The point of the whole article can be summed up, IMHO, in the paragraph below:
Ultimately we have to reassign costs from the recipient back to the sender. Such costs can be artificial (e.g., e-postage) or fundamental (e.g., slowing down SMTP connections, perhaps by adding authentication overhead).
So, he is actually making an argument for one of Microsoft's projects: The Penny Black Project.
Uau, a 4-digit/. UID ! Gotta give that some respect. Anyway, similar to other posters, I don't think saying that an artificial diamond is not real is fair. But that's not why I am posting. I am posting because you said:
p.s. To those people who think that diamonds are overpriced due to DeBeers (...) Could it be that the price of mining and cutting is reflected in the price of diamonds, and that the pricing actually is correct?
Well, no, diamonds would definetly not cost as much as they do if it were not for De Beer. Do you know about De Beer's history ? This book, written by a South African, makes a very interesting read. After finishing it, I trust you will be able to understand just how much the Diamond market was/is dependent on De Beers.
Maybe I just don't know of any tech companies that went IPO and did well, or maybe I don't understand what an IPO brings to the table. Anybody?
In theory (that is, in a purely technical, unpolitical or uninterested world) an IPO would be an alternative source of capital, just like going to a bank and asking them to lend you some money. Well, if they are equivalent which one would you chose ? One pecking order, ranked by cost-of-capital (lower cost on top, meaning if all you need is the money, get it there first) would be: 1)Ask your parents, relatives and friends 2)Mortgage your house 3)Get money (grant) from state development fund 4)Get a bank loan -- if they will lend you 5)Get money from an IPO 6)Get money from a VC/Private Equity fund
Usually you would never think about jumping a step, unless you had no alternative, if you were *only* interested in getting capital to expand your firm.
Now, there are all sorts of BS reasons that seek to justify an IPO (in my opinion, none of them relevant): 1) Clients like to deal with listed cos, for they are transparent (duh! do you buy that after Enron/MCI ?) 2) Employees like to earn options/stocks of the company they work for (more than share of real profits ?) 3) It gives managers a measure of their management performance (cash flow not good enough ?) 4) It gives currency to make acquisitions - like in stock swaps (often trading funny money for funny money, though)
However, the main reason greedy owners go for an IPO is because then they, personally, are able to cash out a portion of what is, essentially, their largest asset. For instance, say you own 100% of Small&Trendy Tech Company. You would like to have a nice sports car. You would like to have a boat. You would like to have an exotic vacation. Well, people say your Small&Trendy Tech Company is worth a lot, but you can't afford all of those things though you own Small&Trendy. So, what do you do ? You...
a) IPO b) Wait a while c) Sell some of your own stock d) Buy house/car/yacth/vacation/girlfriend, etc...
1. There are many ways to "disassemble" something.
1.a. You can take something apart element by element.
1.b. You can make it biodegradable.
1.c. You can incinerate it.
2. (1.a), (1.b) and (1.c) should be incorporated into a law which will be called "Law of Disassembly", which says every MNT product must be disassemblable by at least one of these three alternatives.
Well... Easy, then to have a MNT pass the "Law of Disassembly". Throw MNT in question in a high temperature furnace, prove it gets destroyed (thus disassembled), the end. What doesn't burn (or melt, or vaporize, disassemble) when the temperature is high enough ?
I know there is an important point hidden in the article (e.g. maybe some rule relating speed of reproduction and clocking of self-destruction). But this "Rule of Disassembly", as stated, seems empty by stating "MNTs should not last forever" -- nothing does.
Re:Inevitable Evolution of Explosive Growth
on
The Law of Disassembly
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Absolutely any thing that can self-replicate will be subject to the laws of evolution. (...)
The laws of darwinian evolution require random mutation as well as replication. Computer viruses, which are perfectly able to self replicate, for example, don't evolve. New computer viruses (virii?) are designed by someone and let loose, but old ones do not randomly mutate and transfer mutations down to descendents. They do not evolve into more efficient virii by themselves or by the laws of evolution you imply.
(...) I do not want to pay for hundreds of features that I will never use.
When you take away all most of the features off of a cell phone, they become so cheap they can be disposable. And, in fact, people have already realized that. Why not get yourself one ?
I RTFA. But regardless of how poor this "AccuVote" implementation is, electronic voting can work -- and will prevail, if technophobic feelings are kept at bay. All it takes is some smarter dude to do the development.
Criminals have figured out a way around (shipping restrictions to Eastern Europe), however. They hire folks to act as middlemen for them. Basically, these people get paid to sit at home, sign for packages from Dell, Amazon, and other companies, and then turn around and reship the packages to Russia, Belorussia, and Ukraine.
I bet you, too, thought those spammers were lying.
The correlation between culture (as defined in the article) and nationality is very, ver often exagerated. At least that is my experience, after having worked/studied in plenty of multinational environments and with people of multiple nationalities.
Stereotypes do apply, but anti-stereotypes are plenty, as well. You will find the organized Greek, the warm German, the shy Italian, the Brazilian who does not like soccer and the American who knows world geography.
I have experienced much more consistent cultural environments going from ony company (corporate culture) to another, than crossing national borders. I have seen corporate environments absorb various nationalities, even operating in different countries, and retaining its own (original) corporate culture. And I have seen, as well, plenty of cultural clashes and disagreement over world view within more than one country.
The internet makes the dissociation between nationality/geography and culture even starker./.ers, for example, have a cultural outlook more similar to one another than to the average of his/her national peer. Same applies to many other online communities.
In the weight auction, those individuals who were in the top 50th percentile in terms of demanded price on the average knew 36% of others present, whereas the bottom 50th percentile knew 23% (p =.05), suggesting that individuals are less reluctant to reveal information to an anonymous audience ("phenomenon of the stranger"[21]).
I assume most people in/. are interested in privacy issues because of what the internet, computer databases, etc. are able to do. So the issue of whether or not you care that 10 people in a room know something personal about you is different from whether you care if "data base munching machine" or "online community crowd" knows it. This other issue brings, IMHO, more interesting questions for research. E.g.
a) Do people care more when the info they reveal is disclosed to people they don't know when it can make its way back to people they do know ? b) Is revealing the info in person (face to face) more resisted than revealing it to a terminal which can (or cannot) be accessed later by the group/acquaintances ? c) If a system can assure that no one will know someone else's info without contributing his/her own info first, does this reciprocity make a significant difference ? d) If a given acquaintance never met you personally (e.g. you met online), but over time started to know a lot of private info about you, are you less reluctant to share more private stuff than with people you meet face-to-face, or complete stragers ? If said relationship evolves to a face-to-face relationship does that change ?
Just rambling. I surely wouldn't know if any of this questions was already researched to exhaustion.
Googling around, it seems Strangeberry's claim to fame is their release of an LPGLed implementation of Rendezvous (Zeroconf), an alternative to MS-Backed UPnP (Universal Plug and Play). How important is it ?
Apple's Safari browser was one of the first to make use of the Rendezvous technology and, from what I gather, the most interesting thing it does is to enable local servers transparently (e.g. you can bookmark them, and you can make any computer around serve files). Open source browser Camino is also taking this route.
Tivo has expressed what Rendevous has to do with their plans:
TiVo "TiVo's upcoming premium service package will use Rendezvous technology to automatically discover Macintosh computers within the home network and determine which services they provide, allowing customers to listen to their shared music or view their shared photos on their TV," said Jim Barton, Co-founder and CTO for TiVo. "We are excited about working with Apple on other ways Rendezvous can help TiVo Series2 DVRs connect to a Mac to deliver future services." (see this page)
This is just a collection of web-based info gotten through google. I may be seeing it all wrong, but the picture seems to make some sense to me. They are acquiring a company that brings something which Tivo intends to be a core offering of their system.
However don't set your expectations too high, it seems they still need to work a bit on their Korean translation engine:
The NHD-150D supports a next generation digital sound cause OGG VORBIS file format (ogg) . The MP3 the sound quality and the enemy who jump over a file 500Kbps until it will be able to remake the ogg file which is proud a dosage from the NHD-150D. (sic)
Yup. Seems so. If you look at the staff, a lot of them come from Overture, even the big boss:
The organization will be led by Yahoo!'s Head and Principal Scientist Dr. Gary William Flake, former chief science officer of Overture and founder of Overture Research.
It is interesting that, this Gary William Flake (who looks like a nice guy) may have done a lot before joining Overture (the books he wrote, for instance). But that company in itself does not seem to be much of a credential. I mean, building a search engine which ranks results according to an advertiser bidding system (sort by $bid_amount$) was a very neat idea. A very neat *business idea*, that is. But it does not seem to be ground for any technical innovation claim.
Overture (formerly know as "GoTo") will continue to be more famous as the bright child of IdeaLab, the controversial and trouble mother-of-all-incubators.
IANAL, but taking off the tech hat, and trying to think from a legal standpoint...What would it mean if they can prove to the judge that there is a P2P scenario in which nearly foolproof copyrighted file identification exists ?
Would that then ruin the argument that "P2P should not be shut down because there are plenty of legitimate uses" by countering with "there is an equally efficient P2P architecture that brings all the same functionality to legitimate uses without hurting copyright law" ?
By doing that, wouldn't they change the issue of whether or not to allow P2P into one of which P2P can be allowed ? (or what is required of a legal P2P ?).
Maybe this "window turns TV/monitor" thing can be feasible for an internal window (e.g. between rooms). But I just can't believe it will ever be able to show a well balanced color image (photo/video) both when it's night and clear day outside. Neither projection TVs nor Plasmas are able to display a good "black color".
Listen, I don't know what is your experience with Bionicles, but I decided about a year ago that was a good gift for my 8-year old nephew. After getting his one-robot set, he went about building all sorts of creatures with it. I am not kidding you. He built various types of insects and robots and could even ask me "what do you want me to build ?" and then do it right on the spot. No, it didn't come in any booklet. It all came from his creativity.
I wish I had some pictures taken of what he came up with to post it online. But, anyway, I think we should not understimate the power of a child's imagination and creativity. I mean, I have seen 3rd world poor kids playing with corn cobbs, pieces of wood, broomsticks, boxes and plastic bottles -- and coming up with imaginative representations of things in the grown up world. Why would anyone think they couldn't do that with Bionicles ?
This reminds of what P&G went through. Anyone here remember their familiar old logo ? Apparently someone thought the numbers 666 were hidden in there somehow, and from there everything started to be blown out of proportion.
'Procter & Gamble has answered more than 150,000 calls and letters about these false stories... Calls and letters peaked in 1982, 1985 and again in 1990... Procter & Gamble, which had worldwide sales of $19 billion last year, is still getting as many as 80 calls a month about the rumors. The high was as many as 15,000 a month, when Procter & Gamble had to add staffers to handle the deluge of calls on a nationwide toll-free consumers' line...' (full story)
(...) MP3.com's archive of over 1.5 million songs (...)
It seems to me all this indignation by artists here is probably exagerated. I mean, in the middle of 1.5 million songs to have *yours* picked would be more an honor than a shame. You should be proud! (what if someone listens to you in an elevator ? how much does that hurt ? I listen to myself in the shower every night and it causes me no harm !)
Apparently they are suprised to hear that internet users are more social than non-users: internet users watch less television, read more books and engage in more social activities.
This leads you to think that if you surf the internet you become more prone to social interactions and you read more books. However all of these things are probably related to something else.
The article is not clear about it, but I would guess they did not adjust for Socio-Economic Segments (SES). SES would reflect mainly an individual's income and education level.
Internet usage of course begun in the higher SES levels (having started mainly in the academic world) -- and has ever since penetrated more the top levels than the bottom ones (this has in turn given risen to the term digital divide). On the other hand, guess which SES reads more books and has a richer social experience ?
It's DejaVu all over again
on
No WMA for HP iPod
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The problem is that Apple's iPod -- the most popular portable player on the market -- will not play music encoded in WMA.
Likewise, none of the other portable music players from the likes of Dell, Rio or Creative Technology will play Apple's AAC files.
This at first looks like Betamax vs. VHS, Apple being in Sony's chair. Until you realize it is Betamax vs Betamax. MP3 is VHS. To me this WMA/AAC fight is an entertaining dispute for the second division cup.
Between all the alliances and industry player alignments/supports, MP3 has the best: the pirate industry support -- hundreds of thousands (millions?) of entrepreneurial individuals working out of basements, garages, or simply leaving their machines turned on serving files. I go to a street corner in Brazil and I can find CDs burned with hundreds of songs in MP3. Same thing in all of the "developing world" -- Malaysia, Russia, Paraguay, China. Paying a dollar a song is a luxury that *will* make WMA/AAC (and all DRM) look like Betamax, or Sony's MD.
DRM songs will try to fit in a niche: wealthy countries or individuals which are willing to pay for songs because they "just-want-to", or because of a very slight edge of "coolness" or exclusivity. This niche, though important for the potential margin, will always be smaller than the MP3 choice (or Ogg, in an unlikely scenario). MP3s will survive like cockroaches, and is IMNSHO the only assured bet for a format that will be still be around ten years from now. Trying to "migrate up" MP3 users with cool gadgets like Ipod may be profitable, but will never close the door that MP3/Napster/Kazaa/CD burners opened.
I hope they have a good budget and don't spoil it. BTW, I don't know that actor, and haven't seen "The Office", but his puzzled face in the picture someone posted looks perfect. If this works perhaps more people will get to know where the names "DeepThought", "Trillian" and "BabelFish" first appeared.
Anyway, Douglas Adams fans should know that his computer works are now abandonware, and available for free download:
Slashdot Mirror
The point of the whole article can be summed up, IMHO, in the paragraph below:
Ultimately we have to reassign costs from the recipient back to the sender. Such costs can be artificial (e.g., e-postage) or fundamental (e.g., slowing down SMTP connections, perhaps by adding authentication overhead).
So, he is actually making an argument for one of Microsoft's projects: The Penny Black Project.
Uau, a 4-digit /. UID ! Gotta give that some respect. Anyway, similar to other posters, I don't think saying that an artificial diamond is not real is fair. But that's not why I am posting. I am posting because you said:
p.s. To those people who think that diamonds are overpriced due to DeBeers (...) Could it be that the price of mining and cutting is reflected in the price of diamonds, and that the pricing actually is correct?
Well, no, diamonds would definetly not cost as much as they do if it were not for De Beer. Do you know about De Beer's history ? This book, written by a South African, makes a very interesting read. After finishing it, I trust you will be able to understand just how much the Diamond market was/is dependent on De Beers.
Maybe I just don't know of any tech companies that went IPO and did well, or maybe I don't understand what an IPO brings to the table. Anybody?
In theory (that is, in a purely technical, unpolitical or uninterested world) an IPO would be an alternative source of capital, just like going to a bank and asking them to lend you some money. Well, if they are equivalent which one would you chose ? One pecking order, ranked by cost-of-capital (lower cost on top, meaning if all you need is the money, get it there first) would be:
1)Ask your parents, relatives and friends
2)Mortgage your house
3)Get money (grant) from state development fund
4)Get a bank loan -- if they will lend you
5)Get money from an IPO
6)Get money from a VC/Private Equity fund
Usually you would never think about jumping a step, unless you had no alternative, if you were *only* interested in getting capital to expand your firm.
Now, there are all sorts of BS reasons that seek to justify an IPO (in my opinion, none of them relevant):
1) Clients like to deal with listed cos, for they are transparent (duh! do you buy that after Enron/MCI ?)
2) Employees like to earn options/stocks of the company they work for (more than share of real profits ?)
3) It gives managers a measure of their management performance (cash flow not good enough ?)
4) It gives currency to make acquisitions - like in stock swaps (often trading funny money for funny money, though)
However, the main reason greedy owners go for an IPO is because then they, personally, are able to cash out a portion of what is, essentially, their largest asset. For instance, say you own 100% of Small&Trendy Tech Company. You would like to have a nice sports car. You would like to have a boat. You would like to have an exotic vacation. Well, people say your Small&Trendy Tech Company is worth a lot, but you can't afford all of those things though you own Small&Trendy. So, what do you do ? You...
a) IPO
b) Wait a while
c) Sell some of your own stock
d) Buy house/car/yacth/vacation/girlfriend, etc...
Who can blame them, though ?
1. There are many ways to "disassemble" something.
1.a. You can take something apart element by element.
1.b. You can make it biodegradable.
1.c. You can incinerate it.
2. (1.a), (1.b) and (1.c) should be incorporated into a law which will be called "Law of Disassembly", which says every MNT product must be disassemblable by at least one of these three alternatives.
Well... Easy, then to have a MNT pass the "Law of Disassembly". Throw MNT in question in a high temperature furnace, prove it gets destroyed (thus disassembled), the end. What doesn't burn (or melt, or vaporize, disassemble) when the temperature is high enough ?
I know there is an important point hidden in the article (e.g. maybe some rule relating speed of reproduction and clocking of self-destruction). But this "Rule of Disassembly", as stated, seems empty by stating "MNTs should not last forever" -- nothing does.
Absolutely any thing that can self-replicate will be subject to the laws of evolution. (...)
The laws of darwinian evolution require random mutation as well as replication. Computer viruses, which are perfectly able to self replicate, for example, don't evolve. New computer viruses (virii?) are designed by someone and let loose, but old ones do not randomly mutate and transfer mutations down to descendents. They do not evolve into more efficient virii by themselves or by the laws of evolution you imply.
(...) I do not want to pay for hundreds of features that I will never use.
When you take away all most of the features off of a cell phone, they become so cheap they can be disposable. And, in fact, people have already realized that. Why not get yourself one ?
I RTFA. But regardless of how poor this "AccuVote" implementation is, electronic voting can work -- and will prevail, if technophobic feelings are kept at bay. All it takes is some smarter dude to do the development.
The reasoning is simple:
ATMs exist.
A simple solution is to render characters from a different code page than the default in a different color in urls.
That's smart. Someone, mod parent up!
Criminals have figured out a way around (shipping restrictions to Eastern Europe), however. They hire folks to act as middlemen for them. Basically, these people get paid to sit at home, sign for packages from Dell, Amazon, and other companies, and then turn around and reship the packages to Russia, Belorussia, and Ukraine.
I bet you, too, thought those spammers were lying.
The correlation between culture (as defined in the article) and nationality is very, ver often exagerated. At least that is my experience, after having worked/studied in plenty of multinational environments and with people of multiple nationalities.
/.ers, for example, have a cultural outlook more similar to one another than to the average of his/her national peer. Same applies to many other online communities.
Stereotypes do apply, but anti-stereotypes are plenty, as well. You will find the organized Greek, the warm German, the shy Italian, the Brazilian who does not like soccer and the American who knows world geography.
I have experienced much more consistent cultural environments going from ony company (corporate culture) to another, than crossing national borders. I have seen corporate environments absorb various nationalities, even operating in different countries, and retaining its own (original) corporate culture. And I have seen, as well, plenty of cultural clashes and disagreement over world view within more than one country.
The internet makes the dissociation between nationality/geography and culture even starker.
a) Do people care more when the info they reveal is disclosed to people they don't know when it can make its way back to people they do know ?
b) Is revealing the info in person (face to face) more resisted than revealing it to a terminal which can (or cannot) be accessed later by the group/acquaintances ?
c) If a system can assure that no one will know someone else's info without contributing his/her own info first, does this reciprocity make a significant difference ?
d) If a given acquaintance never met you personally (e.g. you met online), but over time started to know a lot of private info about you, are you less reluctant to share more private stuff than with people you meet face-to-face, or complete stragers ? If said relationship evolves to a face-to-face relationship does that change ?
Just rambling. I surely wouldn't know if any of this questions was already researched to exhaustion.
Apple's Safari browser was one of the first to make use of the Rendezvous technology and, from what I gather, the most interesting thing it does is to enable local servers transparently (e.g. you can bookmark them, and you can make any computer around serve files). Open source browser Camino is also taking this route.
Tivo has expressed what Rendevous has to do with their plans:
This is just a collection of web-based info gotten through google. I may be seeing it all wrong, but the picture seems to make some sense to me. They are acquiring a company that brings something which Tivo intends to be a core offering of their system.
The worst I ever used (probably the worst there ever was) was the Sinclair ZX81's plastic membrane. You know, from back when 16 kilobytes was called a memory expansion module and dinosaurs walked the earth.
Babelfish Translation of the Korean Product page
However don't set your expectations too high, it seems they still need to work a bit on their Korean translation engine:
...but what about this picture ?
It is interesting that, this Gary William Flake (who looks like a nice guy) may have done a lot before joining Overture (the books he wrote, for instance). But that company in itself does not seem to be much of a credential. I mean, building a search engine which ranks results according to an advertiser bidding system (sort by $bid_amount$) was a very neat idea. A very neat *business idea*, that is. But it does not seem to be ground for any technical innovation claim.
Overture (formerly know as "GoTo") will continue to be more famous as the bright child of IdeaLab, the controversial and trouble mother-of-all-incubators.
IANAL, but taking off the tech hat, and trying to think from a legal standpoint...What would it mean if they can prove to the judge that there is a P2P scenario in which nearly foolproof copyrighted file identification exists ?
Would that then ruin the argument that "P2P should not be shut down because there are plenty of legitimate uses" by countering with "there is an equally efficient P2P architecture that brings all the same functionality to legitimate uses without hurting copyright law" ?
By doing that, wouldn't they change the issue of whether or not to allow P2P into one of which P2P can be allowed ? (or what is required of a legal P2P ?).
Just wondering...
Maybe this "window turns TV/monitor" thing can be feasible for an internal window (e.g. between rooms). But I just can't believe it will ever be able to show a well balanced color image (photo/video) both when it's night and clear day outside. Neither projection TVs nor Plasmas are able to display a good "black color".
Listen, I don't know what is your experience with Bionicles, but I decided about a year ago that was a good gift for my 8-year old nephew. After getting his one-robot set, he went about building all sorts of creatures with it. I am not kidding you. He built various types of insects and robots and could even ask me "what do you want me to build ?" and then do it right on the spot. No, it didn't come in any booklet. It all came from his creativity.
I wish I had some pictures taken of what he came up with to post it online. But, anyway, I think we should not understimate the power of a child's imagination and creativity. I mean, I have seen 3rd world poor kids playing with corn cobbs, pieces of wood, broomsticks, boxes and plastic bottles -- and coming up with imaginative representations of things in the grown up world. Why would anyone think they couldn't do that with Bionicles ?
They eventually changed their logo to dull stylized letters.
*sigh* sadly some people are still living in the dark ages, even in the most modern countries... Renaissance, anyone ?
The article is not clear about it, but I would guess they did not adjust for Socio-Economic Segments (SES). SES would reflect mainly an individual's income and education level.
Internet usage of course begun in the higher SES levels (having started mainly in the academic world) -- and has ever since penetrated more the top levels than the bottom ones (this has in turn given risen to the term digital divide). On the other hand, guess which SES reads more books and has a richer social experience ?
Between all the alliances and industry player alignments/supports, MP3 has the best: the pirate industry support -- hundreds of thousands (millions?) of entrepreneurial individuals working out of basements, garages, or simply leaving their machines turned on serving files. I go to a street corner in Brazil and I can find CDs burned with hundreds of songs in MP3. Same thing in all of the "developing world" -- Malaysia, Russia, Paraguay, China. Paying a dollar a song is a luxury that *will* make WMA/AAC (and all DRM) look like Betamax, or Sony's MD.
DRM songs will try to fit in a niche: wealthy countries or individuals which are willing to pay for songs because they "just-want-to", or because of a very slight edge of "coolness" or exclusivity. This niche, though important for the potential margin, will always be smaller than the MP3 choice (or Ogg, in an unlikely scenario). MP3s will survive like cockroaches, and is IMNSHO the only assured bet for a format that will be still be around ten years from now. Trying to "migrate up" MP3 users with cool gadgets like Ipod may be profitable, but will never close the door that MP3/Napster/Kazaa/CD burners opened.
I think that is fine.
I hope they have a good budget and don't spoil it. BTW, I don't know that actor, and haven't seen "The Office", but his puzzled face in the picture someone posted looks perfect. If this works perhaps more people will get to know where the names "DeepThought", "Trillian" and "BabelFish" first appeared.
Anyway, Douglas Adams fans should know that his computer works are now abandonware, and available for free download:
Last Chance to See -- The CD ROM, multimedia version of his book about endangered species
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- the text adventure game adaptation (by Infocom)
Bureaucracy -- the original text adventure game (by Infocom)
Cheers.