Just feed those questions into Google and be done with it.
Which is worse, racism or sexism?
Google answers:"Sexism. Because more than fifty percent of the world is female. Female babies are killed just because they are considered less valuable and or subhuman than males."
Would you rather be a fireman or an astronaut, and why?
Google answers:"For as long as I could remember I wanted to be a cop....it was more than just that childhood phase where you want to be a cop or fireman or astronaut"
I would build the site on some simple CMS like CMS Made Simple, http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/
Then, I would add a ready-made CSS template from a site like http://www.oswd.org/
Also, you could just suggest to your boss that you buy the design along with the CSS. There are tons of freelance designers on the web with excellent references available. Our company has bought some amazing designs for as little as 200$. Try a site like http://www.elance.com/ for starters.
I think that buying copyrighted works will work against wikipedia. It is currently maintained by people who do it gratis because they believe in the cause. Isn't there a risk that doing something like this will actually reduce these people's incentives to write to wikipedia?
In project you got scope, cost and time, right?
When calculating these, you calculate them for the project. If say you will do it fast and cheap, the project gets approved.
At least internal software gets developed as a project and for the project you get some budget. Who cares for the operating cost?
You're pretty much right.
Wikipedia:"Perfect competition is an economic model that describes a hypothetical market form in which no producer or consumer has the market power to influence prices."
A large number of buyers would be a market imperfection ie. an oligopsony.
I wonder how all these new social networking sites are planning to gather the critical mass needed. The only way I see it happening for a start-up is by targeting some niche and wait for "overflow" into other demographics.
I visited Toronto two years ago. I used my Mastercard there in some restaurants and cafes.
Two weeks after I had left Canada, someone had used my credit card in Toronto to buy stuff worth 890 Canadian dollars (pretty near my limit of 1000).
I still don't have a clue how this was done. Where I come from we don't use credit cards that much, mainly cash and debit.
I am not an engineer, but...
For new areas, the price of laying in copper or optical cable is about the same (about 1500 dollars). In fiber optics, the speed could be 1Gb, in copper, about 24Mbit (currently?).
Now, why would a phone company still make all the new areas with copper instead of fiber optics? Equipment might be more expensive for optics but still...
Really stupid question, can you really get Battlefield and COD on Macintosh? I did not there were Macintosh versions available? Only thing stopping me from changing to Apple has been the games...
I have been sent a link to that site by my friends and colleagues about 10 times now I think. Every single time I have clicked on those links just for fun. I have even considered buying ad-space there myself because I know that if I would put a link there with the flag of my country on it, most people from my country going to the site would click on it. For say 200 dollars I would get a lot of traffic that I already know something of, at least that they have nothing better to do than click on funny links.
1. Monopoly CONTROL! Verizon isn't just trying to give you high speed Internet, they're trying completely take over your phone.
On the other hand, mobile phones are pretty good substitutes for landline phones. However, history seems to indicate that local networks tend to fluctuate between total monopolies and fierce competition. Technological advances cause competition, and scope and scale economies plus the network externalities ineherent in local exchange drive the industry towards a monopoly. Furthermore, a monopoly seems to be the most efficient way to produce local exchange services (in a static sense at least). So, one could say here "sure, it is possible they are gonna end up in monopoly position but only until the next technological wave".
3. Why else would you want a copper phone? POWER OUTAGES! Copper phones usually have their own power and continue to work when the main power goes out.
Almost all parts of the POTS are way overdesigned. Somewhere I read that IP telephony can be done with 1/10 the prices of POTS even at the highest levels of the network. This is because the POTS system is engineered to be extremely reliable.
It seems that one good question to ask here is whether reliable telecommunications like that carry such network externalities that they can be considered a public good that the government should provide.
From a consumers point of view, an "old school" phone could be considered something of an insurance. You pay 10* the price for extremely reliable communications all the time so that in case something happens, you will have some added safety from the fact that the copper phone will still work.
Just some random thoughts... I am currently trying to do my thesis about local exchange competition and copper vs. fiber so any comments are much appreciated;)
I am doing my master's thesis on local loop unbundling and its effects in Finland regarding the information society.
France: Cheap hi-speed Internet, yes. However, France is considered a failure by EU because there is no competition.
Finland: Some competition is forming, but 24/1M ADSL connections are really rare. The standard for broadband here is 256kbs which is really really sad.
Sweden: They see fiber network as a true public good and there is a massive government-sponsored program underway to get it everywhere. However, last year, they ran out of money. Reason for this seems to be that the operators were paid their costs and so they did not have an incentive to do it efficiently. However, they got real far and now have hi-speed symmetric connections all over the place.
Korea: Never did unbundling of the local loop but two important aspects. In densely populated areas, they had the possibility to do fiber to the home real cheap. In not so densely populated areas, they had excellent quality cable network owned by electric company that was not used. This was then leased to other companies.
USA: DC Circuit has found something wrong in almost all the local loop unbundling models. Shitload of regulatory capture going on all over the place. CLECs and ILECs fighting. I looked at some economic research done in US and there were concepts in that research that are totally unknown in Europe. Like, in USA, the economists believe that intermodal competition between cable and telephone is enough to drive prices down and quality up. Also, a lot of american research sees local loop unbundling in Europe as a complete failure. The list goes on and on...
Anyways, I think the major thing here is that in Canada and Europe etc. Internet connections are considered a necessity and broadband a public good. Europe has actually increased regulation in telecommunications just to get cheap broadband everywhere. Not much talk about "poor telephone companies" here.
The way I see it, the problem is, that in a totally efficient market the price of a good would be its marginal cost. With information, the marginal cost after the first use is about zero.
Thus, in a market-driven system, the price of all information on Wikipedia will be exactly the same as now, zero.
What you could sell is trust. This is already being done by highly priced consultants, specialty magazines, scholarly databases, peer-reviewed journals and such.
Let's see if I can follow your thinking:
- I sell information (price zero)
- people buy it from me for a certain initial price
- after that, they review me on the site
- gradually, as my review points rise, I will be paid more to deliver information on the subject (price of my trust rises)
- a marketplace of information a la ebay?
Maybe you should consult Wikipedia for the definition of a public good;)
"In economics, a public good is a good that is hard or even impossible to produce for private profit, because the market fails to account for its large beneficial externalities."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good
I am doing research on the subject of local loop unbundling and I think you are right, the business models are pretty peculiar.
There are differences in US vs. Europe in how this is done, but the basics are pretty similar.
Two most common ways to unbundle a local loop are to force the incumbent to offer bitstream access or local loop for the entrant. The price is calculated for the access are calculated by the regulator. Two common pricing methods are engineering models / long run incremental cost and cost plus pricing. In the engineering model, the regulator tries to calculate what it would cost to set up a similar service now and gives it a payback time of say 20 years. In the cost plus pricing, the incumbent will give information about its marginal costs to the regulator who will add a premium on top if this to account for future investment costs.
Long story short, the access price set by the regulator does not equal the true price and there is possibility for arbitrage.
Of course, in the US, the FCC has changed its mind on the subject of should LLU be done at least 4 times.
So, there was some background as I see it. However, I have just started researching this subject so I still might have some stuff mixed up.
I haven't studied too much economics, but I remember from my classes something along the lines that with the Solow growth model one can pretty accurately find out the rate of innovations growth in a country and per capita because innovations are the main force behind productivity growth.
Also, there was this thing called Schumpeterian trilogy which talks about the relation between invention, innovation and diffusion. Basically, there will be no productivity gains from inventions if nobody gets to use them.
I studied related stuff for my thesis and found out an interesting bit of info.
One of the main reasons for big third generation mobile services markets in Japan and Korea are the lengthy daily commutes people do in trains.
And normally, in trains, you can charge your phone (there is AC or DC available). Thus, power consumption is not a problem when you take into account the environment where these 3G services are used.
Same thing for me here in Finland. I use my phone to surf the net during my 3 hours of daily commuting on a train. I decided pretty quickly against carrying a 6 pound computer with me the whole day just to be able to surf the net. Now I use just my Nokia 6600 to read PDA version of slashdot. Some of my commuting friends use a Nokia 9300 for the same purpose and yes, they use it to watch TV shows too.
From my own experience I can tell you one does not need to be an expat to have the same problem.
I have lived in quite many countries - Canada, USA, France, Sweden etc. While abroad, I learnt to love many programs we do not get in my native country, for example Leno, O'Brien and Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I have also adopted a lot of the other cultures along the way. For example, I find american political life hugely interesting (and slightly amusing).
Anyways, there is no way for me currently to obtain these shows other than using bittorrent.
What strikes me as odd is, why don't the TV channels just embrace us "global" people as a new market segment rather than just trying to act all hostile. Historically, customers were segmented and marketed by where they live as you also had to shop there. By this, you formed your 4P's of marketing. That is not true anymore. I, a person living in Finland, can have very similar needs and a mindset as a person living in California. Thanks to global trade and the promise of e-commerce, I can also be marketed very similar products. There are countless examples of products I have bought online that I have seen advertised elsewhere than my home country. Books, clothing etc.
I guess the main problem is, that with media, the products is differentiated to the max. There is only one company that can provide me with "the daily show" or the newest CD by Moby. With no substitutes available...
(And here is something for you that say "why don't you download music by bands that distribute it online". Different pieces of music are just NOT substitutes)
Gotta add non-AC to my post above.
The system seems to be called Linux LTSP. The page did not give any contact information for more information, etunimi.sukunimi is just firstname.lastname.
The idea of the paper is to show that Moore's law can't be used to predict trends in economics.
So
a) "Moore's law" shows us the effect of demand vs. supply
b) It does not mean that the demand (or demanded quantity) would increase infinitely
c) You can not call it a law because the variations have been too big (first it was one year, then two, now 18 months) and as the formula is that of exponential growth, those variations mean huge differences at the number of transistors over a period of, say, five years.
In short, this article looks at the economics (as in macroeconomics) side of Moore's law. It doesn't claim that you couldn't pack more transistors or whatever on a microchip.
You could also claim that Moore's law might actually hinder economic development as Intel wants to obey the law. What results is that we are actually saying that "wow, Intel is keeping up with the R&D forecasts stated in their company strategy". Yipee.
Okay, a shitty explanation but please read the paper and look at the idea behind it before saying it's total bullshit.
Slashdot Mirror
Just feed those questions into Google and be done with it. Which is worse, racism or sexism? Google answers:"Sexism. Because more than fifty percent of the world is female. Female babies are killed just because they are considered less valuable and or subhuman than males." Would you rather be a fireman or an astronaut, and why? Google answers:"For as long as I could remember I wanted to be a cop....it was more than just that childhood phase where you want to be a cop or fireman or astronaut"
I would build the site on some simple CMS like CMS Made Simple, http://www.cmsmadesimple.org/ Then, I would add a ready-made CSS template from a site like http://www.oswd.org/ Also, you could just suggest to your boss that you buy the design along with the CSS. There are tons of freelance designers on the web with excellent references available. Our company has bought some amazing designs for as little as 200$. Try a site like http://www.elance.com/ for starters.
I think that buying copyrighted works will work against wikipedia. It is currently maintained by people who do it gratis because they believe in the cause. Isn't there a risk that doing something like this will actually reduce these people's incentives to write to wikipedia?
In project you got scope, cost and time, right? When calculating these, you calculate them for the project. If say you will do it fast and cheap, the project gets approved. At least internal software gets developed as a project and for the project you get some budget. Who cares for the operating cost?
You're pretty much right. Wikipedia:"Perfect competition is an economic model that describes a hypothetical market form in which no producer or consumer has the market power to influence prices." A large number of buyers would be a market imperfection ie. an oligopsony.
Same problem here, Slashdot logo as well as rounded corners are missing.
Good for you. I do.
I wonder how all these new social networking sites are planning to gather the critical mass needed. The only way I see it happening for a start-up is by targeting some niche and wait for "overflow" into other demographics.
I have a hunch that these people have been educated on security by their lovely neighbourhood telco's... Have some more FUD, will you please?
I visited Toronto two years ago. I used my Mastercard there in some restaurants and cafes. Two weeks after I had left Canada, someone had used my credit card in Toronto to buy stuff worth 890 Canadian dollars (pretty near my limit of 1000). I still don't have a clue how this was done. Where I come from we don't use credit cards that much, mainly cash and debit.
I am not an engineer, but... For new areas, the price of laying in copper or optical cable is about the same (about 1500 dollars). In fiber optics, the speed could be 1Gb, in copper, about 24Mbit (currently?). Now, why would a phone company still make all the new areas with copper instead of fiber optics? Equipment might be more expensive for optics but still...
Really stupid question, can you really get Battlefield and COD on Macintosh? I did not there were Macintosh versions available? Only thing stopping me from changing to Apple has been the games...
I have been sent a link to that site by my friends and colleagues about 10 times now I think. Every single time I have clicked on those links just for fun. I have even considered buying ad-space there myself because I know that if I would put a link there with the flag of my country on it, most people from my country going to the site would click on it. For say 200 dollars I would get a lot of traffic that I already know something of, at least that they have nothing better to do than click on funny links.
1. Monopoly CONTROL! Verizon isn't just trying to give you high speed Internet, they're trying completely take over your phone.
;)
On the other hand, mobile phones are pretty good substitutes for landline phones. However, history seems to indicate that local networks tend to fluctuate between total monopolies and fierce competition. Technological advances cause competition, and scope and scale economies plus the network externalities ineherent in local exchange drive the industry towards a monopoly. Furthermore, a monopoly seems to be the most efficient way to produce local exchange services (in a static sense at least). So, one could say here "sure, it is possible they are gonna end up in monopoly position but only until the next technological wave".
3. Why else would you want a copper phone? POWER OUTAGES! Copper phones usually have their own power and continue to work when the main power goes out.
Almost all parts of the POTS are way overdesigned. Somewhere I read that IP telephony can be done with 1/10 the prices of POTS even at the highest levels of the network. This is because the POTS system is engineered to be extremely reliable.
It seems that one good question to ask here is whether reliable telecommunications like that carry such network externalities that they can be considered a public good that the government should provide.
From a consumers point of view, an "old school" phone could be considered something of an insurance. You pay 10* the price for extremely reliable communications all the time so that in case something happens, you will have some added safety from the fact that the copper phone will still work.
Just some random thoughts... I am currently trying to do my thesis about local exchange competition and copper vs. fiber so any comments are much appreciated
I am doing my master's thesis on local loop unbundling and its effects in Finland regarding the information society.
France: Cheap hi-speed Internet, yes. However, France is considered a failure by EU because there is no competition.
Finland: Some competition is forming, but 24/1M ADSL connections are really rare. The standard for broadband here is 256kbs which is really really sad.
Sweden: They see fiber network as a true public good and there is a massive government-sponsored program underway to get it everywhere. However, last year, they ran out of money. Reason for this seems to be that the operators were paid their costs and so they did not have an incentive to do it efficiently. However, they got real far and now have hi-speed symmetric connections all over the place.
Korea: Never did unbundling of the local loop but two important aspects. In densely populated areas, they had the possibility to do fiber to the home real cheap. In not so densely populated areas, they had excellent quality cable network owned by electric company that was not used. This was then leased to other companies.
USA: DC Circuit has found something wrong in almost all the local loop unbundling models. Shitload of regulatory capture going on all over the place. CLECs and ILECs fighting. I looked at some economic research done in US and there were concepts in that research that are totally unknown in Europe. Like, in USA, the economists believe that intermodal competition between cable and telephone is enough to drive prices down and quality up. Also, a lot of american research sees local loop unbundling in Europe as a complete failure. The list goes on and on...
Anyways, I think the major thing here is that in Canada and Europe etc. Internet connections are considered a necessity and broadband a public good. Europe has actually increased regulation in telecommunications just to get cheap broadband everywhere. Not much talk about "poor telephone companies" here.
The way I see it, the problem is, that in a totally efficient market the price of a good would be its marginal cost. With information, the marginal cost after the first use is about zero. Thus, in a market-driven system, the price of all information on Wikipedia will be exactly the same as now, zero. What you could sell is trust. This is already being done by highly priced consultants, specialty magazines, scholarly databases, peer-reviewed journals and such. Let's see if I can follow your thinking: - I sell information (price zero) - people buy it from me for a certain initial price - after that, they review me on the site - gradually, as my review points rise, I will be paid more to deliver information on the subject (price of my trust rises) - a marketplace of information a la ebay?
Maybe you should consult Wikipedia for the definition of a public good ;)
"In economics, a public good is a good that is hard or even impossible to produce for private profit, because the market fails to account for its large beneficial externalities."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_good
I am doing research on the subject of local loop unbundling and I think you are right, the business models are pretty peculiar.
There are differences in US vs. Europe in how this is done, but the basics are pretty similar.
Two most common ways to unbundle a local loop are to force the incumbent to offer bitstream access or local loop for the entrant. The price is calculated for the access are calculated by the regulator. Two common pricing methods are engineering models / long run incremental cost and cost plus pricing. In the engineering model, the regulator tries to calculate what it would cost to set up a similar service now and gives it a payback time of say 20 years. In the cost plus pricing, the incumbent will give information about its marginal costs to the regulator who will add a premium on top if this to account for future investment costs.
Long story short, the access price set by the regulator does not equal the true price and there is possibility for arbitrage.
Of course, in the US, the FCC has changed its mind on the subject of should LLU be done at least 4 times.
So, there was some background as I see it. However, I have just started researching this subject so I still might have some stuff mixed up.
I haven't studied too much economics, but I remember from my classes something along the lines that with the Solow growth model one can pretty accurately find out the rate of innovations growth in a country and per capita because innovations are the main force behind productivity growth.
Also, there was this thing called Schumpeterian trilogy which talks about the relation between invention, innovation and diffusion. Basically, there will be no productivity gains from inventions if nobody gets to use them.
Ideas for Google searches from here:
http://www.nber.org/reporter/summer99/eaton.html
One more point-of-view.
In the case of information goods, Google already "owns" the product. After all, the zeros and ones of NYT articles already reside on Google servers.
So, the system could be effectively "person-to-google" - ultimate information subscription service.
I studied related stuff for my thesis and found out an interesting bit of info.
One of the main reasons for big third generation mobile services markets in Japan and Korea are the lengthy daily commutes people do in trains.
And normally, in trains, you can charge your phone (there is AC or DC available). Thus, power consumption is not a problem when you take into account the environment where these 3G services are used.
Same thing for me here in Finland. I use my phone to surf the net during my 3 hours of daily commuting on a train. I decided pretty quickly against carrying a 6 pound computer with me the whole day just to be able to surf the net. Now I use just my Nokia 6600 to read PDA version of slashdot. Some of my commuting friends use a Nokia 9300 for the same purpose and yes, they use it to watch TV shows too.
From my own experience I can tell you one does not need to be an expat to have the same problem.
I have lived in quite many countries - Canada, USA, France, Sweden etc. While abroad, I learnt to love many programs we do not get in my native country, for example Leno, O'Brien and Daily Show with Jon Stewart. I have also adopted a lot of the other cultures along the way. For example, I find american political life hugely interesting (and slightly amusing).
Anyways, there is no way for me currently to obtain these shows other than using bittorrent.
What strikes me as odd is, why don't the TV channels just embrace us "global" people as a new market segment rather than just trying to act all hostile. Historically, customers were segmented and marketed by where they live as you also had to shop there. By this, you formed your 4P's of marketing. That is not true anymore. I, a person living in Finland, can have very similar needs and a mindset as a person living in California. Thanks to global trade and the promise of e-commerce, I can also be marketed very similar products. There are countless examples of products I have bought online that I have seen advertised elsewhere than my home country. Books, clothing etc.
I guess the main problem is, that with media, the products is differentiated to the max. There is only one company that can provide me with "the daily show" or the newest CD by Moby. With no substitutes available...
(And here is something for you that say "why don't you download music by bands that distribute it online". Different pieces of music are just NOT substitutes)
Gotta add non-AC to my post above. The system seems to be called Linux LTSP. The page did not give any contact information for more information, etunimi.sukunimi is just firstname.lastname.
Yeah, right. Me, myself and I? In Estonia, they are far ahead of Finland when it comes to technology usage growth and even usage per se.
Ever heard of Wi-Fi in Finland. Go on, check out www.wifi.ee
Maybe if you weren't so drunk everytime you go to Tallinn you would've noticed this...
The idea of the paper is to show that Moore's law can't be used to predict trends in economics.
So
a) "Moore's law" shows us the effect of demand vs. supply
b) It does not mean that the demand (or demanded quantity) would increase infinitely
c) You can not call it a law because the variations have been too big (first it was one year, then two, now 18 months) and as the formula is that of exponential growth, those variations mean huge differences at the number of transistors over a period of, say, five years.
In short, this article looks at the economics (as in macroeconomics) side of Moore's law. It doesn't claim that you couldn't pack more transistors or whatever on a microchip.
You could also claim that Moore's law might actually hinder economic development as Intel wants to obey the law. What results is that we are actually saying that "wow, Intel is keeping up with the R&D forecasts stated in their company strategy". Yipee.
Okay, a shitty explanation but please read the paper and look at the idea behind it before saying it's total bullshit.