC. Because such a immigration allowance would be considered a security risk, theres no way the administration would ever propose this. Hell, even student visas are down after 9/11, as some of the attackers were here on visas. It seems some people love America's prosperity, and others love it's freedom, but nobody will trade one to give the other to everyone.
In the long term, the best option is to reform China's pratices. Theoretically, China has democratic means to address social problems. In some ways, the authoritarian executive branch (unelected, btw) is an ally of change, and an enemy. For example, take the number from the CIA world factbook for China's male to female birth rate. 115:100 is a pretty damn high number, and you probably know why. Wikipedia suggests that a recent finding thinks its partly to do with hepatitis, but there's still a cultural bias against having a daughter. The Chinese administration has taken a couple of good steps towards solving the problem of infanctide. On the otherhand, the administration also takes very poorly to criticism of its policies, and allowing the public to hear it. I subscribe to the John Stuart Mill's philosophy that both truth and opinion are public goods, and look forward to the day in which the administration submits to the democratic process as well. But I expect that as long as their economy is doing better, there won't be any leverage for that to happen. There's still humanitarian things that could be addressed, but perhaps we should look in the mirror before preaching abroad.
Simply put, people deserve a government that acts in their own interests without having to resort to democracy of the foot.
The bluetooth spec doesn't allow for more than 30 feet. Your average laptop connections might go further, but don't expect the Lego smart brick to push much past it.
You know, I just might hate MMORPGs and MMORPG "analysis" enough to be "the game player who officially invited the agency to visit the world of MMOs and gave the feds the opening to tax virtual income". I might have to change my legal name afterwards, though. Hopefully provoking 2 million people into burning my house down isn't considered insurance fruad.
In truth, the old system could do the same thing with the IR device it came with. Its just that few people bothered to make anything complicated enough to warrant it. The same will happen here; certainly elementary and high school teachers will be ill equipped to use this functionality.
I know Circuit City at least, uses independent contractors. They post things to computerrepair (apparently now named Onforce), and I think i saw a couple of Geek Squad postings. Point is, the pay was awful. Partly, this is because much of the requests are doable by your average geeky highschooler (image a computer, install a print driver, "remove spyware"). Maybe these are simply the worst of the worst, the things that the company has decided cannot be done profitably (or fast enough). But look at it this way; the length of time it takes to perform your average virus and spyware scan is typically outside the range of what they're willing to pay.
Best Buy et all are capable of offering the service because they already have a large store of parts and a nationwide marketing budget. If I could charge 230 dollars for an onsite visit, that might be worth it, though we've no way of telling how popular these expensive services are. Either way I've got to compete with the likes of GeekSquad on price and services. So when the grandparent says that he will never service home users again, perhaps its because they simply lack the resources that GS does to efficiently help these people. Specialization is entirely possible, with one firm being better at (and being known for being good at) home and another at business.
BG&E didn't have that much going for it. It's really only notable in that you actually see women that aren't overendowed fantasies of their male creators, intended to reward their male fanbase (*cough*Ghost in the Shell*cough*). They make the distinction between story-writing and story-telling, and somehow claim that because the game never addresses the mismash of reality and fantasy passes for a coherent telling of story.
I haven't played Kong yet, so I can't really tell whether he was able to execute better with a script in front of him. On the other hand, I much more deeply value game designers who are able to impress me rather than film directors and buffs. I think the same goes for everyone;)
I haven't used LISP, but I do have experience with a functional language (OCaml). Praytell how do you permit multithreaded access local variables of a function without severely destroying things? "Stack variables" in C are variables local to the function (and parameters). To access the local variables within another thread you'd have to perform some very specific kludges to obtain a reference into another thread's stack, either by knowing presciently where the compiler will place the thread or some communciation thereafter. Leaking pointers to stack data is a fast way to wind up with exactly that sort of race condition.
If I understand your language correctly, what I understand to be happening in their C++ multithreaded system was bluntly impossible to do in LISP. You can't have the problem, because you can't solve it that way. The typical C++ solution is to use shared globals and accurately protect them. I suppose there could be a kludge workaround to what I'm saying, but the general point I was making was that it's a kludge in C/C++ too. Trying something like that in a multithreaded LISP environment isn't something on my todo list, however.
Not that I have an axe to grind against LISP'ers, but I'm not sure how better memory management would have prevented one thread from accessing another's now defunct stack data aside from not allowing it in the first place.
Context is everything. MySQL originated as a flat file backed database. Something quick and dirty that got picked up by a few php coders. Naturally its SQL syntax was incompatible and the implementation lacking. By 2000 it had grown up somewhat but was still somewhat scary; fast but not what I'd call safe or transaction oriented. You'll note in the post that they claim they never got it as fast as MySQL. Probably because they went with something "Real" (Oracle's a good a guess as any) that did transactions and considered recovery from failure.
If you dig further, you'll find a post about a multithreading race condition that boggles my mind. Maybe I've no imagination, but I'm having trouble imagining a scenario where that's a good idea. It's not even something you can do unconciously! The explaination is also unsatisfactory, which leads me to believe that perhaps the fog of time is clouding the whole story somewhat?
Is to make games people want to keep. Nintendo's publicly discussed this for a while now, so I can't help but wonder why these other companies haven't picked up on it. Are they worried that they don't know how to do that?
Or maybe EA's just wants their practice of dumping yearly sports franchise revisions to be supported by retailers, despite the obvious used game trend it creates.
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I live in Manhattan KS at the moment. Bush came in today to speak about how he plans to run the nation (poorly, as usual). But I used to live in KC. Yes, there's a lot of dentists in KC. But how often do you notice them advertising? At least in my neck of the woods, never. Should you stick around abusive dentists? No! In fact, I suggested that you'd be right to leave the practice and find a new one.
;)
However, I think your righteous indignation spilled over into your retelling of the story, and I don't think it's inappropriate to conclude from your writing that you, at the least, matched the aggression the secretary presented you. I think its stupid for a practice to threaten a customer, and then yell at them, and the relative market demand doesn't justify that kind of behavior. The letter made it clear that they either wanted you to change or stop service; you made your choice and they got upset-- no human being deserves that kind of irrational treatment. If you're really the vindictive sort, a brief and politely written letter to the appropriate professional association should suffice to turn the screws
More importantly, I'd suggest that perhaps you've cherry picked an business to make the point about customers vs serf. At the very least, your needs are not the sort of clients their practice had in mind, and most of dentistry operates as I've described, sans the passive-aggressive secretary. You can't say that about retail, food, passenger airlines, auto sales, or software development contracting, or a myriad of other american businesses.
GOOD DENTISTS are usually booked for months, being in high demand. Making an appointment is basicaly an unstated promise to arrive and do business, and if they're not in the habit of double booking that's a waste of resources. Lost money. However you want to look at it, it's a waste. I've not heard of dentists charging for missed appointments, but I suppose it's one way of deterring this sort of waste. Usually making an appointment for a month later is punishment enough to people, I'd imagine.
More importantly, good dentists usually aren't looking for new clients, being booked for months and all. Sure, you can work your way through every shitty unscroupulus dentist who can't keep clients in town by "firing" the previous one, but you can't exactly do the same thing with dentists who know what's up. Finding new clients is expensive compared to servicing the same clients (and their children) over and over again.
The fact that you were able to reschedule for a week later kind of indicates you're not the only person having troubles with the dentist. So you're perhaps justified in leaving, but maybe abusing the secretary is overboard. However, if you repeatedly have to reschedule appointments days or hours before they occur, you're simply going to have to do a lot of shopping around and keep the attidude in check. Since you apparently make quite a bit of money, perhaps you can find a doctor who specializes in keeping a far more open schedule in exchange for a higher fee. At least, I've read about doctors who only take in perhaps 10 clients and offer a far higher level of service; how useful this would be in dentistry is unclear to me.
"The officers suggest a list of Healthy Titles for players to enjoy. The list includes titles such as 'Whack-A-Coon', 'Which Towelhead Is The Terrorist' (the answer is all of them) and the highly controversial 'MLK Assassination Simulator.'"
It's not like he's putting that money in a money market fund (that's a travesty of a whole 'nother sort that ought to be a crime against humanity, whether you're alive or dead!); presumably the money is being invested on his behalf by someone in charge of his estate. In such a manner this money still serves to lower interest rates, create wealth etc as it would if his already well to do child inherited it. The big question is if and when government gets a cut, and if his children can successfully sue to invalidate the will or whatever have you that directs his estate. I don't see it working, if only because unthawing someone frozen incorrectly successfully is probably harder than curing whatever disease ailed them.
I guess if you plan on skipping out on one of life's certainty's, you may as well plan on skipping the other!
Even the article suggests that Ebay lost to Yahoo! because they were late getting to market in Japan. Metcalf's law really applies in ebay style auctioneering. In the absense of software interoperable with ALL auction sites, the largest site will have huge advantages over competitors identical in operations. If bidders have to use the website to find auctions and bid, then they'll gravitate to one or two sites, the ones with the largest selection. The primary function of this is the number of people visiting, so early gains over competitors aren't just important, they're vital. It would appear that marketplaces are one area that gravitate towards a natural monopoly.
The problem here is that the technology "capable of saving small town America" is also available to everyone NOT in small town America as well. In fact, the same advantages that make large towns work better than small towns make the Internet work better for large towns than small towns. How many small towns have cheap and widely available broadband Internet access? Geography and demographics play an important role in availablity here. Sure, the cost of living and real estate may be cheaper, but the prices to bring high speed internet to Colby, Kansas might not be attractive. The theory is that even better technology can help fix this, but so far I haven't seen anything worthy of mention.
Another problem is the attitudes frequently found in small town america. There are people who worry that success will drasticaly change the atmosphere, either through large jumps in population, building and the likes, or that prosperity itself will destroy the values and way of life they appreciate. There's even a few who worry that prosperity will bring an increase in taxes. You can see the influence taxes wield in small town america just by looking at the local school district budget. Expecting entrepeneurs to spring forth from this environment is silly. For most of the guys I know that come from small towns, they'd just as soon live in a large metropolitian area and make a million dollars a year than do the same in their hometown. And even if there was a couple entrepeneurs thinking of a product on the national level, there simply aren't enough local human resources compared with the suburbs a few hours drive away. Try finding a competent graphic designer for hire. Or webmaster. Better yet, try finding an unemployed network engineer that lives locally. And you'd really have troubles convincing a potential hire with a family of three to move.
Napster was successful because he saw a common problem and came up with a fairly common solution. Napster didn't invent mp3 trading; he took the already prevailant method of ratio uploading and FTPs and mp3 search engines and combined them all, removing the designations between client and server. And he couldn't have done it without access to subsized internet from his University dorm room. Furthermore, all the guy did was invent a better way to steal things; there wasn't even a profit motive! Universities are the one place small america can look to for a pooling of young mobile talent; but Uni towns rarely resemble the small town america we know. Firstly, they're not exactly small. 30 thousand students alone means we're starting to break the definition, and doubly so once you figure in people in jobs serving those students etc. Manhattan, KS for example, has about 40 thousand people living in it. Sadly, the cost of living is almost the same as the suburbs of KC in Johnson County. If you've got an idea that needs a lot of part time people though, Manhattan's your place.
Shit, by 2007 I'll be stealing Vista instead of XP anyways.
First off, the state of radio: ClearChannel is reducing (or has reduced) the number of ads they run, XM and Sirius are making fast gains. The future of radio advertising is looking bleak. A lot of radio ads are sold by salesmen, with high costs. Radio basically consists of pop music and a lot of fractured markets like country, rock and rap. Every day, more of those fractured markets change to pop hoping to get more listeners and consequently more advertisers. If your goal is to make a market out of the sale and purchase of advertising, the last thing you want to see is consolidation, shrinking supplies and fewer buyers.
Secondly, the state of internet; Google has shown an immense capability to compete in internet advertising systems. They've basically automated the sales process, and have a stellar program that can take text pages and generate a degree of relevance to a given ad. Their internet ad division brings in more and more money each quarter. Even their competitors are growing at 50 to 100 percent quarter to quarter.
All the analysts appear to think that Google is going to expand their current services into radio. Expanding there doesn't make sense. Nobody's listening to radio, and the size of that nobody gets smaller every day. The technology needed to create a context and compare it to a given advertiser is ridiculusly hard. Google almost certainly knows this (to call contextualizing digital streams Google's "core competancy" is a foolish oversimplification); what I don't know is if Google plans to try anyways. To give an example, I doubt lining up an ad about Mutual Funds following a song about flashing bling is likely to do well, despite some similarities. Google's text ads work better here because the Internet is a very big place. Most of the advertising that AdSense runs is put on informative articles rather than entertainment, which means they generally don't have to translate content into interest. It's possible that dMarc has a huge and valuable technology that can already come up with some of this demographics information, but I don't expect to see anything out of google that will improve or create new information of this sort. I don't think they do either: look at the conditional terms. Google might have to pay ten times as much for dMarc depending on things like ad inventory growth (pretty much out of their hands if the market continues to contract), integration and revenue growth targets are met. Of these three, I'd only expect the integration one to have a decent chance at paying off.
Instead, its pretty obvious this acquisition is more about what dMarc did BEFORE it was spun off into a radio advertising firm: it sold more internet ads than doubleclick. Many of the key people are still there. Maybe they'll start buying and selling digital radio ads, but I don't see that being a very good game (Yahoo!'s already tried it and they just missed earnings expectations) and there's some complexities revolving around the broadcast of ads over digital radio streams. What makes a lot more sense is video.google.com. Huge inventory of pre-existing content, and they've already got the functionality to take payments from advertisers and to pay video holders. The obvious tactic would be to put the ad in front of video clips, but this probably requires a change in the EULA to let google do that, which may or may not construe an affront of their goodwill. The less obvious strategy is to build an opt in system whereby the content authors get paid a bit for putting in their targeted ads. The benefit here is that part of the effort (determining when and how many ads to introduce) is removed from google and placed into the hands of the content producers.
If this is the case, it provides dMarc with a way into an expanding market and provides google with a good way for Google to expand their revenue growth outside of a narrowly defined market. The downside is that this is still yet another form of advertising, not the kind of diversity of earnings that I'd like to see from a company now worth more than Berkshire-Hathaway.
Of course the vast majority aren't gold farmers. The thing is, most of the Chinese play on Chinese servers where they can talk and play with other Chinese using a Chinese localized client. Most of the little I know about WoW comes from my roommate, but I do read on occasion about WoW and if what I've read is correct there are tons of people playing WoW (and paying by the hour) in China. I suppose it's entirely possible that there are tons of farmers in Mexico, or the US as well. Hell, it could be some people pretending to be foreign so they have an excuse to ninja the loot.
I do have an interesting story to tell where in my roommate had sort of brokered an agreement with a "gold farmer" to simply buy the farmer's produced materials with in game gold, and would easily sell it for like 5 times as much on the auction house. I guess the fact that these people either don't have the money or time to learn how to play the auction house for more money speaks to something, but I'm not sure what. Perhaps the authortarian nature or the overwhelming poverty combined with slaving demands of their employers, I donno. Maybe it points to corrupt morality of Western society, but on the other hand, when was the morality of your actions an overriding concern within a fucking video game?!
Honestly, the number I mentioned was simply to place the idea that it wasn't simply feasible, and maybe bring up the notion that there's more to the equation than civil liberties, such as the economy. The administration is doing an okay job there, although undoing years of communist regime naturally times time (though the numbers coming from Beijing are likely fraudulent, I believe them to be only overstating an already good number). The rest of arguments can be equally applied at the margins of immigration. Why dont more people leave China? Because France is already in deep(er) shit reguarding immigration after the riots recently. Moreover, none of the countries surrounding China are friendly enough to accept immigrants on any serious basis. Or maybe you think Australia is better equipped? They're certainly doing an okay job of it, but they may already be close to the locally tolerable limits.
On a side topic, maybe traditional Chinese wisdom is wrong. Should I close the blinds when my neighbors beat their wife and children? Or turn the volume on my ipod up when passing beggars? Does free speech not apply when the majority dissents with the opinion? Would anything have been done about the birth gaps if other societies hadn't noticed, and verbally complained? If Taiwan or a border state suddenly found itself under attack, are we to maintain a neutral position at all costs? If Mississippi wants to attack blacks with water hoses and dogs, is it rude to suggest they stop?
As best I can decipher the logic, the chinese administration feels its population incapable of distinguishing truth from lies, even in the long run. If they believed differently, then the widespread dissemination of information on all topics would be a positive societal gain obstructed by the administration. Alternatively, it wouldn't be difficult to imagine that the administration is afraid that allowing free global communication would quickly lead to their own undoing, despite the economic progress they've made. I can't say I like governments lying to the people they're charged with protecting, domestic or abroad.
Well, I'll take on your bear of a question. Keep in mind that I don't particularly favor China's administration or its policies.
First off, according to the CIA World factbook, China's population is about 1.5 billion. This is out of about 6.5 billion world wide. Their unemployment rate is about ten percent nationally, with a reported "unemployment and underemployment rate" at twice that. I think its safe to say that very few of these people have the weath required to simply leave. Also remember that few Chinese have the kind of means access to the internet you have in the first place. I don't just mean unfiltered content, but a physical computer and stable and affordable electricity to power it. Of course, this isn't the only means of censoring dissent. Newspapers are frequently accused of whitewashing and publishing only approved content. But even if 1 billion Chinese who felt oppressed and/or unserved by the current authorities wanted and could afford to migrate, it would be difficult to accomodate them. Putting these people to work, in say France, would be difficult since few would have the language skills nessecary, among other things. Shifting that many people is simply untenable in the short term.
Furthermore, even if nations had the available housing and whatnot to accomodate this, many are unwilling to accept large numbers of immigrants. The nation most able to accommodate Chinese immigrants is probably the US, as we've got plenty of land and are a next exporter of food. But I'm sure you've witnessed the backlash to border patrolling and outsourcing lately. Protectionist laws favoring the current labor pool are a large force to recon with and would quickly moblize to squash any such mass immigration bill in Congress. Additionally, the current administration seems paralyzed, in a way, by the terrorist attacks on the WTC. Because such a immigration allowance would be considered a security risk, theres no way the administration would ever propose this. Hell, even student visas are down after 9/11, as some of the attackers were here on visas. It seems some people love America's prosperity, and others love it's freedom, but nobody will trade one to give the other to everyone.
In the long term, the best option is to reform China's pratices. Theoretically, China has democratic means to address social problems. In some ways, the authoritarian executive branch (unelected, btw) is an ally of change, and an enemy. For example, take the number from the CIA world factbook for China's male to female birth rate. 115:100 is a pretty damn high number, and you probably know why. Wikipedia suggests that a recent finding thinks its partly to do with hepatitis, but there's still a cultural bias against having a daughter. The Chinese administration has taken a couple of good steps towards solving the problem of infanctide. On the otherhand, the administration also takes very poorly to criticism of its policies, and allowing the public to hear it. I subscribe to the John Stuart Mill's philosophy that both truth and opinion are public goods, and look forward to the day in which the administration submits to the democratic process as well. But I expect that as long as their economy is doing better, there won't be any leverage for that to happen. There's still humanitarian things that could be addressed, but perhaps we should look in the mirror before preaching abroad.
Simply put, people deserve a government that acts in their own interests without having to resort to democracy of the foot.
The bluetooth spec doesn't allow for more than 30 feet. Your average laptop connections might go further, but don't expect the Lego smart brick to push much past it.
You know, I just might hate MMORPGs and MMORPG "analysis" enough to be "the game player who officially invited the agency to visit the world of MMOs and gave the feds the opening to tax virtual income". I might have to change my legal name afterwards, though. Hopefully provoking 2 million people into burning my house down isn't considered insurance fruad.
If they've missed the obvious ones on ext3, what does this say about reiserFS?
In truth, the old system could do the same thing with the IR device it came with. Its just that few people bothered to make anything complicated enough to warrant it. The same will happen here; certainly elementary and high school teachers will be ill equipped to use this functionality.
I know Circuit City at least, uses independent contractors. They post things to computerrepair (apparently now named Onforce), and I think i saw a couple of Geek Squad postings. Point is, the pay was awful. Partly, this is because much of the requests are doable by your average geeky highschooler (image a computer, install a print driver, "remove spyware"). Maybe these are simply the worst of the worst, the things that the company has decided cannot be done profitably (or fast enough). But look at it this way; the length of time it takes to perform your average virus and spyware scan is typically outside the range of what they're willing to pay.
Best Buy et all are capable of offering the service because they already have a large store of parts and a nationwide marketing budget. If I could charge 230 dollars for an onsite visit, that might be worth it, though we've no way of telling how popular these expensive services are. Either way I've got to compete with the likes of GeekSquad on price and services. So when the grandparent says that he will never service home users again, perhaps its because they simply lack the resources that GS does to efficiently help these people. Specialization is entirely possible, with one firm being better at (and being known for being good at) home and another at business.
Gee, I thought wake-on-lan was something EVERYBODY wanted!
I'm pretty sure he was suggesting the media doesn't accurately portray reality, not suggesting that what he said was true.
If you dont want people digging around your files, perhaps you should set permissions appropriately?
BG&E didn't have that much going for it. It's really only notable in that you actually see women that aren't overendowed fantasies of their male creators, intended to reward their male fanbase (*cough*Ghost in the Shell*cough*). They make the distinction between story-writing and story-telling, and somehow claim that because the game never addresses the mismash of reality and fantasy passes for a coherent telling of story.
;)
I haven't played Kong yet, so I can't really tell whether he was able to execute better with a script in front of him. On the other hand, I much more deeply value game designers who are able to impress me rather than film directors and buffs. I think the same goes for everyone
I haven't used LISP, but I do have experience with a functional language (OCaml). Praytell how do you permit multithreaded access local variables of a function without severely destroying things? "Stack variables" in C are variables local to the function (and parameters). To access the local variables within another thread you'd have to perform some very specific kludges to obtain a reference into another thread's stack, either by knowing presciently where the compiler will place the thread or some communciation thereafter. Leaking pointers to stack data is a fast way to wind up with exactly that sort of race condition.
If I understand your language correctly, what I understand to be happening in their C++ multithreaded system was bluntly impossible to do in LISP. You can't have the problem, because you can't solve it that way. The typical C++ solution is to use shared globals and accurately protect them. I suppose there could be a kludge workaround to what I'm saying, but the general point I was making was that it's a kludge in C/C++ too. Trying something like that in a multithreaded LISP environment isn't something on my todo list, however.
Not that I have an axe to grind against LISP'ers, but I'm not sure how better memory management would have prevented one thread from accessing another's now defunct stack data aside from not allowing it in the first place.
Context is everything. MySQL originated as a flat file backed database. Something quick and dirty that got picked up by a few php coders. Naturally its SQL syntax was incompatible and the implementation lacking. By 2000 it had grown up somewhat but was still somewhat scary; fast but not what I'd call safe or transaction oriented. You'll note in the post that they claim they never got it as fast as MySQL. Probably because they went with something "Real" (Oracle's a good a guess as any) that did transactions and considered recovery from failure.
If you dig further, you'll find a post about a multithreading race condition that boggles my mind. Maybe I've no imagination, but I'm having trouble imagining a scenario where that's a good idea. It's not even something you can do unconciously! The explaination is also unsatisfactory, which leads me to believe that perhaps the fog of time is clouding the whole story somewhat?
Is to make games people want to keep. Nintendo's publicly discussed this for a while now, so I can't help but wonder why these other companies haven't picked up on it. Are they worried that they don't know how to do that?
Or maybe EA's just wants their practice of dumping yearly sports franchise revisions to be supported by retailers, despite the obvious used game trend it creates.