Although Apple seems to be doing quite well in retail, Gateway was losing money hand-over fist. (Gee, think that could have anything to do with quality?)
Nah, more to do with uniqueness. You've got to go through Apple to get a Macintosh that runs OSX... but anybody can make sell you a PC running Windows. Apple therefore can keep tighter control over their retail prices, while an undercut from a competitor can force a PC maker to lower prices.
The Gateway Store was mainly a "showroom" environment because Gateway's main product is a made-to-order PC. Gateway could never get into a Best Buy or Circuit City environment because they didn't want to cheapen their customizable image by providing computers that would sit on shelves. Meanwhile, eMachines is the sit-on-the-shelf cheap PC that you can find at Best Buy and Circuit City along with discount environments such as Wal-Mart.
Shutting down the stores is more or less a nod to the retail chains that they can have eMachines all to themselves, and there's no danger of having to compete with eMachines coming out of a Gateway Country store. Even if those eMachines PCs had a "Gateway" sticker on them, it'd still be just as bad to the retailers... they don't like suppliers who are trying to undercut them by operating their own retail stores.
This is one of the forces that limits Apple's distribution. Apple choses to sell mostly directly and therefore they aren't making much of a push to get themselves into major retail chains... Since Wal-Mart can't undercut Apple's prices, Wal-Mart's not particularly interested in having Apple.
So, there's a nice firm wall going up at Gateway. Made-to-order PCs will be ordered by phone or Internet and be stamped Gateway, mass-made machines will be in retail stores and called eMachines. Everybody should be happy...
You people sound like a senior citizen mad about loud fireworks on the fourth of july, or someone pissed that a Christmas walk has main street closed off.
I feel sorry for these people. See, this isn't your typical slashdotting... It's a slashdotting that comes after eighteen consecutive nonsense stories being posted over twelve hours on the US April Fool's Day.
So, their chance to build a reputation is going to be damaged by the fact that anybody reading Slashdot today has already given up on finding anything useful, and will be evaluating them as a joke that they're "not getting" rather than as a proposed networking scheme.
Furthermore, the geek world is bored today by Slashdot's denial-of-normal-service throughout the day. So, once word leaks out that this is a real and normal story, they're going to get all of the pent up slashdotting force applied to their server.
Simon, you should have started your set tonight with an NY Times article or two. That would have been a suitable transition between nonsense content and factual content, since NYT operates in that murky space and has a suitable web setup to absorb a larger-than-usual slashdotting. I'm sure the people at PDTP would have not minded at all if their moment in the sun had come an hour later tonight.
Sure... Google's going to the moon just because of the fact that...... there's no minimum wage laws.... they'd be outside of every tax jurisdiction.... there's no labor practice laws.... there's a weaker gravity law there.... the longer moon days that can be used to justify workdays.... there's a 0% employment rate there.... a large building's roof can also serve as an earth-visble billboard...
Michael isn't intentionally picking April Fools stories. He's actually following his normal selection patern, it's just today that we're willing to consider them jokes....
I'm getting sick of these April Fool's posts... We all already know that Open Source Defense Projects is an oxymoron, you know source has to be closed to be truely secure.
Assuming this is a joke for a moment.. I'm not so sure Google would have wanted this much publicity. PigeonRank was of course done an idea crazy enough that nobody would buy it, but this one's just too close to possible...
Nope, because they still haven't done their IPO, so their stock isn't being traded on the open market. SEC has no jurisdiction over Google until they file for an IPO.
Maybe not so. They don't read all the text on every search: they index it before it's saved and they search the index. That returns pointers to saved messages which are then decompressed if requested by the user.
Text compression in the simple form is done by indexing the most common words and phrases in the plaintext, then storing an index that consist of the plaintext long-form of each word or phrase, and a shorter series of bytes to represent that word or phrase. Then they can replace every instance of a frequently used word or phrase with its byte symbol.
So, to search, they'd only have to check to see if the entered string exists anywhere on the plaintext side of the index table, and then just go looking for the byte symbol instead. It actually can be faster... because for the most commonly used terms, the index has already been created.
It is a joke, it's going to have to go down in history as one of the biggest pranks ever pulled... both the AP and Reuters have put out wire stories which means it's going to be in hundreds of newspapers tomorrow morning.
It'll say a lot about the gullibility of the news media if this is indeed a joke...
One of two situations are true... I'm just not sure which:
A: This is Google's April Fool's prank that they'll fully put on display tomorrow, and somehow a ton of media outlets including the NY Times, Reuters, Forbes, Wired News, ZDNet, and Slashdot have all fallen for it hook line and sinker.
Yep. Yahoo's main revenue model is getting users to pay for services right now. Google, however, has the AdWords structure which I'm guessing is mighty effective when given an e-mail to consider...
Slashdot Mirror
April 1's a great day to release bad news... some people will dismiss almost any story as a joke today.
Although Apple seems to be doing quite well in retail, Gateway was losing money hand-over fist. (Gee, think that could have anything to do with quality?)
Nah, more to do with uniqueness. You've got to go through Apple to get a Macintosh that runs OSX... but anybody can make sell you a PC running Windows. Apple therefore can keep tighter control over their retail prices, while an undercut from a competitor can force a PC maker to lower prices.
The Gateway Store was mainly a "showroom" environment because Gateway's main product is a made-to-order PC. Gateway could never get into a Best Buy or Circuit City environment because they didn't want to cheapen their customizable image by providing computers that would sit on shelves. Meanwhile, eMachines is the sit-on-the-shelf cheap PC that you can find at Best Buy and Circuit City along with discount environments such as Wal-Mart.
Shutting down the stores is more or less a nod to the retail chains that they can have eMachines all to themselves, and there's no danger of having to compete with eMachines coming out of a Gateway Country store. Even if those eMachines PCs had a "Gateway" sticker on them, it'd still be just as bad to the retailers... they don't like suppliers who are trying to undercut them by operating their own retail stores.
This is one of the forces that limits Apple's distribution. Apple choses to sell mostly directly and therefore they aren't making much of a push to get themselves into major retail chains... Since Wal-Mart can't undercut Apple's prices, Wal-Mart's not particularly interested in having Apple.
So, there's a nice firm wall going up at Gateway. Made-to-order PCs will be ordered by phone or Internet and be stamped Gateway, mass-made machines will be in retail stores and called eMachines. Everybody should be happy...
You people sound like a senior citizen mad about loud fireworks on the fourth of july, or someone pissed that a Christmas walk has main street closed off.
Do you know how much Andy Rooney gets paid?
We stopped taking the "from the..." line seriously this morn, er, did we ever take that line seriously?
Isn't it about time we ditched floppy disks for something better?
CD-RW
Isn't it about time we ditched IDE drives for something better?
SATA
Isn't it about time we ditched x86 for something better?
AMD
Isn't it about time we ditched Microsoft Windows for something better?
Linux
Isn't it about time we ditched CDs for something better?
DVDs
Isn't it about time we ditched telnet for something better?
SSH
Isn't it about time we ditched CRTs for something better?
LCDs
Isn't it about time we ditched 20-year-old TV sets for something better?
New TVs, available at your local stores.
Isn't it about time we ditched COBOL for something better?
Visual Basic.
Isn't it about time we ditched BASIC for something better?
Uhm... it's for beginners. We can't ditch the biginners...
Isn't it about time we ditched SCO Unix for something better?
Linux... we think.
Isn't it about time we ditched DOS for something better?
Windows XP
Isn't it about time we ditched Dubya for something better?
John Kerry
At least you're giving me some credit for my quotes...The Reuters Wire used my words without mentioning my name earlier today.
Tin Foil hat firmly in place!
How does this differ from any other day of the year?
I feel sorry for these people. See, this isn't your typical slashdotting... It's a slashdotting that comes after eighteen consecutive nonsense stories being posted over twelve hours on the US April Fool's Day.
So, their chance to build a reputation is going to be damaged by the fact that anybody reading Slashdot today has already given up on finding anything useful, and will be evaluating them as a joke that they're "not getting" rather than as a proposed networking scheme.
Furthermore, the geek world is bored today by Slashdot's denial-of-normal-service throughout the day. So, once word leaks out that this is a real and normal story, they're going to get all of the pent up slashdotting force applied to their server.
Simon, you should have started your set tonight with an NY Times article or two. That would have been a suitable transition between nonsense content and factual content, since NYT operates in that murky space and has a suitable web setup to absorb a larger-than-usual slashdotting. I'm sure the people at PDTP would have not minded at all if their moment in the sun had come an hour later tonight.
This is a poorly excuted joke.
Yeah, Slashdot ran out of the good jokes somewhere around, uh... wait a second...
Nevermind. There weren't any today.
Yep... the ISBN number of 0974312002 checks out...
Amazon.com
Barnes & Noble (They recongize the number, but don't have it.)
CafePress.com
NerdBooks.com
Some of the gag items will actually give you negative Geek Points, so don't try too hard to buy them.
Unfortunately, this page does not appear to be part of the April Fool's section.
Sure... Google's going to the moon just because of the fact that... ... there's no minimum wage laws. ... they'd be outside of every tax jurisdiction. ... there's no labor practice laws. ... there's a weaker gravity law there. ... the longer moon days that can be used to justify workdays. ... there's a 0% employment rate there. ... a large building's roof can also serve as an earth-visble billboard ...
Michael, knock it off with all of these April Fools stories. We're getting sick of them.
What? Taco's doing it too? Uh... wake me up tomorrow.
Michael isn't intentionally picking April Fools stories. He's actually following his normal selection patern, it's just today that we're willing to consider them jokes....
I'm getting sick of these April Fool's posts... We all already know that Open Source Defense Projects is an oxymoron, you know source has to be closed to be truely secure.
Can we have a real story now?
Assuming this is a joke for a moment.. I'm not so sure Google would have wanted this much publicity. PigeonRank was of course done an idea crazy enough that nobody would buy it, but this one's just too close to possible...
Nope, because they still haven't done their IPO, so their stock isn't being traded on the open market. SEC has no jurisdiction over Google until they file for an IPO.
See, this was nothing but an April Fool's joke. Those weren't actually chat bots... those are all actual AOL users!
Maybe not so. They don't read all the text on every search: they index it before it's saved and they search the index. That returns pointers to saved messages which are then decompressed if requested by the user.
Text compression in the simple form is done by indexing the most common words and phrases in the plaintext, then storing an index that consist of the plaintext long-form of each word or phrase, and a shorter series of bytes to represent that word or phrase. Then they can replace every instance of a frequently used word or phrase with its byte symbol.
So, to search, they'd only have to check to see if the entered string exists anywhere on the plaintext side of the index table, and then just go looking for the byte symbol instead. It actually can be faster... because for the most commonly used terms, the index has already been created.
Uh, no, the Google Cache is here, you linked to the original.
Uhm... wait... a Google Press Release isn't in the Google Cache yet... who would have figured?
It is a joke, it's going to have to go down in history as one of the biggest pranks ever pulled... both the AP and Reuters have put out wire stories which means it's going to be in hundreds of newspapers tomorrow morning.
It'll say a lot about the gullibility of the news media if this is indeed a joke...
One of two situations are true... I'm just not sure which:
A: This is Google's April Fool's prank that they'll fully put on display tomorrow, and somehow a ton of media outlets including the NY Times, Reuters, Forbes, Wired News, ZDNet, and Slashdot have all fallen for it hook line and sinker.
=or=
B: Google's really going through with this...
Yep. Yahoo's main revenue model is getting users to pay for services right now. Google, however, has the AdWords structure which I'm guessing is mighty effective when given an e-mail to consider...