I think in something like search engines, the tech crowd dictates what people use. It's easy to switch your homepage. If there's a new better browser out there, tech people will use it, and inform their non-tech friends about it too.
How much does google spend on marketing?? When's the last time you saw a google TV ad?
I have a friend who works on the MSN Search team as an intern. He said their marketing budget is massive. The article says that MS invested hundreds of millions of dollars, but I'm guessing most of that is for marketing - NOT the research and development that is needed to come up with a truly innovative search technology. If MS wants to win, they should focus on having a quality product, and not worry so much about promoting it. If they really do make something better, people will use it.
It does look good in comparison....and I'm not saying it shouldn't be done....but $2 billion is a lot of money. $80 billion is more - and for a worse cause IMHO, but a lot could be done with $2 billion. There was an article awhile back about how NASA was considering funding x-prize like contests. I wouldn't be surprised if a private company was able to build something to get the job done with a reward of under $500 million. There were some issues with them being able to give out big awards though, so I don't think we'll ever see it happen.
That $2 billion price tag they mentioned was the cost of a robotic repair crew. $2 billion is a lot of money... it's hard to imagine all the R&D and other work that must go into a project like this.
Yeah, they're not doing anything new. This sounds just like what you can do with Google. You can also use google to find 'related pages'....and it sounds like they might come out with an AdSense competitor too....but where's the originality there? It'll just be like what Google already has.
The company should own things that concern them
on
Who Owns Weblog Content?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
People should really treat blogs just like anything that they would say in public. Most companies have IP agreements, or nondisclosure agreements. If an employee posts something that violates that agreement, then the company can ask them to take it down. People have a right to talk about their personal lives, but when you work for someone else, you usually have to agree not to disclose private information about them. Blogs are just a natural extension of that rule.
I could swear I read somewhere recently that at the moment, Google didn't plan on offering domains for sale. Instead, they were going to use the information they got as a registrar to help their PageRank data. For example, they could reset a domains PageRank when the domain changed hands.
I agree that the GPL has some issues that should be cleared up..., but with such a major revision, I'm worried that it will just add another 'compeletly separate' license. Some projects might still want to have the old GPL license, while other projects might want to be released under the 'version 3' license. I think it will add more confusion to all the licenses that already exist.
Blackberries have some PDA functionality, but they do much more. Web browsing (although it's slow) and e-mail are great features that you can't get with a typical 'unconnected' PDA.
That's not a bad deal... I can see this being especially useful in university residences. Just get one person in the building to buy a membership and collect their $2 from everyone who wants to use it... and free shipping for the rest of the year!
I wonder what will happen to this technology. It does seem like it could be useful for a number of applications (university research, for example). If you had a big problem that you spent a lot of time preparing, and then needed a bunch of processing power, this seems like the ideal solution. It certainly is cheaper than building your own giant cluster... but as the first poster pointed out, you pay per CPU per hour, not just per hour.
I disagree. Movies are about the same cost, and you get a lot less entertainment out of them. Obviously it depends on the person - some people like playing online games, and some people don't....but for those people who like it, $10 is quite a deal.
I do agree that they should (a) make the game free to download if they're going to charge monthly, and (b) do some scaling on the price, so if you play less than 1 hour/month for example, you get the month free......, but you can really get quite a bit of entertainment from a multiplayer online game.
"The Benfords calculate a one-hour burst of microwaves could accelerate the craft to 60 kilometres per second"
That's quite fast...:) With the trip only taking a month, I'd imagine it would make it much more manageable for whoever made the journey.
Although it may not be the most practical thing in the world, having people visit Mars gets me excited. It's just like something out of TV shows
This post is sure to generate a ton of replies:) Really though, it depends exactly on what you need. For the company I worked for, the most important thing was ease of maintainability. For that reason, we chose to go with Debian. It was easy to update things across multiple machines. That was the biggest appeal for us. Other distributions have other features to offer.
No kidding... it's a bit drastic when they start to analyze peoples handwriting to develop a personality profile like that. I doubt there's anything accurate and important they can determine by looking at handwriting.
It's easy to modify your handwriting style. It takes some time, but you can adjust your habits to write "in whatever font" you want. I don't understand how people can draw useful conclusions from it....especially if you scribble something down in a hurry.
I really can't think of any bad that can come from this. Hopefully it will improve the visibility of Linux for people who make decisions. In certain cases, people might not even know that linux is an option. Hopefully this new division can help fix that.
The article does make a good point with the Exchange servers though. It's been mentioned here before..., but Linux does need some better connectivity with Exchange to help sell some of the people who already have large systems already set up be more comfortable with the idea of Linux.
When I read that, my jaw dropped open. That's just sick. I don't understand how a country can think it's acting for the good of its people when it spends so much money on licensing proprietary software. I suppose there are worse things - for example spending that much money on weapons to kill people when your own people are starving..., but things like that probably point to bigger issues in the administration.
Re:Could see more like this in the future
on
SBC Might Buy AT&T
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· Score: 1
Yeah, the phone companies aren't going away. Like I said in my initial post, "They will still have a purpose". But that doesn't mean that they can continue charging ridiculously high rates. You're absolutely right that it does cost money to run a network. But the rates they're charging now cover that cost probably 100 or 1000 times over. In Canada, wireless rates are even worse. With Rogers, it costs $90/month to get "unlimited" (25 MB?) voice+data service for a mobile device. Whatever the cost of the network is, $90 for 25 MB of data transfer is higher.
You're right, the phone companies aren't going away, but they will need to learn to be more efficient.
Could see more like this in the future
on
SBC Might Buy AT&T
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I wonder if this is just a sign to come. With things like the internet (skype?) hurting the traditional phone companie's revenue streams, and with the slow but steady emergence of VoIP, the big phone companies days are numbered. They will still have a purpose, of course, but they'll have to learn to be more competitive in a more competitive industry.
I just re-read that, and it said even in 2006, their WiFi model WON'T be able to do VoIP... what's the point? It sounds like they're going to miss out on all the potential that exists with the internet and VoIP
This isn't going to be a replacement for cell phones. I don't think the bluetooth capability is that much of a benefit. Needing the base station really limits where you can use it. They did say that they'd have a WiFi version in 2006 though... that has potential:) Cell + data coverage is just unnecessarily expensive.
The problem is the downloaders wouldn't ordinarily buy it. There have been occasions where I've downloaded a movie, loved it, and then gone out to buy the DVD. I don't buy many movies, but in the recent years, the ones I have purchased are BECAUSE I downloaded them first (and wanted the extras and better quality).
Slashdot Mirror
I think in something like search engines, the tech crowd dictates what people use. It's easy to switch your homepage. If there's a new better browser out there, tech people will use it, and inform their non-tech friends about it too. How much does google spend on marketing?? When's the last time you saw a google TV ad?
I have a friend who works on the MSN Search team as an intern. He said their marketing budget is massive. The article says that MS invested hundreds of millions of dollars, but I'm guessing most of that is for marketing - NOT the research and development that is needed to come up with a truly innovative search technology. If MS wants to win, they should focus on having a quality product, and not worry so much about promoting it. If they really do make something better, people will use it.
Yeah, there are other ways to detect a WiFi signal. ...but how many of them are as cool and uber nerd like as this? :)
Why should I truest oneupweb when they don't have the #1 position for the keywords 'search engine optimization'? :-)
It does look good in comparison. ...and I'm not saying it shouldn't be done. ...but $2 billion is a lot of money. $80 billion is more - and for a worse cause IMHO, but a lot could be done with $2 billion. There was an article awhile back about how NASA was considering funding x-prize like contests. I wouldn't be surprised if a private company was able to build something to get the job done with a reward of under $500 million. There were some issues with them being able to give out big awards though, so I don't think we'll ever see it happen.
That $2 billion price tag they mentioned was the cost of a robotic repair crew. $2 billion is a lot of money... it's hard to imagine all the R&D and other work that must go into a project like this.
Yeah, they're not doing anything new. This sounds just like what you can do with Google. You can also use google to find 'related pages'. ...and it sounds like they might come out with an AdSense competitor too. ...but where's the originality there? It'll just be like what Google already has.
People should really treat blogs just like anything that they would say in public. Most companies have IP agreements, or nondisclosure agreements. If an employee posts something that violates that agreement, then the company can ask them to take it down. People have a right to talk about their personal lives, but when you work for someone else, you usually have to agree not to disclose private information about them. Blogs are just a natural extension of that rule.
I could swear I read somewhere recently that at the moment, Google didn't plan on offering domains for sale. Instead, they were going to use the information they got as a registrar to help their PageRank data. For example, they could reset a domains PageRank when the domain changed hands.
I agree that the GPL has some issues that should be cleared up..., but with such a major revision, I'm worried that it will just add another 'compeletly separate' license. Some projects might still want to have the old GPL license, while other projects might want to be released under the 'version 3' license. I think it will add more confusion to all the licenses that already exist.
They're a "smartphone". They're counted differently. This study only measured the sales of plain old PDAs. As other studies show (http://www.mobilizedsoftware.com/news/showArticle .jhtml?articleId=59201653
the sales of smartphone devices are up.
Blackberries have some PDA functionality, but they do much more. Web browsing (although it's slow) and e-mail are great features that you can't get with a typical 'unconnected' PDA.
That's not a bad deal... I can see this being especially useful in university residences. Just get one person in the building to buy a membership and collect their $2 from everyone who wants to use it... and free shipping for the rest of the year!
I wonder what will happen to this technology. It does seem like it could be useful for a number of applications (university research, for example). If you had a big problem that you spent a lot of time preparing, and then needed a bunch of processing power, this seems like the ideal solution. It certainly is cheaper than building your own giant cluster... but as the first poster pointed out, you pay per CPU per hour, not just per hour.
I disagree. Movies are about the same cost, and you get a lot less entertainment out of them. Obviously it depends on the person - some people like playing online games, and some people don't. ...but for those people who like it, $10 is quite a deal.
..., but you can really get quite a bit of entertainment from a multiplayer online game.
I do agree that they should (a) make the game free to download if they're going to charge monthly, and (b) do some scaling on the price, so if you play less than 1 hour/month for example, you get the month free...
"The Benfords calculate a one-hour burst of microwaves could accelerate the craft to 60 kilometres per second" That's quite fast... :) With the trip only taking a month, I'd imagine it would make it much more manageable for whoever made the journey.
Although it may not be the most practical thing in the world, having people visit Mars gets me excited. It's just like something out of TV shows
This post is sure to generate a ton of replies :) Really though, it depends exactly on what you need. For the company I worked for, the most important thing was ease of maintainability. For that reason, we chose to go with Debian. It was easy to update things across multiple machines. That was the biggest appeal for us. Other distributions have other features to offer.
No kidding... it's a bit drastic when they start to analyze peoples handwriting to develop a personality profile like that. I doubt there's anything accurate and important they can determine by looking at handwriting.
...especially if you scribble something down in a hurry.
It's easy to modify your handwriting style. It takes some time, but you can adjust your habits to write "in whatever font" you want. I don't understand how people can draw useful conclusions from it.
I really can't think of any bad that can come from this. Hopefully it will improve the visibility of Linux for people who make decisions. In certain cases, people might not even know that linux is an option. Hopefully this new division can help fix that.
The article does make a good point with the Exchange servers though. It's been mentioned here before..., but Linux does need some better connectivity with Exchange to help sell some of the people who already have large systems already set up be more comfortable with the idea of Linux.
When I read that, my jaw dropped open. That's just sick. I don't understand how a country can think it's acting for the good of its people when it spends so much money on licensing proprietary software. I suppose there are worse things - for example spending that much money on weapons to kill people when your own people are starving..., but things like that probably point to bigger issues in the administration.
Yeah, the phone companies aren't going away. Like I said in my initial post, "They will still have a purpose". But that doesn't mean that they can continue charging ridiculously high rates. You're absolutely right that it does cost money to run a network. But the rates they're charging now cover that cost probably 100 or 1000 times over. In Canada, wireless rates are even worse. With Rogers, it costs $90/month to get "unlimited" (25 MB?) voice+data service for a mobile device. Whatever the cost of the network is, $90 for 25 MB of data transfer is higher.
You're right, the phone companies aren't going away, but they will need to learn to be more efficient.
I wonder if this is just a sign to come. With things like the internet (skype?) hurting the traditional phone companie's revenue streams, and with the slow but steady emergence of VoIP, the big phone companies days are numbered. They will still have a purpose, of course, but they'll have to learn to be more competitive in a more competitive industry.
I just re-read that, and it said even in 2006, their WiFi model WON'T be able to do VoIP... what's the point? It sounds like they're going to miss out on all the potential that exists with the internet and VoIP
This isn't going to be a replacement for cell phones. I don't think the bluetooth capability is that much of a benefit. Needing the base station really limits where you can use it. They did say that they'd have a WiFi version in 2006 though... that has potential :) Cell + data coverage is just unnecessarily expensive.
The problem is the downloaders wouldn't ordinarily buy it. There have been occasions where I've downloaded a movie, loved it, and then gone out to buy the DVD. I don't buy many movies, but in the recent years, the ones I have purchased are BECAUSE I downloaded them first (and wanted the extras and better quality).
They've actually got some good whitepapers in MS Word format on their website. Look at the information section: http://www.zigbee.org/en/resources/