They say that the manufacturer didn't provide pricing, but say they're currently on sale in the UK. OK, so how about telling us what the UK price is? Some fine reporting there.
I might be biased, but HP would have to do a lot for me to replace Dell as my hardware manufacturer of choice.
Similarly, it would take a lot to get me to drop HP and go to Dell. As a (small) business customer, I can go to their website, fill out the form, and I've got my replacement part in hand the next day. No questions. They trust that I know what I'm doing when it comes to diagnosing a hardware problem.
I really doubt it's 40M retail licenses. So yeah, I'd give the credit to cutting off OEM licenses of XP. Even though build-to-order OEMs like Dell can still install XP for now, every retail computer has Vista.
Yup. You just have to look at the numbers. "HP's worldwide PC market share grew to 17.6 percent in the first quarter of 2007 with sales of just over 11 million units, according a preliminary report from Gartner Inc." (source). Do the math. The same article says that Gartner and IDC define 'PC' in a slightly different way, so their numbers are different, but they report worldwide sales of 67 million and 58.9 million, respectively. That's in a single quarter. If that sales pace has continued, that can easily account for a huge chunk of Vista sales.
Wow. You found a landfill that closed in 1971. How that equates to the modern landfill construction I mentioned is quite the challenging exercise.
It should be fairly obvious that it will cost more to produce the CFL lamps, and further, that the energy cost will be higher.
Because a gut feeling is always an accurate analysis. Your issue was that by including the extra energy used for production, that perhaps the CFL wasn't a net energy saver. But simply saying the CFL has a bit more complexity and more parts, therefore must use more energy to make, and therefore must not be a net saver of energy doesn't prove anything.
We're not talking about the mercury entering my system directly, but being concentrated in/beneath landfills as the result of the non-recycling discarding of the majority of CFL lamps, which you can count on unless they have a $5 recycling deposit or similar - which would ensure that people bought incandescents on the black market instead of CFLs by creating price parity.
Actually, TFA was talking about cleaning up a person's house after the breakage of a bulb. The mercury amalgam was presented as a way to prevent this from being a problem. You compared apples to oranges and brought up leaching from mercury fillings, which you now clarify to be a concern of mercury in landfills. The mercury in landfills is going to be pretty well contained, as modern landfill construction doesn't allow much to get out. Mercury being exhausted from a power plant, on the other hand, is dispersed widely.
The cost of producing the CFL is also dramatically higher than that of making an incandescent. Making and twisting the tube is much more complex than making the simple bubble for an incandescent. The circuitry (ballast) and plastic case also cost more to make than the filament, both in terms of money and energy.
You seem very certain of this. Care to provide any detailed analysis?
Studies have shown both that mercury content in your teeth is less at the time of your death than at the time of insertion, meaning that mercury leaches out of your fillings, and that mercury content is higher in the brains and other organs of persons with mercury amalgam fillings than those without, meaning that the mercury leaching out of your teeth is ending up accumulating in your body.
Well, you're not going to be keeping the broken bulb in your mouth for most of your life either.
"The proper solution is to further regulate power generation and force them to reduce their emissions. Forcing people to use CFL lamps is just a bullshit attempt to make people believe that you're doing something to improve the environment."
Except reducing power plant emissions only tackles one part of the equation. By reducing energy consumption, a CFL not only means fewer pollutants, but fewer greenhouse gases, less pollution moving the coal to the power plant, etc.
You realize that a Festiva is simply a rebadged Kia, don't you? And since the Festiva in question was rusty, it was likely older. Older cars tend to have more problems. Older cars that were cheap to start with tend to not get much in the way of regular maintenance and repairs.
Well, they may very well be saving money vs. their old setup. But the real issue you failed to consider in looking at their analysis is how much money MS contributed to the campaign of the person who hired the person in charge.
I'm sorry, but WTF does Gates spending his personal fortune on charitable causes have to do with the company? I would think that the typical WSJ reader wouldn't use that as part of their opinion of MS overall. I'd be more inclined to believe that the typical WSJ reader would have voted for them because of their ruthless nature and ability to make money hand over fist.
Of course there's a risk involved. Some quick searching reveals that between 1 and 2 percent of amnios cause a miscarriage.
And while it's certainly possible that these particular stem cells could be proven useful, unless I'm missing something, you'll have issues with host rejection. It's my understanding that one of the beauties of somatic cell nuclear transfer is that the patient's own cell nucleus is being used, so all the stem cells created are 'theirs.'
However, I have to question the judgement of the author. First of all, what kind of consultant deploys branch offices "weekly" and didn't know about these problems in advance? Anyone with much experience would know about (a) how difficult it is to move windows from one storage subsystem to another, (b) that HP uses bad recovery disks, and (c) that RAID installs require a floppy.
Yeah, this was the sort of rant of someone who hasn't done this sort of thing very much. If you're going to do something like he was trying, you just need to carry a Windows OEM CD with you, since, contrary to what he stated, there's nothing that ties the license key to HP's recovery disk, but rather it only works with an OEM version of Windows.
Don't forget that our current mode of space exploration is something that this generation has grown up with. I remember the first shuttle launch. To a teenager today, shuttles have been flying their entire lives, so to them there's no real novelty to captivate a large audience.
That landscape changes dramatically when you have multiple players -- instead of the cable company dictating what the market will get, the market dictates what the cable company will provide. (If company A doesn't give you what you want, you will switch to company B.) Franchising authorities are no longer needed.
There are a few problems with this. First, the cable companies played by the rules when it came to franchising. Now that the telcos want in on it, they want the rules changed. This creates a very uneven playing field.
The idea that you can go to Company B to get what Company A doesn't offer isn't a great one. If Company A doesn't think it's profitable to wire your block, Company B probably won't either.
Competition also gives incentives to build-out to rural customers. Sure, they may have to pay more than city-dwellers, but why should somebody in the city subsidize internet access for somebody in the country? There are lots of things that are more expensive in the country -- why should internet service be kept artificially cheap. Besides, wireless technologies have already made reaching rural areas much less expensive. If you force wired technologies to deliver service to rural areas, you will supplant the more efficient wireless services.
Who said anything about subsidizing rural areas? The build-out requirements are/were part of the franchising laws. A franchise in a municipality has nothing to do with providing service to rural customers.
You should revisit your data, and reread the article. The "problem" is that the scammers buy the stock pre-scam, and dump immediately at the first sign of a price blip. When I plug whichever penny stock into Yahoo, the price spike has always been a day or two in the past by the time my server receives (nevermind by the time I read) the spam touting it, and hasn't lasted more than a few hours.
Don't know what to tell you. The ones I've watched have typically run over a couple of days. And for the scammers, they need people to be able to buy into the stocks in order to make their money. So quickly dumping the stock would be leaving a lot of money on the table.
And the problem is that it appears to work. For giggles, I've tracked a couple of these stocks. If you don't get too greedy, and get out before the spammers (presumably holders of large blocks of stock) dump, you can actually make a good return.
So if you, as a spam recipient, play along with their stock game, you can make money, while helping drive up the price for the spammers to make their profit.
As for buying spammed products, I've long held the opinion that no one need to buy any products for the spam to keep flowing. Much like the pump and dump schemes, I get the feeling that a lot of spam originates from people paying for 'internet marketing' services touted in various 'get rich on the internet' programs. So the actual money-making product is the 'service' that's being sold to those down the chain.
I'll second your greylisting comment. Once I started greylisting, I saw a tremendous drop in our mail volume. I was either going to have to purchase a faster server or start rejecting blacklisted hosts at SMTP time (and the collateral damage from that wasn't something I was looking forward to).
However, this pump and dump image spam is getting nuts, and it appears to be coming largely from compromised PCs. Even more fun is that appears to use the legitimate mail gateways of their ISP to send, and/or runs a small mail server of its own, given the number that manage to resend and bypass the greylist.
RIAA doesn't have anything to do with that. It's ASCAP and BMI that are the big players in this sort of thing. They represent the composers and collect royalties on their behalf for public performance of their works. Most venues pay an annual fee to those two organizations that covers this. Most composers are members of either ASCAP or BMI, so paying both organizations covers nearly anything that would be performed.
Dumping is when a manufacturer sells below cost for the purpose of killing off the competition. I'm talking about a US consumer shopping for, say, a Canon lens. That person can buy a 'US' lens with a fully supported US warranty, or they can buy a grey-market lens which won't be supported by Canon USA. By cutting out the US marketing and support, you can save substantial amounts of money.
And honestly, why would it be a surprise that the Japanese could buy a camera cheaper in the US? They're two different markets with different currencies. Go out and compare the US list prices of European cars to their home country prices, and do the currency conversion. The current low value of the US dollar means that the cars sold in the US are quite a bit cheaper, but that's simply the way the current situation is.
And each of those suppliers along the way is happy to slap whatever label or certification text on it.
A member of a car club I'm in was on business in China, and found a company that made various pins and badges. He showed them one of the club's grille badges to see if he could make them. The guy looked at it, and then asked our club member if he wanted the same stuff that was on the back of the original. Unsure of what he meant, he looked at the badge, and the guy pointed to the 'Made in UK' stamped on it.
Slashdot Mirror
They say that the manufacturer didn't provide pricing, but say they're currently on sale in the UK. OK, so how about telling us what the UK price is? Some fine reporting there.
I might be biased, but HP would have to do a lot for me to replace Dell as my hardware manufacturer of choice.
Similarly, it would take a lot to get me to drop HP and go to Dell. As a (small) business customer, I can go to their website, fill out the form, and I've got my replacement part in hand the next day. No questions. They trust that I know what I'm doing when it comes to diagnosing a hardware problem.
I really doubt it's 40M retail licenses. So yeah, I'd give the credit to cutting off OEM licenses of XP. Even though build-to-order OEMs like Dell can still install XP for now, every retail computer has Vista.
Yup. You just have to look at the numbers. "HP's worldwide PC market share grew to 17.6 percent in the first quarter of 2007 with sales of just over 11 million units, according a preliminary report from Gartner Inc." (source). Do the math. The same article says that Gartner and IDC define 'PC' in a slightly different way, so their numbers are different, but they report worldwide sales of 67 million and 58.9 million, respectively. That's in a single quarter. If that sales pace has continued, that can easily account for a huge chunk of Vista sales.
New Jersey Superfund Site: Lipari Landfill
Just a quickie hit.
Landfills seep pollution all the time.
Wow. You found a landfill that closed in 1971. How that equates to the modern landfill construction I mentioned is quite the challenging exercise.
It should be fairly obvious that it will cost more to produce the CFL lamps, and further, that the energy cost will be higher.
Because a gut feeling is always an accurate analysis. Your issue was that by including the extra energy used for production, that perhaps the CFL wasn't a net energy saver. But simply saying the CFL has a bit more complexity and more parts, therefore must use more energy to make, and therefore must not be a net saver of energy doesn't prove anything.
We're not talking about the mercury entering my system directly, but being concentrated in/beneath landfills as the result of the non-recycling discarding of the majority of CFL lamps, which you can count on unless they have a $5 recycling deposit or similar - which would ensure that people bought incandescents on the black market instead of CFLs by creating price parity.
Actually, TFA was talking about cleaning up a person's house after the breakage of a bulb. The mercury amalgam was presented as a way to prevent this from being a problem. You compared apples to oranges and brought up leaching from mercury fillings, which you now clarify to be a concern of mercury in landfills. The mercury in landfills is going to be pretty well contained, as modern landfill construction doesn't allow much to get out. Mercury being exhausted from a power plant, on the other hand, is dispersed widely.
The cost of producing the CFL is also dramatically higher than that of making an incandescent. Making and twisting the tube is much more complex than making the simple bubble for an incandescent. The circuitry (ballast) and plastic case also cost more to make than the filament, both in terms of money and energy.
You seem very certain of this. Care to provide any detailed analysis?
Studies have shown both that mercury content in your teeth is less at the time of your death than at the time of insertion, meaning that mercury leaches out of your fillings, and that mercury content is higher in the brains and other organs of persons with mercury amalgam fillings than those without, meaning that the mercury leaching out of your teeth is ending up accumulating in your body.
Well, you're not going to be keeping the broken bulb in your mouth for most of your life either.
"The proper solution is to further regulate power generation and force them to reduce their emissions. Forcing people to use CFL lamps is just a bullshit attempt to make people believe that you're doing something to improve the environment."
Except reducing power plant emissions only tackles one part of the equation. By reducing energy consumption, a CFL not only means fewer pollutants, but fewer greenhouse gases, less pollution moving the coal to the power plant, etc.
You realize that a Festiva is simply a rebadged Kia, don't you? And since the Festiva in question was rusty, it was likely older. Older cars tend to have more problems. Older cars that were cheap to start with tend to not get much in the way of regular maintenance and repairs.
Now, if they'd just build GPS into a camera
I was wishing the same thing on a recent vacation. It surely wouldn't cost much to use the same sort of chipset used in cell phones for GPS locations.
Well, they may very well be saving money vs. their old setup. But the real issue you failed to consider in looking at their analysis is how much money MS contributed to the campaign of the person who hired the person in charge.
I'm sorry, but WTF does Gates spending his personal fortune on charitable causes have to do with the company? I would think that the typical WSJ reader wouldn't use that as part of their opinion of MS overall. I'd be more inclined to believe that the typical WSJ reader would have voted for them because of their ruthless nature and ability to make money hand over fist.
Not only that, but don't forget that a couple of years ago, people were paying near this price point for the RAZR.
Of course there's a risk involved. Some quick searching reveals that between 1 and 2 percent of amnios cause a miscarriage.
And while it's certainly possible that these particular stem cells could be proven useful, unless I'm missing something, you'll have issues with host rejection. It's my understanding that one of the beauties of somatic cell nuclear transfer is that the patient's own cell nucleus is being used, so all the stem cells created are 'theirs.'
However, I have to question the judgement of the author. First of all, what kind of consultant deploys branch offices "weekly" and didn't know about these problems in advance? Anyone with much experience would know about (a) how difficult it is to move windows from one storage subsystem to another, (b) that HP uses bad recovery disks, and (c) that RAID installs require a floppy.
Yeah, this was the sort of rant of someone who hasn't done this sort of thing very much. If you're going to do something like he was trying, you just need to carry a Windows OEM CD with you, since, contrary to what he stated, there's nothing that ties the license key to HP's recovery disk, but rather it only works with an OEM version of Windows.
Don't forget that our current mode of space exploration is something that this generation has grown up with. I remember the first shuttle launch. To a teenager today, shuttles have been flying their entire lives, so to them there's no real novelty to captivate a large audience.
Yeah, but Jobs and Woz were probably both virgins at Apple's birth.
That landscape changes dramatically when you have multiple players -- instead of the cable company dictating what the market will get, the market dictates what the cable company will provide. (If company A doesn't give you what you want, you will switch to company B.) Franchising authorities are no longer needed.
There are a few problems with this. First, the cable companies played by the rules when it came to franchising. Now that the telcos want in on it, they want the rules changed. This creates a very uneven playing field.
The idea that you can go to Company B to get what Company A doesn't offer isn't a great one. If Company A doesn't think it's profitable to wire your block, Company B probably won't either.
Competition also gives incentives to build-out to rural customers. Sure, they may have to pay more than city-dwellers, but why should somebody in the city subsidize internet access for somebody in the country? There are lots of things that are more expensive in the country -- why should internet service be kept artificially cheap. Besides, wireless technologies have already made reaching rural areas much less expensive. If you force wired technologies to deliver service to rural areas, you will supplant the more efficient wireless services.
Who said anything about subsidizing rural areas? The build-out requirements are/were part of the franchising laws. A franchise in a municipality has nothing to do with providing service to rural customers.
Here
You should revisit your data, and reread the article. The "problem" is that the scammers buy the stock pre-scam, and dump immediately at the first sign of a price blip. When I plug whichever penny stock into Yahoo, the price spike has always been a day or two in the past by the time my server receives (nevermind by the time I read) the spam touting it, and hasn't lasted more than a few hours.
Don't know what to tell you. The ones I've watched have typically run over a couple of days. And for the scammers, they need people to be able to buy into the stocks in order to make their money. So quickly dumping the stock would be leaving a lot of money on the table.
I never said I did it. I was just passing along my observations, and how some recipients of pump and dump spam may actually be glad to get it.
And the problem is that it appears to work. For giggles, I've tracked a couple of these stocks. If you don't get too greedy, and get out before the spammers (presumably holders of large blocks of stock) dump, you can actually make a good return.
So if you, as a spam recipient, play along with their stock game, you can make money, while helping drive up the price for the spammers to make their profit.
As for buying spammed products, I've long held the opinion that no one need to buy any products for the spam to keep flowing. Much like the pump and dump schemes, I get the feeling that a lot of spam originates from people paying for 'internet marketing' services touted in various 'get rich on the internet' programs. So the actual money-making product is the 'service' that's being sold to those down the chain.
I'll second your greylisting comment. Once I started greylisting, I saw a tremendous drop in our mail volume. I was either going to have to purchase a faster server or start rejecting blacklisted hosts at SMTP time (and the collateral damage from that wasn't something I was looking forward to).
However, this pump and dump image spam is getting nuts, and it appears to be coming largely from compromised PCs. Even more fun is that appears to use the legitimate mail gateways of their ISP to send, and/or runs a small mail server of its own, given the number that manage to resend and bypass the greylist.
Maybe, but it would be much more fishy if the results for 'Excel' returned a bunch of non-Excel info.
RIAA doesn't have anything to do with that. It's ASCAP and BMI that are the big players in this sort of thing. They represent the composers and collect royalties on their behalf for public performance of their works. Most venues pay an annual fee to those two organizations that covers this. Most composers are members of either ASCAP or BMI, so paying both organizations covers nearly anything that would be performed.
Dumping is when a manufacturer sells below cost for the purpose of killing off the competition. I'm talking about a US consumer shopping for, say, a Canon lens. That person can buy a 'US' lens with a fully supported US warranty, or they can buy a grey-market lens which won't be supported by Canon USA. By cutting out the US marketing and support, you can save substantial amounts of money.
And honestly, why would it be a surprise that the Japanese could buy a camera cheaper in the US? They're two different markets with different currencies. Go out and compare the US list prices of European cars to their home country prices, and do the currency conversion. The current low value of the US dollar means that the cars sold in the US are quite a bit cheaper, but that's simply the way the current situation is.
And each of those suppliers along the way is happy to slap whatever label or certification text on it.
A member of a car club I'm in was on business in China, and found a company that made various pins and badges. He showed them one of the club's grille badges to see if he could make them. The guy looked at it, and then asked our club member if he wanted the same stuff that was on the back of the original. Unsure of what he meant, he looked at the badge, and the guy pointed to the 'Made in UK' stamped on it.