The question was all about analysis and aggregation, not IMO and YMMV.
The problem is the same is with trying to assess the quality of any complex consumer good, e.g. automobiles. Yes, reliable aggregate data does exist (e.g. JD Powers for automobiles). You as a consumer however will never see this data, and if you get hold of any of it the manufacturers will sue your butt into bankruptcy to get it back (you don't think that the "JD Powers ratings" you see in the ads are the real data or the full story, do you?).
The best you can do is either collect anecdotes for the providers/areas you are considering, or try the recent Consumer Reports survey. But you are basically on your own.
In the aforementioned areas, Verizon is sufuckingperior
I lived for a while in rural Illinois, and received reasonable (if a bit expensive) service from Verizon.
Then I moved to a reasonably well-to-do suburb of a major midwestern city, with a few more hills than rural Illinois. Basically, my Verizon phone just stopped working. There was no signal - zero - nada - within 1000m of my house.
I spent 3 months on the phone with Verizon Customer Disservice and Verizon Technical Non-Support to try to get it working. Their final answer? "You have a bad handset". Funny - it works in rural Illinois, it works in downtown Chicago, it works everywhere it the midwest but fails when I bring it in to my house. Funny that. Funny too how 3 coworkers with different handset models experienced the same failure when they drove through my neighborhood.
I asked them to send out a signal strength truck and copy me on the test results. "Signal strength truck? What's that?".
Their FINAL ANSWER? "Too bad dude. Don't forget to send us a check every month for the next two years".
So then I got involved in a registered letter battle with the VP of Customer Service, the President of Verizon Wireless, and the CEO of Verizon. Finally, I had to write a letter to the senior outside memeber of the Verizon Board of Directors and the Verizon Corporate Counsel explaining that yes, I do know what a formal complaint to the FCC is, and yes, I will write up one asking that Verizon's license to do business in my state be revoked. Suddenly they were able to make an exception to their "no refunds" policy.
Switched to AT&T and everything has been hunky-dory since.
That's my experience with Verizon. Your milage may vary.
Of course, we all know that the answer is supposed to be no, but what most people don't realize is that this very thing has, in essence, been going on since the Clean Air Act of 1967. It is actually illegal to modify the engine in a passenger car to produce more horsepower, though such modification is seldom prosecuted.
Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe that the CAA makes it illegal to modify the emissions controls systems of a vehicle for hire. You may still modify a personally owned automobile to your heart's content.
Why the hell not - it seems the ideal. Ability to stay on the equator due to winds etc, the equator should be the goal, not explained away with the words "obviously not".
Two problems: lack of wind at the equator. And too many countries along the equator which shoot down flying objects that they classify as "threats" - e.g. the PRC. He was not able to get permission to fly over all the countries along the equator, plus he would have come close to some hot spots. And I don't mean 38 deg.C.
How smart would he be if he decided to base his spending habits on the advice of people who haven't managed to save any of their own money.
Fosset made his fortune trading financial instruments. It is pretty clear that success in that arena is due to two factors: (a) connections, usually provided by one's father, to get started (b) lots of luck. Financial traders are not a bunch of Thomas Edisons or even Bill Gateses, dragging new wealth from barren ground. They just skim a bit off other peoples' money.
We are not saying, "Okay, you made your money, and now you can't spend a cent of it." We're saying, "Spend away, and spend it on something that makes you feel good, but see if you can find something that makes you feel that that *also* helps other people."
What I would say is a little different: Go ahead and try for your record. In fact, on these adventures you do end up spending some of your money in remote 3rd world locations, which helps them out a bit. But PLEASE STOP BUYING YOURSELF ALL THAT PUBLICITY BEFORE YOU SET THE RECORD. Go ahead and set it, THEN call the aviation and general press. You will be praised by the former and perhaps noticed by the latter. But please stop stoking your ego in public prior to accomplishing anything.
This is a troll, right? You are aware of thermal lift, jet streams, mountain waves, and other atmospheric phenomena which a good glider pilot can use to gain energy and go higher?
Reminds me a great deal of the stories about John Glenn's "mission" on the space shuttle, and all the "science" they would gather from sending an older man into space.
Following John Glenn's successful orbital flight, he was deemed by NASA to be a "national treasure" too valuable to risk on later flights. Sorry buddy - no moon ride for you. Which was a bit of a nasty way to repay all that training and risk. The shuttle flight was an attempt to make up for how they treated him in the 60s.
And it actually didn't hurt to get some data on how old people react to space flight. There is nothing that says that all space travellers will forever be 30-something athletes.
And of course the marketing geniuses at Wash U [wustl.edu] keep thinking they are tailing on to something great by providing this bozo assistance for these stunts. Whereas they just make the university look bozo'ish as well.
You know, re-reading my post I realize that it is unfair. Having grown up in Chicago, I should have remembered that the real Bozo the Clown had both entertainment and educational value for young children. Mr. "Too Much Money" Fosset has neither.
And of course the marketing geniuses at Wash U keep thinking they are tailing on to something great by providing this bozo assistance for these stunts. Whereas they just make the university look bozo'ish as well.
I haven't read enough Clarke to be sure, but you're definitely describing something like Asimov's "strips" in the novel The Caves of Steel.
Clarke's Against the Fall of Night (later rewritten as The City and the Stars) predates Asimov's Caves of Steel. Clarke's ciy of Dispar had the variable speed walkways.
Wow - that would take us all the way to 1920 and the Milwaukee Road's use of regenerative braking on their electrified lines through the Cascade Mountains!
Reference please? Everything I have read in the last 30 years indicates that NORAD does not have the capability to detect asteroids. A high-angle asteroid strike from over the Atlantic would look very much like a FOBS shot from a ship or submarine.
Now, the powers that be may very well have capabilities they don't talk about. Or perhaps you have info I don't. But since "Not only is peace our profession, but we guard you from asteroids too!" would be a great PR win for the USAF, I think they would tout the capability if they had it.
In an attempt to figure out how statistically significant the article's 6-in-a-million chance of the asteroid hitting earth is, exactly, I ran a search on the most popular statistic--the odds of being hit by lightning. Turns out there's even controversy about that. The odds cited [stats.org] range from 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 5 million. So was this asteroid statistically significant? Turn to Mark Twain for that one.
Problem is, you have to multiply the oods by the consequences. The worst lightning strike I ever read about killed 5 golfers. Or you look at forest fires ignited by lightning: a few dozen deaths and a few hundered million in property damage.
Then look at two possible consequences of an asteroid strike
A BIG ONE (tm) - Arizona sized - all human life on Earth destroyed.
A small one - say 10 Mt worth - comes across the Atlantic from the direction of Iraq and lands near a US city. Effects not easily distinguished from a nuclear strike during the first few hours. US launches "retaliatory" strike against whomever - a few hundred million dead.
Multiply those consequences by the odds (remembering that asteroids of various sizes do strike the Earth from time to time, and you can see that keeping watch is a rational thing to do.
'd just like to point out that it doesn't really work like that. When you buy a company, you don't sit around waiting for the checks to come in so you can get your money back. Well, not just that, anyway. The key to making your money back is in market capitalization. If I spent $100 million to buy a publicly traded company, then I'm going to hope that the market capitalization (the total value of all outstanding shares of the company's stock, more or less) is equal to or greater than $100 million.
Except that market capitalization doesn't come from nowhere. Or isn't supposed to come from nowhere anyway, although the period 1998-2001 changed that thinking a bit;-)
If the efficient market hypothesis is correct, the market valuation should be based on the present value of all future earnings of the firm. Over the long term these earnings can only be profit, plus some allowance for the possibility of R&D coming up with a breakthrough development.
If the market cap is higher than the simple PV of current profits, then the market expects that the company will change or grow in some way to increase profits from their current level. However, see Yahoo, Nortel, and Worldcom for examples of what happens when these expectations turn out to be wrong.
sPh
PS Yes, I am familiar with the technical terms such as EBITDA, "free cash flow", "operating earnings", etc. To simplify this discussion I used the word "profit", which over the long term means essentially what you think it means.
Re:Server-Workstation Expert is dead
on
Ziff Davis Teeters
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
According to their website, Server-Workstation Expert has ceased publication.
At least for the moment they have their article and column archives available for download in PDF format. I grabbed all the "Storage Expert" columns; the best discussion of high-end storage systems I have ever found.
The problem is, the plot for LOTR is 50, 70 years old? (Sorry, can't remember). What it means is that there are no new ideas.
Try, um, 3000 - 4000 years old? In written form anyway? Tolkien was in perfect agreement with the 1920s Hollywood mogul who said, "there are are only 5 stories in human history: we are just retelling those five in different forms".
ow do you fit 500 pictures in 25 pages? Seems kinda hard to do!
Good question. First, remember that these are US standard photo albums, which are about 14" x 14" (35cm x 35cm), so there is a lot of real estate on the page. Second, she doesn't just lay out the prints in row-column order: she puts them down in layers, cropping as necessary with the scissors, cutting out a face here and a corner there, etc., until each page is more of a storybook than a HS yearbook page. I was impressed watching her do one - her hands were flying, but at the end she had a really cool storybook for that particular trip.
Again, this took a little over a month, working mostly on weekends, and I was pretty burned out, as far as scanning stuff goes, for a very, very long time after, but it was well worth it...and soon after I bout a digital camera! I'll never have to do that again!
Well, I have seen a friend (admittedly someone good at this) build a 25 page, 500 picture conventional photo album in 30 minutes. That's with sorting, layout, "cropping" (using a scissors), and attaching. Very artfully arranged, easily transported, and good for at least 100 years. I guess I can't help but think of that when I see someone mousing away at Photoshop...
We predict the lifetime of KODAK Photo CD, and KODAK Writable CD Media with InfoGuard Protection System, under normal storage conditions in an office or home environment, should be 100 years or more.
Well, great. Of course we have some photos in our family collection that are 120 years old, and could still make prints from the negatives. Are you sure the CDs will last that long?
File format longevity is the real killer, though. I have quite a few 5.25" floppy disks with documents that were created in industry-leading formats in the mid-1980s. I would like to retrieve some of them, but I (a) haven't seen a 5.25" floppy drive in years (b) can't find any software that will read those formats. And that is only 17 years! Do you really trust your family's history to the idea that JPEGs, for example, will still be readable in 2102?
I would say mozilla.org is about right for its intended audience - at least according to the project charter. It was (and maybe still is) intended that average joe customers would download a polished distribution from a provider such as Netscape, Opera, etc. Sort of like the difference between reading kernel.org and buying a Redhat package.
The appearance of "GNU Hardware": open designs, based on a strict "No Palladium" clause, along with an explosion of small, customized hardware shop based on these designs.
That might have worked in the 1970s or even 80s, when chipmaking systems had "reasonable" prices (say in the 50 million USD range), there were many companies making chips, and there was competition among microprocessors.
Today, chipmaking systems cost in the billions of USD. No one is going to start a garage shop to fabricate these things - they will have to come from established (read: large) manufacturers. Large companies are very susceptible to government pressure: "no DRM instructions in your new CPU? I guess we will have to cancel that big secret contract with the NSA, and also sic the SEC on your financial statements."
Similarly on the CPU side: Intel and AMD are really the only games in town now. Any new systems would have to "play ball" with one of those two. And again, as large organizations (in Intel's case with large US Government contracts) they will fall into line if pushed.
Since I started filling out the "Opt Out" (of data sharing) cards (or sending Ralph Nader's version for those entities whose standard card defeated even my willingness to read fine print), I have received much less financial junk mail. Fewer unwanted credit card offers, in particular.
I figure if I am receiving fewer offers, my information is going fewer places, and therefore can be abused in fewer places as well.
Not a huge gain, but at least it helps reduce the exposure a bit.
Slashdot Mirror
The best you can do is either collect anecdotes for the providers/areas you are considering, or try the recent Consumer Reports survey. But you are basically on your own.
sPh
Then I moved to a reasonably well-to-do suburb of a major midwestern city, with a few more hills than rural Illinois. Basically, my Verizon phone just stopped working. There was no signal - zero - nada - within 1000m of my house.
I spent 3 months on the phone with Verizon Customer Disservice and Verizon Technical Non-Support to try to get it working. Their final answer? "You have a bad handset". Funny - it works in rural Illinois, it works in downtown Chicago, it works everywhere it the midwest but fails when I bring it in to my house. Funny that. Funny too how 3 coworkers with different handset models experienced the same failure when they drove through my neighborhood.
I asked them to send out a signal strength truck and copy me on the test results. "Signal strength truck? What's that?".
Their FINAL ANSWER? "Too bad dude. Don't forget to send us a check every month for the next two years".
So then I got involved in a registered letter battle with the VP of Customer Service, the President of Verizon Wireless, and the CEO of Verizon. Finally, I had to write a letter to the senior outside memeber of the Verizon Board of Directors and the Verizon Corporate Counsel explaining that yes, I do know what a formal complaint to the FCC is, and yes, I will write up one asking that Verizon's license to do business in my state be revoked. Suddenly they were able to make an exception to their "no refunds" policy.
Switched to AT&T and everything has been hunky-dory since.
That's my experience with Verizon. Your milage may vary.
sPh
sPh
sPh
sPh
That's what I would say.
sPh
sPh
And it actually didn't hurt to get some data on how old people react to space flight. There is nothing that says that all space travellers will forever be 30-something athletes.
sPh
Bob Bell - I apologize.
sPh
sPh
sPh
sPh
Now, the powers that be may very well have capabilities they don't talk about. Or perhaps you have info I don't. But since "Not only is peace our profession, but we guard you from asteroids too!" would be a great PR win for the USAF, I think they would tout the capability if they had it.
sPh
Then look at two possible consequences of an asteroid strike
- A BIG ONE (tm) - Arizona sized - all human life on Earth destroyed.
Multiply those consequences by the odds (remembering that asteroids of various sizes do strike the Earth from time to time, and you can see that keeping watch is a rational thing to do.A small one - say 10 Mt worth - comes across the Atlantic from the direction of Iraq and lands near a US city. Effects not easily distinguished from a nuclear strike during the first few hours. US launches "retaliatory" strike against whomever - a few hundred million dead.
sPh
www.swexpert.com
sPh
If the efficient market hypothesis is correct, the market valuation should be based on the present value of all future earnings of the firm. Over the long term these earnings can only be profit, plus some allowance for the possibility of R&D coming up with a breakthrough development.
If the market cap is higher than the simple PV of current profits, then the market expects that the company will change or grow in some way to increase profits from their current level. However, see Yahoo, Nortel, and Worldcom for examples of what happens when these expectations turn out to be wrong.
sPh
PS Yes, I am familiar with the technical terms such as EBITDA, "free cash flow", "operating earnings", etc. To simplify this discussion I used the word "profit", which over the long term means essentially what you think it means.
sPh
sPh
sPh
sPh
On physical longevity, here's some info based on testing by the manufacturers:
Well, great. Of course we have some photos in our family collection that are 120 years old, and could still make prints from the negatives. Are you sure the CDs will last that long?File format longevity is the real killer, though. I have quite a few 5.25" floppy disks with documents that were created in industry-leading formats in the mid-1980s. I would like to retrieve some of them, but I (a) haven't seen a 5.25" floppy drive in years (b) can't find any software that will read those formats. And that is only 17 years! Do you really trust your family's history to the idea that JPEGs, for example, will still be readable in 2102?
sPh
sPh
sPh
Today, chipmaking systems cost in the billions of USD. No one is going to start a garage shop to fabricate these things - they will have to come from established (read: large) manufacturers. Large companies are very susceptible to government pressure: "no DRM instructions in your new CPU? I guess we will have to cancel that big secret contract with the NSA, and also sic the SEC on your financial statements."
Similarly on the CPU side: Intel and AMD are really the only games in town now. Any new systems would have to "play ball" with one of those two. And again, as large organizations (in Intel's case with large US Government contracts) they will fall into line if pushed.
sPh
I figure if I am receiving fewer offers, my information is going fewer places, and therefore can be abused in fewer places as well.
Not a huge gain, but at least it helps reduce the exposure a bit.
sPh