It'll also be very interesting to see how an auction-based IPO works for a company with as much interest as google
I have a sinking feeling that this auction business might lead to IPOs prices reminiscent of the dot com days. The average investor spends money on emotion and greed, not on business sense, so I could see a bunch of arm chair investors, who are longing for the 1998-2000 days, to drive this sucker up to insane proportions, at which time all the institutional investors will pull out, making the big bucks and causing the stock to fall back down to a sane price.
What might help abate a scenario like this, though, is that Google, according to this artile, "will add a process to try to keep a lid on IPO mania by requiring potential bidders for IPO shares to become certified." I don't know how one becomes "certified," but if done right it'll cut down on the number of people that can participate, and thereby keep prices more in line, I think.
I know that not having an auction means that only those connected investors (Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston) make out (and make out like bandits, to boot), but having a come-one-come-all auction could be a rude wakeup call for arm chair investors when they find that the $300/share price they paid for Google from little Jimmy's college fund was not money well spent.
By choosing bloggers to help beta test GMail, Google gets:
Users who are interested in new technology/new features/computers/etc.
Users who are influencers: those who share their opinions with others.
In essence, they have an ideal test base - testers who will give great feedback, and testers who will plug GMail to those who read their blogs. Great word of mouth advertising...
Do you still get a lot of those? I used to get those forwards from family and friends in rather great abundance back in, say, 2000 to 2002. Perhaps it was around that time that most of them were going online, and annoying others via email was still new and exciting to them...
Maybe it's the email itself that's not unique: how much duplicated (or really similar) mail will Google come across and avoid saving multiple times?
I thought this initially too, as a colleague of mine works for a company that provides online data storage (Steamload.com). Anyway, they do what you suggest - use MD5 hashing and file size to see if two files are equal. If so, they physically store only one copy.
Globalism is here if you like it or not, and protectionalism isn't going to stop it. What I think globalism will do is bring many nations' standards of living into parity. This is great if you live in a nation with a low standard of living (India, China, Vietnam, etc.), as your standard of living will raise. Kind of sucks in the short term if you live in a country with a higher standard of living (U.S., Western Europe, Japan, etc.), because for the standards of living to even out, we've gotta come down a bit. But..... in the long run, everyone will benefit. Of course, you may not be around to enjoy the long run benefits, but your posterity should.
As a mid-20 year old about to get married and thinking longer term with family and what not, I am thinking more and more that my generation will see a noticeable decline in standard of living. The standard of living in the U.S. has improved so much over the past 50 years - people retire sooner, live longer, make more (adjusted for inflation), live in bigger homes, take longer vacations, have more dispoable income, own more cars, etc., etc. What goes up is bound to come down, and things like a crippled social security system, a large baby boomer population readying to retire with poor financial planning, and the fact that we're entering a 10-20 year bear market don't help. Throw in this globalization, and I fear that my quality of life today is going to be better than my quality of life at 40.
Because in EVERY business, the final price of a product comes from PERCEIVED VALUE not the real cost of goods. So, by giving stuff away for the past few years, the percieved value of software has been going down.
This may be true for very small companies and individuals, but the big companies still drop the big dollars for professional software. Look at the Web server usage of Fortune 1000 companies. Over 80% use either IIS, Netscape's Web server, or some other Web server (WebLogic, Websphere, SunOne, etc.). Less than 20% use Apache. As a general rule of thumb, for-profit companies use for-profit software.
Now, if you are in the shareware market or the market geared toward homeusers, yes - this free source mantra has pretty much screwed you out of many potential sales.
There is not going to be a rebound or a society to rebound 30 years from now. People have leveraged credit for houses/cars/properties based on the idea that they will earn enough to pay those debts. Get a large enough portion of those people defaulting and you get complete and utter economic collapse.
Not necessarily so. You have a bunch of people defaulting, those with money come in and buy said properties at a much deflated price. The government then takes militaristic action to ensure our economic position. The average American starts to earn more as the economy rebounds and the rich that bought the depressed properties sell them back at a tremendous profit.
Considering how badly fuxored the California economy is, I'm not holding my breath.
Exactly. Especially since the last major highway update this state embarked on was God knows when. And from what I hear, Arnold is following past governor prescedent by bleeding the transportation fund dry.
What we need is for some company to fund this for-profit bullet train. Weren't a lot of the train lines laid in this country done by such companies, and not by government handouts?
I live in a part of San Diego where they've taken your suggestion to the extreme. For 50 square city blocks, you have either:
Typical commercial buildings (grocery store and the like)
Tattoo parlor or bar
Apartment building or duplex or condo building (a single building with typically 5-10 units).
And I'm not kidding about the 50 square blocks of nothing but the above. Literally, you walk several blocks in any direction and it's condo building next to condo building next to condo building next to apartment building next to condo building. No big yards. No single family homes.
What's the result? It's packed. If you don't have off street parking, try finding a spot after 5:00 pm on the weekdays, or on the weekends at all. (It's a hot spot for 4th of July, and my first year here I foolishly gave up my spot to drive (!!!) to the grocery store when I could have walked. It ended up that I had to park more than half a mile from my place upon returning.) It's populated primarily by college students and 20-somethings. Being in that demographic myself, I have no qualms, but my biggest complaint is that they're mostly renters so they don't give a damn about the area. So it's not uncommon to find several beer cans / beer bottles on the street/sidewalk after a Friday/Saturday night. Plus, it can be very loud at very late hours (thankfully I live on a cul-de-sac on the quiet side of town, so it's only noisy maybe once a month, when the folks in a neighboring condo unit throw a party).
I am here, though, because I love it. Not the noise, or pollution, but the beach (less than 1 mile away) and the feeling of the town. Everything is walkable. I walk to restaraunts, to the grocery store, to the drug store, to the office supply store, to Blockbuster, to the dry cleaners, to the bar, to the 7-11, to the beach, and to the basketball courts. I've had my car out here for close to four years now and have put less than 25,000 miles on it since moving here.
The point is, being crammed together does have its advantages, but it also comes with a slew of disadvantages as well (increased noise, pollution, etc.). Also, most Americans really like large living spaces, and who can blame them? I'd love a huge house with acres of back yard, but that's not affordable here (a two bedroom condo, 1,200 square feet, would likely go between $400k-$500k). I own a place in a condo building with 7 units. I have 1,050 square feet to my name. It's ok, it's just me and my fiancee for now, but it would be tough to raise a family in such cramped quarters. I fear we'll have to move further inland to more of a typical suburban type place once we start a family...
I think they should start off implementing high speed trains between some well-traveled destinations where there is significant traffic to fully assess just how economical this would be. A bullet train from LA to San Diego, or LA to San Francisco, or LA to Vegas. (Can you tell what part of the country I live in?)
Too, I think the passenger train system today is too expensive. From the $8 hotdogs they serve, to the high ticket prices, it's almost more enjoyable to wait an hour in an airport and be crowded on a Southwest flight than it is to drop the money Amtrack charges for train travel.
Your brother, by comparision, can't turn on you as easily. Afterall, if there's ever a problem your parents will end up serving as a binding arbitration process. He might walk away from you, but he's never going to seriously cause problems on the way out like an ex might.
You should have reminded a friend of mine's brother. This friend ran a small, but successful print shop-type business, and hired his brother on full time. Well, long story short, friend ends up in the hospital for a few weeks. When he gets out he finds his brother has taken (stolen) all his equipment, screwed over some customers, and skipped town! Perhaps this friend's mistake was hiring his brother because he was his brother, and not because he felt him to be an honest, hard working person.
What are web forms for?? You set up a web-based form on the website and upon submissions, the server-side script sends you an email.
I addressed two issues: feedback on a Web site and USENET posts. On a newsgroup post, my email is out there, there's no "form" for sending feedback. Also, maybe I don't run the site, maybe I just wrote an article for the site and the site place's an email address as contact information. Or maybe some spammers are smart enough to create a script that will send email via a feedback form. I know I am hit with automated spam messages on my blog system's comments.
Back in the.com craze there were a number of companies that made money solely by running large, popular, opt-in email lists. While the dot com crash surely killed off the poorly managed ones, the ones that were run modestly by a few folks from a small office in some cheap location still hung on... although I would wager such companies are hardly around anymore with the way spammers have effectively killed off opt-in email....... drag
Well, a more realistic example would be where I run a Web site with many readers. Someone wants to send me feedback, so I have no idea that they should be on a whitelist. Or perhaps someone is sending me an email to reply privately to a USENET post I made. Etc., etc. It's naive to think that both parties will always have some alternate means to communicate with one another. Now, you may discern that such email isn't vital, and htat it's ok if it gets lost in the C/R deadly embrace, but Alice and Bob might not feel the same way...........
If I had a nickel for every Web site that has, without permission and without giving credit, copied verbatim an article from my Web site... well, I'd definitely be a few bucks richer today.
My solution is to usually email them and appeal to their morality. Let them know that "Plagairsm is stealing, 'mkay?" Most times it's good enough to get an apology and, at minimum, credit added to the article, if not removing it altogether. (Or perhaps they just say that and move it to a different URL......)
Another deadlock case, which happened too many times in my experiences with C/R:
Alice sends a message to Bob. Alice is not in Bob's whitelist, so Bob's C/R anti-spam system sends a challenge to Alice.
Alice doesn't use C/R, but rather a filter. Her filter, unfortunately, marks Bob's challenge as spam. Since Alice is only a computer novice, she does not know how to check his Junk Email folder, and therefore never receives Bob's challenge, hence Bob never gets Alice's email. Alice, who is blissfully ignorant of the "behind-the-scenes" happenings, thinks Bob just is trying to ignore her. So she sends another email, which is, of course, not received by Bob. And she sends another. Still, no response from Bob. Alice takes it personally and decides if she does ever hear from Bob again she won't be going on a second date with him no matter what.
Yes, spam changes over time, but Bayesian filters naturally adapt over time. Of course, the downside is that as spam mutates you will get it in your inbox and have to manually mark it as spam, but I've found that this is somewhat more of perverse pleasure than a chore. (For more on why filters aren't an ideal solution, check out this article...)
What happens when someone on your whitelist opens an attachment that automatically sends email from their account, signing it? Now you have a spam that has been legitamately sent from your friend's account.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a sinking feeling that this auction business might lead to IPOs prices reminiscent of the dot com days. The average investor spends money on emotion and greed, not on business sense, so I could see a bunch of arm chair investors, who are longing for the 1998-2000 days, to drive this sucker up to insane proportions, at which time all the institutional investors will pull out, making the big bucks and causing the stock to fall back down to a sane price.
What might help abate a scenario like this, though, is that Google, according to this artile, "will add a process to try to keep a lid on IPO mania by requiring potential bidders for IPO shares to become certified." I don't know how one becomes "certified," but if done right it'll cut down on the number of people that can participate, and thereby keep prices more in line, I think.
I know that not having an auction means that only those connected investors (Morgan Stanley and Credit Suisse First Boston) make out (and make out like bandits, to boot), but having a come-one-come-all auction could be a rude wakeup call for arm chair investors when they find that the $300/share price they paid for Google from little Jimmy's college fund was not money well spent.
Six, maybe. It's a password-protected site that only immediate family members have access to.
In essence, they have an ideal test base - testers who will give great feedback, and testers who will plug GMail to those who read their blogs. Great word of mouth advertising...
Interesting. My last blogger entry was Apr. 16, but the one before that was back in Sept. 2003. I do not have the Gmail invite. :-(
Do you still get a lot of those? I used to get those forwards from family and friends in rather great abundance back in, say, 2000 to 2002. Perhaps it was around that time that most of them were going online, and annoying others via email was still new and exciting to them...
I thought this initially too, as a colleague of mine works for a company that provides online data storage (Steamload.com). Anyway, they do what you suggest - use MD5 hashing and file size to see if two files are equal. If so, they physically store only one copy.
I had read it was 4,285,203,148 pages.
Yahoo's not doing too bad. (Yahoo sizzling as its first-quarter profits double...)
As a mid-20 year old about to get married and thinking longer term with family and what not, I am thinking more and more that my generation will see a noticeable decline in standard of living. The standard of living in the U.S. has improved so much over the past 50 years - people retire sooner, live longer, make more (adjusted for inflation), live in bigger homes, take longer vacations, have more dispoable income, own more cars, etc., etc. What goes up is bound to come down, and things like a crippled social security system, a large baby boomer population readying to retire with poor financial planning, and the fact that we're entering a 10-20 year bear market don't help. Throw in this globalization, and I fear that my quality of life today is going to be better than my quality of life at 40.
This may be true for very small companies and individuals, but the big companies still drop the big dollars for professional software. Look at the Web server usage of Fortune 1000 companies. Over 80% use either IIS, Netscape's Web server, or some other Web server (WebLogic, Websphere, SunOne, etc.). Less than 20% use Apache. As a general rule of thumb, for-profit companies use for-profit software.
Now, if you are in the shareware market or the market geared toward homeusers, yes - this free source mantra has pretty much screwed you out of many potential sales.
Not necessarily so. You have a bunch of people defaulting, those with money come in and buy said properties at a much deflated price. The government then takes militaristic action to ensure our economic position. The average American starts to earn more as the economy rebounds and the rich that bought the depressed properties sell them back at a tremendous profit.
Exactly. Especially since the last major highway update this state embarked on was God knows when. And from what I hear, Arnold is following past governor prescedent by bleeding the transportation fund dry.
What we need is for some company to fund this for-profit bullet train. Weren't a lot of the train lines laid in this country done by such companies, and not by government handouts?
And I'm not kidding about the 50 square blocks of nothing but the above. Literally, you walk several blocks in any direction and it's condo building next to condo building next to condo building next to apartment building next to condo building. No big yards. No single family homes.
What's the result? It's packed. If you don't have off street parking, try finding a spot after 5:00 pm on the weekdays, or on the weekends at all. (It's a hot spot for 4th of July, and my first year here I foolishly gave up my spot to drive (!!!) to the grocery store when I could have walked. It ended up that I had to park more than half a mile from my place upon returning.) It's populated primarily by college students and 20-somethings. Being in that demographic myself, I have no qualms, but my biggest complaint is that they're mostly renters so they don't give a damn about the area. So it's not uncommon to find several beer cans / beer bottles on the street/sidewalk after a Friday/Saturday night. Plus, it can be very loud at very late hours (thankfully I live on a cul-de-sac on the quiet side of town, so it's only noisy maybe once a month, when the folks in a neighboring condo unit throw a party).
I am here, though, because I love it. Not the noise, or pollution, but the beach (less than 1 mile away) and the feeling of the town. Everything is walkable. I walk to restaraunts, to the grocery store, to the drug store, to the office supply store, to Blockbuster, to the dry cleaners, to the bar, to the 7-11, to the beach, and to the basketball courts. I've had my car out here for close to four years now and have put less than 25,000 miles on it since moving here.
The point is, being crammed together does have its advantages, but it also comes with a slew of disadvantages as well (increased noise, pollution, etc.). Also, most Americans really like large living spaces, and who can blame them? I'd love a huge house with acres of back yard, but that's not affordable here (a two bedroom condo, 1,200 square feet, would likely go between $400k-$500k). I own a place in a condo building with 7 units. I have 1,050 square feet to my name. It's ok, it's just me and my fiancee for now, but it would be tough to raise a family in such cramped quarters. I fear we'll have to move further inland to more of a typical suburban type place once we start a family...
Too, I think the passenger train system today is too expensive. From the $8 hotdogs they serve, to the high ticket prices, it's almost more enjoyable to wait an hour in an airport and be crowded on a Southwest flight than it is to drop the money Amtrack charges for train travel.
You should have reminded a friend of mine's brother. This friend ran a small, but successful print shop-type business, and hired his brother on full time. Well, long story short, friend ends up in the hospital for a few weeks. When he gets out he finds his brother has taken (stolen) all his equipment, screwed over some customers, and skipped town! Perhaps this friend's mistake was hiring his brother because he was his brother, and not because he felt him to be an honest, hard working person.
I addressed two issues: feedback on a Web site and USENET posts. On a newsgroup post, my email is out there, there's no "form" for sending feedback. Also, maybe I don't run the site, maybe I just wrote an article for the site and the site place's an email address as contact information. Or maybe some spammers are smart enough to create a script that will send email via a feedback form. I know I am hit with automated spam messages on my blog system's comments.
Think before you write.
You should follow your own advice.
Back in the .com craze there were a number of companies that made money solely by running large, popular, opt-in email lists. While the dot com crash surely killed off the poorly managed ones, the ones that were run modestly by a few folks from a small office in some cheap location still hung on... although I would wager such companies are hardly around anymore with the way spammers have effectively killed off opt-in email....... drag
Well, a more realistic example would be where I run a Web site with many readers. Someone wants to send me feedback, so I have no idea that they should be on a whitelist. Or perhaps someone is sending me an email to reply privately to a USENET post I made. Etc., etc. It's naive to think that both parties will always have some alternate means to communicate with one another. Now, you may discern that such email isn't vital, and htat it's ok if it gets lost in the C/R deadly embrace, but Alice and Bob might not feel the same way...........
Check out Raymond Chen's blog, especially the History category. There are some gems in there, like Why 16-bit DOS and Windows Apps are Still With Us and Hardware Backwards Compatability.
My solution is to usually email them and appeal to their morality. Let them know that "Plagairsm is stealing, 'mkay?" Most times it's good enough to get an apology and, at minimum, credit added to the article, if not removing it altogether. (Or perhaps they just say that and move it to a different URL......)
Yes, spam changes over time, but Bayesian filters naturally adapt over time. Of course, the downside is that as spam mutates you will get it in your inbox and have to manually mark it as spam, but I've found that this is somewhat more of perverse pleasure than a chore. (For more on why filters aren't an ideal solution, check out this article...)
Am I the only 20-something who immediately thought, "Spammers are Scammers, and Scammers are Spammers, So Don't Do Spam, Dooooon't do Spam!"
Ok, I feel better now.
What happens when someone on your whitelist opens an attachment that automatically sends email from their account, signing it? Now you have a spam that has been legitamately sent from your friend's account.
I created a C/R anti-spam system myself, but gave up on it and turned to Spambayes for two main reasons:
1.) I was losing challenges in others' spam filters
2.) I would still get emails from whitelisted folks when they were infected with an email worm.
If you're interested, I blogged about my switch from C/R to Bayesian filtering here.
Perhaps you would enjoy this.... Why your Movable Type blog must die.