Anyone that persists in ads that don't work, but just infuriate, has demonstrated an inability to change a failing strategy.
So far infuriating consumers hasn't slowed down the outfits that advertise using unsolicited email.
I think companies that persist in using irritating advertising simply have ignorant marketing staffs that look at the wrong metrics when calculating ROI for the advertising dollars. X10's folks no doubt were looking at stuff such as the number of "impressions" or sales per advertising dollar spent & neglecting to do focus group research.
Here's how I see it. (And remember, we're talking advertising & marketing people, a great number of whom ain't very bright. If you get a 1% conversion ratio on 100,000 pop-under ads it yields the same number of sales as a 10% conversion ratio on a print ad that reaches 10,000 people. And the pop-unders are cheaper to produce & deploy. Never mind that the pop-unders also convert viewers into enemies of your company at a 5% rate while print ads have almost a 0% negative conversion ratio -- that's not the kind of metric ad people look at (or want to think about) very often, if at all.
Having just finished yet another clean up of the spyware, malware & obnoware installed by Kazaa, I agree that end users should be warned that installing P2P software is indeed likely to create security & privacy risks.
As far as file sharing, I have no problem with my household teenage unit enjoying free music. Given the typical bitrate of the tunes she's downloading, there's very little difference between P2P music & taping off the FM radio. OTOH, all that garbage that her favorite P2P software installs with itself is EVIL.
I live in a Mississippi "dry county," but beer & wine coolers may be sold inside the city limits after 7 AM & no later than 10 PM, Sundays excluded. Quantities less than 32 oz may not be purchased. Since there's not a liquor store, everyone buys their "distilled spirits" by the case or pickup truckload anyway.
There are other counties were even beer isn't sold & others where beer isn't available but liquor is. My personal favorite is Oktibbeha County (home of Miss'ippi State University) where, for many years, beer could only be purchased by the case, hot.
And the state commission doesn't control the sale of 'shine, anyway, thank goodness.
Contrary to what all the damyankees on/. think, most of the deep rednecks switched over to crystal meth several years back...
How well computers truly make sense of what they are reading is, of course, highly questionable, and most of those who use text-mining software say that it works best when guided by smart people with knowledge of the particular subject.
May I offer that computers make no sense of what they are reading & that "smart people with knowledge of the particular subject" aren't optional if the results of text-mining are to be of any usefulness whatsoever, at least in any kind of reasonable time frame.
Otherwise, the text-mining computer is playing the old "99 monkeys with typewriters" game...
Short People got no reason
Short People got no reason
Short People got no reason
To live
They got little hands
Little eyes
They walk around
Tellin' great big lies
They got little noses
And tiny little teeth
They wear platform shoes
On their nasty little feet
Well, I don't want no Short People
Don't want no Short People
Don't want no Short People
`Round here
Short People are just the same
As you and I
(A Fool Such As I)
All men are brothers
Until the day they die
(It's A Wonderful World)
Short People got nobody
Short People got nobody
Short People got nobody
To love
They got little baby legs
That stand so low
You got to pick 'em up
Just to say hello
They got little cars
That got beep, beep, beep
They got little voices
Goin' peep, peep, peep
They got grubby little fingers
And dirty little minds
They're gonna get you every time
Well, I don't want no Short People
Don't want no Short People
Don't want no Short People
'Round here
So now as I'm leavin'
I'm weary as Hell
The confusion I'm feelin'
Ain't no tongue can tell
The words fill my head
And fall to the floor
If God's on our side
He'll stop the next war.
A lot of the free ebooks at sites like memoware.com were converted from Project Gutenberg files.
But to address your question even more directly, my 78 yr old father recently "discovered" Project Gutenberg & has enjoyed it a lot. In fact, he announced this to me as if it should be a great revelation & I just had to grin:-D
Having had Brazilian coffee before, I know that it's worth a lot MORE than 50 cents! (Of course, factoring in the airfare to Rio runs up the price of the coffee quite a bit.)
"Pretty fuckin' good coffee" isn't aesthetically pleasing? I beg to differ: a really GOOD cup of coffee transcends whatever container it's poured in, which is why Starbucks can get around selling a paper cup full of it for five bucks. (On that last point, I do agree... I dunno if it's worth $5;-)
A 2002 Ford Expedition features 106 cubic feet of storage space with the 3rd seat removed and the 2nd row seats folded. A DVD in a standard jewel case is approximately 5 5/8" square and 3/8" thick. So we can safely assume that 32 DVD's (in jewel cases) could be stacked in a one foot pile and that four such piles could be placed in a square foot area. This gives us 128 DVDs per cubic foot, and 13,568 DVDs per Ford Expedition.
The capacity of a DVD-18 is 17 GB. So, our Ford Expedition has the capability of hauling 230,656 GBytes or 1,845,248 Gbits of data. Assuming we drive the SUV 65 mph over a one mile course, we can use a factor of 1.08 mi/sec & arrive at an estimate of 1,992,868 Gbps.
Of course, we might decide to put the DVDs on spindles, which would increase the capacity of the SUV, but we'd also have to factor in latency due to stoplights or traffic flow... And I think we'd have to have Ford install some heavy duty overload springs on that Expedition...
Folks, sit back, relax, and just do what you do for the joy of doing it.
Good rule to live by. And it's pretty much what I took away from the article, too.:-)
Linus is wealthy beyond his wildest dreams, I'm sure & he got there by, well, just being Linus. That's a reassuring message in these troubled days. Linus impresses me as the kind of guy who, were the bottom to fall out tomorrow, would just look for another engineering job.
...where she's busy laundering the money she made from selling the pirated CDs. At least, that's where the RIAA told me she was;-)
Spontaneous organization of the 'net???
on
Trusted Computing
·
· Score: 1
Personal computers, originally isolated, almost immediately began to self-organise into means of communication as well as computation--indeed it is the former, rather than the latter, which is their principal destiny.
Hmmm... The computers were sitting there waiting for the Internet, so they could spontaneously organize?
The aroma of that argument reminds me a bit of Haldane soup.
... I was restoring my 16 yr old daughter's laptop (after a particularly NASTY Kazaa episode) & decided to go with Firebird. In the past, she had told me that she preferred Netscape 7.1 to MSIE anyway, and knowing that Netscape was dead-in-the-water, I asked if she ever used the mail client. When she answered "no", I installed Firebird.
So last night, I ducked into her room & asked which browser she was using. She answered "Firebird... and it is GOOD"...
I'll have to ask her opinion of the new Firebird homepage, though:-D
Darl McBride learned a while back that litigation can produce money faster than real work. But that doesn't work if the opponent has more resources (IBM) or believes it is right (Red Hat).
What we've been seeing is McBride's worst nightmare: SCO files suit & the opponent files a countersuit. The opponent doesn't want to settle; the opponent wants to go to court a.s.a.p. Things are not going according to plan.
McBride still might be able to make some money out of this by printing SCO stock in rolls on "cushy" paper & selling it in one of the gag gift catalogs...
I agree that a vendor who contracts with spammers who in turn hack systems to send spam is (or should be) as legally culpable as the spammer itself.
But how in the world do we prosecute them if all their spam is zinging off trojaned machines, their "legal" address is an abandoned oil platform in the Caribbean, their credit card processing is done in Russia, their legal department is a nonexistent address in Bangalore & they're drop shipping from East Bumfsck, Kansas?
At that point, what district attorney in the US has enough money to investigate?
Slashdot Mirror
Or for those interesting in equipping their "mobile fleets" cost-effectively, $3,970 will buy 7 or 8 PocketPC or Palm handhelds.
I think companies that persist in using irritating advertising simply have ignorant marketing staffs that look at the wrong metrics when calculating ROI for the advertising dollars. X10's folks no doubt were looking at stuff such as the number of "impressions" or sales per advertising dollar spent & neglecting to do focus group research.
Here's how I see it. (And remember, we're talking advertising & marketing people, a great number of whom ain't very bright. If you get a 1% conversion ratio on 100,000 pop-under ads it yields the same number of sales as a 10% conversion ratio on a print ad that reaches 10,000 people. And the pop-unders are cheaper to produce & deploy. Never mind that the pop-unders also convert viewers into enemies of your company at a 5% rate while print ads have almost a 0% negative conversion ratio -- that's not the kind of metric ad people look at (or want to think about) very often, if at all.
Is Neotonic what Keanu Reeves puts on his hair?
As far as file sharing, I have no problem with my household teenage unit enjoying free music. Given the typical bitrate of the tunes she's downloading, there's very little difference between P2P music & taping off the FM radio. OTOH, all that garbage that her favorite P2P software installs with itself is EVIL.
I sent it to our tech staff. But something tells me they are already familiar with everything in the article ;-)
There are other counties were even beer isn't sold & others where beer isn't available but liquor is. My personal favorite is Oktibbeha County (home of Miss'ippi State University) where, for many years, beer could only be purchased by the case, hot.
And the state commission doesn't control the sale of 'shine, anyway, thank goodness.
Contrary to what all the damyankees on /. think, most of the deep rednecks switched over to crystal meth several years back...
Something tells me at least six /.ers are already working on the case mods :-D
May I offer that computers make no sense of what they are reading & that "smart people with knowledge of the particular subject" aren't optional if the results of text-mining are to be of any usefulness whatsoever, at least in any kind of reasonable time frame.
Otherwise, the text-mining computer is playing the old "99 monkeys with typewriters" game...
Short People got no reason
Short People got no reason
To live
They got little hands
Little eyes
They walk around
Tellin' great big lies
They got little noses
And tiny little teeth
They wear platform shoes
On their nasty little feet
Well, I don't want no Short People
Don't want no Short People
Don't want no Short People
`Round here
Short People are just the same
As you and I
(A Fool Such As I)
All men are brothers
Until the day they die
(It's A Wonderful World)
Short People got nobody
Short People got nobody
Short People got nobody
To love
They got little baby legs
That stand so low
You got to pick 'em up
Just to say hello
They got little cars
That got beep, beep, beep
They got little voices
Goin' peep, peep, peep
They got grubby little fingers
And dirty little minds
They're gonna get you every time
Well, I don't want no Short People
Don't want no Short People
Don't want no Short People
'Round here
-- Randy Newman (1977)
Either that or they were into psilocybin.
But to address your question even more directly, my 78 yr old father recently "discovered" Project Gutenberg & has enjoyed it a lot. In fact, he announced this to me as if it should be a great revelation & I just had to grin :-D
Having had Brazilian coffee before, I know that it's worth a lot MORE than 50 cents! (Of course, factoring in the airfare to Rio runs up the price of the coffee quite a bit.)
Too Much Coffee Man
The capacity of a DVD-18 is 17 GB. So, our Ford Expedition has the capability of hauling 230,656 GBytes or 1,845,248 Gbits of data. Assuming we drive the SUV 65 mph over a one mile course, we can use a factor of 1.08 mi/sec & arrive at an estimate of 1,992,868 Gbps.
Of course, we might decide to put the DVDs on spindles, which would increase the capacity of the SUV, but we'd also have to factor in latency due to stoplights or traffic flow... And I think we'd have to have Ford install some heavy duty overload springs on that Expedition...
Linus is wealthy beyond his wildest dreams, I'm sure & he got there by, well, just being Linus. That's a reassuring message in these troubled days. Linus impresses me as the kind of guy who, were the bottom to fall out tomorrow, would just look for another engineering job.
Citing prior art, the Keebler elves have filed suit against Microsoft for using "cookies"...
...where she's busy laundering the money she made from selling the pirated CDs. At least, that's where the RIAA told me she was ;-)
The aroma of that argument reminds me a bit of Haldane soup.
Trusted computing? Trust yourself.
So last night, I ducked into her room & asked which browser she was using. She answered "Firebird ... and it is GOOD"...
I'll have to ask her opinion of the new Firebird homepage, though :-D
What we've been seeing is McBride's worst nightmare: SCO files suit & the opponent files a countersuit. The opponent doesn't want to settle; the opponent wants to go to court a.s.a.p. Things are not going according to plan.
McBride still might be able to make some money out of this by printing SCO stock in rolls on "cushy" paper & selling it in one of the gag gift catalogs...
But how in the world do we prosecute them if all their spam is zinging off trojaned machines, their "legal" address is an abandoned oil platform in the Caribbean, their credit card processing is done in Russia, their legal department is a nonexistent address in Bangalore & they're drop shipping from East Bumfsck, Kansas?
At that point, what district attorney in the US has enough money to investigate?
But most folks want their dollars to be worth 100 cents & not just 25...
Summary execution would be more humane & more in keeping with the crime...
Bill Gates is powerful, because he's so insanely wealthy. He then can influence all sorts of people with his power.
Linus Torvalds may be influential in tech circles, but whether that translates into any normal interpretation of "power" is another question.