Mutual fund managers are almost never empowered to trade the "pinks". Plus why would they bother risking their $$$$$ jobs for a 5% profit? Part of the reason they can't/don't is that you just can't put large amounts of $ to work in these stocks. Even if they truly loved some penny stock and thought it would be the next microsoft - you can't invest even as little $10M in a company with $50M market without totally distorting the market - easier to just do a buy out the company of you like it that much.
In theory you could write a few lines of java/lisp/perl into your favorite automated trading platform and seek out the patterns of the spammers taking their position before they start pumping. That is, if they traded on some "real" exchange you could. In the "pinks sheets" there are no market makers, frequently no level 2 quotes, etc. Not enough data to easily find the patterns. As others have pointed out, this is also what makes it hard to prosecute the pumpers, they data trail is just too thin.
The risk the parent is actually talking about is not from eating "clones" but rather a diet consisting of monoclones. This may or may not happen with meat products (I'd bet not) but has been the norm for a long time with agricultural products. Unless you going out of your way to buy non corporate produced vegetarian food you have been beta testing this potential problem for the rest of us. Your sacrifice is appreciated.
"But the real abstract ideas? The inventions that can't be implemented for another 10, 20, 30, 300 years? Who funds the research that will be the bedrock for the next generation, or the next 15 generations, of developers and corporations? Observations of kettles boiling ultimately made the internal combustion engine possible. The equations of motion for non-linear springs made international travel reliable and safe, and made international communications possible. But if you'd tried to get James Watt a research grant or financial backing from any modern institution, they'd tell you to go take a long walk off a short plank."
VCs don't do this. You are right. It's not their business. It's not what they promise their *own* investors when they take their $. Once upon a time this stuff was funded by Medicis (in a loose sense)... and don't fool yourself, they make a buttload from Da Vinci. Now who does it? If it's long term research investment you can still probably call the japanese. If it makes the world a better place, but only makes limited profit? Gates, Buffet, that fund that Google is starting, Bono (not Sonny). Muhammad Yunus just won the Nobel Peace Prize for microcredit. People fund him. It's not the "Future of Banking" and it's not going to make those who fund it rich, but it's a Good Thing and it doesn't lose $.
Watt is probably a very bad example of your point. Not only could he get VC $ now - he got it then. Carron Iron Works backed him - not only would Roebuck he make a killing on sucess, but iron consumption would go up. Roebuck's timing was off and he lost his ass (still happens to VCs today). Boulton picked up his patent rights like India picked up the "dark fibre" from the 90's and ran with them. Watt's steam engine was not any sort of blue sky investment. And Watt was connected - a family of well heeled shipwrights with strong connections in the Presbyterian Church.
Re #1: most noise meters are SPL meters. They measure energy. Horrible as that sound is, it won't register very loud in terms of sound pressure waves. For #3 - you go kill it. I'm not sure I could get that close to the accursed thing.
Hey! I'm 48 and that is still ringing in my left ear. I have a headache behind my left eye now, and I'm not being sarcastic. Use that as a ringtone anywhere near me and I will break your phone. If a neighbor of mine had that sound going 24/7 and wouldn't turn it off he'd be in for a world of hurt.
The sound reminds me of a high pitched shriek that made it impossible for me to get near some malls when I was a kid. Best guess was that it was coming from the escalators. This mosquito sound is a lot lower pitch than that, but the same grating shrieking quality. I'm glad I'm too old to hear that one anymore, I suspect it's still there.
I agree that you can't just "do what Ben says" - heck the book is 70 some years old. The world marches on. But - unless you understand the basic of valuation and fundamentals that he teaches you will get badly burned in statistical arbitrage, pair trading, option straddles or anything else. If you don't understand the time value of money - how can "the greeks" (calculus derivatives on option contracts) ever make any sense?
I'm just a believer in knowing the rules before you break them. Since I was just writing the same thing about SQL queries last week, it must just be part of how I think.
But the parent is correct that it will not teach you the most difficult thing - controlling your emotions. Closing out a losing position is much harder than it sounds. It hits your stops and says SELL but every instinct screams at you to hold out.. it going to bounce... and minute now... arg it went down even more, now it's really oversold... I can't sell into this, it's a bull trap... blatent market manipulation. And that's how you blow up a trading account. It doesn't help that things *do* bounce sometimes and that there are real bull traps out there, etc.
"Trading in options, futures, and other derivative instruments should be reserved strictly for Ph.D's with their own Beowulf cluster, or people who aren't losing enough money by day-trading. You can get in more trouble, quicker, than you can imagine."
Sounds intuitively correct. But the people that are most succesful at this are *not* that. I don't quite get it myself. They actually tend to be very sharp (a sprinter intellect rather than a marathon intellect required for a Ph.D) folks with a background that includes competitive sports. Maybe it's just that those are the types of people the Goldmans look to hire out of Ivy League 4 year degrees and they are overrepresented in the pool of potential traders.
Oh, and if you haven't read Ben Graham's "Intelligent Investor" and understood everything in it already -- just stop now and go back to unjamming peoples printers and resetting their network passwords until you do.
Those brokers are all geared towards individual "investors". If you do "trading" you are going to hit their screens for a "pattern day trader" and your $2k becomes a minimum $25k balance. And all you can get are common stocks, options and bonds at fair but not great commissions. A $10 commision will kill you on small trades done frequently.
If you were to go this path to gain experience (not sure it's the way to go really) you need a deep discount broker that gives you good derivitaves exposure. I use interactivebrokers.com for options, futures and forex. If you trade futures you don't hit the "pattern day trader" radar and can trade as often as you want with a theoretical $2k balance. Of course, it's really really easy to blow up a $2k account balance trading futures in a few days and be broke.
The quant route is a good way to move from IT. Get a paper account that has API access (IB has that) and start looking at coding algorithms for trade scenarios. Look at Medved and other free tools that are out there - look at how they work under the hood. See if you can do better.
As I said, it's a bit blue sky. Determining longitude was once considered blue sky too. If someone could make it work, I think I'd bet on the japanese. They don't mind speculative R&D that may produce nothing. They are putting a lot of good work in ITER, and that's speculative too. They don't seem to suffer from the stupid US mindset that says things like "if we can put a man on the moon, why can't we eliminate poverty?"
The moonbase article is probably just chest pumping, but you never know. The US is not doing anythng interesting in the "humans in space" area and russia went bankrupt. So, if anything gets done it will be Japan or China.
Not totally practical, but it's there if you want a blue sky reason to invest the capital. Most of the early work would be an excuse to get the japanese government to fund some R&D, later investment can be scaled depending on developments on h3 reactors and other practical returns. With its energy needs and aging population Japan needs some revenue that has a high return on labor. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
They all have "enhancements" to standard sql. Some good, some bad like all things. IF you write basic ansi89 sql it will work on all 3 of the databases you mention - admittedly not optimally and once in a great while not at all. When I did this for a living I typically used the Perl DBI, wrote simple sql queries and used perl to do things that are a pain in the ass to do in in proprietary sql variants - or worse - Oracle PL/SQL (if I say PL/SQL sucks that make me not a pure MS hater?).
If you learn one dialect of sql first and nothing else most people will write tons of code that has RDBMS specific gunk in it. This makes it a nightmare to move the codebase to a new platform. Usually this means that PHBs will totally scrap a functional system, spend a couple million $ on some new VAR's closed vertical application that is less suited to the business than the original one was - just because there is a corporate mandate to move everything to Oracle - or "MS SQL Server" - or "JD Edwards" (and no, they can't understand that that is not an RDBMS).
If you learn basic "baby talk" sql and use it whenever you can, you will produce code that is more portable and much easier to maintain. Start simple and get fancy if - and only if -you really need to. Don't write T-SQL procedures before you can write a basic ANSI89 query.
Suppose this really is an effective treatment. It will be 10-15 years before it grinds through the system and is available. What happened to the comic book scientists that inject themselves with their promising drugs and gain super powers? Seriously though - if the mouse studies and the stage I studies are far enough to whow efficacy in mice and that it's at least reasonably tolerated in humans why not go for it? People with late stage Alzheimers have nothing to lose. People with earlier stage disease sometimes suicide when faced with the immenent death of their minds.
The FDA has all sorts of bizzare rules that you must follow if you want to sell in the US, and if you can't sell in the US you can't sell in most other countries.
Isn't there some country where people are allowed to take highly experimental drugs and make themselves lab rats to try to save their lives or sanity?
Ah, but this is a 12+ hour old/. story.... nobody will ever even read this, much less answer.
" have been working with various versions of Microsoft SQL Server since 1999"
Man... talk about Microsoft winning the marketing war even when the tech is 3rd rate.
Also also question the need for a book on leaning sql that is specific to that bastard version of Sybase that Microsoft sells (the real answer is that PHBs typically sign off on book buys). Sql is sql, stuff that you have to code specific to any particuloar RDBMS is not sql, or at least not standard sql. Why not teach people standard sql before giving them the nonstandard exceptions for "Microsoft SQL Server" or Oracle for that matter? Or just title the book "How to write queries for MS SQL Server 2005"?
The answer probably is that you can't fill a book with "Learning SQL", there just isn't that much to it.
Management covered their asses by hiring "expert"s, folowing their advice and performing a followup audit. As long as they followed existing approved SOPs they are clean. The programmers are at each other's mercy. If any one of them got pissed at the others and dropped a dime on the others they would be in federal prison for conspiracy and dozen other charges.
If federal auditors discovered this the real penalty to management would be that they would rip their systems apart and do a *real* audit from top to bottom. 99% of the people the feds send out for routine computer audits are totally clueless about how technology actually works and what real failure modes there may be or where security problems is likely to have. All they know howe to do is pore over validation and design docs (that they also don't understand) and look for clerical things they don't like. The fed *does* have a (very) few people with a clue, but you have to be very bad to get their attention. They would probably still have to pull in people from FBI to do what you or I would consider a real audit.
Quite possibly. But, I have no real interest in spending a bunch of time swapping out network cards, investigating power supply issues, tracking driver updates and service patches for something I really don't need..NET got installed as part of an ATI graphic driver install and started causing problems. I don't really need the "control center" that requires it so out it goes and so do all the problems. Similarly I don't "need" to know the exact upgradability of my system to Vista, since I have no plans to ever install Vista.
I guess I'll never know if I'm ready or not. It requires.NET to run and every time I've installed that my network stack has crashed reliably every 10 minutes. Joy.
I guess I'll just have to upgrade to something less "crashy".
"Excluding businesses such as shipping companies, delivery companies, et al. that need bigger engines and more horsepower"
OK, lets look at them. Business care about costs. That's why they don't run more wasteful vehicles than they need. Long haul trucks may need big engines, but UPS trucks don't and they don't have them.
"My brother is an electrical worker. He needs his Silverado. Not want, need."
Maybe. A Silverado work truck with a Vortec V6 engine. They don't get such bad MPG. An electrical worker has no need for some monster 3500 with a 300HP engine like I see sitting in gridlock commuter traffic every day. Only a fool would own one of those that didn't need it for stump pulling or as an emergency tow vehicle for some really heavy stuff.
"What about large families that need large vehicles?"
What about a van? Safer, better MPG, more useful space, etc.
"How about someone who owns a boat and needs to tow it to a lake, so he needs a big V-8 or V-10?"
If you own a boat that is so big as to need that and you can't afford to have a dedicated tow vehicle for it -- you really need to rethink your priorities. Buy a used Camry and leave that thing home on the weekdays. If you are using that behmoth for your 50 mile commute every day I have no sympathy.
"Should these people "feel the pain" when despite owning gas guzzlers, are driving vehicles they need?"
Yes. The pain may be the only thing that will make them reevaluate their needs. Even of the consumers you list probably no more than 10% actually need those beasts they drive every day.
From my limited understanding it seems like this type of traffic shaping should reduce the low priority service speed by 2%-5%. VOIP packets get 1st priority, but there really isn't all that much VOIP traffic. And it's the packets that get priority, not the "conversation".
Are the ISPs really doing traffic shaping or are they doing something more primitive? Are they really just doing port throttling? Detecting P2P traffic and artifically limiting its bandwidth? If so, that's stupid. done right, shaping should make things better for everyone, including the P2P user.
"I like how I can call Oracle and get the best developers/DBAs/integrators/troubleshooters to solve my problem"
Not true for most of their "customers" since they are not Oracle's cusomters. They are customers of some vertical marker supplier that they bought their MRP/CRM/SOX/LIMS/whatever software from that just happens to use Oracle. They have zero support through Oracle. Usually if the VAR can't fix the problem you end up playing semaphore with the VAR sitting in the middle trying to mediate. This does not always work well.
"Just seems like an organization responsible for distribution would want to embrase a new distribution medium"
People hate change. Corporations hate change even more. They have never operated in a "free market" and have no desire to./. Has a high representation of people that Alvin Toffler would call "change junkies". In the rest of the world these type of people are very very rare. I didn't really understand this until I worked for a few years for a dow 30 company, the feeling that what worked 50 years ago should still work now is so pervasive that you breathe it with the air. As far as I can infer - that's how normal people think.
The RIAA isn't even the record companies that they represent. They are paid to represent the industry as a whole. That interest is selling a million copies of the same thing to everyone. They make the most $$ when the record stores all sell the same 30 products. I could write a 10 page screed on the law of large numbers to prove that point, but frankly nobody cares except investors and economists. It's the mega-platinum sellers that subsidise everything else according to the current (obsolete) business model. It really will be a bit sad to lose that.
Jaince Ian has written about how cool it is to be truly wicked famous. We are going to lose that as part of this transition. It's kind of like losing the romance of whaling. I don't miss it, but Moby Dick was a hell of a book. We did lose something.
The RIAA can't stop that, but their clear mission is to stop it or die trying. They *will* die trying, and it won't be pretty. The Hillary Rosen's and Jack Valenti's will cash their checks, sangine that they have done the best they possibly could at something that had no chance of success and move on to the next gig.
This industry is going to die. But it is going to go out kicking and screaming like every other doomed business model that used to work so very profitably.
"Back to the issue at hand, the RIAA has criminalized the issue and in the process alienated a lot of their customers. One need only to look at the top selling software to see that pirating does not hurt sales but in fact helps it."
True, but you miss the point. Yes, it helps sales but they don't care about sales, they care about profit. Max profit comes from having everyone listening to the same music. P2P and other post modern music distribution makes that impossible. They need you to buy Madonna, if you buy Ayumi Hamasaki instead you have seriously screwed up their business. Their real business is controlling access to the listening public. you can't get people to listen to your music unless you go through them.
If everyone listens to music that they like, the terrorists win.
Slashdot Mirror
Mutual fund managers are almost never empowered to trade the "pinks". Plus why would they bother risking their $$$$$ jobs for a 5% profit? Part of the reason they can't/don't is that you just can't put large amounts of $ to work in these stocks. Even if they truly loved some penny stock and thought it would be the next microsoft - you can't invest even as little $10M in a company with $50M market without totally distorting the market - easier to just do a buy out the company of you like it that much.
In theory you could write a few lines of java/lisp/perl into your favorite automated trading platform and seek out the patterns of the spammers taking their position before they start pumping. That is, if they traded on some "real" exchange you could. In the "pinks sheets" there are no market makers, frequently no level 2 quotes, etc. Not enough data to easily find the patterns. As others have pointed out, this is also what makes it hard to prosecute the pumpers, they data trail is just too thin.
The risk the parent is actually talking about is not from eating "clones" but rather a diet consisting of monoclones. This may or may not happen with meat products (I'd bet not) but has been the norm for a long time with agricultural products. Unless you going out of your way to buy non corporate produced vegetarian food you have been beta testing this potential problem for the rest of us. Your sacrifice is appreciated.
"But the real abstract ideas? The inventions that can't be implemented for another 10, 20, 30, 300 years? Who funds the research that will be the bedrock for the next generation, or the next 15 generations, of developers and corporations? Observations of kettles boiling ultimately made the internal combustion engine possible. The equations of motion for non-linear springs made international travel reliable and safe, and made international communications possible. But if you'd tried to get James Watt a research grant or financial backing from any modern institution, they'd tell you to go take a long walk off a short plank."
VCs don't do this. You are right. It's not their business. It's not what they promise their *own* investors when they take their $. Once upon a time this stuff was funded by Medicis (in a loose sense)... and don't fool yourself, they make a buttload from Da Vinci. Now who does it? If it's long term research investment you can still probably call the japanese. If it makes the world a better place, but only makes limited profit? Gates, Buffet, that fund that Google is starting, Bono (not Sonny). Muhammad Yunus just won the Nobel Peace Prize for microcredit. People fund him. It's not the "Future of Banking" and it's not going to make those who fund it rich, but it's a Good Thing and it doesn't lose $.
Watt is probably a very bad example of your point. Not only could he get VC $ now - he got it then. Carron Iron Works backed him - not only would Roebuck he make a killing on sucess, but iron consumption would go up. Roebuck's timing was off and he lost his ass (still happens to VCs today). Boulton picked up his patent rights like India picked up the "dark fibre" from the 90's and ran with them. Watt's steam engine was not any sort of blue sky investment. And Watt was connected - a family of well heeled shipwrights with strong connections in the Presbyterian Church.
ARRR! I'll be scuppered! The day be half to the bow before I screed a calendar!
Re #1: most noise meters are SPL meters. They measure energy. Horrible as that sound is, it won't register very loud in terms of sound pressure waves. For #3 - you go kill it. I'm not sure I could get that close to the accursed thing.
Hey! I'm 48 and that is still ringing in my left ear. I have a headache behind my left eye now, and I'm not being sarcastic. Use that as a ringtone anywhere near me and I will break your phone. If a neighbor of mine had that sound going 24/7 and wouldn't turn it off he'd be in for a world of hurt.
The sound reminds me of a high pitched shriek that made it impossible for me to get near some malls when I was a kid. Best guess was that it was coming from the escalators. This mosquito sound is a lot lower pitch than that, but the same grating shrieking quality. I'm glad I'm too old to hear that one anymore, I suspect it's still there.
I agree that you can't just "do what Ben says" - heck the book is 70 some years old. The world marches on. But - unless you understand the basic of valuation and fundamentals that he teaches you will get badly burned in statistical arbitrage, pair trading, option straddles or anything else. If you don't understand the time value of money - how can "the greeks" (calculus derivatives on option contracts) ever make any sense?
I'm just a believer in knowing the rules before you break them. Since I was just writing the same thing about SQL queries last week, it must just be part of how I think.
But the parent is correct that it will not teach you the most difficult thing - controlling your emotions. Closing out a losing position is much harder than it sounds. It hits your stops and says SELL but every instinct screams at you to hold out.. it going to bounce... and minute now... arg it went down even more, now it's really oversold... I can't sell into this, it's a bull trap... blatent market manipulation. And that's how you blow up a trading account. It doesn't help that things *do* bounce sometimes and that there are real bull traps out there, etc.
"Trading in options, futures, and other derivative instruments should be reserved strictly for Ph.D's with their own Beowulf cluster, or people who aren't losing enough money by day-trading. You can get in more trouble, quicker, than you can imagine."
Sounds intuitively correct. But the people that are most succesful at this are *not* that. I don't quite get it myself. They actually tend to be very sharp (a sprinter intellect rather than a marathon intellect required for a Ph.D) folks with a background that includes competitive sports. Maybe it's just that those are the types of people the Goldmans look to hire out of Ivy League 4 year degrees and they are overrepresented in the pool of potential traders.
Oh, and if you haven't read Ben Graham's "Intelligent Investor" and understood everything in it already -- just stop now and go back to unjamming peoples printers and resetting their network passwords until you do.
Those brokers are all geared towards individual "investors". If you do "trading" you are going to hit their screens for a "pattern day trader" and your $2k becomes a minimum $25k balance. And all you can get are common stocks, options and bonds at fair but not great commissions. A $10 commision will kill you on small trades done frequently.
If you were to go this path to gain experience (not sure it's the way to go really) you need a deep discount broker that gives you good derivitaves exposure. I use interactivebrokers.com for options, futures and forex. If you trade futures you don't hit the "pattern day trader" radar and can trade as often as you want with a theoretical $2k balance. Of course, it's really really easy to blow up a $2k account balance trading futures in a few days and be broke.
The quant route is a good way to move from IT. Get a paper account that has API access (IB has that) and start looking at coding algorithms for trade scenarios. Look at Medved and other free tools that are out there - look at how they work under the hood. See if you can do better.
As I said, it's a bit blue sky. Determining longitude was once considered blue sky too. If someone could make it work, I think I'd bet on the japanese. They don't mind speculative R&D that may produce nothing. They are putting a lot of good work in ITER, and that's speculative too. They don't seem to suffer from the stupid US mindset that says things like "if we can put a man on the moon, why can't we eliminate poverty?"
The moonbase article is probably just chest pumping, but you never know. The US is not doing anythng interesting in the "humans in space" area and russia went bankrupt. So, if anything gets done it will be Japan or China.
"Wake me up when Japanese industrialists figure out something they can do on the moon and want to send robots there or something."
6 30.html
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/helium3_000
Not totally practical, but it's there if you want a blue sky reason to invest the capital. Most of the early work would be an excuse to get the japanese government to fund some R&D, later investment can be scaled depending on developments on h3 reactors and other practical returns. With its energy needs and aging population Japan needs some revenue that has a high return on labor. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.
They all have "enhancements" to standard sql. Some good, some bad like all things. IF you write basic ansi89 sql it will work on all 3 of the databases you mention - admittedly not optimally and once in a great while not at all. When I did this for a living I typically used the Perl DBI, wrote simple sql queries and used perl to do things that are a pain in the ass to do in in proprietary sql variants - or worse - Oracle PL/SQL (if I say PL/SQL sucks that make me not a pure MS hater?).
If you learn one dialect of sql first and nothing else most people will write tons of code that has RDBMS specific gunk in it. This makes it a nightmare to move the codebase to a new platform. Usually this means that PHBs will totally scrap a functional system, spend a couple million $ on some new VAR's closed vertical application that is less suited to the business than the original one was - just because there is a corporate mandate to move everything to Oracle - or "MS SQL Server" - or "JD Edwards" (and no, they can't understand that that is not an RDBMS).
If you learn basic "baby talk" sql and use it whenever you can, you will produce code that is more portable and much easier to maintain. Start simple and get fancy if - and only if -you really need to. Don't write T-SQL procedures before you can write a basic ANSI89 query.
Suppose this really is an effective treatment. It will be 10-15 years before it grinds through the system and is available. What happened to the comic book scientists that inject themselves with their promising drugs and gain super powers? Seriously though - if the mouse studies and the stage I studies are far enough to whow efficacy in mice and that it's at least reasonably tolerated in humans why not go for it? People with late stage Alzheimers have nothing to lose. People with earlier stage disease sometimes suicide when faced with the immenent death of their minds.
/. story.... nobody will ever even read this, much less answer.
The FDA has all sorts of bizzare rules that you must follow if you want to sell in the US, and if you can't sell in the US you can't sell in most other countries.
Isn't there some country where people are allowed to take highly experimental drugs and make themselves lab rats to try to save their lives or sanity?
Ah, but this is a 12+ hour old
when he said this:
" have been working with various versions of Microsoft SQL Server since 1999"
Man... talk about Microsoft winning the marketing war even when the tech is 3rd rate.
Also also question the need for a book on leaning sql that is specific to that bastard version of Sybase that Microsoft sells (the real answer is that PHBs typically sign off on book buys). Sql is sql, stuff that you have to code specific to any particuloar RDBMS is not sql, or at least not standard sql. Why not teach people standard sql before giving them the nonstandard exceptions for "Microsoft SQL Server" or Oracle for that matter? Or just title the book "How to write queries for MS SQL Server 2005"?
The answer probably is that you can't fill a book with "Learning SQL", there just isn't that much to it.
Management covered their asses by hiring "expert"s, folowing their advice and performing a followup audit. As long as they followed existing approved SOPs they are clean. The programmers are at each other's mercy. If any one of them got pissed at the others and dropped a dime on the others they would be in federal prison for conspiracy and dozen other charges.
If federal auditors discovered this the real penalty to management would be that they would rip their systems apart and do a *real* audit from top to bottom. 99% of the people the feds send out for routine computer audits are totally clueless about how technology actually works and what real failure modes there may be or where security problems is likely to have. All they know howe to do is pore over validation and design docs (that they also don't understand) and look for clerical things they don't like. The fed *does* have a (very) few people with a clue, but you have to be very bad to get their attention. They would probably still have to pull in people from FBI to do what you or I would consider a real audit.
Quite possibly. But, I have no real interest in spending a bunch of time swapping out network cards, investigating power supply issues, tracking driver updates and service patches for something I really don't need. .NET got installed as part of an ATI graphic driver install and started causing problems. I don't really need the "control center" that requires it so out it goes and so do all the problems. Similarly I don't "need" to know the exact upgradability of my system to Vista, since I have no plans to ever install Vista.
I guess I'll never know if I'm ready or not. It requires .NET to run and every time I've installed that my network stack has crashed reliably every 10 minutes. Joy.
I guess I'll just have to upgrade to something less "crashy".
"Excluding businesses such as shipping companies, delivery companies, et al. that need bigger engines and more horsepower"
OK, lets look at them. Business care about costs. That's why they don't run more wasteful vehicles than they need. Long haul trucks may need big engines, but UPS trucks don't and they don't have them.
"My brother is an electrical worker. He needs his Silverado. Not want, need."
Maybe. A Silverado work truck with a Vortec V6 engine. They don't get such bad MPG. An electrical worker has no need for some monster 3500 with a 300HP engine like I see sitting in gridlock commuter traffic every day. Only a fool would own one of those that didn't need it for stump pulling or as an emergency tow vehicle for some really heavy stuff.
"What about large families that need large vehicles?"
What about a van? Safer, better MPG, more useful space, etc.
"How about someone who owns a boat and needs to tow it to a lake, so he needs a big V-8 or V-10?"
If you own a boat that is so big as to need that and you can't afford to have a dedicated tow vehicle for it -- you really need to rethink your priorities. Buy a used Camry and leave that thing home on the weekdays. If you are using that behmoth for your 50 mile commute every day I have no sympathy.
"Should these people "feel the pain" when despite owning gas guzzlers, are driving vehicles they need?"
Yes. The pain may be the only thing that will make them reevaluate their needs. Even of the consumers you list probably no more than 10% actually need those beasts they drive every day.
They may not market it here (unless you watch the international channels) but it's easy to find.... if you like that kind of thing.
Whatever happened to that Belgian guy that used to run the Newton project? Maybe they should move him back in!
From my limited understanding it seems like this type of traffic shaping should reduce the low priority service speed by 2%-5%. VOIP packets get 1st priority, but there really isn't all that much VOIP traffic. And it's the packets that get priority, not the "conversation".
Are the ISPs really doing traffic shaping or are they doing something more primitive? Are they really just doing port throttling? Detecting P2P traffic and artifically limiting its bandwidth? If so, that's stupid. done right, shaping should make things better for everyone, including the P2P user.
"I like how I can call Oracle and get the best developers/DBAs/integrators/troubleshooters to solve my problem"
Not true for most of their "customers" since they are not Oracle's cusomters. They are customers of some vertical marker supplier that they bought their MRP/CRM/SOX/LIMS/whatever software from that just happens to use Oracle. They have zero support through Oracle. Usually if the VAR can't fix the problem you end up playing semaphore with the VAR sitting in the middle trying to mediate. This does not always work well.
"Just seems like an organization responsible for distribution would want to embrase a new distribution medium"
/. Has a high representation of people that Alvin Toffler would call "change junkies". In the rest of the world these type of people are very very rare. I didn't really understand this until I worked for a few years for a dow 30 company, the feeling that what worked 50 years ago should still work now is so pervasive that you breathe it with the air. As far as I can infer - that's how normal people think.
People hate change. Corporations hate change even more. They have never operated in a "free market" and have no desire to.
The RIAA isn't even the record companies that they represent. They are paid to represent the industry as a whole. That interest is selling a million copies of the same thing to everyone. They make the most $$ when the record stores all sell the same 30 products. I could write a 10 page screed on the law of large numbers to prove that point, but frankly nobody cares except investors and economists. It's the mega-platinum sellers that subsidise everything else according to the current (obsolete) business model. It really will be a bit sad to lose that.
Jaince Ian has written about how cool it is to be truly wicked famous. We are going to lose that as part of this transition. It's kind of like losing the romance of whaling. I don't miss it, but Moby Dick was a hell of a book. We did lose something.
The RIAA can't stop that, but their clear mission is to stop it or die trying. They *will* die trying, and it won't be pretty. The Hillary Rosen's and Jack Valenti's will cash their checks, sangine that they have done the best they possibly could at something that had no chance of success and move on to the next gig.
This industry is going to die. But it is going to go out kicking and screaming like every other doomed business model that used to work so very profitably.
"Back to the issue at hand, the RIAA has criminalized the issue and in the process alienated a lot of their customers. One need only to look at the top selling software to see that pirating does not hurt sales but in fact helps it."
True, but you miss the point. Yes, it helps sales but they don't care about sales, they care about profit. Max profit comes from having everyone listening to the same music. P2P and other post modern music distribution makes that impossible. They need you to buy Madonna, if you buy Ayumi Hamasaki instead you have seriously screwed up their business. Their real business is controlling access to the listening public. you can't get people to listen to your music unless you go through them.
If everyone listens to music that they like, the terrorists win.