I've heard this a lot, and I'm genuinely curious: has anyone ever actually done a study to figure out how going first affects negotiations and haggling? It shouldn't be too hard, at a minimum, to set up a small experiment in which person A has something that's worth about $5, person B actually has $5, tell them to trade, and then observe how going first or second affects the average result.
You can't always trust folk wisdom, and such an experiment, or carefully conducting a survey, seems so straightforward that I find it hard to believe no one's done it before.
I believe there was, in the past, an idea to depreciate the term "Administrators" because the term seems to denote an authority which is not actually present. Being is an administrator is a position of responsibility, but not one of authority. Had this idea been implemented and Administrators were referred to as something like "Special Access Editors" or even "Superusers", "Sysops" (as the primary term), "Wiki mongers", etc, that the current situation may not have occurred, and we wouldn't be seeing this on the front page of Slashdot and elsewhere.
Apple's been attributed with kick-starting modern television advertising with its 1984 ad. The technologies you mention may have been very good products with a smaller advertising budget than their competitors, but none of these are clearly superior products with "modest" marketing.
And let's not forget that marketing is more than just promotion. I was going to rattle off ways in which Compuserve wasn't so great, but a quick look at Wikipedia reminded me of the most serious flaw in Compuserve's marketing: "it was sidelined by the rise of information services, such as AOL, who adopted pricing models based on monthly subscriptions rather than CompuServe's hourly rate approach."
Oh, and since I mentioned a Superbowl ad, whatever happened to all those dot-bombs that spent big money on advertising? A larger advertising budget helps, but does not guarantee, success; a smaller one, conversely, does not guarantee failure.
And can we please remember that it's One Laptop Per Child, and not One Laptop Per Slashdot-reading Guerilla Geek? Any abuse regarding deactivation of the laptops is more likely to be carried out by confiscation of the laptop by school personal.
Also, the feature can be disabled with a Developer Key from OLPC:
1018 The anti-theft system cannot be bypassed as long as P_SF_CORE is enabled (and
1019 disabling it requires a developer key). This, in effect, means that a child is
1020 free to do any modification to her machine's userspace (by disabling P_SF_RUN
1021 without a developer key), but cannot change the running kernel without
1022 requesting the key. The key-issuing process incorporates a 14-day delay to
1023 allow for a slow theft report to percolate up through the system, and is only
1024 issued if the machine is not reported stolen at the end of that period of time.
Read the definition at http://dictionary.law.com/default2.asp?selected=33 7 – "[A contract is] an agreement with specific terms between two or more persons or entities in which there is a promise to do something in return for a valuable benefit known as consideration" – for a contract to exist, you must have consideration, something that's exchanged. If I were, hypothetically, to promise you $5.00 for no reason, you could not say that I broke our contract when I failed to do so, because no contract exists, because you have not offered any consideration in exchange for that $5.00
Prizes rather than grants; there was even a story on in this the New York Times within the last couple of weeks! I found out about this via the economist Robin Hanson on the Overcoming Bias blog. One advantage, and just one advantage of many, to offering a prize like this is that more money than the prize amount is spent on the research – there is a small but very real chance that some unknown and relatively disconnected person, spending a relatively small amount of money, will find a solution and claim the prize. From that perspective, the $25 million is worth more than $25 million; think of it as akin to a matching donation in a charity drive.
It's much more likely that these laptops will be stolen and used for illegal purposes afterward. Unless they have terrible security, it won't be an issue.
They've thought of this. These machines are essentially paperweights once they leave the factory until a student receives them. Regarding theft after that point, the full document says:
997 We do not expect the machines will be an appealing target for part resale. Save
998 for the custom display, all valuable parts of the XO laptops are soldered onto
999 the motherboard.
Also note the nearby information on the optional 'anti-theft deamon' which will shut down a laptop after some time if it's stolen.
I'm more inclined to think that the current decentralized approach is probably more efficient, especially since Real Estate agents will still need to pay for photographers for properties they're selling, but this is just my prediction, and it's for the market to judge.
Well, yeah, people lie. And they also may go to the trouble of making the outside of their house nicer than it really is, especially if this becomes common practice. Even for a loan, if you have a question about the house's value, you'd be far, far better off sending someone out to actually look at the property than relying on a database, especially THIS database, as someone can put up a facade as easily as they can, say, cover vats of water with oil.
Ditto that. Plus, there's no way they're not going to end up with a database full of cruft. Even though they say they've "developed proprietary software and systems to continuously maintain and update the database as properties change and redevelopment occurs." I would take anything from this company with a grain of salt, at the least. (Recent!) Historical sales prices from the local area are probably more useful for most of the purposes they're marketing this for.
Truth be told, it kind of strikes me as a www.tuna-sandwich-delivered-to-your-cubical.com kind of idea. I wonder who's paying for a small army of photographers to go criss-crossing the country?
Recently, I read The Wisdom of Crowds, and can't help but think that better results could be achieved by giving individuals some sort of incentive to take pictures of neighborhoods, not individual houses. You could have a panel offer opinions on the average value of the homes in the photographs, and use some sort of (Bayesian?) logic to determine the value of individual buildings. The devil's in the details as far as second part goes, but the photography half shouldn't be any big deal at all – City-data.com already has plenty of photos of cities, so it'd basically be a matter of pumping a bit for money into some contests, and writing some scripts to keep everything organized.
There's a list of registars at http://www.internic.net/alpha.html if you'd really like to compare. Myself, I tranferred a domain away from GoDaddy, and didn't have any particular problems (I transferred partly because I could get a better deal elsewhere, and partly because I don't want my domains all over the place). I currently use DreamHost and 000Domains, both of which seem decent enough.
Well, no. I've actually paid Amazon with coins via a local Coinstar kiosk. They also take Money Orders, which you can get from either Wal-Mart itself or the USPS for fairly cheap (USPS site says $0.95 each up to $500.00). So, even if you don't have any relationship at all with any financial institution and mostly deal with cash, it doesn't stop you from ordering something from Amazon.
Regarding video games, is there any place in the US that's
1) Within a one-hour drive of a Wal-Mart but... 2) Amazon.com won't deliver to?
I'm genuinely curious. When I can't find something local (which is quite often), and I can't drive out a bit further to get it, I try to get someone to ship it to me.
One thing that I haven't seen anyone else mention yet is, regardless of if Google dominates search and search advertisement or not, they have an opportunity cost in that they could be advertising something for someone else in the space they take for themselves. This is true even if it's in a space of the page that isn't used for AdWords (Seriously, what would YOU pay to place a link to your site on Google's front page? What do you think Amazon, Netflix, or WalMart would pay, given the chance?). If Google gives up a click that they would get money for in order to promote something of their own, so be it. They are, after all, paying for it!
Well, Rolex certainly tries to shut down copycats, I'm sure, but Rolex watches are nearly the epitome of luxury goods that have cheap knock offs. They have been for a long time. See Wikipedia if you're interested.
"King of the Pirates," eh? I wonder if he has the second FLCL soundtrack in that collection of his. Or maybe the title isn't so original after all. Oh well.
Slashdot Mirror
...or at least I tried to, and the link even appeared in the preview, but somehow it got eaten: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_suicide
This has actually led to some interesting thought. I point to the Quantum Suicide Wikipedia article.
It's an idiom. English has a lot of them. It makes a bit more sense spoken, because you can emphasize the second word.
I've heard this a lot, and I'm genuinely curious: has anyone ever actually done a study to figure out how going first affects negotiations and haggling? It shouldn't be too hard, at a minimum, to set up a small experiment in which person A has something that's worth about $5, person B actually has $5, tell them to trade, and then observe how going first or second affects the average result.
You can't always trust folk wisdom, and such an experiment, or carefully conducting a survey, seems so straightforward that I find it hard to believe no one's done it before.
I believe there was, in the past, an idea to depreciate the term "Administrators" because the term seems to denote an authority which is not actually present. Being is an administrator is a position of responsibility, but not one of authority. Had this idea been implemented and Administrators were referred to as something like "Special Access Editors" or even "Superusers", "Sysops" (as the primary term), "Wiki mongers", etc, that the current situation may not have occurred, and we wouldn't be seeing this on the front page of Slashdot and elsewhere.
I believe EUPHORIA uses '=' for both assignment and testing based on context, but I haven't used it for some years, so I may be wrong about that.
Ha. This whole story reminds me of the OS-tan phenomenon.
You would prefer that he didn't bathe? Sounds like some sort of problem with you, alright. ;)
Macs and Compuserve were marketed modestly?
Apple's been attributed with kick-starting modern television advertising with its 1984 ad. The technologies you mention may have been very good products with a smaller advertising budget than their competitors, but none of these are clearly superior products with "modest" marketing.
And let's not forget that marketing is more than just promotion. I was going to rattle off ways in which Compuserve wasn't so great, but a quick look at Wikipedia reminded me of the most serious flaw in Compuserve's marketing: "it was sidelined by the rise of information services, such as AOL, who adopted pricing models based on monthly subscriptions rather than CompuServe's hourly rate approach."
Oh, and since I mentioned a Superbowl ad, whatever happened to all those dot-bombs that spent big money on advertising? A larger advertising budget helps, but does not guarantee, success; a smaller one, conversely, does not guarantee failure.
Several people, myself included, specifically pointed this out during the last story on OLPC's BitFrost system..
And can we please remember that it's One Laptop Per Child, and not One Laptop Per Slashdot-reading Guerilla Geek? Any abuse regarding deactivation of the laptops is more likely to be carried out by confiscation of the laptop by school personal.
Also, the feature can be disabled with a Developer Key from OLPC:
- http://dev.laptop.org/git.do?p=security;a=blob;hbRead the definition at http://dictionary.law.com/default2.asp?selected=33 7 – "[A contract is] an agreement with specific terms between two or more persons or entities in which there is a promise to do something in return for a valuable benefit known as consideration" – for a contract to exist, you must have consideration, something that's exchanged. If I were, hypothetically, to promise you $5.00 for no reason, you could not say that I broke our contract when I failed to do so, because no contract exists, because you have not offered any consideration in exchange for that $5.00
Nonono... that's how you recognize the leader of the local group of enemy invaders and their MIBs.
Reminds me of the quote I saw on Google a few days ago – "The United States is a nation of laws: badly written and randomly enforced." - Frank Zappa
Prizes rather than grants; there was even a story on in this the New York Times within the last couple of weeks! I found out about this via the economist Robin Hanson on the Overcoming Bias blog. One advantage, and just one advantage of many, to offering a prize like this is that more money than the prize amount is spent on the research – there is a small but very real chance that some unknown and relatively disconnected person, spending a relatively small amount of money, will find a solution and claim the prize. From that perspective, the $25 million is worth more than $25 million; think of it as akin to a matching donation in a charity drive.
They've thought of this. These machines are essentially paperweights once they leave the factory until a student receives them. Regarding theft after that point, the full document says:
Also note the nearby information on the optional 'anti-theft deamon' which will shut down a laptop after some time if it's stolen.
I'm more inclined to think that the current decentralized approach is probably more efficient, especially since Real Estate agents will still need to pay for photographers for properties they're selling, but this is just my prediction, and it's for the market to judge.
Well, yeah, people lie. And they also may go to the trouble of making the outside of their house nicer than it really is, especially if this becomes common practice. Even for a loan, if you have a question about the house's value, you'd be far, far better off sending someone out to actually look at the property than relying on a database, especially THIS database, as someone can put up a facade as easily as they can, say, cover vats of water with oil.
Ditto that. Plus, there's no way they're not going to end up with a database full of cruft. Even though they say they've "developed proprietary software and systems to continuously maintain and update the database as properties change and redevelopment occurs." I would take anything from this company with a grain of salt, at the least. (Recent!) Historical sales prices from the local area are probably more useful for most of the purposes they're marketing this for.
Truth be told, it kind of strikes me as a www.tuna-sandwich-delivered-to-your-cubical.com kind of idea. I wonder who's paying for a small army of photographers to go criss-crossing the country?
Recently, I read The Wisdom of Crowds, and can't help but think that better results could be achieved by giving individuals some sort of incentive to take pictures of neighborhoods, not individual houses. You could have a panel offer opinions on the average value of the homes in the photographs, and use some sort of (Bayesian?) logic to determine the value of individual buildings. The devil's in the details as far as second part goes, but the photography half shouldn't be any big deal at all – City-data.com already has plenty of photos of cities, so it'd basically be a matter of pumping a bit for money into some contests, and writing some scripts to keep everything organized.
There's a list of registars at http://www.internic.net/alpha.html if you'd really like to compare. Myself, I tranferred a domain away from GoDaddy, and didn't have any particular problems (I transferred partly because I could get a better deal elsewhere, and partly because I don't want my domains all over the place). I currently use DreamHost and 000Domains, both of which seem decent enough.
Well, no. I've actually paid Amazon with coins via a local Coinstar kiosk. They also take Money Orders, which you can get from either Wal-Mart itself or the USPS for fairly cheap (USPS site says $0.95 each up to $500.00). So, even if you don't have any relationship at all with any financial institution and mostly deal with cash, it doesn't stop you from ordering something from Amazon.
Regarding video games, is there any place in the US that's
1) Within a one-hour drive of a Wal-Mart but...
2) Amazon.com won't deliver to?
I'm genuinely curious. When I can't find something local (which is quite often), and I can't drive out a bit further to get it, I try to get someone to ship it to me.
One thing that I haven't seen anyone else mention yet is, regardless of if Google dominates search and search advertisement or not, they have an opportunity cost in that they could be advertising something for someone else in the space they take for themselves. This is true even if it's in a space of the page that isn't used for AdWords (Seriously, what would YOU pay to place a link to your site on Google's front page? What do you think Amazon, Netflix, or WalMart would pay, given the chance?). If Google gives up a click that they would get money for in order to promote something of their own, so be it. They are, after all, paying for it!
Well, Rolex certainly tries to shut down copycats, I'm sure, but Rolex watches are nearly the epitome of luxury goods that have cheap knock offs. They have been for a long time. See Wikipedia if you're interested.
"King of the Pirates," eh? I wonder if he has the second FLCL soundtrack in that collection of his. Or maybe the title isn't so original after all. Oh well.
That, and the adsense thing that someone already mentioned.