the more uncommon the SiteFinder 'service' becomes---the less users expect it.
Most users probably do not even notice. As far as the tyipical user is concerned when they mistype a URL they get a search page, whether its from MS or Verisign will hardly be noticed.
It's not about MS crapware, censorship or privacy, it's about kids being abused by adults.
It is about MS Crapware. According to the article MS said:
"This is a decision based upon consumer experiences, child protection and our strategic investment to build up MSN Messenger,"
and:
Users in the affected regions will still be able to chat online but must do so through Microsoft Messenger, the company's instant messaging product.
and:
In the United States, Canada and Japan, Microsoft will introduce an unsupervised chat service solely for subscribers
It is not about protecting children, it is about getting people to use MS Messenger and subscribe to MSN. Most users will not know about competing services. They will recieve a message from MS telling them that the service they have been using is being closed down, and here is how to subscribe to the new secure replacement from MSN. What will the average user do?
I do not write anything as long as books (few thousand words at the most), but what its worth I use Lyx.
It has a GUI but a very simple one
You get well formatted documents (better than word), but you do not do the formatting.
You can output to a variety of formats (PDF, HTML, PostScript, Plain text) and formatting (even hyperklinks) is well adjusted to each format
By making global format settings easy to use, tweaking difficult it encourages you to spend your time on writing rather than formatting.
For those of us who sometimes needs to include diagrams or pictures in a document it can do it (which is more than vi conveniently can.
I agree we should concentrate on content ratehr than formatting but going all the way to using vi seems a little minimalist given the other tools avaialable.
The only thing I miss for MS Word is the ability to review changes and that is as dangerous as it is useful.
What if the payload did its damage immediately, but it was subtle? For example, making small random alterations to numbers in Excel spreadsheets may not be immediately noticed, but could be potentially hugely damaging (lots of money depends on spreadsheet models in investment banks for example). If it takes some time to be noticed, unoing the damage would be a LOT of work.
I assume that everyone who is so against free trade in your own industry have a convincing rebutal of the arguments in favour of it? read Riccardo then come back to this argument (or admit that you value your job more than the national interest, in which case no one else needs particularly care).
At a simpler level remember you can not export without a matching flow of either imports or investment the other way (not sustainably anyway).
Anyway I am quite happy to have moved from the first world to the third for one of these jobs and a higher standard of living so I am all in favour of this.
I find it really sad how many people I have to walk through the basics (saving a CSV file in Excel, for example) especially when these are people who are supposed to know what they are doing (IT, programmers).
A few weeks ago I had to teach a "Head of IT" how to do a simple calculation in Excel (using a single financial formula). I actually had to give him a template of how to do the calculation (one column of numbers, one box with a formula) before he was comfortable.
web developers are the worst. I have run into so many who know how to use Dreamweaver, but they have no concept of how to actually modify an HTML page by hand.
Well some do learn a bit of more technical stuff but not necessarilly to great effect. One once told me that he was mentally drained becuase he had been using Javascript.
Firstly, always pay off debt before you invest. This includes mortgages, personal loans, credit card debt etc. The saving is zero risk and usually a decent level of return compared with putting the money in bank deposits.
Secondly, learn as much as you can about the alternatives you ahve. You will need to know about the tax effects etc. as well as returns and risk. So do you want money in equities, a pension scheme or what?
Thirdly, remember proffessional investment managers will tend to be cautious. The presure on them (especially in the current environment) is to not risk underperformance, against whatever benchmark they use. What benefits you is high absolute returns. It is not worth paying high fees to mutual fund managers or brokers to have your money in a closet tracker, you may as well pay the smaller fees for a real tracker.
Finally, asothers have said, research, research, research.
Re:I was shocked that I couldn't find a Go board.
on
Low Tech Toys?
·
· Score: 1
Except that the point of my post is NOT to complain about their abuse of a monoploy.
I have had three replies to that post, none of which seemed to have anything to do with the main point - why the products that are high margin for manufacturers are also high margin for retailers.
Did anyone actually read my post or its parent?
Re:I was shocked that I couldn't find a Go board.
on
Low Tech Toys?
·
· Score: 1
More expensive toys (branded, patented etc.) will generally be higher margin.
Hasbro, the maker of board games such as monopoly, was recently fined for price fixing in the UK.
They prevented retailers from selling games at below the list price. The motive for doing this is that by making a product high margin you encourage retailers to carry it, so the manufacturer benefits from more or better distribution (number of outlets,shelf space, rpomotional displays, etc.) and the retailer gets better margins.
Consider a retailer selling deciding whether to give extra shelf space to chess or monopoly. The chess sets are completely comoditised and you are very likely to be low margin. Monopoly is only sold by the retailers Hasbro will supply, as long Hasbro can discourage retailers from undercutting each other, all the retailers get higher margins.
Even though price fixing is illegal many manufactuers can put pressure on retailers not to discount too much. I do not know much about games specifically but it is certainly true of areas such as clothing where branding is very important. I have covered the sector as an analyst and we often asked brand owners in that sort of business about their ability to prevent discounting
choose banks based on their interest, their customer service, and their desire to give you a loan
If you have to buy Windows in order to use their web site the cost would off-set a lot of interest.
It does not matter for credit cards which usually have fairly good service by telephone (at least here in the UK), but there is no way it would be worth my buying Windows so in can use IE for some internet only savings accounts that I would otherwise have considered.
More funadamentally what is arrogant about wanting to buy from the supplier who provides what you want, that is the whole point of consumer choice (and therefore the coundation of free market economies).
Customers are locked in to you so your revenues do not suffer, or
Customers do not notice a deterioration in what you are supplying for some time afterwards, or
People only buy your product or service for the brand so the drop in quality does not matter anyway.
The first two work well in financial services. It takes customers a long time to notice is an investment portfolio is underperforming (2) or what a nuisance moving a currrent (checking) account is (1). The last works well for things like over priced clothing etc. The first is the most applicable to IT but some people (e.g. MS, other big names) do manage (3) quite nicely.
Exactly.
Capitalism is not synonymous with free markets - that is why we need strong anti trust laws (among other things) to ensure that free markets are maintained.
A lot of business strategies are based on trying to deliberately create a market for one's product that is less comeptitive. That is why so much is spending on branding. It is also why large businesses oftendlike heavy regulation (as the CEO of a largish business that expands through acquisitions told me small businessses often sell up becuase they can not cope with the regulation). It is also a major reason for mergers and acquisitions - a larger player can squeeze suppliers prices down and customers prices up.
This is fine if a website openly advocates violence. What about websites that advocate non-violent protests that are likely to lead to violence, or imply support for violence rather than explictyly supporting it. What about non-violent but illegal protest (Gandhi broke a LOT of laws and went to prison for it).
I suspect that a lot of non-violent protest will be suppressed too, especially if they belong to groups that are a real nuisance to the authorities ("anti-globalization" and anticapitalist sites for example).
As the parent post says this is going to lead to a lot of presumtions being made.
US govt --(controls or is in bed with)-->Microsoft
Microsoft --(controls)--->Every desktop in the world
Especially with TCPA and Palladium!
I am pretty sure this thought as occured to the Chinese,Indians, European Union and a lot of other people. Why do you think that the Chinese are so keen on developing their own processors and OSes?
(ok, call me paranoid)
Yes and no. It is very unlikely to be an organised consipracy, but as the end result will be to make the US more powerful, I suspect other countries will regard it as irrelevant whether is planned or not.
Scotland used to be refered to as "North Britain". The only example I can think of is off the top of my head is in The Importance of Being Earnest where Jack gives an address as "The Sporran, Fifeshire, N.B.", but I have seen it used elsewhere (although not in anything recent).
Given the use of the term North Britain, and the fact the the term Great Britain was introduced when England and Wales were united with Scotland, are you sure Great Britain is used to distinguish it from Britanny, rather than Britain? If so can you tell us what the country consisting of England and Wales was called before the union with Scotald?
MySQL is available with a GPL license, for use in GPL applications, or with a different license for non-GPL applications
What stops you building a non-GPL application with GPL software? You can not make a non-free derivative of the software itself, but there is nothing to stop you building propreietary systems on a GPL platform.
they'll be putting Hollywood out of business, possibly within the next three years
Please, please, please God
I will miss those wonderful Hollywood film studios, after all I love their high quality output so much that I have not been to a film for months, On the other hand I go to the theatre regularly (as I actually get something worth the effort of going out for). Just think how dreaful it would be if I could see something as good on a screen.
News for Nerds:
Perpetual motion machine does not work. Tnaks for letting us know, I never knew that.
Stuff that matters:
It would matter if it DID work.
Provide some proper evidence from a respectabel source. Sequential Innovation, patents and immitation by James Besen and Eric Maskin provides evidence that patents do not work in some industries and provides a proper economic model for why they do not - and why they can slow innovation. It also makes the practiacal point the point that extending patents to cover software in the US did not lead to an increase in R & D spend. I do not know if the paper was published in a journal but it did appear as an MIT working paper dated January 2000 (available on the web).
If you have the time a paper by Bronwyn Hall on innovation in semiconductors suggests that patents do not encurage innovation in industries where technology is developing very quickly.
Concrete examples:
Pick something that the person you are talking to can understand and show how its development would have been affected by patents. Take spreadsheets as an example, they have developed a huge amount of functionality becusae of competitive pressures. If Visicalc had taken a patent (which they only did not do because at the time software was regarded as unpatentable) on spreadsheets they would have had no competition and no reason to invest in adding features like database funtionality, solving, plugins (I used to use one that did Monte Carlo simulations), macros etc.
It may also be worth pointing out the number of advances that have taken place as a result of free software without the patent incentive (web browsers and quite a lot else internet related).
Software is unique in being protected by patents and copyright. Is it a mechanism or an artistic work? Creators of software are given the advantages of both. This is on top of the intrinsic advantage over artistic creations and mechanical/electronic mechanisms that the work itself(i.e. source code) can be kept secret.
Finally, network effects are common in software and this combines with patents to give a patent holder more monopoly power than a patent holder in most industries - for example consider how strong a position is gained from having a patent on a file format or protocol that is a de facto standard (actually one suggestion to make might be that protocols and file formats are excluded from patents).
I knew I could get someone to call me an elitist (or something similar) if I worded it right.
I did mean what I said about books vs TV though. Books make you make at least make the reader make atleast a minimal effort of imagination, TV allows a viewer to turn off. Thats why I got rid of my TV. Its very easy to use it as a time killer, I rarely that find myself using books the same way.
If you own the copyright they can not archive it without your permsiission, legally, that is all there is to it.
Of course in practice you have to purse this and ask them to remove it.
If you really object I suggest a list of every site you have or have had and dates with a request to remove everything. Then you only need to notify them when you put up a new site that that whould also be excluded. That would not be such a nuisance, would it?
That said I think they are providing a service that is interesting so unless you are harmed by it, why object?
I am interested in knowing how they had such old versions of your site though. Do search engines keep archives?
Slashdot Mirror
Most users probably do not even notice. As far as the tyipical user is concerned when they mistype a URL they get a search page, whether its from MS or Verisign will hardly be noticed.
It is about MS Crapware. According to the article MS said:
"This is a decision based upon consumer experiences, child protection and our strategic investment to build up MSN Messenger,"
and:
Users in the affected regions will still be able to chat online but must do so through Microsoft Messenger, the company's instant messaging product.
and:
In the United States, Canada and Japan, Microsoft will introduce an unsupervised chat service solely for subscribers
It is not about protecting children, it is about getting people to use MS Messenger and subscribe to MSN. Most users will not know about competing services. They will recieve a message from MS telling them that the service they have been using is being closed down, and here is how to subscribe to the new secure replacement from MSN. What will the average user do?
I agree we should concentrate on content ratehr than formatting but going all the way to using vi seems a little minimalist given the other tools avaialable.
The only thing I miss for MS Word is the ability to review changes and that is as dangerous as it is useful.
What if the payload did its damage immediately, but it was subtle? For example, making small random alterations to numbers in Excel spreadsheets may not be immediately noticed, but could be potentially hugely damaging (lots of money depends on spreadsheet models in investment banks for example). If it takes some time to be noticed, unoing the damage would be a LOT of work.
HAS he retired?
Looks more like continuing the same career to me.
I assume that everyone who is so against free trade in your own industry have a convincing rebutal of the arguments in favour of it? read Riccardo then come back to this argument (or admit that you value your job more than the national interest, in which case no one else needs particularly care). At a simpler level remember you can not export without a matching flow of either imports or investment the other way (not sustainably anyway). Anyway I am quite happy to have moved from the first world to the third for one of these jobs and a higher standard of living so I am all in favour of this.
A few weeks ago I had to teach a "Head of IT" how to do a simple calculation in Excel (using a single financial formula). I actually had to give him a template of how to do the calculation (one column of numbers, one box with a formula) before he was comfortable.
web developers are the worst. I have run into so many who know how to use Dreamweaver, but they have no concept of how to actually modify an HTML page by hand.
Well some do learn a bit of more technical stuff but not necessarilly to great effect. One once told me that he was mentally drained becuase he had been using Javascript.
Firstly, always pay off debt before you invest. This includes mortgages, personal loans, credit card debt etc. The saving is zero risk and usually a decent level of return compared with putting the money in bank deposits.
Secondly, learn as much as you can about the alternatives you ahve. You will need to know about the tax effects etc. as well as returns and risk. So do you want money in equities, a pension scheme or what?
Thirdly, remember proffessional investment managers will tend to be cautious. The presure on them (especially in the current environment) is to not risk underperformance, against whatever benchmark they use. What benefits you is high absolute returns. It is not worth paying high fees to mutual fund managers or brokers to have your money in a closet tracker, you may as well pay the smaller fees for a real tracker.
Finally, asothers have said, research, research, research.
I have had three replies to that post, none of which seemed to have anything to do with the main point - why the products that are high margin for manufacturers are also high margin for retailers.
Did anyone actually read my post or its parent?
Hasbro, the maker of board games such as monopoly, was recently fined for price fixing in the UK.
They prevented retailers from selling games at below the list price. The motive for doing this is that by making a product high margin you encourage retailers to carry it, so the manufacturer benefits from more or better distribution (number of outlets,shelf space, rpomotional displays, etc.) and the retailer gets better margins.
Consider a retailer selling deciding whether to give extra shelf space to chess or monopoly. The chess sets are completely comoditised and you are very likely to be low margin. Monopoly is only sold by the retailers Hasbro will supply, as long Hasbro can discourage retailers from undercutting each other, all the retailers get higher margins.
Even though price fixing is illegal many manufactuers can put pressure on retailers not to discount too much. I do not know much about games specifically but it is certainly true of areas such as clothing where branding is very important. I have covered the sector as an analyst and we often asked brand owners in that sort of business about their ability to prevent discounting
If you have to buy Windows in order to use their web site the cost would off-set a lot of interest.
It does not matter for credit cards which usually have fairly good service by telephone (at least here in the UK), but there is no way it would be worth my buying Windows so in can use IE for some internet only savings accounts that I would otherwise have considered.
More funadamentally what is arrogant about wanting to buy from the supplier who provides what you want, that is the whole point of consumer choice (and therefore the coundation of free market economies).
- Customers are locked in to you so your revenues do not suffer, or
- Customers do not notice a deterioration in what you are supplying for some time afterwards, or
- People only buy your product or service for the brand so the drop in quality does not matter anyway.
The first two work well in financial services. It takes customers a long time to notice is an investment portfolio is underperforming (2) or what a nuisance moving a currrent (checking) account is (1). The last works well for things like over priced clothing etc. The first is the most applicable to IT but some people (e.g. MS, other big names) do manage (3) quite nicely.Exactly. Capitalism is not synonymous with free markets - that is why we need strong anti trust laws (among other things) to ensure that free markets are maintained. A lot of business strategies are based on trying to deliberately create a market for one's product that is less comeptitive. That is why so much is spending on branding. It is also why large businesses oftendlike heavy regulation (as the CEO of a largish business that expands through acquisitions told me small businessses often sell up becuase they can not cope with the regulation). It is also a major reason for mergers and acquisitions - a larger player can squeeze suppliers prices down and customers prices up.
This is fine if a website openly advocates violence. What about websites that advocate non-violent protests that are likely to lead to violence, or imply support for violence rather than explictyly supporting it. What about non-violent but illegal protest (Gandhi broke a LOT of laws and went to prison for it).
I suspect that a lot of non-violent protest will be suppressed too, especially if they belong to groups that are a real nuisance to the authorities ("anti-globalization" and anticapitalist sites for example).
As the parent post says this is going to lead to a lot of presumtions being made.
It is, but it seems to take a lot longer update its index when pages change.
The last time I made major changes on my site Google had updated in a week or two, Altavista and Alltheweb took literally months.
Presumeable this is why I see far more hits from Google's spider in my site's logs.
Especially with TCPA and Palladium!
I am pretty sure this thought as occured to the Chinese,Indians, European Union and a lot of other people. Why do you think that the Chinese are so keen on developing their own processors and OSes?
(ok, call me paranoid)
Yes and no. It is very unlikely to be an organised consipracy, but as the end result will be to make the US more powerful, I suspect other countries will regard it as irrelevant whether is planned or not.
Given the use of the term North Britain, and the fact the the term Great Britain was introduced when England and Wales were united with Scotland, are you sure Great Britain is used to distinguish it from Britanny, rather than Britain? If so can you tell us what the country consisting of England and Wales was called before the union with Scotald?
What stops you building a non-GPL application with GPL software? You can not make a non-free derivative of the software itself, but there is nothing to stop you building propreietary systems on a GPL platform.
Please, please, please God
I will miss those wonderful Hollywood film studios, after all I love their high quality output so much that I have not been to a film for months, On the other hand I go to the theatre regularly (as I actually get something worth the effort of going out for). Just think how dreaful it would be if I could see something as good on a screen.
News for Nerds: Perpetual motion machine does not work. Tnaks for letting us know, I never knew that. Stuff that matters: It would matter if it DID work.
Provide some proper evidence from a respectabel source. Sequential Innovation, patents and immitation by James Besen and Eric Maskin provides evidence that patents do not work in some industries and provides a proper economic model for why they do not - and why they can slow innovation. It also makes the practiacal point the point that extending patents to cover software in the US did not lead to an increase in R & D spend. I do not know if the paper was published in a journal but it did appear as an MIT working paper dated January 2000 (available on the web).
If you have the time a paper by Bronwyn Hall on innovation in semiconductors suggests that patents do not encurage innovation in industries where technology is developing very quickly.
Concrete examples:
Pick something that the person you are talking to can understand and show how its development would have been affected by patents. Take spreadsheets as an example, they have developed a huge amount of functionality becusae of competitive pressures. If Visicalc had taken a patent (which they only did not do because at the time software was regarded as unpatentable) on spreadsheets they would have had no competition and no reason to invest in adding features like database funtionality, solving, plugins (I used to use one that did Monte Carlo simulations), macros etc.
It may also be worth pointing out the number of advances that have taken place as a result of free software without the patent incentive (web browsers and quite a lot else internet related).
Software is unique in being protected by patents and copyright. Is it a mechanism or an artistic work? Creators of software are given the advantages of both. This is on top of the intrinsic advantage over artistic creations and mechanical/electronic mechanisms that the work itself(i.e. source code) can be kept secret.
Finally, network effects are common in software and this combines with patents to give a patent holder more monopoly power than a patent holder in most industries - for example consider how strong a position is gained from having a patent on a file format or protocol that is a de facto standard (actually one suggestion to make might be that protocols and file formats are excluded from patents).
Maybe with Nessie hunters becoming rarer UFO enthusiasts are what the Scottish tourist industry needs?
Its a bit of having to gradually filter down ones choise of fonts to the ones that are complete.
I did mean what I said about books vs TV though. Books make you make at least make the reader make atleast a minimal effort of imagination, TV allows a viewer to turn off. Thats why I got rid of my TV. Its very easy to use it as a time killer, I rarely that find myself using books the same way.
Of course in practice you have to purse this and ask them to remove it.
If you really object I suggest a list of every site you have or have had and dates with a request to remove everything. Then you only need to notify them when you put up a new site that that whould also be excluded. That would not be such a nuisance, would it?
That said I think they are providing a service that is interesting so unless you are harmed by it, why object?
I am interested in knowing how they had such old versions of your site though. Do search engines keep archives?