Back in the day, I had a financial modeling simulation that ran on a HeathKit H89, a Z80 based machine. It allowed you to buy and sell stocks and bonds, then rolled the dice and told you how you did. Eventually, I figured out that to "win", you had to bet big on long shots. If you lose, restart the game. If you win, you win big.
VCs have figured out how to reset the game. "We're the VC that started Google, so you should 'invest' in our companies", where 'invest' means, come work for, extend credit, or buy our product. The VC uses it's name to give an air a respectability to a fly-by-night. If it crashes, then the corporation or LLC documents protect the original VC from liability, but if it does well, the VC makes a ton of money on the IPO.
If you want to succeed in business, learn to invest other people's money. If you lose, it's their money. If you win, take a slice off the top, give them what's left. Rinse, Lather, repeat.
Some very basic functionality that should exist (but I haven’t seen) would be that the TV should detect a signal on an input and auto switch to it via some kind of hierarchy. Turn on the DVD player.. input should go to that.. turn it off.. back to digital box.. turn that off, back to analog cable. This seems basic and maybe it has been done, but when I looked I couldn’t find a TV that supported this.
I had exactly that functionality before using a composite/S-Video box. It would autoswitch, always going to the most recently turned on input, then back to the previous when the most recent turned off. There was one button on the top that would override.
I've not seen this in a higher-end TV. My Sony set knows which inputs are active, but doesn't have an autoswitch feature. Is it possible that one company has a lock on the patent for this?
I have several unopened sets of Irix 6.x buried somewhere in a box in my basement. Alas, I've nothing to run them on. As I recall, Irix came complete with lots of utilities, but the C complier was crippled, unless you paid extra, PPP was crippled unless you paid extra, etc. etc.
One thing the tobacco companies did was to have their lawyers conduct "scientific" studies, then only release the ones that showed no harm. Since Big T didn't actually know what studies were being conducted, they had plausible deniability.
In this case, you'd have your law firm perform "secret" backups. Then you delete everything using a retention policy that mandates everything be deleted as soon as legally possible. If your lawyers decide they need a 2 year old document to defend you, and the benefit outweighs the risk, the documents could be "found". Even if the actual document isn't found, it might lead you to a public doc that exonerates you.
If you post a comment that general user base of slashdot likes, it will be modded up. If you post a comment, even a really insightful and interesting one that the general user base doesn't like, it will be modded down.
Google's solution? Allow trusted evaluators to transfer a 'quantity of authority' to like-minded 'contributing authorities', who in turn designate and delegate authority to additional like-minded contributing authorities.
It sounds like Slashdot has randomly created groupthink, but with this new and improved patent from Google, you'll have designed groupthink. This is better why?
A better stat (for disk drives) is the warranty period. The rule of thumb is the manufacturer has to make the drive last 5x the warranty or there will be too many returns.
However, you have to ask, will this company be around at the end of the warranty? Is the company just charging enough extra so that they've amortized the cost of the returns? (This is the way automobile battery companies work)
That's because it doesn't do anything good for hard drives. There was a paper about it some years ago, I'm too lazy to google it up, but even 32 MB is too much (I think the sweet spot was around 2 MB).
The sweet spot will be very application and OS dependent. In the old days, the drive didn't have any cache, and the controller couldn't hold much more than 1 sector. So, when the head dropped, you had to wait for your sector to spin around before you could read. If you then needed the adjacent sector, you might have to wait for an entire revolution before you could read it. Schemes like interleaving were devised to get around this. (Logical sectors N and N+1 were physically 2 or 3 sectors apart)
With IDE, the controller was migrated mostly to the drive, and a bigger cache was added. If you can cache the entire track across all the heads, you can drop your heads on any track and start reading after a small settling time. Then give the OS the exact sector it asked for. Most of the time, the next sector the OS asks for will be in your cache, so you win. If you have this much cache x2, you can move your head and start reading before the OS is done with the current cached track.
Beyond 2x an entire track, you have to play guessing games. A better OS will already to all the optimizations like sorting requests, and caching frequently used sectors, so if you aren't rebooting too often, more cache on the drive isn't a big win.
Attorney-client privilege is not a magic shield that protects everything one might throw behind the term. The backups are almost certainly not privileged and would most likely have to be turned over in discovery. The only thing this does is lengthen the process and rack up fees that you will ultimately be held responsible for.
With the Tobacco companies it took decades to hold anyone responsible for these kinds of tricks. Many of the executives were probably dead before the truth came out. Certainly, many of their customers were.
Of course, now that their tricks have been brought to light, there may be new legislation that prevents them from being used today. (So the lawyers have to invent new tricks.)
In the end, the things that really saved the world from destruction were spies, double agents, informants and whistleblowers, the same people our societies would like to weed out and hang for treason in this age.
No, no, no, it's *their* spies, double agents, informants and whistleblowers we want to hang. Our spies, double agents, informants and whistleblowers are necessary and rewarded. (As long as they toe the party line...)
But you are right. Even though we don't want the other nation's spies to succeed, things like spy satellites are stabilizing and more weapons are destabilizing.
When another country builds a nuke, our military industrial complex can ask for more money.
When another country tries to get our secrets, we try to detain or kill the agent.
I've worked for a company that mandated irrevocably deleting emails as soon as legally possible. Why? "One email, a SINGLE email, can make the difference between a multi million dollar lawsuit..."
A even more sleazy company could send all its backups to its lawyers, so they are protected by attorney/client privilege.
I suggested something similar to improve the contrast in the sonar room on submarines, without tripping up the people who were doing other things. Polarize the displays up and down, and the room lights side to side. People wearing polarized glasses could see the displays well, but the glare from the room lights would be diminished.
I think the first description of such a system was in a golden age science fiction story. Car head lights were polarized diagonally. You'd wear glasses that allowed your light to be bright, but oncoming ca's headlights would be reduced. Of course unsuspecting pedestrians would be blinded.
Why? How is this better than a simple flat discount? It seems like you'd just turn off customers who feel like they've been gypped out of a better deal?
Look at the airlines. You might have paid $600 for a last minute seat, but the person next to you paid $200 for the same flight, but bought it 2 weeks ago.
When you're selling a product, any price you get above what it costs to make is profit. But, you can only charge what people are willing to spend. So, the trick to maximizing your profit, is to figure out what each customer is willing to spend, then sell to that customer for that price. (as you've stated, you need to do this without pissing off the customer who pays more)
The key here is value add. A normal cupcake might sell for $0.30. A custom cupcake, with a design or special flavor, might sell for $3.00. Fresh, out the oven, delivered might be $6.00, while a day old cupcake might only bring $.15. As long as each customer perceives that they are getting a unique product, they won't worry that the other guy only paid 10% of what they did.
Of course with more expensive things, like enterprise software, you can get your customers to sign NDAs about how much they paid, then tell each and every one of them that they are getting a discount on the list price. Since they can't legally compare prices, they won't complain too much.
Groupon could do this by only offering some customers the great deal, and the others a lesser deal. If not enough customers take the great deal, then re-offer another customer a better deal.
Groupon should offer a staggered approach. First 100 customers get offered 75% off. Next 100 get offered 50%, then 25%. After a time, the system could float to the discount that was optimal, with some total per day limit.
According to the article, "Heather Dickinson, a Groupon spokeswoman, said there was no limit to the number of vouchers that could be sold. She said: “We approach each business with a tailored, individual approach based on the prior history of similar deals.” "
This is a tailored approach? Groupon seems to only get this kind a negative publicity. I can't see them as being a long term viable entity.
I don't see how Groupon can be considered long term viable, if this is the kind of press they're getting. This lady will never be doing that again, and she's going to go to her local chamber of commerce meetings and say, "I had a bad experience with Groupon". Any salesperson from Groupon will have an uphill battle selling to anyone in that area again.
How hard would it be for Groupon to make the default limit be a small number? If the business selects a large number with a large discount, then their forms could ask, "Can you really service this number of customers over this time?"
I know it's easy to blame the baker for this mistake, it's not a viable business strategy to kill your customers. Customers are supposed to be bled slowly, so that you can bleed them some more tomorrow.
However his skill set is mainly in coding on the PeopleSoft API. Comp Sci degree is not required for that job.
Agreed. However, many HR departments use automated scanners to filter resumes and if you don't have CS or and Engineering degree, you won't be interviewed for the position. Some companies have made it difficult or impossible for managers to find their own people without the HR department.
What's the difference between this and Google mapping wifi? In one case people are broadcasting on 2.5 and 5GHz, in another they are broadcasting on 650 - 240nm. (~ 470THz to 1000THz)
If you don't want people recording your license plate, maybe you should encrypt it. (:-)
There's a small wormhole somewhere between CERN and Gran Sasso. If they run the experiment somewhere else, then they should be the expected results. A 60ns wormhole wouldn't be that big, and it would be hard to find, especially if it's inside a rock.
... Do authors get judged by the number of pages they write in a day, no they get paid by the success or failure of the book. You can't judge by the number of lines of code, bugs per line ratio or anything like that, because it is all subjective and has little to no bearing on the end product.
Many successful novels, started out as magazine serials, which were paid by the word. Usually, though, they are edited before they are put into book form.
I've seen a bunch of movies, where I thought, "This would be a great movie, if they just cut half of it, then sped the result up by 1.5x"
I've often thought that coders should be paid by how *little* they write, as long as it does the job.
Let's say you've set aside 6 bits in every data structure that deals with core administration. You can grow to 2^6, or 64 cores without re-architecting your data structures.
As long as we are using binary in computers, making everything 2^N will make the most efficient use of space.
Of course, space isn't always the limiting factor, so sometimes for cost or speed reasons, we see objects that number 2^N-M.
More than likely, there's 64 cores but only 50 are activated because they can't get a decent yield of perfect chips. That also means that you might be able to get samples of 25 core chips that didn't even make the 50 core cutoff. (One core might also be dedicated for book keeping purposes)
I hearby transfer all rights physical, digital, and ethereal for the term "The Representative Party", to a group that can get elected as "The Representative Party"
Here's how it would work. A figurehead would be nominated and if elected, would contractually agree to vote the way the People want. Electronic voting would be used to transmit the will of the people to the figurehead. Voting may or may not be secret ballot. (TBD)
Question. Would the "People" be defined as any voter, or just the registered members of the Representative Party? Would regular voting rules apply, or could someone underage register to be a member and be counted, agreeing to vote for the party when of age?
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the day, I had a financial modeling simulation that ran on a HeathKit H89, a Z80 based machine. It allowed you to buy and sell stocks and bonds, then rolled the dice and told you how you did. Eventually, I figured out that to "win", you had to bet big on long shots. If you lose, restart the game. If you win, you win big.
VCs have figured out how to reset the game. "We're the VC that started Google, so you should 'invest' in our companies", where 'invest' means, come work for, extend credit, or buy our product. The VC uses it's name to give an air a respectability to a fly-by-night. If it crashes, then the corporation or LLC documents protect the original VC from liability, but if it does well, the VC makes a ton of money on the IPO.
If you want to succeed in business, learn to invest other people's money. If you lose, it's their money. If you win, take a slice off the top, give them what's left. Rinse, Lather, repeat.
... the horse drawn carriage wasn't "broken" when the automobile was invented. ...
Horse poo. Literally tons of in on NY city streets. http://www.thefreemanonline.org/columns/our-economic-past-the-great-horse-manure-crisis-of-1894/
Some very basic functionality that should exist (but I haven’t seen) would be that the TV should detect a signal on an input and auto switch to it via some kind of hierarchy. Turn on the DVD player.. input should go to that.. turn it off.. back to digital box.. turn that off, back to analog cable. This seems basic and maybe it has been done, but when I looked I couldn’t find a TV that supported this.
I had exactly that functionality before using a composite/S-Video box. It would autoswitch, always going to the most recently turned on input, then back to the previous when the most recent turned off. There was one button on the top that would override.
I've not seen this in a higher-end TV. My Sony set knows which inputs are active, but doesn't have an autoswitch feature. Is it possible that one company has a lock on the patent for this?
I have several unopened sets of Irix 6.x buried somewhere in a box in my basement. Alas, I've nothing to run them on. As I recall, Irix came complete with lots of utilities, but the C complier was crippled, unless you paid extra, PPP was crippled unless you paid extra, etc. etc.
One thing the tobacco companies did was to have their lawyers conduct "scientific" studies, then only release the ones that showed no harm. Since Big T didn't actually know what studies were being conducted, they had plausible deniability.
In this case, you'd have your law firm perform "secret" backups. Then you delete everything using a retention policy that mandates everything be deleted as soon as legally possible. If your lawyers decide they need a 2 year old document to defend you, and the benefit outweighs the risk, the documents could be "found". Even if the actual document isn't found, it might lead you to a public doc that exonerates you.
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.
- (commonly attributed to) Cardinal Richelieu
If you post a comment that general user base of slashdot likes, it will be modded up. If you post a comment, even a really insightful and interesting one that the general user base doesn't like, it will be modded down.
Google's solution? Allow trusted evaluators to transfer a 'quantity of authority' to like-minded 'contributing authorities', who in turn designate and delegate authority to additional like-minded contributing authorities.
It sounds like Slashdot has randomly created groupthink, but with this new and improved patent from Google, you'll have designed groupthink. This is better why?
A better stat (for disk drives) is the warranty period. The rule of thumb is the manufacturer has to make the drive last 5x the warranty or there will be too many returns.
However, you have to ask, will this company be around at the end of the warranty? Is the company just charging enough extra so that they've amortized the cost of the returns? (This is the way automobile battery companies work)
That's because it doesn't do anything good for hard drives. There was a paper about it some years ago, I'm too lazy to google it up, but even 32 MB is too much (I think the sweet spot was around 2 MB).
The sweet spot will be very application and OS dependent. In the old days, the drive didn't have any cache, and the controller couldn't hold much more than 1 sector. So, when the head dropped, you had to wait for your sector to spin around before you could read. If you then needed the adjacent sector, you might have to wait for an entire revolution before you could read it. Schemes like interleaving were devised to get around this. (Logical sectors N and N+1 were physically 2 or 3 sectors apart)
With IDE, the controller was migrated mostly to the drive, and a bigger cache was added. If you can cache the entire track across all the heads, you can drop your heads on any track and start reading after a small settling time. Then give the OS the exact sector it asked for. Most of the time, the next sector the OS asks for will be in your cache, so you win. If you have this much cache x2, you can move your head and start reading before the OS is done with the current cached track.
Beyond 2x an entire track, you have to play guessing games. A better OS will already to all the optimizations like sorting requests, and caching frequently used sectors, so if you aren't rebooting too often, more cache on the drive isn't a big win.
Attorney-client privilege is not a magic shield that protects everything one might throw behind the term. The backups are almost certainly not privileged and would most likely have to be turned over in discovery. The only thing this does is lengthen the process and rack up fees that you will ultimately be held responsible for.
With the Tobacco companies it took decades to hold anyone responsible for these kinds of tricks. Many of the executives were probably dead before the truth came out. Certainly, many of their customers were.
Of course, now that their tricks have been brought to light, there may be new legislation that prevents them from being used today. (So the lawyers have to invent new tricks.)
In the end, the things that really saved the world from destruction were spies, double agents, informants and whistleblowers, the same people our societies would like to weed out and hang for treason in this age.
No, no, no, it's *their* spies, double agents, informants and whistleblowers we want to hang. Our spies, double agents, informants and whistleblowers are necessary and rewarded. (As long as they toe the party line...)
But you are right. Even though we don't want the other nation's spies to succeed, things like spy satellites are stabilizing and more weapons are destabilizing.
When another country builds a nuke, our military industrial complex can ask for more money.
When another country tries to get our secrets, we try to detain or kill the agent.
This makes sense how?
I've worked for a company that mandated irrevocably deleting emails as soon as legally possible. Why? "One email, a SINGLE email, can make the difference between a multi million dollar lawsuit..."
A even more sleazy company could send all its backups to its lawyers, so they are protected by attorney/client privilege.
I suggested something similar to improve the contrast in the sonar room on submarines, without tripping up the people who were doing other things. Polarize the displays up and down, and the room lights side to side. People wearing polarized glasses could see the displays well, but the glare from the room lights would be diminished.
I think the first description of such a system was in a golden age science fiction story. Car head lights were polarized diagonally. You'd wear glasses that allowed your light to be bright, but oncoming ca's headlights would be reduced. Of course unsuspecting pedestrians would be blinded.
Why? How is this better than a simple flat discount? It seems like you'd just turn off customers who feel like they've been gypped out of a better deal?
Look at the airlines. You might have paid $600 for a last minute seat, but the person next to you paid $200 for the same flight, but bought it 2 weeks ago.
When you're selling a product, any price you get above what it costs to make is profit. But, you can only charge what people are willing to spend. So, the trick to maximizing your profit, is to figure out what each customer is willing to spend, then sell to that customer for that price. (as you've stated, you need to do this without pissing off the customer who pays more)
The key here is value add. A normal cupcake might sell for $0.30. A custom cupcake, with a design or special flavor, might sell for $3.00. Fresh, out the oven, delivered might be $6.00, while a day old cupcake might only bring $.15. As long as each customer perceives that they are getting a unique product, they won't worry that the other guy only paid 10% of what they did.
Of course with more expensive things, like enterprise software, you can get your customers to sign NDAs about how much they paid, then tell each and every one of them that they are getting a discount on the list price. Since they can't legally compare prices, they won't complain too much.
Groupon could do this by only offering some customers the great deal, and the others a lesser deal. If not enough customers take the great deal, then re-offer another customer a better deal.
Groupon should offer a staggered approach. First 100 customers get offered 75% off. Next 100 get offered 50%, then 25%. After a time, the system could float to the discount that was optimal, with some total per day limit.
According to the article, "Heather Dickinson, a Groupon spokeswoman, said there was no limit to the number of vouchers that could be sold. She said: “We approach each business with a tailored, individual approach based on the prior history of similar deals.” "
This is a tailored approach? Groupon seems to only get this kind a negative publicity. I can't see them as being a long term viable entity.
I don't see how Groupon can be considered long term viable, if this is the kind of press they're getting. This lady will never be doing that again, and she's going to go to her local chamber of commerce meetings and say, "I had a bad experience with Groupon". Any salesperson from Groupon will have an uphill battle selling to anyone in that area again.
How hard would it be for Groupon to make the default limit be a small number? If the business selects a large number with a large discount, then their forms could ask, "Can you really service this number of customers over this time?"
I know it's easy to blame the baker for this mistake, it's not a viable business strategy to kill your customers. Customers are supposed to be bled slowly, so that you can bleed them some more tomorrow.
However his skill set is mainly in coding on the PeopleSoft API. Comp Sci degree is not required for that job.
Agreed. However, many HR departments use automated scanners to filter resumes and if you don't have CS or and Engineering degree, you won't be interviewed for the position. Some companies have made it difficult or impossible for managers to find their own people without the HR department.
What's the difference between this and Google mapping wifi? In one case people are broadcasting on 2.5 and 5GHz, in another they are broadcasting on 650 - 240nm. (~ 470THz to 1000THz)
If you don't want people recording your license plate, maybe you should encrypt it. (:-)
There's a small wormhole somewhere between CERN and Gran Sasso. If they run the experiment somewhere else, then they should be the expected results. A 60ns wormhole wouldn't be that big, and it would be hard to find, especially if it's inside a rock.
Purdue has done this for years, but with macro turbines. The main physical plant provides power, chilled water and heat most of the University.
... Do authors get judged by the number of pages they write in a day, no they get paid by the success or failure of the book. You can't judge by the number of lines of code, bugs per line ratio or anything like that, because it is all subjective and has little to no bearing on the end product.
Many successful novels, started out as magazine serials, which were paid by the word. Usually, though, they are edited before they are put into book form.
I've seen a bunch of movies, where I thought, "This would be a great movie, if they just cut half of it, then sped the result up by 1.5x"
I've often thought that coders should be paid by how *little* they write, as long as it does the job.
Addressing.
Let's say you've set aside 6 bits in every data structure that deals with core administration. You can grow to 2^6, or 64 cores without re-architecting your data structures.
As long as we are using binary in computers, making everything 2^N will make the most efficient use of space.
Of course, space isn't always the limiting factor, so sometimes for cost or speed reasons, we see objects that number 2^N-M.
More than likely, there's 64 cores but only 50 are activated because they can't get a decent yield of perfect chips. That also means that you might be able to get samples of 25 core chips that didn't even make the 50 core cutoff. (One core might also be dedicated for book keeping purposes)
I hearby transfer all rights physical, digital, and ethereal for the term "The Representative Party", to a group that can get elected as "The Representative Party"
Here's how it would work. A figurehead would be nominated and if elected, would contractually agree to vote the way the People want. Electronic voting would be used to transmit the will of the people to the figurehead. Voting may or may not be secret ballot. (TBD)
Question. Would the "People" be defined as any voter, or just the registered members of the Representative Party? Would regular voting rules apply, or could someone underage register to be a member and be counted, agreeing to vote for the party when of age?
I like it.