Just a side note to your comments... I'm doing some hiring now... you don't sound like a very interesting potential employee. I'm sorry that you are wasting your college career by not attending classes and not finding anything of interest outside the curriculum. It's probably too late to salvage anything of it, but give it a shot if you still have some time. The world is much larger and much more interesting than you seem to realize at this point.
My first thought on reading this was "that's a trade school" and now reading the article i see that Northface is "accredited by an organization that certifies trade schools"
And just because they're going to "offer an MBA" doesn't make it a real school... MBAs are of questionable merit, except to other MBAs, even when they're from the best schools.
This is absurd, the VC's answer to everything... pare away the important bits, keep the surface and try to get away with it.
Now you're starting to catch on to the trap of patents over software and business practices... shortly, very shortly IMO, most innovation in computing will be pretty much boxed out by patents, and that which isn't may be restrained by pending legislation over P2P, DRM, etc...
I don't want the government to know anything about me that it doesn't need in order to run the country... and that's not a whole lot. I was born and remain a free and independent human being. I did not create this government. I did not ask and do not consent to being spied upon by it. I'm also not now, and never will be, the bad guy they are looking for, so every search "of my records," every dollar spent monitoring my credit card purchases, every closed circuit video image, every bag search at the airport (I had another last week because I was traveling alone, it's summer, and i have nice dark skin due to a fabulous tan), every check and recheck of my bank accounts, my employment, my friends, my telephone calls, my Internet usage, my e-mails... all of this is a waste of my time and money, and YOUR money too, it diverts security resources away from finding and dealing with actual bad guys, and all of this ridiculous, ineffective, money-wasting activity degrades our humanity and diminishes our freedoms little by little. I miss my old country, and I want it back... if it doesn't come back, I'm going to have to leave, I guess, and you can HAVE what's left -- but what's left won't much be worth saving by that point, if present trends are allowed to continue unchecked.
So Ron, that is one common definition of the word, but you need to open your own world a little because in this conduct you're half a step from petty jabs at typographical errors.
What of the "geography of the mind" or the geography of Mars for that matter? I find the phrase not only appropriate but evocative, so when I use it in the future, please don't come around to correct... it leads to off-topic BS like this.
sure, at the global scale they are, as it's a given that when hopping across oceans, the same routes will tend to be followed... this is nothing but the network expressing its underlying TOPology, to be a pedant about it)... but it's still not physical geography that drove those decisions, but again, the needs of the network, political requirements, practicalities that caused it to be that way.
On the ground, say, across this country (people were comparing to telephone number portability which is a USA-only construct when discussing the portability of a US-based phone number) where the network is dense and many possible routes exist between points, it doesn't make any sense at all to suggest that "where" something is has anything to tell us about the best way to route packets to it. As a demo some time ago I mapped out a few "shortest paths" as many others have done... sometimes the best route from Cleveland to Columbus (2 hours driving) is via Chicago (10 hours driving?), if you're a packet and not a pedant.
PS I consider it bad form to scold someone anonymously. Please idenfity yourself if this conversation continues.
uhh no, if IP addresses were geographic routing would be no easier... physical geography has nothing to do with network geography...
If the network is already optimized (or converging toward optimal routing) then that underlying geography is already mapped out and actively in use
The phone network uses the underlying physical geography in call delivery because in the backbone (I think it's fair to say) the route costs are pretty much leveled out: it costs about the same to switch a call from Boston to LA as across town... this is not entirely true of the Internet. As well the phone network is still viewable (even if not implemented) as a heterogeneous system, very few routers, very few participants, lots of stability in what-goes-where. The configuration is not in flux. This is also not true of the Internet (nor should it be, the Internet is a different animal). So in the end all that's left is physical geography. Maybe this won't make sense at all in a few years when we're all wireless.
The phone network was designed to connect physical-place A to physical-place B. the Internet connects nodes on an abstract network (already discussed so I won't flog the horse), so there is the legacy issue as well...
May I point out that due to the physical routing restriction it is unlikely that carriers in the immediate term will tolerate a customer having, say, a Boston phone if he's moved to Los Angeles and places/receives all his calls from there... number portability or not, the law allows portability when changing carriers, not when changing locations... in the event of a customer's move to a new area code, the routing problem for carriers is exactly the same as the routing problem that the Internet would face if an IP address or block could be reassigned willy nilly to any arbitrary network space.
Oh, and one final note... the overhead to open a circuit for a telephone call is approximately the same as the overhead to route one packet across the Internet. Call set-up time can be arbitrarily large for a dialed telephone call (one or two seconds would even be acceptable) but for the ten thousand packets you need to send across the net, this would not be, so the problems are not at all analogous.
Last tidbit... toll free numbers (800,888,877) are individually looked up in routing tables, as these numbers always terminate at "real" phone numbers, they're just CNAMEs to use the Internet nomenclature. What's different about these? (1) tolerance for long call-setup times because the circuit is only opened once; (2) very long gaps between lookups in comparison to Internet packets
IP addresses *are* geographic. If you suppose the are not, then you are just looking at the wrong geography. The Internet has a different shape than the physical world, and nodes that are "far apart" on the net might be physically near one another but there is an underlying geography nonetheless... it just doesn't always follow the geography of the physical world, nor should it.
If it's been debunked, that was a mighty fast debunking as the linked story's dated today, only about 2 hours ago, "9:57 am EDT June 27, 2004".. this one appears to be real, not an urban legend... it names names, lists charges, reports a fight and a knife, bloody sneakers, has a location...
My supa-cheap photo enlarger used a fairly ordinary incandescent bulb and a diffuser (or was it a condenser, now i forget) and I won plenty of awards with those prints. I'm looking at one of them now.
Granted it takes a lot less light to expose a photographic print than to project Terminator on a bedsheet hanging from the wall, but there are ways to massage the light into something even enough to not gross anyone out.
While you're on the subject and all authoritative-like, why are similar bulbs for, say, Kodak slide projectors, only priced at around $15 now (and maybe $50 when they were actually in demand)? Seems to me a slide projection light source would have characteristics similar to that of a video projector, no? (yes, including color temperature which is a function of the gassy stuff in the bulb)
I love movies of all kinds but I seldom go to theaters. It's not the guys with the video cameras that bother me (Is this REALLY so common?) but the morons with cell phones, the people who talk back to the screen (I checked and turns out the actors actually CANNOT hear the audience, unlike a stage play), and the $9 to $12/ticket price combined with $4 paper cups of soda and "no outside food permitted" rules.
Screw that. I miss watching good movies on big screens. On the other hand, indie films and film festivals are (a) squarely outside the MPAA's space; (b) less expensive; (c) attended by people who respect the art and keep their phones put away, so that's where I spend my film dollars.
This method of partitioning applications in their own directories also allows installing multiple versions of any application trivial.
You mean, like we used to do on MS-DOS systems?
afterhours quotes like that don't mean anything... all the market-price bids and asks were pulled, leaving the outliers. I always wonder if the guys who enter those just like to look at their own orders sitting there, or if they're hoping for someone to miskey an order in the middle of the night.
Your comment smacks of a small measure of paranoia about the owners of the company, and I recommend not working for a company that would take the least interest in your personal affairs outside the office PROVIDED they do not impact the company.
That said, you are mentioning what must be a very rare, very unlikely circumstance that should not factor into a business decision, whether this has to do with productivity or security... it is their right to ban such things, and as a sometimes employee and sometimes employER I don't have a problem with it... usually I have problems w/ strict workplace rules, but this does not seem out of bounds.
I would suggest that if it were the case that your wife had a serious, chronic or immediate problem (e.g. that she is in the hospital suddenly and may need to reach you) that the company would be fools to prevent your carrying a cell phone DURING THAT TIME... but that would be an exception, not the anticipation that an unlikely random event *might* happen.
At the risk of repeating, we've only had these pocket cell phones for a couple of years, and yet Darrin and the gang down at the Ad Agency, and Peter Brady over at the Architecture Firm, and Mel down at Mel's Diner have always been reachable for events ranging from the mother-in-law's unexpected arrival for dinner, to Jan's broken glasses/nose, to Fonzie's motorcycle crash... particularly "at work" you are not so far afield that a message can't be left, worst case.
If the employer needs you to be reachable in real-time, they should do it on their dime, with equipment they own, anyway... for legal AND moral reasons... and if they won't, then that is GOOD news for you... as you are no longer accountable to them in real-time for random interruptions.
You don't need a personal cell phone at work. IF these server notices are important to work, then the employer can provide you with either a telephone or text pager or blackberry... and if they don't want to do that, then you are no longer on the hook for notices you couldn't receive
if you family needs to reach you at work, they can call in through the usual office lines, like everyone always did in the time before we all had cell phones in our pockets.
Your "logic" has massive holes in it. For starters, a gap in employment tells you nothing at all about the person, the circumstances of their leaving the position, their suitability to work where you work...
"... a month based approach that's honest about gaps".. pardon me for noticing, but you sound exactly like the sorts of HR weenies that are making a mess of companies large and small. You're finding information that simply isn't there in this silly pattern analysis game. Bad for your company, and good for nobody.
You will have equal odds of sorting out the "bad candidates" by only talking to those who were ties with stripes, not dots, or everyone above 5'7, or people with brown and red hair, but not blond.
I've certainly CONSIDERED the impact of such as system on legitimate mailing lists. I didn't discuss it in my brief comment, however.
I'll just throw one arbitrary example together:
Let's say you have a system wherein senders ALWAYS send money to recipients to get a message through.
As others have noted, some proposals allow variable costs, so messages to lists I'm subscribed to might be priced at $0.000001. You can make it small enough that the lists aren't materially hurt.
Or my mailer might send money back to the list evey time I get a message, or once a month, or whatever.
The REAL bottom line of all this (Someday I will finally write that stupid paper) is that ALL of these proposals are THROTTLES on the rate at which e-mail can be sent.
The reason that money is an interesting device to use as a throttle is that money can be moved in and out of any system by anyone involved in the system, it's liquid, it's generic, and if the machinery is scaled properly, it can have an effect on behavior.
You don't get 100 to 200 of those postal mail junk things every day, because of the cost. THAT is what's stopped, not all junk, but most of what would come if it were totally free free free.
There is nothing at all in the mechanisms of sending e-mail to prevent the volume of spam from increasing another 10- or hundred-fold over the next year. Spam volumes under present conditions will only stop increasing when every spammer is spamming at maximum velocity... that's their incentive and it's a vicious cycle as spam crowds mailboxes, causing spammers to send MORE to try to get THEIR messages read.
Economic solutions using real money can work, and needn't cost much for those who are sending legitimate mail. The devil is in the details -- some proposed implementations really suck, others get closer to something that regular people could live with. I would not mind spending 25 cents a month for all the e-mail I send, if the volume of spam could be cut dramatically.
The biggest problem with the economic-using-real-money solutions is that when you distill them down to their essence, it turns out you can implement the same solution WITHOUT using money... and then the problem is revealed to be what it's been all along -- issues of protocols and trust and distributed senders and the reality that many legitimate messages move between strangers (I write to someone I've just met in a meeting), or between systems that don't haven't talked to each other previously (I write to a friend, but via dialup from some place I've traveled to)
And the issue with THAT is that it's considered a given that all the mail servers in all the world cannot be updated at once... that we still need to receive mail from those that aren't updated... and so, the spammers end up using those.
yada yada
anyway, there are economics-based solutions to spam, but they don't necessarily have to involve real money. Using real money makes some things easier because the "system" doesn't have to track credits and debits internally then, anyone can cash out or add funds because the credits and debits are liquid.
Ah, the book itself is snake oil... simple stuff, tiny things made into grand events. Much ado about nothing. And he took the most circuitous paths to finding the guys. sheesh.
It was later shown (by opening the case) that Hop-On's "disposable phones" were really Nokia phones with their own plastic casing put around them.... and costing WAY more than $30 for the parts.
There was a bit of a problem with a Universal Studios tie-in back in 2001: "In November 2001, Hop-On announced that it would partner with Universal Studios Home Video to give away a limited number of the disposable phone to purchasers of the "Jurassic Park III" DVD/ home video. The "winners" would get a free Hop-On phone if their copy of the video contained a special coupon. The promotion was cancelled when Hop-On failed to deliver the phones... Universal has advised Stock Patrol that it is sending all of those winners - about 1000 in all - $30 checks (the supposed cost of a Hop-On phone) and a free DVD. "
Last year we had the story of how it looked like disposable cell phone company Hop-On Wireless was a scam. Since then, I've seen the company highly touted in many news stories, talking about how it was this great invention... but which no one seemed to be selling. Now, the CEO of Hop-On has been arrested for fraud, relating to work he did on an earlier company - but which brings up many parallels to Hop-On. The earlier company was an online gambling site, which he raised a lot of money for. However, they did so by showing software that was really someone else's software "cosmetically altered" to look like their own. Hop-On's "disposable phones" were really Nokia phones with their own plastic casing put around them.
From the hop-on website: Q. When will I be able to buy the Hop-on phone? A. The release date of our Hop-on phone is contingent on a variety of factors. We are doing everything we can to get our phones into the hands of all those who want and need them as soon as possible. If you like, you can e-mail us your contact information, and we'll let you know as soon as our phone is available in your area.
Don't forget that every customer who "leaves" a given carrier becomes a new customer of another carrier... carriers should only oppose this if they believe they are not providing high value products and services, or that their customers really dislike them and have to be trapped into maintaining their accounts.
A carrier with a good reputation and happy customers should have nothing to fear as the switching cost, even with number portability, is fairly high due to technology issues (might need a new phone) and logistics (people to talk to, accounts to open and close, credit check)...
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Just a side note to your comments... I'm doing some hiring now... you don't sound like a very interesting potential employee. I'm sorry that you are wasting your college career by not attending classes and not finding anything of interest outside the curriculum. It's probably too late to salvage anything of it, but give it a shot if you still have some time. The world is much larger and much more interesting than you seem to realize at this point.
My first thought on reading this was "that's a trade school" and now reading the article i see that Northface is "accredited by an organization that certifies trade schools"
And just because they're going to "offer an MBA" doesn't make it a real school... MBAs are of questionable merit, except to other MBAs, even when they're from the best schools.
This is absurd, the VC's answer to everything... pare away the important bits, keep the surface and try to get away with it.
But this is going to cost the recipients of those shares and option grants a bundle more than $25M altogether.
That's what patents do.
Now you're starting to catch on to the trap of patents over software and business practices... shortly, very shortly IMO, most innovation in computing will be pretty much boxed out by patents, and that which isn't may be restrained by pending legislation over P2P, DRM, etc...
I don't want the government to know anything about me that it doesn't need in order to run the country... and that's not a whole lot. I was born and remain a free and independent human being. I did not create this government. I did not ask and do not consent to being spied upon by it. I'm also not now, and never will be, the bad guy they are looking for, so every search "of my records," every dollar spent monitoring my credit card purchases, every closed circuit video image, every bag search at the airport (I had another last week because I was traveling alone, it's summer, and i have nice dark skin due to a fabulous tan), every check and recheck of my bank accounts, my employment, my friends, my telephone calls, my Internet usage, my e-mails... all of this is a waste of my time and money, and YOUR money too, it diverts security resources away from finding and dealing with actual bad guys, and all of this ridiculous, ineffective, money-wasting activity degrades our humanity and diminishes our freedoms little by little. I miss my old country, and I want it back... if it doesn't come back, I'm going to have to leave, I guess, and you can HAVE what's left -- but what's left won't much be worth saving by that point, if present trends are allowed to continue unchecked.
So Ron, that is one common definition of the word, but you need to open your own world a little because in this conduct you're half a step from petty jabs at typographical errors.
What of the "geography of the mind" or the geography of Mars for that matter? I find the phrase not only appropriate but evocative, so when I use it in the future, please don't come around to correct... it leads to off-topic BS like this.
sure, at the global scale they are, as it's a given that when hopping across oceans, the same routes will tend to be followed... this is nothing but the network expressing its underlying TOPology, to be a pedant about it)... but it's still not physical geography that drove those decisions, but again, the needs of the network, political requirements, practicalities that caused it to be that way.
On the ground, say, across this country (people were comparing to telephone number portability which is a USA-only construct when discussing the portability of a US-based phone number) where the network is dense and many possible routes exist between points, it doesn't make any sense at all to suggest that "where" something is has anything to tell us about the best way to route packets to it. As a demo some time ago I mapped out a few "shortest paths" as many others have done... sometimes the best route from Cleveland to Columbus (2 hours driving) is via Chicago (10 hours driving?), if you're a packet and not a pedant.
PS I consider it bad form to scold someone anonymously. Please idenfity yourself if this conversation continues.
If the network is already optimized (or converging toward optimal routing) then that underlying geography is already mapped out and actively in use
The phone network uses the underlying physical geography in call delivery because in the backbone (I think it's fair to say) the route costs are pretty much leveled out: it costs about the same to switch a call from Boston to LA as across town... this is not entirely true of the Internet. As well the phone network is still viewable (even if not implemented) as a heterogeneous system, very few routers, very few participants, lots of stability in what-goes-where. The configuration is not in flux. This is also not true of the Internet (nor should it be, the Internet is a different animal). So in the end all that's left is physical geography. Maybe this won't make sense at all in a few years when we're all wireless.
The phone network was designed to connect physical-place A to physical-place B. the Internet connects nodes on an abstract network (already discussed so I won't flog the horse), so there is the legacy issue as well...
May I point out that due to the physical routing restriction it is unlikely that carriers in the immediate term will tolerate a customer having, say, a Boston phone if he's moved to Los Angeles and places/receives all his calls from there... number portability or not, the law allows portability when changing carriers, not when changing locations... in the event of a customer's move to a new area code, the routing problem for carriers is exactly the same as the routing problem that the Internet would face if an IP address or block could be reassigned willy nilly to any arbitrary network space.
Oh, and one final note... the overhead to open a circuit for a telephone call is approximately the same as the overhead to route one packet across the Internet. Call set-up time can be arbitrarily large for a dialed telephone call (one or two seconds would even be acceptable) but for the ten thousand packets you need to send across the net, this would not be, so the problems are not at all analogous.
Last tidbit... toll free numbers (800,888,877) are individually looked up in routing tables, as these numbers always terminate at "real" phone numbers, they're just CNAMEs to use the Internet nomenclature. What's different about these? (1) tolerance for long call-setup times because the circuit is only opened once; (2) very long gaps between lookups in comparison to Internet packets
IP addresses *are* geographic. If you suppose the are not, then you are just looking at the wrong geography. The Internet has a different shape than the physical world, and nodes that are "far apart" on the net might be physically near one another but there is an underlying geography nonetheless... it just doesn't always follow the geography of the physical world, nor should it.
If it's been debunked, that was a mighty fast debunking as the linked story's dated today, only about 2 hours ago, "9:57 am EDT June 27, 2004" .. this one appears to be real, not an urban legend... it names names, lists charges, reports a fight and a knife, bloody sneakers, has a location...
My supa-cheap photo enlarger used a fairly ordinary incandescent bulb and a diffuser (or was it a condenser, now i forget) and I won plenty of awards with those prints. I'm looking at one of them now.
Granted it takes a lot less light to expose a photographic print than to project Terminator on a bedsheet hanging from the wall, but there are ways to massage the light into something even enough to not gross anyone out.
While you're on the subject and all authoritative-like, why are similar bulbs for, say, Kodak slide projectors, only priced at around $15 now (and maybe $50 when they were actually in demand)? Seems to me a slide projection light source would have characteristics similar to that of a video projector, no? (yes, including color temperature which is a function of the gassy stuff in the bulb)
I love movies of all kinds but I seldom go to theaters. It's not the guys with the video cameras that bother me (Is this REALLY so common?) but the morons with cell phones, the people who talk back to the screen (I checked and turns out the actors actually CANNOT hear the audience, unlike a stage play), and the $9 to $12/ticket price combined with $4 paper cups of soda and "no outside food permitted" rules.
Screw that. I miss watching good movies on big screens. On the other hand, indie films and film festivals are (a) squarely outside the MPAA's space; (b) less expensive; (c) attended by people who respect the art and keep their phones put away, so that's where I spend my film dollars.
This method of partitioning applications in their own directories also allows installing multiple versions of any application trivial. You mean, like we used to do on MS-DOS systems?
afterhours quotes like that don't mean anything... all the market-price bids and asks were pulled, leaving the outliers. I always wonder if the guys who enter those just like to look at their own orders sitting there, or if they're hoping for someone to miskey an order in the middle of the night.
Your comment smacks of a small measure of paranoia about the owners of the company, and I recommend not working for a company that would take the least interest in your personal affairs outside the office PROVIDED they do not impact the company.
That said, you are mentioning what must be a very rare, very unlikely circumstance that should not factor into a business decision, whether this has to do with productivity or security... it is their right to ban such things, and as a sometimes employee and sometimes employER I don't have a problem with it... usually I have problems w/ strict workplace rules, but this does not seem out of bounds.
I would suggest that if it were the case that your wife had a serious, chronic or immediate problem (e.g. that she is in the hospital suddenly and may need to reach you) that the company would be fools to prevent your carrying a cell phone DURING THAT TIME... but that would be an exception, not the anticipation that an unlikely random event *might* happen.
At the risk of repeating, we've only had these pocket cell phones for a couple of years, and yet Darrin and the gang down at the Ad Agency, and Peter Brady over at the Architecture Firm, and Mel down at Mel's Diner have always been reachable for events ranging from the mother-in-law's unexpected arrival for dinner, to Jan's broken glasses/nose, to Fonzie's motorcycle crash... particularly "at work" you are not so far afield that a message can't be left, worst case.
If the employer needs you to be reachable in real-time, they should do it on their dime, with equipment they own, anyway... for legal AND moral reasons... and if they won't, then that is GOOD news for you... as you are no longer accountable to them in real-time for random interruptions.
You don't need a personal cell phone at work. IF these server notices are important to work, then the employer can provide you with either a telephone or text pager or blackberry... and if they don't want to do that, then you are no longer on the hook for notices you couldn't receive
if you family needs to reach you at work, they can call in through the usual office lines, like everyone always did in the time before we all had cell phones in our pockets.
i really don't see the problem here.
Your "logic" has massive holes in it. For starters, a gap in employment tells you nothing at all about the person, the circumstances of their leaving the position, their suitability to work where you work...
"... a month based approach that's honest about gaps".. pardon me for noticing, but you sound exactly like the sorts of HR weenies that are making a mess of companies large and small. You're finding information that simply isn't there in this silly pattern analysis game. Bad for your company, and good for nobody.
You will have equal odds of sorting out the "bad candidates" by only talking to those who were ties with stripes, not dots, or everyone above 5'7, or people with brown and red hair, but not blond.
Good luck!
Steve's children aren't allowed to drink soda or watch television, if this story is accurate. http://212.100.234.54/content/6/35259.html
I've certainly CONSIDERED the impact of such as system on legitimate mailing lists. I didn't discuss it in my brief comment, however.
I'll just throw one arbitrary example together:
Let's say you have a system wherein senders ALWAYS send money to recipients to get a message through.
As others have noted, some proposals allow variable costs, so messages to lists I'm subscribed to might be priced at $0.000001. You can make it small enough that the lists aren't materially hurt.
Or my mailer might send money back to the list evey time I get a message, or once a month, or whatever.
The REAL bottom line of all this (Someday I will finally write that stupid paper) is that ALL of these proposals are THROTTLES on the rate at which e-mail can be sent.
The reason that money is an interesting device to use as a throttle is that money can be moved in and out of any system by anyone involved in the system, it's liquid, it's generic, and if the machinery is scaled properly, it can have an effect on behavior.
You don't get 100 to 200 of those postal mail junk things every day, because of the cost. THAT is what's stopped, not all junk, but most of what would come if it were totally free free free.
There is nothing at all in the mechanisms of sending e-mail to prevent the volume of spam from increasing another 10- or hundred-fold over the next year. Spam volumes under present conditions will only stop increasing when every spammer is spamming at maximum velocity... that's their incentive and it's a vicious cycle as spam crowds mailboxes, causing spammers to send MORE to try to get THEIR messages read.
Economic solutions using real money can work, and needn't cost much for those who are sending legitimate mail. The devil is in the details -- some proposed implementations really suck, others get closer to something that regular people could live with. I would not mind spending 25 cents a month for all the e-mail I send, if the volume of spam could be cut dramatically.
The biggest problem with the economic-using-real-money solutions is that when you distill them down to their essence, it turns out you can implement the same solution WITHOUT using money... and then the problem is revealed to be what it's been all along -- issues of protocols and trust and distributed senders and the reality that many legitimate messages move between strangers (I write to someone I've just met in a meeting), or between systems that don't haven't talked to each other previously (I write to a friend, but via dialup from some place I've traveled to)
And the issue with THAT is that it's considered a given that all the mail servers in all the world cannot be updated at once... that we still need to receive mail from those that aren't updated... and so, the spammers end up using those.
yada yada
anyway, there are economics-based solutions to spam, but they don't necessarily have to involve real money. Using real money makes some things easier because the "system" doesn't have to track credits and debits internally then, anyone can cash out or add funds because the credits and debits are liquid.
I really hate that hackneyed phrase "litmus test". Do you even know what it means?
This is a pretty good definition:
"A test that uses a single indicator to prompt a decision"
So there cannot be a "first litmus test". There is merely "a litmus test" and it's either "yes" or "no" and you're outta there.
Why not just write "... the disruptive technology hype that surrounded VoIP in the late-1990s is about to see its first real test." ?
thank you and have a nice day.
Ah, the book itself is snake oil... simple stuff, tiny things made into grand events. Much ado about nothing. And he took the most circuitous paths to finding the guys. sheesh.
Go ahead, try to buy one! You can't. Offer them some investment money... they'll take it!
... and costing WAY more than $30 for the parts.
_ room_floor_2/
Did nobody notice that all images of the "phone" are virtual mockups?
How many promos/how much hype for this have I seen in the past three years?
Hmm, BusinessWeek mag was persuadade that they were available back in 1999 and claimed to have tested one.
It was later shown (by opening the case) that Hop-On's "disposable phones" were really Nokia phones with their own plastic casing put around them.
There were some delays admitted-to long after the 1999 "demo", in June 2002
There was a bit of a problem with a Universal Studios tie-in back in 2001:
"In November 2001, Hop-On announced that it would partner with Universal Studios Home Video to give away a limited number of the disposable phone to purchasers of the "Jurassic Park III" DVD/ home video. The "winners" would get a free Hop-On phone if their copy of the video contained a special coupon. The promotion was cancelled when Hop-On failed to deliver the phones... Universal has advised Stock Patrol that it is sending all of those winners - about 1000 in all - $30 checks (the supposed cost of a Hop-On phone) and a free DVD. "
See also http://www.wirelessreview.com/ar/wireless_cutting
and oh, oopsie!!!!
Disposable Cell Phone Company Hop-On Wireless CEO Indicted For Fraud (April 18, 2003 -- for ANOTHER venture of his, not Hop On, but it looks like a familiar tale)
Last year we had the story of how it looked like disposable cell phone company Hop-On Wireless was a scam. Since then, I've seen the company highly touted in many news stories, talking about how it was this great invention... but which no one seemed to be selling. Now, the CEO of Hop-On has been arrested for fraud, relating to work he did on an earlier company - but which brings up many parallels to Hop-On. The earlier company was an online gambling site, which he raised a lot of money for. However, they did so by showing software that was really someone else's software "cosmetically altered" to look like their own. Hop-On's "disposable phones" were really Nokia phones with their own plastic casing put around them.
From the hop-on website:
Q. When will I be able to buy the Hop-on phone?
A. The release date of our Hop-on phone is contingent on a variety of factors. We are doing everything we can to get our phones into the hands of all those who want and need them as soon as possible. If you like, you can e-mail us your contact information, and we'll let you know as soon as our phone is available in your area.
Oh Jayzus not this guy again. I can't get away from him.
His brainstorms:
togamatons (wearable computers built into your watch, glasses or clothes)
automatons (built into your car)
refrigermatons (built into your refrigerator door)
bitemematons (Howard, get some fresh air)
Don't forget that every customer who "leaves" a given carrier becomes a new customer of another carrier... carriers should only oppose this if they believe they are not providing high value products and services, or that their customers really dislike them and have to be trapped into maintaining their accounts. A carrier with a good reputation and happy customers should have nothing to fear as the switching cost, even with number portability, is fairly high due to technology issues (might need a new phone) and logistics (people to talk to, accounts to open and close, credit check)...