I know a lot of small libraries use solutions that involve FileMaker Pro. There are barcode generation programs, readers, and pretty much anything else you would need that plug into an FMP solution. Not saying it is necessarily the best, but people have been doing this with FMP for a long time, so the products are mature and full-featured.
Overall I think it looks good. One thing I really like about the chart is that as you change the date it updates the news articles to that time period, which is great if you're just looking at a new stock and want to see what that 30% dip 10 months ago was about. On the downside, the little boxes linking to the news stories are nice, but overall annoying, there should be a way to turn them off. Having them on the chart makes it much harder to read technically. Charting should also have at least basic technical analysis tools like Yahoo! Finance where you can get moving averages, volatility metrics, etc. Plus, you've got to have the ability to view the chart on a logarithmic scale. Its a nice start, but its not enough to get me to start using it instead of Yahoo! Finance. If they enrich the charting capabilities, then we might be in business.
As someone who has done business with OWC for the last eight years I just want to say that they've been great. I've ordered everything from software to RAM to processor upgrades from them and never had a problem. Once I got a couple of bad sticks of RAM (in an order of 50) and they were replaced promptly and without a problem.
Simple. The uncertainty surrounding RIM was hurting their business and was going to continue to. By resolving the dispute sooner they keep many customers they might have lost and have a better chance of attracting more. NTP could have kept this dragging through the courts for years and possibly sunk RIM in the process. Gotta love corporate shakedowns.
Clearly SOMEONE is clicking on the links. You only pay Google if someone actually does. You can wonder and try to deny reality if you like, but A is A. I rarely click the links, but I do very occasionally. You only need one in a million searches to result in a click because perhaps billions of searches are run daily.
I think the business case is obvious. Google wants to drive traffic to their site. How does anyone do this? Give people what they want. The answer to how to run a successful business is always, give the people what they want. Does Google need to monetize this right now? No, but they will, to some extent through ads. They're also selling content, of which I'm sure they get a cut. What you seem to be forgetting here is the cost side of the equation. It costs Google very little to digitize this stuff and because they've figured out how to build a massively parellel supercomputer from commodity hardware it costs them nothing to host it. So, even if you make no money from a project, if it costs you next to nothing, and you are already making billions of dollars a year, I don't think you need to worry about the resource drain of said project so much. This of course forgets that in the process google will get ad revenue and continue to build its brands, which is very important.
Re:IPods are the only reason why Apple still exist
on
Woz On Apple's Success
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Well, here in Ole Silicon Valley where I take the train every day to work (no, unfortunately not at Apple) they seem to have a lot of penetration. There are three laptops that I see on the train, PowerBooks, ThinkPads, and Dell whatevers. I'd say I see each in about equal numbers. Given that I have a bais to notice PowerBooks ('cause they're dead sexy!) maybe PB's account for more like 20%. Still, pretty good numbers in the Valley where I'd say a lot of the tech trend setters are.
Wow, can I have some of what he's smoking? Dvorak has seemed crazy before, but this is a new level.
Re:Why economic equality is sometimes bad
on
The New Boom
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· Score: 1
Now if you just looked at the revenue and profit numbers in a vacuum I might agree with you. What people are really paying for is their growth. Growth which is still accelerating, so if last year they grew at 60%, this year its 65% (these are fake numbers, just trying to get the point across.) Do I think Google with a market cap over $125 billion is overvalued, perhaps. But if it is, its not like the.com era over valuation when some companies were worth a tenth or less of their market cap. With Google, maybe they are overvalued by 25%, I'd give you 50% at most, and this is stretching it. Why? Look at Dell, which I think is pretty fairly value. On profits of $3.2 billion, the market values them $68 billion. And Google makes $1.3 billion with much, much higher revenue and profit growth rates. Additionally people value Google highly because they are viewed as innovators and they are pricing in revenue from as yet unseeen products and services.
PS. Absolute stock prices ($500/share, etc) have no meaning, use market caps.
PPS. No one makes $25 billion in profits, not even the biggest company in the world, GE, yet they are worth far more than Google.
Re:Had it for about 6 months
on
Gmail Gets RSS
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· Score: 1
Yeah, I've had it for quite a while. I was actually pretty suprised that the first batch of posts weren't "Hey idiot editors, this is old news." Perhaps people who have had GMail longer got it first? Google figured older users are more interested and willing to test new stuff?
Google has neither an endless mountain of cash, nor a 90% of the browsers, nor 90% of the desktops.
While they do not have an endless mountain of cash (neither does M$FT), Google is making huge profits and has over $7 Billion in cash right now. Microsoft will not be able to undersell Google. Google will generate nearly $2 billion in free cash flow this year from operations. Microsoft will generate much more, but they woudl have to give away advertising to effectively underprice Google.
I disagree, competition is always good. Companies should provide products that the market wants. Competition is the economic Darwinism that selects the product the market wants. What emerges as the "winner" is, by definition, what people want. They may say they want this or that that's different, but its a lie. If they really wanted that, they would have picked that. In a proper capitalist economy there is no coercion by force, and you are free to buy whatever you want. What you buy reflects the values you seek in that product, and also reflects yor values in general.
European governments mandated GSM, but governments are notoriously bad at knowing what the market wants. Don't tell people what they want, let them decide. I think they got lucky with GSM, everyone screws up and does something once in a while. If you look at it GSM networks are going to have a hard time delivering the same things that newer CDMA networks (like Verizon) will be able to provide. So maybe governments made a good short term decision that is going to be a bad long term one.
...to go from a 1-button mouse to a 0-button mouse. LOL. I know Steve was sitting around saying, "They all want us to release a 2-button mouse, so we can NOT do that." This is Apple being true to form, why release a product that you can already get for $15 when you can release a totally new, better design?
Imitators, start your engines.
Well, you haven't given me reason to rethink it. Stating a number in isolation has no meaning. How about we consider that the GDP of the US is over 10 trillion and that we still have some of the lowest borrowing costs in the world. Also consider that a large portion of that 7.8 trillion we owe to ourselves. Exactly how hard are we going to press us to pay ourselves? Further there is no shortage of buyers for US Treasuries, indicating that the world still thinks the US is a good investment. While past performance is no guarantee of future returns, it is a good indicator and where are you going to get better returns than the US? Don't get me wrong, we owe more than I think we should, but using the debt figure to say we're in economic trouble just doesn't hold water.
You know, for a long time I was inclined to believe all the alarmists about America losing its edge. But you know what? We haven't yet and people have predicted the decline of America for a long time. Yet our economy remains the most innovative, vibrant economy in the world. Why is that exactly? I don't know, and no one else seems to. Its some combination of education, ambition, and market flexibility that has yet to be replicated. You can piss and moan about test scores until the cows come home, but its really means less than you think. Consider that I knew jack about Java beans until I wanted to use them. When I decided to use them, I learned, and now I'd pass a test about them with flying colors. To a large extent success is not measured by what you know, but rather you capacity to learn. You need a certain base of information, but after that it doesn't matter. Teaching how to learn is much harder than teaching knowledge. Maybe Americans are good at learning something when they need to know it, and that's our edge. Maybe that's not the case. My point is I've heard for a decade how our demise was just around the corner, I have yet to see it.
Unbelieveable. WindowsXP is pretty much Win2K with a different default user interface theme and a whole boatload of junk to make it more compatible with every piece of crap Window95 program still around. How can it not be slower? When you really get down to it there isn't much that WinXP can provide that Win2K doesn't and for less resources and hassles. Win2K is the best OS Microsoft ever made, sad they have stopped making a workstation focused OS. Yes, yes, WinXP Pro, but like I said, comes with bundles of junk you don't need!
I agree with your points but what stops a spammer (or group of spammers) setting up a "dummy server" to collect these valid replies into and to harvest those? Nothing, but if spammers are forced to buy enough of these dummy servers, then they stop making money. This also goes back to my point that we have to be able to direct the replies to the actual sender which may range from difficult to impossible (if botnets are being used to send the spam), but by its very nature an advertisement needs to contain some sort of valid return path to the product being sold.
Again, my point is never ever give anyone any information about you unless you really have to - because personal information is worth a lot of money to someone. IN terms of an e-mail address, this isn't so much of a problem. It wouldn't be difficult to have a script check the e-mail that you really use, identify the spam and then use another account to send out the responses, thus shielding your real e-mail address.
The analogy to spam-fighting as a "war" is a good one - it's about an ever-escalating series of attacks and counter-attacks between each side, getting more and more time-consuming each time. It is the first of many electronic wars we will fight either as individual, countries, soceities, or groups. Once the virtual world holds more resources than the physical, wars will be fought there. In a hundred years, instead of fighting over oil in the Middle East we might battle for control of Internet traffic paths.
No, I realize I response indicates its a real e-mail address. But I'm assuming that this sort of response would effectively shut down the spammer. In fact, this is tactic advocated by some people studying the spam problem. Spammers have enough computing power to deal with responses because they assume the percentage of reponses relative to solicitations will be very low. The theory goes that if everyone responded spammers would have to make huge investments to deal with all the return traffic. Essentially spammers can dish it out, but they can't take it.
I started out writing a comment very against this idea on the premise that the use of force is never an acceptable tool. However, spam itself is using force. If you are attacked first, I believe the use of force is acceptable, and this is the only time. The real problem is deciding who is a spammer and who is not. I'm not sure this is cut and dry and we risk running down a slippery slope.
What if each person who received spam fired back 10 unsubscribe messages, assuming the mail has a valid sender address. This is a complex issues, to say the least.
...comes great responsibility. Seriously, as more information becomes more readily available you're going to need to be able to trust everyone else more. What's the reason that most crime isn't committed? Because its too hard due to a lack of information. In other words, most of today's security is still obtained through obscurity. The burglar doesn't break into your house cause he doesn't have the blueprints to plan escape routes. The more you know the easier it is to plan an attack. A similar increase in information does not produce the same attack resistance, since an attacker must only choose one vector, while you have to protect against all of many possible vectors of attack. More information exposes more attack vectors and effectively weakens your defenses. You better start loving your neighbor, cause its only going to get easier for him to attack.
Perhaps reporters are looking at things the wrong way. The reason for Google's success and break neck product generation pace is the people that work for them. Maybe you should be more interested in their habits if you want to know where Google is going. More to the topic of valuation though, Google is highly valued because their growth is tremendous, their has been almost no growth deceleration, and they generate huge amounts of cash. I believe they are on course to generation $1.8B in cash this year, something very, very few companies can say. Is it worth what the stock is trading for? Clearly, no one knows, but many think it is. Google's growth will start to level at some point, but the thing is that when you're growing this fast, slowing growth down only a little later (or earlier) is going to make a big difference in absolute sales or profit numbers. So, timing of the leveling off is crucial, but almost impossible to predict.
Well, to summarize, morals are absolute, because reality is absolute. Let us assume that life and living is good. If you don't think life and living is good, you're probably not going to around to discuss this much longer. (I don't mean that as an insult, just a fact.) Assuming life is good, all things that promote life are good, all that promote death are evil. This formula may seem simplistic, but logical extension of this will lead you to a course for every decision you have to make. Does what you do cause soceity harm? This is evil, it will eventually lead to the death of everyone. Does what you do cause others, specifically, harm? This is more evil because it is harder to undo a wound against an individual than a society. Does what you do cause yourself harm? This is the most evil, as harming yourself is directly wishing death upon yourself. It is self-mutilation of the body, mind, or soul. All that which does not harm, but rather improves, is good.
I think I'm a lot less angry at the world than you, and that is saying something.
Who's to say who's honorable and who are the good guys?
Me, of course.
He doesn't answer to you or to some imaginary "geek community".
No, he doesn't have any responsibility to anyone and I doubt his actions have ever been an attempt to gain popularity. Which is why the questions I posed were, not "should he have done it", but rather "how do we [the open source and/or linux] community feel about it".
Slashdot Mirror
I know a lot of small libraries use solutions that involve FileMaker Pro. There are barcode generation programs, readers, and pretty much anything else you would need that plug into an FMP solution. Not saying it is necessarily the best, but people have been doing this with FMP for a long time, so the products are mature and full-featured.
Overall I think it looks good. One thing I really like about the chart is that as you change the date it updates the news articles to that time period, which is great if you're just looking at a new stock and want to see what that 30% dip 10 months ago was about. On the downside, the little boxes linking to the news stories are nice, but overall annoying, there should be a way to turn them off. Having them on the chart makes it much harder to read technically. Charting should also have at least basic technical analysis tools like Yahoo! Finance where you can get moving averages, volatility metrics, etc. Plus, you've got to have the ability to view the chart on a logarithmic scale. Its a nice start, but its not enough to get me to start using it instead of Yahoo! Finance. If they enrich the charting capabilities, then we might be in business.
As someone who has done business with OWC for the last eight years I just want to say that they've been great. I've ordered everything from software to RAM to processor upgrades from them and never had a problem. Once I got a couple of bad sticks of RAM (in an order of 50) and they were replaced promptly and without a problem.
Simple. The uncertainty surrounding RIM was hurting their business and was going to continue to. By resolving the dispute sooner they keep many customers they might have lost and have a better chance of attracting more. NTP could have kept this dragging through the courts for years and possibly sunk RIM in the process. Gotta love corporate shakedowns.
Clearly SOMEONE is clicking on the links. You only pay Google if someone actually does. You can wonder and try to deny reality if you like, but A is A. I rarely click the links, but I do very occasionally. You only need one in a million searches to result in a click because perhaps billions of searches are run daily.
I think the business case is obvious. Google wants to drive traffic to their site. How does anyone do this? Give people what they want. The answer to how to run a successful business is always, give the people what they want. Does Google need to monetize this right now? No, but they will, to some extent through ads. They're also selling content, of which I'm sure they get a cut. What you seem to be forgetting here is the cost side of the equation. It costs Google very little to digitize this stuff and because they've figured out how to build a massively parellel supercomputer from commodity hardware it costs them nothing to host it. So, even if you make no money from a project, if it costs you next to nothing, and you are already making billions of dollars a year, I don't think you need to worry about the resource drain of said project so much. This of course forgets that in the process google will get ad revenue and continue to build its brands, which is very important.
Well, here in Ole Silicon Valley where I take the train every day to work (no, unfortunately not at Apple) they seem to have a lot of penetration. There are three laptops that I see on the train, PowerBooks, ThinkPads, and Dell whatevers. I'd say I see each in about equal numbers. Given that I have a bais to notice PowerBooks ('cause they're dead sexy!) maybe PB's account for more like 20%. Still, pretty good numbers in the Valley where I'd say a lot of the tech trend setters are.
Wow, can I have some of what he's smoking? Dvorak has seemed crazy before, but this is a new level.
Now if you just looked at the revenue and profit numbers in a vacuum I might agree with you. What people are really paying for is their growth. Growth which is still accelerating, so if last year they grew at 60%, this year its 65% (these are fake numbers, just trying to get the point across.) Do I think Google with a market cap over $125 billion is overvalued, perhaps. But if it is, its not like the .com era over valuation when some companies were worth a tenth or less of their market cap. With Google, maybe they are overvalued by 25%, I'd give you 50% at most, and this is stretching it. Why? Look at Dell, which I think is pretty fairly value. On profits of $3.2 billion, the market values them $68 billion. And Google makes $1.3 billion with much, much higher revenue and profit growth rates. Additionally people value Google highly because they are viewed as innovators and they are pricing in revenue from as yet unseeen products and services.
PS. Absolute stock prices ($500/share, etc) have no meaning, use market caps.
PPS. No one makes $25 billion in profits, not even the biggest company in the world, GE, yet they are worth far more than Google.
Yeah, I've had it for quite a while. I was actually pretty suprised that the first batch of posts weren't "Hey idiot editors, this is old news." Perhaps people who have had GMail longer got it first? Google figured older users are more interested and willing to test new stuff?
Google has neither an endless mountain of cash, nor a 90% of the browsers, nor 90% of the desktops.
While they do not have an endless mountain of cash (neither does M$FT), Google is making huge profits and has over $7 Billion in cash right now. Microsoft will not be able to undersell Google. Google will generate nearly $2 billion in free cash flow this year from operations. Microsoft will generate much more, but they woudl have to give away advertising to effectively underprice Google.
I disagree, competition is always good. Companies should provide products that the market wants. Competition is the economic Darwinism that selects the product the market wants. What emerges as the "winner" is, by definition, what people want. They may say they want this or that that's different, but its a lie. If they really wanted that, they would have picked that. In a proper capitalist economy there is no coercion by force, and you are free to buy whatever you want. What you buy reflects the values you seek in that product, and also reflects yor values in general. European governments mandated GSM, but governments are notoriously bad at knowing what the market wants. Don't tell people what they want, let them decide. I think they got lucky with GSM, everyone screws up and does something once in a while. If you look at it GSM networks are going to have a hard time delivering the same things that newer CDMA networks (like Verizon) will be able to provide. So maybe governments made a good short term decision that is going to be a bad long term one.
...to go from a 1-button mouse to a 0-button mouse. LOL. I know Steve was sitting around saying, "They all want us to release a 2-button mouse, so we can NOT do that." This is Apple being true to form, why release a product that you can already get for $15 when you can release a totally new, better design? Imitators, start your engines.
Well, you haven't given me reason to rethink it. Stating a number in isolation has no meaning. How about we consider that the GDP of the US is over 10 trillion and that we still have some of the lowest borrowing costs in the world. Also consider that a large portion of that 7.8 trillion we owe to ourselves. Exactly how hard are we going to press us to pay ourselves? Further there is no shortage of buyers for US Treasuries, indicating that the world still thinks the US is a good investment. While past performance is no guarantee of future returns, it is a good indicator and where are you going to get better returns than the US? Don't get me wrong, we owe more than I think we should, but using the debt figure to say we're in economic trouble just doesn't hold water.
Why? There are actually theories about that.
yup, a lot of theories and not a lot of answers. Its quite the open question.
You know, for a long time I was inclined to believe all the alarmists about America losing its edge. But you know what? We haven't yet and people have predicted the decline of America for a long time. Yet our economy remains the most innovative, vibrant economy in the world. Why is that exactly? I don't know, and no one else seems to. Its some combination of education, ambition, and market flexibility that has yet to be replicated. You can piss and moan about test scores until the cows come home, but its really means less than you think. Consider that I knew jack about Java beans until I wanted to use them. When I decided to use them, I learned, and now I'd pass a test about them with flying colors. To a large extent success is not measured by what you know, but rather you capacity to learn. You need a certain base of information, but after that it doesn't matter. Teaching how to learn is much harder than teaching knowledge. Maybe Americans are good at learning something when they need to know it, and that's our edge. Maybe that's not the case. My point is I've heard for a decade how our demise was just around the corner, I have yet to see it.
Unbelieveable. WindowsXP is pretty much Win2K with a different default user interface theme and a whole boatload of junk to make it more compatible with every piece of crap Window95 program still around. How can it not be slower? When you really get down to it there isn't much that WinXP can provide that Win2K doesn't and for less resources and hassles. Win2K is the best OS Microsoft ever made, sad they have stopped making a workstation focused OS. Yes, yes, WinXP Pro, but like I said, comes with bundles of junk you don't need!
I agree with your points but what stops a spammer (or group of spammers) setting up a "dummy server" to collect these valid replies into and to harvest those?
Nothing, but if spammers are forced to buy enough of these dummy servers, then they stop making money. This also goes back to my point that we have to be able to direct the replies to the actual sender which may range from difficult to impossible (if botnets are being used to send the spam), but by its very nature an advertisement needs to contain some sort of valid return path to the product being sold.
Again, my point is never ever give anyone any information about you unless you really have to - because personal information is worth a lot of money to someone.
IN terms of an e-mail address, this isn't so much of a problem. It wouldn't be difficult to have a script check the e-mail that you really use, identify the spam and then use another account to send out the responses, thus shielding your real e-mail address.
The analogy to spam-fighting as a "war" is a good one - it's about an ever-escalating series of attacks and counter-attacks between each side, getting more and more time-consuming each time.
It is the first of many electronic wars we will fight either as individual, countries, soceities, or groups. Once the virtual world holds more resources than the physical, wars will be fought there. In a hundred years, instead of fighting over oil in the Middle East we might battle for control of Internet traffic paths.
No, I realize I response indicates its a real e-mail address. But I'm assuming that this sort of response would effectively shut down the spammer. In fact, this is tactic advocated by some people studying the spam problem. Spammers have enough computing power to deal with responses because they assume the percentage of reponses relative to solicitations will be very low. The theory goes that if everyone responded spammers would have to make huge investments to deal with all the return traffic. Essentially spammers can dish it out, but they can't take it.
I started out writing a comment very against this idea on the premise that the use of force is never an acceptable tool. However, spam itself is using force. If you are attacked first, I believe the use of force is acceptable, and this is the only time. The real problem is deciding who is a spammer and who is not. I'm not sure this is cut and dry and we risk running down a slippery slope.
What if each person who received spam fired back 10 unsubscribe messages, assuming the mail has a valid sender address. This is a complex issues, to say the least.
...comes great responsibility. Seriously, as more information becomes more readily available you're going to need to be able to trust everyone else more. What's the reason that most crime isn't committed? Because its too hard due to a lack of information. In other words, most of today's security is still obtained through obscurity. The burglar doesn't break into your house cause he doesn't have the blueprints to plan escape routes. The more you know the easier it is to plan an attack. A similar increase in information does not produce the same attack resistance, since an attacker must only choose one vector, while you have to protect against all of many possible vectors of attack. More information exposes more attack vectors and effectively weakens your defenses. You better start loving your neighbor, cause its only going to get easier for him to attack.
Perhaps reporters are looking at things the wrong way. The reason for Google's success and break neck product generation pace is the people that work for them. Maybe you should be more interested in their habits if you want to know where Google is going. More to the topic of valuation though, Google is highly valued because their growth is tremendous, their has been almost no growth deceleration, and they generate huge amounts of cash. I believe they are on course to generation $1.8B in cash this year, something very, very few companies can say. Is it worth what the stock is trading for? Clearly, no one knows, but many think it is. Google's growth will start to level at some point, but the thing is that when you're growing this fast, slowing growth down only a little later (or earlier) is going to make a big difference in absolute sales or profit numbers. So, timing of the leveling off is crucial, but almost impossible to predict.
Well, to summarize, morals are absolute, because reality is absolute. Let us assume that life and living is good. If you don't think life and living is good, you're probably not going to around to discuss this much longer. (I don't mean that as an insult, just a fact.) Assuming life is good, all things that promote life are good, all that promote death are evil. This formula may seem simplistic, but logical extension of this will lead you to a course for every decision you have to make. Does what you do cause soceity harm? This is evil, it will eventually lead to the death of everyone. Does what you do cause others, specifically, harm? This is more evil because it is harder to undo a wound against an individual than a society. Does what you do cause yourself harm? This is the most evil, as harming yourself is directly wishing death upon yourself. It is self-mutilation of the body, mind, or soul. All that which does not harm, but rather improves, is good.
Read Atlas Shrugged.
I think I'm a lot less angry at the world than you, and that is saying something.
Who's to say who's honorable and who are the good guys?
Me, of course.
He doesn't answer to you or to some imaginary "geek community".
No, he doesn't have any responsibility to anyone and I doubt his actions have ever been an attempt to gain popularity. Which is why the questions I posed were, not "should he have done it", but rather "how do we [the open source and/or linux] community feel about it".