I disagree that hiding intellegence is a worthwhile goal. I know of many people that do not (and probably could not) hide their intellegence, and yet fit into social groups that are not as intelligent.
I don't think it's worthwhile in all situations. However, it's useful:
In adversarial or negotiation situations (games, battles, courtrooms, dealmaking) where being underestimated can have substantial impacts on your opponents level of alertness and quality of assumptions.
Because not all less intelligent groups are willing to integrate those who are obviously more intelligent, or have the cultural markers of being more intelligent.
Teaching environments are almost definitively ones which have a more intelligent/educated/experienced person and one who is less so (note the difference between teaching and education which is much more likely to be a shared discovery). If you're in a teaching role, you do need to balance your greater whatever (which is explicit in your role) in the subject with a bit of humility that that subject is not the entirety of human wisdom. But that's different from hiding your intelligence.
"The CD's copy protection" (meaning the copy protection of the CD) would still be incorrect, as you don't apostrophise the genetive case of objects (only people).
Thus "The CD's copy protection" would only be a contraction of "The CD is/was copy protection".
Oh, and I've been known to delete apostrophised plurals from colleagues' word processor dictionaries where they've added it to stop the machine reminding them that writing about "2 PC's" is wrong. Dammit.
machines keep getting smarter, but the problem of CONVINCING A HUMAN that you are smart means having some sort of survival and/or communication skills.
And to be even smarter, convincing a human that you're not as smart as you actually are (a much harder communication task, which many smart humans fail at).
The key point is that they're only keen to defend civil liberties that are attractive to their current support, not the issues which will widen that support to a larger section of the electorate.
So foxhunting - sure, they'll defend that. But you want to be gay, a parent without being married, take substances past the artificial line which marks out illegal drugs from legal ones? No chance.
But that media which isn't owned by private entities is owned by the government, so we get right back to the issue of how much the government itself actually wants this.
An easy misperception to make. Actually, the BBC is not owned by the government, and certainly isn't run by the government (although the government is a stakeholder which sets the broad regulatory (and funding) environment in which it operates, as is the case for all broadcasters).
The BBC is an independent, self-running organisation, controlled by a board of governers which has a license to collect a license fee from television owners to fund itself. It is not politically possible for the government of the day to direct the content of the BBC, although it may from time to time pass statutes which control all broadcasters (such as the act which prevented the broadcasting of the voices of leaders of defined terrorist organisations. This act didn't actually accomplish anything as the broadcasters simply dubbed the pictures with the voices of actors).
As the BBC is seen as broadcasting in the public interest, any move to bring its output under government direction would be seen by the population as the strongest movement possible towards a dictatorship.
It would be easier for the government to revoke/reallocate the license for a commercial operator than the BBC. And the government has done this before when in the 80s it invited the incumbent ITV companies to reapply for their own licenses, including the level of cash they were to pay for the priviledge.
Generally you're right, although it's worth noting that both your examples are BBC ones.
Sky News is pretty good from the now and then that I catch it, as is Channel 4 news.
All the broadsheet newspapers generally provide more challenge to the government than the present Westminster opposition do - even The Guardian which is nominally a Labour-supporting paper.
It's actually quite interesting that the one policy theme that the current opposition could successfully pick up on as a basis for the next election is the Libertarian agenda, currently being touted by The Daily Telegraph (which has been the Conservative Party's candid friend for a long time).
However, the Conservative Party has far too many internal interests who are bound to social authoritarianism despite their economic liberalism to go for this. It would be a brave step for them to refocus the party and lose a large part of the existing (small) support in the hope of gaining a larger support elsewhere.
They've started to recognise this - that their authoritarianism makes the country view them as the 'nasty' party - but they'll have to move very carefully to make the move effectively.
NAT routers such as the Linksys range allow you to specify the MAC address from their web-based setup - ideal if your broadband provider insists on you registering (and limiting the number of) MAC addresses of all the machines going to connect.
I wonder what they'll do when they discover several simultaneous connections to the server (and sessions) from the same MAC?
David Blunkett has a habit of putting legislation into action that is far too heavy handed - think about his post-Sept 11 proposals, or his reaction to refugee housing. Thankfully most of it seems to get filtered out by due process.
That's why we have process. It's a useful negotiating tactic - make your points more forcefully than you need to, knowing you're going to get scaled back to about where you wanted to be, rather than making your points where you want, and then lose half of them. It should be noted that Blunkett is a lot more liberal than any of his recent predecessors.
I sometimes wonder if his presence is reverse-discrimination in action (he was blind from birth).
No, he's there because he did a good job at Education.
The private ownership of media in the UK is concentrated in a small number of hands - particularly in the wake of the recent combination of Carlton and Grenada, bringing all but 2 of the commercial TV stations into one group
Channel 4 is in public ownership
The BBC has within it a large number of TV and radio stations. On the TV side, they have 2 nationally broadcast terrestrial stations (out of 5), with about 6 sets of regional opt-outs, plus 3 cable services, while on Radio, they have 4 national stations (compared to I think 2 national commercial rivals) plus maybe 20 local stations.
The BBC has a history of being rather more critical of the government of the day than the privately owned outlets
Logs in hand of govt means logs in hands of big corporations.
That may or may not happen in the land where the incoming president appoints all his oil business buddies to top government positions, but it sure as hell doesn't happen in the UK. We have a little matter of a Data Protection regime. This may be avoidable by the government when they pass primary legislation such as RIPA, but corporations can't just opt out of it.
If the data protection registrar discovered that corporations were receiving identifying personal information from non-legitimate sources, their databases would be closed down the same day.
Elizabethan English corruption of 'Scorched' - a reference to the effect that the (then) likely rotten meat would have on your digestive system.
Re:The article is the worst form of drek
on
Unmaking The Game
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· Score: 2
The reason there's so much plat in EQ is really pretty simple, it comes into the economy and never really leaves it. So over 3 years a big ole piles of it built up.
If this is so, then of course it's going to be hyper-inflationary. It's Monetary Policy 101 - print money indefinitely and you get hyper inflation[1], which is predominantly a problem for savers.
If you're living in a cash economy, then the value of money is purely nominal anyway, and the fact that something costs you 2X Ningies today when it only cost you 1 Ningy yesterday doesn't matter as long as you're also being paid double what you got yesterday.
[1] As discovered by the Golgafrincham B-Arkers. From a monetary policy PoV, burning down the forests was exactly the right move to revalue the leaf.
[A blacksmith] is able to make 5pp7gp into 7pp1gp6sp1cp. Now this is a good thing, it gives smiths a way to make PROFIT! One PC without a macro program did all this in about 7 minutes and 30 seconds. I am sure you could stream line the process down to 6 minutes, and if you had a macro program, 1 minute.
I'm sure that the 18th century hand textile spinners also cried shame upon their neighbours who'd bought Hargreave's Spinning Jenny, allowing them to spin 6 or 8 threads at a time - the same level of acceleration as quoted for the macro.
Advances in technology permit faster production over manual methods - sounds like an industrial revolution to me.
If you're building what claims to be a realistic economic model then this should be perfectly reasonable. Not fair, you say? Well, realistic economies aren't. Get over it.
This is different because occasionally, a Chevy worker will drive a Ford to work; and a McDonalds worker will eat Burger King food. Neither activity is restricted by their job.
You'd actually be surprised how common those kind of restrictive agreements apply, particularly in branded goods companies.
Example - a branded alcohol company I did some work for was perfectly happy for its employees not to drink (officially, anyway), but had a strong policy of not permitting employees to drink products from other companies which competed in categories with their own. Even out of work.
They expect - and get - their people to be brand advocates. Don't like it? Don't join - the policy is up front in the recruitment materials. It's not as if they're producing crap anyway - they have very high quality brands (and employees get an allowance anyway).
They didn't expect this strictness from outside contractors and consultants, but did expect you to drink their products when on social events with their staff. Hell, they were paying, so I was happy...
the way open source works, if you need an unusual tool for your project, you create it yourself and share it.
Sure, you can do that. But I don't think you should have to if there's an alternative you're happy with. If you're focused on whatever is your baby, building your own tools when there are alternatives which work for you are a distraction, and not the point of what you're doing.
If BitKeeper weren't available, perhaps the Linux project would develop its own version control system either from scratch or as an improvement on an existing one. But that's not the situation - Linus et al aren't in the business to build version control software but Linux.
Shows what you know. The following is based on real analysis, carried out in the UK by a major supermarket.
Basket analysis shows that for stores in Joe's area, there's a certain tendency for people to buy beer and nappies (diapers) together. This sparks some qualitative research, and they discover that it's largely because of men sent out to buy nappies also buy beer to reward themselves.
So as an experiment, the supermarket's store manager places some high-profit brands of nappies next to the beer section. Sales go up, and not only that, more profitable sales go up. Store manager gets a big bonus.
Next, the supermarket expands the test to neighbourhoods of similar socio-demographic profile to the first one. Sales of high-profit brands go up nationwide, because retail behaviour has a strong correlation to socio-demographic profile. That's the GIS bit - which doesn't actually need tying into individual consumers.
Even if total sales of nappies don't increase, the sales of specific brands does. This gives the supermarket leverage with nappy manufacturers to extract fees for putting their brands next to the beer section. (Incidentally, many manufacturers don't know exactly how much they're shelling out in promotional costs... which can lead to big holes in their account - as happened to Bulmers recently - 3m+ spent without anyone noticing)
So while total sales doesn't change, profit does, because there's additional profit from the high-margin brands, and additional shelving fees from the manufacturers.
And that's just one category... most supermarkets have several thousand categories. Profit doesn't have to increase 100% year on year - double digit is fine, especially in the current climate.
The other reason is staff turnover. UK staff tend to drop cold calling jobs much more quickly because they are less likely to tollerate hostile responses which brits are much more likely to give. US types are trained to be polite to everyone, calling everyone sir and mam. That type of forelock tugging has been absent from the UK since we discovered trades unions.
You've not worked in or for a professional call centre, then. Pro call centres pay pretty well (especially for OB sales calls), and are damned sure to script everything, including an appropriate level of politeness. They also train the call agents extremely highly. In a good call centre, you don't get a high level of turnover, and you don't get agents being anything but very polite.
If a telemarketer does get a polite response it is often from an OAP who just wants to talk to someone.
As someone who's working on a telemarketing campaign targeted at older people (and yes, it's targeted and part of an ongoing relationship, not spam cold calling), I can tell you that that's a particularly patronising generalisation.
A final reason is that the successful response rate is much much lower
Depends on how well targeted your call campaign is. I've worked on campaigns with 95%+ response rates... because we didn't cold call, we called people with an ongoing warm relationship with the client. And we sold 50k+ cars on the back of it, sight unseen.
See, if you're paying a callcentre x$CURRENCY_UNIT per DMC (Decision-maker contact), it pays to make sure they only call people who are likely to respond, which means people with a relationship with you already. It also pays to not piss off these people as their LTV (LifeTime Value) is not something to throw away.
The problem with telemarketing in the US is that too many people respond.
Strikes me that that negates the argument that telemarketing is a problem. This broadband internet access really annoys me - it's just too good. If people respond in droves, then it's not a problem, surely..?
If you want to see what technology is winning, don't look at the carriers, look at the infrastructure providers.
3G market share:
Ericsson: 33% (GSM-focused provider)
Nokia: 32% (GSM-focused)
Siemens/NEC: 19% (mixed GSM and CDMA/TDMA)
Nortel: 8% (mixed)
Lucent: 3% (70% of their revenue is CDMA, with TDMA at 20%)
Although if you want to look at US carriers, they're moving towards GSM. Take Cingular, for example - they've just added GSM to their CDMA network, and gone with Nokia, rather than Lucent. Verizon are owned by Vodaphone, and are being pressured into GSM by their parent.
Hell, forget the US altogether. The world's biggest and fastest growing market? China. And China is rolling out GSM-based networks.
Now you can just download all the pictures, arechive the ones you want, edit the others, and send it to production. Savings of 30-40 minutes.
30-40 minutes, assuming that you're in your newspaper's office. If you're out in the field and need to get the pics back to base, then doing so with film is a major PITA, compared to connecting the camera to your laptop and emailing them.
If I get locked out of my house, anything that costs less than replacing a broken window makes financial sense. That doesn't mean I should feel good about a keysmith charging me $100 for 2 minutes at my door. Sure, it makes more sense than breaking a window to get in, but that doesn't mean I'm not getting ripped off.
Of course, you can feel jealous about someone who can get paid $100 for 2 minutes work (although by the time the keysmith gets to you and gets back after, it probably translates into a better hourly rate), but if that's the going rate, then it's fair. And if it's less than replacing the broken window, then it's worthwhile, as you already said.
The fact that it takes little work to create a key does not matter to anything except your level of envy. It adds a crapload of value, and costs pocket change compared to all the other costs of running a business.
You can have a lot of fun speculating about the price you'd like to pay. But that's not the economic reality, just like I'd like my car not to cost me £20k+ because I live in the UK, not in Europe (where it would be 16k or so).
As long as it adds greater value than it costs, many people will keep paying $400, and Verisign will keep charging it, especially if they've got another brand by which they can access the market of people who won't pay it.
(And yes, the $401 income I mentioned was a silly sum. Call it $440, 10% RoI (pretty good in most cases) and move on.)
However, charging the same person $N every single year to change the expiry date in the certificate is not a useful service - it is highway robbery.
Oh please. When will you learn about business pricing? If it's worth more to me than the price I pay for it, it's a useful service.
If paying $400 per annum means that I get $401 additional contribution to my bottom line each year, it's made me money, and I'm doing it, and not complaining (other than in the general 'trying to get a better deal' way).
If you're going to comment on business, please at least have the courtesy to find out the basics first.
Why blow $400 on a certificate from a company that doesn't really provide a useful service?
Because the service they provide to you - the person with the $400 - is that end-users will do business with you securely because they trust the certificate.
And for goodness' sake, get off your high horse about end-users' understanding of cryptography. The business reality is that the $CURRENCY_UNITs of the people who understand cryptography are no more valid than those of everyone else.
Unless you have a niche market amongst cryptographic experts, not having security warnings popping up in browsers is the most important thing that customers (yes, those people who pay your rent for you) want to see.
Don't know about you, but $400 is small beer to any business I can think of that needs SSL for the general public. If $400 per annum kills your business plan, then maybe you don't need universally accepted certificates for SSL after all.
Possibly it will be great for OSX. But in terms of revenue, that's not the MS competition. MS make most of their money from corporates, both desktops (more for Office licenses than Windows) and servers.
MS are facing two threats from Linux:
The loss of their market in servers - basic NT fileservers, mailservers and general authentication, the stuff which basically makes corporate networks run
The increasing realisation by corporate senior execs exactly how much they're paying MS on an annual basis just to provide all their office staff with desktop computers running simple office apps (ie not the high-end of Word, Excel and Access, the basic, simple spreadsheets and documents).
Linux (plus StarOffice) have a ready solution to all those problems, both in terms of price and stability and also in terms of a basis in standards (which is the rebuttal to the MS tax).
Yes, OSX is/can be many of those things too. Hell, I use it to run my network at home, providing all the basic network services to a mix of other OSs. But I'm not a 20,000 seat enterprise, and those guys ain't buying Macs for anyone outside their design/communications departments.
Now take out a magnifying glass.
Now you will see the difference.
So what you're saying is that there is no difference except under entirely unrealistic viewing conditions.
Excellent - I don't know anyone who uses a magnifying glass to view the physical prints I put out (yes, on photo paper at the highest (1440x720) resolution of my old Epson Colour600), so I don't need to do any better than that.
To be honest, I output A4 size (approx 10x8 inch) prints from digicam pics (output quality as above)
from 1200x960px digicam shots, and I can't see the pixelation under usual viewing conditions. I don't even need the full 3.3MP of my camera, let alone more resolution, for what I do.
What would make a difference is more manual control over the camera - particularly manual focusing (or at least a more definite focus point such as an SLR split ring), aperture and shutter speed. Hell, even a nominal ISO rating of the CCD would be useful.
Oh, and an ability to use my real lenses, rather than the toy optics I've got in my Sony DSC-P1, particularly if I can get apertures up around f1.8 or so.
What I basically need is a digital body version of my Canon EOS 360...
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I don't think it's worthwhile in all situations. However, it's useful:
Teaching environments are almost definitively ones which have a more intelligent/educated/experienced person and one who is less so (note the difference between teaching and education which is much more likely to be a shared discovery). If you're in a teaching role, you do need to balance your greater whatever (which is explicit in your role) in the subject with a bit of humility that that subject is not the entirety of human wisdom. But that's different from hiding your intelligence.
Indeed it is. Hence shouldn't be apostrophised.
"The CD's copy protection" (meaning the copy protection of the CD) would still be incorrect, as you don't apostrophise the genetive case of objects (only people).
Thus "The CD's copy protection" would only be a contraction of "The CD is/was copy protection".
Oh, and I've been known to delete apostrophised plurals from colleagues' word processor dictionaries where they've added it to stop the machine reminding them that writing about "2 PC's" is wrong. Dammit.
And to be even smarter, convincing a human that you're not as smart as you actually are (a much harder communication task, which many smart humans fail at).
The key point is that they're only keen to defend civil liberties that are attractive to their current support, not the issues which will widen that support to a larger section of the electorate.
So foxhunting - sure, they'll defend that. But you want to be gay, a parent without being married, take substances past the artificial line which marks out illegal drugs from legal ones? No chance.
An easy misperception to make. Actually, the BBC is not owned by the government, and certainly isn't run by the government (although the government is a stakeholder which sets the broad regulatory (and funding) environment in which it operates, as is the case for all broadcasters).
The BBC is an independent, self-running organisation, controlled by a board of governers which has a license to collect a license fee from television owners to fund itself. It is not politically possible for the government of the day to direct the content of the BBC, although it may from time to time pass statutes which control all broadcasters (such as the act which prevented the broadcasting of the voices of leaders of defined terrorist organisations. This act didn't actually accomplish anything as the broadcasters simply dubbed the pictures with the voices of actors).
As the BBC is seen as broadcasting in the public interest, any move to bring its output under government direction would be seen by the population as the strongest movement possible towards a dictatorship.
It would be easier for the government to revoke/reallocate the license for a commercial operator than the BBC. And the government has done this before when in the 80s it invited the incumbent ITV companies to reapply for their own licenses, including the level of cash they were to pay for the priviledge.
Generally you're right, although it's worth noting that both your examples are BBC ones.
Sky News is pretty good from the now and then that I catch it, as is Channel 4 news.
All the broadsheet newspapers generally provide more challenge to the government than the present Westminster opposition do - even The Guardian which is nominally a Labour-supporting paper.
It's actually quite interesting that the one policy theme that the current opposition could successfully pick up on as a basis for the next election is the Libertarian agenda, currently being touted by The Daily Telegraph (which has been the Conservative Party's candid friend for a long time).
However, the Conservative Party has far too many internal interests who are bound to social authoritarianism despite their economic liberalism to go for this. It would be a brave step for them to refocus the party and lose a large part of the existing (small) support in the hope of gaining a larger support elsewhere.
They've started to recognise this - that their authoritarianism makes the country view them as the 'nasty' party - but they'll have to move very carefully to make the move effectively.
NAT routers such as the Linksys range allow you to specify the MAC address from their web-based setup - ideal if your broadband provider insists on you registering (and limiting the number of) MAC addresses of all the machines going to connect.
I wonder what they'll do when they discover several simultaneous connections to the server (and sessions) from the same MAC?
That's why we have process. It's a useful negotiating tactic - make your points more forcefully than you need to, knowing you're going to get scaled back to about where you wanted to be, rather than making your points where you want, and then lose half of them. It should be noted that Blunkett is a lot more liberal than any of his recent predecessors.
No, he's there because he did a good job at Education.
Note also
That may or may not happen in the land where the incoming president appoints all his oil business buddies to top government positions, but it sure as hell doesn't happen in the UK. We have a little matter of a Data Protection regime. This may be avoidable by the government when they pass primary legislation such as RIPA, but corporations can't just opt out of it.
If the data protection registrar discovered that corporations were receiving identifying personal information from non-legitimate sources, their databases would be closed down the same day.
Really, this is a paranoid red herring.
Elizabethan English corruption of 'Scorched' - a reference to the effect that the (then) likely rotten meat would have on your digestive system.
If this is so, then of course it's going to be hyper-inflationary. It's Monetary Policy 101 - print money indefinitely and you get hyper inflation[1], which is predominantly a problem for savers.
If you're living in a cash economy, then the value of money is purely nominal anyway, and the fact that something costs you 2X Ningies today when it only cost you 1 Ningy yesterday doesn't matter as long as you're also being paid double what you got yesterday.
[1] As discovered by the Golgafrincham B-Arkers. From a monetary policy PoV, burning down the forests was exactly the right move to revalue the leaf.
I'm sure that the 18th century hand textile spinners also cried shame upon their neighbours who'd bought Hargreave's Spinning Jenny, allowing them to spin 6 or 8 threads at a time - the same level of acceleration as quoted for the macro.
Advances in technology permit faster production over manual methods - sounds like an industrial revolution to me.
If you're building what claims to be a realistic economic model then this should be perfectly reasonable. Not fair, you say? Well, realistic economies aren't. Get over it.
You'd actually be surprised how common those kind of restrictive agreements apply, particularly in branded goods companies.
Example - a branded alcohol company I did some work for was perfectly happy for its employees not to drink (officially, anyway), but had a strong policy of not permitting employees to drink products from other companies which competed in categories with their own. Even out of work.
They expect - and get - their people to be brand advocates. Don't like it? Don't join - the policy is up front in the recruitment materials. It's not as if they're producing crap anyway - they have very high quality brands (and employees get an allowance anyway).
They didn't expect this strictness from outside contractors and consultants, but did expect you to drink their products when on social events with their staff. Hell, they were paying, so I was happy...
Sure, you can do that. But I don't think you should have to if there's an alternative you're happy with. If you're focused on whatever is your baby, building your own tools when there are alternatives which work for you are a distraction, and not the point of what you're doing.
If BitKeeper weren't available, perhaps the Linux project would develop its own version control system either from scratch or as an improvement on an existing one. But that's not the situation - Linus et al aren't in the business to build version control software but Linux.
Shows what you know. The following is based on real analysis, carried out in the UK by a major supermarket.
Basket analysis shows that for stores in Joe's area, there's a certain tendency for people to buy beer and nappies (diapers) together. This sparks some qualitative research, and they discover that it's largely because of men sent out to buy nappies also buy beer to reward themselves.
So as an experiment, the supermarket's store manager places some high-profit brands of nappies next to the beer section. Sales go up, and not only that, more profitable sales go up. Store manager gets a big bonus.
Next, the supermarket expands the test to neighbourhoods of similar socio-demographic profile to the first one. Sales of high-profit brands go up nationwide, because retail behaviour has a strong correlation to socio-demographic profile. That's the GIS bit - which doesn't actually need tying into individual consumers.
Even if total sales of nappies don't increase, the sales of specific brands does. This gives the supermarket leverage with nappy manufacturers to extract fees for putting their brands next to the beer section. (Incidentally, many manufacturers don't know exactly how much they're shelling out in promotional costs... which can lead to big holes in their account - as happened to Bulmers recently - 3m+ spent without anyone noticing)
So while total sales doesn't change, profit does, because there's additional profit from the high-margin brands, and additional shelving fees from the manufacturers.
And that's just one category... most supermarkets have several thousand categories. Profit doesn't have to increase 100% year on year - double digit is fine, especially in the current climate.
You've not worked in or for a professional call centre, then. Pro call centres pay pretty well (especially for OB sales calls), and are damned sure to script everything, including an appropriate level of politeness. They also train the call agents extremely highly. In a good call centre, you don't get a high level of turnover, and you don't get agents being anything but very polite.
As someone who's working on a telemarketing campaign targeted at older people (and yes, it's targeted and part of an ongoing relationship, not spam cold calling), I can tell you that that's a particularly patronising generalisation.
Depends on how well targeted your call campaign is. I've worked on campaigns with 95%+ response rates... because we didn't cold call, we called people with an ongoing warm relationship with the client. And we sold 50k+ cars on the back of it, sight unseen.
See, if you're paying a callcentre x$CURRENCY_UNIT per DMC (Decision-maker contact), it pays to make sure they only call people who are likely to respond, which means people with a relationship with you already. It also pays to not piss off these people as their LTV (LifeTime Value) is not something to throw away.
Strikes me that that negates the argument that telemarketing is a problem. This broadband internet access really annoys me - it's just too good. If people respond in droves, then it's not a problem, surely..?
If you want to see what technology is winning, don't look at the carriers, look at the infrastructure providers.
3G market share:
Although if you want to look at US carriers, they're moving towards GSM. Take Cingular, for example - they've just added GSM to their CDMA network, and gone with Nokia, rather than Lucent. Verizon are owned by Vodaphone, and are being pressured into GSM by their parent.
Hell, forget the US altogether. The world's biggest and fastest growing market? China. And China is rolling out GSM-based networks.
30-40 minutes, assuming that you're in your newspaper's office. If you're out in the field and need to get the pics back to base, then doing so with film is a major PITA, compared to connecting the camera to your laptop and emailing them.
Of course, you can feel jealous about someone who can get paid $100 for 2 minutes work (although by the time the keysmith gets to you and gets back after, it probably translates into a better hourly rate), but if that's the going rate, then it's fair. And if it's less than replacing the broken window, then it's worthwhile, as you already said.
The fact that it takes little work to create a key does not matter to anything except your level of envy. It adds a crapload of value, and costs pocket change compared to all the other costs of running a business.
You can have a lot of fun speculating about the price you'd like to pay. But that's not the economic reality, just like I'd like my car not to cost me £20k+ because I live in the UK, not in Europe (where it would be 16k or so).
As long as it adds greater value than it costs, many people will keep paying $400, and Verisign will keep charging it, especially if they've got another brand by which they can access the market of people who won't pay it.
(And yes, the $401 income I mentioned was a silly sum. Call it $440, 10% RoI (pretty good in most cases) and move on.)
Oh please. When will you learn about business pricing? If it's worth more to me than the price I pay for it, it's a useful service.
If paying $400 per annum means that I get $401 additional contribution to my bottom line each year, it's made me money, and I'm doing it, and not complaining (other than in the general 'trying to get a better deal' way).
If you're going to comment on business, please at least have the courtesy to find out the basics first.
Because the service they provide to you - the person with the $400 - is that end-users will do business with you securely because they trust the certificate.
And for goodness' sake, get off your high horse about end-users' understanding of cryptography. The business reality is that the $CURRENCY_UNITs of the people who understand cryptography are no more valid than those of everyone else.
Unless you have a niche market amongst cryptographic experts, not having security warnings popping up in browsers is the most important thing that customers (yes, those people who pay your rent for you) want to see.
Don't know about you, but $400 is small beer to any business I can think of that needs SSL for the general public. If $400 per annum kills your business plan, then maybe you don't need universally accepted certificates for SSL after all.
Possibly it will be great for OSX. But in terms of revenue, that's not the MS competition. MS make most of their money from corporates, both desktops (more for Office licenses than Windows) and servers.
MS are facing two threats from Linux:
Linux (plus StarOffice) have a ready solution to all those problems, both in terms of price and stability and also in terms of a basis in standards (which is the rebuttal to the MS tax).
Yes, OSX is/can be many of those things too. Hell, I use it to run my network at home, providing all the basic network services to a mix of other OSs. But I'm not a 20,000 seat enterprise, and those guys ain't buying Macs for anyone outside their design/communications departments.
So what you're saying is that there is no difference except under entirely unrealistic viewing conditions.
Excellent - I don't know anyone who uses a magnifying glass to view the physical prints I put out (yes, on photo paper at the highest (1440x720) resolution of my old Epson Colour600), so I don't need to do any better than that.
To be honest, I output A4 size (approx 10x8 inch) prints from digicam pics (output quality as above) from 1200x960px digicam shots, and I can't see the pixelation under usual viewing conditions. I don't even need the full 3.3MP of my camera, let alone more resolution, for what I do.
What would make a difference is more manual control over the camera - particularly manual focusing (or at least a more definite focus point such as an SLR split ring), aperture and shutter speed. Hell, even a nominal ISO rating of the CCD would be useful.
Oh, and an ability to use my real lenses, rather than the toy optics I've got in my Sony DSC-P1, particularly if I can get apertures up around f1.8 or so.
What I basically need is a digital body version of my Canon EOS 360...