The article shows nothing new from an analytics angle, except how to apply common techniques to the online gaming industry. For quite some time, grocery stores to airlines to web sites have been modeling user patterns, and exploiting them by adapting the product to what works the best. Anti-churn algorithms and targeted educative emails are cool techniques that work. Not every company needs or can use this style of analytics. Some companies stumble upon "gut-feel" brilliance and just do everything right. Others have to work at success and modern analytic techniques make that possible. As the article points out, insight can be misused. Those that become overbearing will suffer, and others will take their place.
So if I have 10% packet loss and incur a lot of transmissions, will that be counted in my cap? Hopefully they will only charge for data truly received at the application layer and not for the overhead. I also don't want to pay for SPAM or any random address pinging me, even if this is all just noise compared to my Netflix and Vonage use. If there must be a cap, let it be for usable data where I initiated the request. Hopefully this move triggers an invalidation of contracts with every town where they do business. Its time to bring in competition.
A computer networking show, probably Interface, was underway in Washington DC and in our booth we had a live network connection to our corporate intranet. I was running the tech support for the booth and got an instant message from one of my co-workers back at the office telling me what had happened. This is in the days before cell-phones, so the buzz spread from our booth very quickly. The show just stopped for a while until people could take it all in. It was a shocker. The report that followed was good insight into the workings of NASA and flight operations. In the history of discovery, space is still a lot safer than the early days on the ocean were.
Opt in won't work. Not enough people will do it to keep contextual ads flowing. Opt out might work, but not one that is all-or-nothing. Tracking is done by the site you are visiting and across sites by the ad networks. The former is critical to make the site suck less. The latter is the problem people are concerned about. Products you look at on site A turn up as ads on site B. The online ad market is worth 10's of billions and is not going to be quieted easily. Ads in context work so much better, and are therefore worth much more. It is hard to fight the strong flow of money, especially when it has a chance of helping the economy. Admit it or not - advertising works.
It is still bad. This year will be the runner-up, not the new record low for arctic sea ice. Perhaps, as before, the moisture in the arctic air will swirl down and result in a good snow year for the northeast US ski areas.
I had a good look at the US Census hardware and used it in the field with a census taker. It did nothing a smart phone couldn't do, but appeared to be an over-engineered yet poorly featured military industrial complex piece of crap. I'm SURE it cost way too much money, especially compared with the cost of an LG smart phone.
Why can't we get past the question if and why - and on to the more important question, now what? There is little science that I've seen showing that anything we do will change things. Perhaps we are past the tipping point and just have to ride out the results. The economic costs of stopping CO2 emission are very high - and there is no guarantee it will do any good. Why not invest billions in fixing whatever climate change brings. Perhaps a carbon tax could go towards this, but my fear is global corruption will take control of this and we'll all get screwed.
The cable companies are the ones that have to change. They may lose all their media business and be stuck just pumping bits through their Internet tubes. I get my phone from Vonage, and many movies from Roku/Netflix. That is just the start of where things are headed. The concept of broadcasting at a specific time, and having schedules is becoming quite quaint. The cable companies can compete for a piece of mny content dollar just like any company connected to the Internet. They may have attractive bundles that makes it worth while, but their current business model is headed out the door.
If you have ever touched one of their Web sites and caught their cookie, your tracks can be followed into unexpected places. This data is a gold mine for them, if they can figure out how to sell it without pissing off users with how much they know.
When I bought my ROKU, I was just about to purchase HBO from Time Warner because I couldn't find anything good to watch on TV. Granted, ROKU/Netflix has a limited selection, but its enough to get by. As content gets better and the masses start going to steaming video, the cable companies get positioned as bit slingers and cut out of the middle of the content cash flow. I'm all for that after the high subscription fees I've paid for crap, but Time Warner, Comcast, Verizon and others are not going to stand for this attack on their revenue streams. Not only do they lose premium subscription revenue, but the streaming is going to consume way more of their bandwidth - especially as better quality HD becomes available. The cable companies will shape the bandwidth or start charging by the gigabit, and that is just a start. Their model is to attack by creating regulations that favor their business model - and that will slow down Netflix and others.
I'm already suspecting Time Warner of shaping ROKU/Netflix traffic. My ROKU/Netflix movies start out at "four dot" quality and quickly shift to "two dot" quality - with the ROKU reporting 0.5 megabits/second throughput at the same time my PC can get 5-7 megabits/second to various speed test sites. ROKU is unusable until the throughput issue is fixed - but neither ROKU, Netflix or Time Warner has determined what the problem is.
They gotta do what they gotta do. The problem is, a claim of probable cause by the border patrol is tainted when they find something that is not border related. It should be a free pass if your special crime is not directly related to their duties. States do not need the feds acting as their cops, beyond that special airport zone. Isn't that partly what started the last civil war?
Perhaps the noise canceling headphones are also causing the problem. Many spend hours of listening to the reverse wave pattern of engine whine. There must be high frequency sounds and high volume needed to drown it out. I'd like to see a study of hearing loss in that population segment.
Shore up your applications and let users do what they will. Its a losing battle to lock down personal systems, especially for those with tech experience. Do YOU use a restricted system image? Most IT professionals do what they want, yet try to get others to follow their stupid rules. I'm fighting my IT department now because I've disabled all their crap except anti-virus and now my machine runs MUCH faster. I had zero tech support calls till they made me enable specialized spyware detectors, software installers and firewall software. With it running, blue-screens, hung applications and performance sucked. Now - their crap is disabled again. I'll take care of my own machine, thank you very much. Stay the fark out of my machine! I use my work PC for personal reasons and work during personal time. I'll fight them till they fire me.
The cable companies will be reduced to being "bit slingers", just like the phone company as IP TV takes off. The ROKU is an amazing device. Pick your show over the web and watch it right away on your TV. Lots of improvments possible (like going HD) - but it completely bypasses the TV portion of TWC (or what ever cable company has you in its grasps). What will they do though, when their cable revenue goes down and everyone is pounding their bandwidth with pass-through video. What pissed me off was the inability to buy a Tivo HD due to the lack of the switched cards. When I got the NetFlix ROKU, I stopped considering buying the premium channels from TWC. No extra $20/month to them for movies. So now, I'm getting my movies and my Vonage phone over their cable line - none of the revenue beyond bit-slinging fees to them (except for basic cable). Hopefully ROKU will get more sources of content - like the live networks. Then the fun begins. It won't take long and after years of being abused by the Cable TV industry - I won't feel sorry for them a bit.
My Netflix instant queue has over a dozen movies all queued up so I don't care if the plastic arrives a bit late. I'll just pull in the bits over the net and watch "Strange Brew" tonight. Its not quite DVD quality, but I'm not going to be demanding a rebate.
Wasn't the first network for the ISS based on Token-ring? I participated in an Ethernet vs Token-ring RFP in the mid-80's against IBM and we lost the bid. We didn't play golf as well.
By exempting the over 50 crowd, they cut out the pushback from many of the boomers, who understand the value of privacy. The yungins don't seem to care as much, so pushing it through will be more of a cake-walk.
Stimulating the market is really not how it works at Gartner. There is an element of consumer driven data in the predictions. Not all the predictions turn out to be accurate, but they've been at it for over a decade and have an impressive history to help you calibrate the quality of their market projections.
It is sad that Urchin (the product) is all but dead, but what did you expect? Google bought a Web analytics product to help sell ad-words. Its hosted version is free, has been much updated and is well worth the price you pay. Google is not deeply in the product business, except for their search engine appliance. It takes a huge infrastructure to compete with the leaders of Web analytics products and services, such as Omniture, WebTrends, Coremetrics, Visual Sciences and Unica. Its not in Google's business model to do this. What is really sad is that there are so few good web analytic products left. WebTrends, Unica (the old Sane NetTracker) and ClickTracks is about it. If you have been paying yearly support on the Urchin product to Google, you seriously need a lesson in dealing with software vendors. Oh wait - you just got one.
When I installed FIOS, Verizon cut my copper - after telling me they would. When I discontinued Verizon's internet service for a variety of reasons, my POTS line remained at the same price it was while on copper. Granted, it doesn't have the power-out reliability, but there is no forcing to pay for a whole load of services I don't want.
Vonage gives a utility that is unavailable from other sources. I use Comcast in one location, Adelphia from another. I can buy VOIP services from either, but can't take a box with me and have the same services where I go - like Vonage offers. The patent wars Verizon is fighting threatens my utility. This sucks!
I gave the 30 day free FIOS Internet service a shot and then stuck with Comcast. It was faster on large files, but slower for web pages with lots of objects. They must have some sort of sluggish proxy that eats up time on socket setup. Also, uploading to their FTP server from my webcam sucked, giving me more timeouts than successful transfers. Maybe I'll give them another shot one of these days. I have a Slingbox now and that 2MB uplink speed would be useful.
The good news, my land line is now fiber from the house, and it cleaned up a hum that I had lived with for years. I'm waiting for Verizon to offer cable, so I can hopefully reduce my Comcast TV bill, but last I heard, NH is not getting this soon. A more detailed writeup on my experience is at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=187828&cid=154 91591
So what if you walk out of the store, and the alarm goes off, you know you aren't guilty, and just continue walking. What can the store do except ask you to stop and hope you do? Are there any laws against disobeying the order of a private security guard?
That is an urban legend easily dispelled if you think for two seconds what a large DEC would have done to a tiny Microsoft back in the day if it was real. It also labels the people involved as one trick ponies.
More than an urban legend, it is actually true. The NT source code had comment statements that were left over from the VMS code. Too bad DCL wasn't added into NT. DEC was on its last legs at the time, and Microsoft was no small pony. While Digital (no longer wishing to be called DEC) complained to Microsoft about stealing VMS, the only benefit DEC was able to negotiate was free Microsoft software for all DEC employees. -aggles
No hack or warez. But, quality of service matters. I'm uploading webcam snapshot pictures, a 35Kb file every 10 minutes - then downloading the pile of pictures when I reach my size capacity. Many uploads from the camera failed - like 20% of them. When downloading several hundred files, I would get timeouts and have to restart the FTP transfer several times. With Comcast FTP server - it doesn't happen. Yes, I could get a different FTP service, but it comes with the ISP service, so why spend the extra money for an extra service?
Slashdot Mirror
The article shows nothing new from an analytics angle, except how to apply common techniques to the online gaming industry. For quite some time, grocery stores to airlines to web sites have been modeling user patterns, and exploiting them by adapting the product to what works the best. Anti-churn algorithms and targeted educative emails are cool techniques that work. Not every company needs or can use this style of analytics. Some companies stumble upon "gut-feel" brilliance and just do everything right. Others have to work at success and modern analytic techniques make that possible. As the article points out, insight can be misused. Those that become overbearing will suffer, and others will take their place.
So if I have 10% packet loss and incur a lot of transmissions, will that be counted in my cap? Hopefully they will only charge for data truly received at the application layer and not for the overhead. I also don't want to pay for SPAM or any random address pinging me, even if this is all just noise compared to my Netflix and Vonage use. If there must be a cap, let it be for usable data where I initiated the request. Hopefully this move triggers an invalidation of contracts with every town where they do business. Its time to bring in competition.
A computer networking show, probably Interface, was underway in Washington DC and in our booth we had a live network connection to our corporate intranet. I was running the tech support for the booth and got an instant message from one of my co-workers back at the office telling me what had happened. This is in the days before cell-phones, so the buzz spread from our booth very quickly. The show just stopped for a while until people could take it all in. It was a shocker. The report that followed was good insight into the workings of NASA and flight operations. In the history of discovery, space is still a lot safer than the early days on the ocean were.
Opt in won't work. Not enough people will do it to keep contextual ads flowing. Opt out might work, but not one that is all-or-nothing. Tracking is done by the site you are visiting and across sites by the ad networks. The former is critical to make the site suck less. The latter is the problem people are concerned about. Products you look at on site A turn up as ads on site B. The online ad market is worth 10's of billions and is not going to be quieted easily. Ads in context work so much better, and are therefore worth much more. It is hard to fight the strong flow of money, especially when it has a chance of helping the economy. Admit it or not - advertising works.
>This year we are going to see a new record low for arctic sea ice --- surpassing even the dramatic 2007 decline. http://arctic.atmos.uiuc.edu/cryosphere/IMAGES/seaice.recent.arctic.png
Another source, the Arctic News, differs with your conclusion. See link here: http://nsidc.org/data/seaice_index/images/daily_images/N_stddev_timeseries.png and the main site at http://nsidc.org/arcticseaicenews/
It is still bad. This year will be the runner-up, not the new record low for arctic sea ice. Perhaps, as before, the moisture in the arctic air will swirl down and result in a good snow year for the northeast US ski areas.
I had a good look at the US Census hardware and used it in the field with a census taker. It did nothing a smart phone couldn't do, but appeared to be an over-engineered yet poorly featured military industrial complex piece of crap. I'm SURE it cost way too much money, especially compared with the cost of an LG smart phone.
Why can't we get past the question if and why - and on to the more important question, now what? There is little science that I've seen showing that anything we do will change things. Perhaps we are past the tipping point and just have to ride out the results. The economic costs of stopping CO2 emission are very high - and there is no guarantee it will do any good. Why not invest billions in fixing whatever climate change brings. Perhaps a carbon tax could go towards this, but my fear is global corruption will take control of this and we'll all get screwed.
The cable companies are the ones that have to change. They may lose all their media business and be stuck just pumping bits through their Internet tubes. I get my phone from Vonage, and many movies from Roku/Netflix. That is just the start of where things are headed. The concept of broadcasting at a specific time, and having schedules is becoming quite quaint. The cable companies can compete for a piece of mny content dollar just like any company connected to the Internet. They may have attractive bundles that makes it worth while, but their current business model is headed out the door.
If you have ever touched one of their Web sites and caught their cookie, your tracks can be followed into unexpected places. This data is a gold mine for them, if they can figure out how to sell it without pissing off users with how much they know.
When I bought my ROKU, I was just about to purchase HBO from Time Warner because I couldn't find anything good to watch on TV. Granted, ROKU/Netflix has a limited selection, but its enough to get by. As content gets better and the masses start going to steaming video, the cable companies get positioned as bit slingers and cut out of the middle of the content cash flow. I'm all for that after the high subscription fees I've paid for crap, but Time Warner, Comcast, Verizon and others are not going to stand for this attack on their revenue streams. Not only do they lose premium subscription revenue, but the streaming is going to consume way more of their bandwidth - especially as better quality HD becomes available. The cable companies will shape the bandwidth or start charging by the gigabit, and that is just a start. Their model is to attack by creating regulations that favor their business model - and that will slow down Netflix and others.
I'm already suspecting Time Warner of shaping ROKU/Netflix traffic. My ROKU/Netflix movies start out at "four dot" quality and quickly shift to "two dot" quality - with the ROKU reporting 0.5 megabits/second throughput at the same time my PC can get 5-7 megabits/second to various speed test sites. ROKU is unusable until the throughput issue is fixed - but neither ROKU, Netflix or Time Warner has determined what the problem is.
They gotta do what they gotta do. The problem is, a claim of probable cause by the border patrol is tainted when they find something that is not border related. It should be a free pass if your special crime is not directly related to their duties. States do not need the feds acting as their cops, beyond that special airport zone. Isn't that partly what started the last civil war?
Perhaps the noise canceling headphones are also causing the problem. Many spend hours of listening to the reverse wave pattern of engine whine. There must be high frequency sounds and high volume needed to drown it out. I'd like to see a study of hearing loss in that population segment.
Shore up your applications and let users do what they will. Its a losing battle to lock down personal systems, especially for those with tech experience. Do YOU use a restricted system image? Most IT professionals do what they want, yet try to get others to follow their stupid rules. I'm fighting my IT department now because I've disabled all their crap except anti-virus and now my machine runs MUCH faster. I had zero tech support calls till they made me enable specialized spyware detectors, software installers and firewall software. With it running, blue-screens, hung applications and performance sucked. Now - their crap is disabled again. I'll take care of my own machine, thank you very much. Stay the fark out of my machine! I use my work PC for personal reasons and work during personal time. I'll fight them till they fire me.
The cable companies will be reduced to being "bit slingers", just like the phone company as IP TV takes off. The ROKU is an amazing device. Pick your show over the web and watch it right away on your TV. Lots of improvments possible (like going HD) - but it completely bypasses the TV portion of TWC (or what ever cable company has you in its grasps). What will they do though, when their cable revenue goes down and everyone is pounding their bandwidth with pass-through video. What pissed me off was the inability to buy a Tivo HD due to the lack of the switched cards. When I got the NetFlix ROKU, I stopped considering buying the premium channels from TWC. No extra $20/month to them for movies. So now, I'm getting my movies and my Vonage phone over their cable line - none of the revenue beyond bit-slinging fees to them (except for basic cable). Hopefully ROKU will get more sources of content - like the live networks. Then the fun begins. It won't take long and after years of being abused by the Cable TV industry - I won't feel sorry for them a bit.
My Netflix instant queue has over a dozen movies all queued up so I don't care if the plastic arrives a bit late. I'll just pull in the bits over the net and watch "Strange Brew" tonight. Its not quite DVD quality, but I'm not going to be demanding a rebate.
Wasn't the first network for the ISS based on Token-ring? I participated in an Ethernet vs Token-ring RFP in the mid-80's against IBM and we lost the bid. We didn't play golf as well.
By exempting the over 50 crowd, they cut out the pushback from many of the boomers, who understand the value of privacy. The yungins don't seem to care as much, so pushing it through will be more of a cake-walk.
Stimulating the market is really not how it works at Gartner. There is an element of consumer driven data in the predictions. Not all the predictions turn out to be accurate, but they've been at it for over a decade and have an impressive history to help you calibrate the quality of their market projections.
-aggles
When I installed FIOS, Verizon cut my copper - after telling me they would. When I discontinued Verizon's internet service for a variety of reasons, my POTS line remained at the same price it was while on copper. Granted, it doesn't have the power-out reliability, but there is no forcing to pay for a whole load of services I don't want.
Vonage gives a utility that is unavailable from other sources. I use Comcast in one location, Adelphia from another. I can buy VOIP services from either, but can't take a box with me and have the same services where I go - like Vonage offers. The patent wars Verizon is fighting threatens my utility. This sucks!
I gave the 30 day free FIOS Internet service a shot and then stuck with Comcast. It was faster on large files, but slower for web pages with lots of objects. They must have some sort of sluggish proxy that eats up time on socket setup. Also, uploading to their FTP server from my webcam sucked, giving me more timeouts than successful transfers. Maybe I'll give them another shot one of these days. I have a Slingbox now and that 2MB uplink speed would be useful. The good news, my land line is now fiber from the house, and it cleaned up a hum that I had lived with for years. I'm waiting for Verizon to offer cable, so I can hopefully reduce my Comcast TV bill, but last I heard, NH is not getting this soon. A more detailed writeup on my experience is at http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=187828&cid=154 91591
So what if you walk out of the store, and the alarm goes off, you know you aren't guilty, and just continue walking. What can the store do except ask you to stop and hope you do? Are there any laws against disobeying the order of a private security guard?
No hack or warez. But, quality of service matters. I'm uploading webcam snapshot pictures, a 35Kb file every 10 minutes - then downloading the pile of pictures when I reach my size capacity. Many uploads from the camera failed - like 20% of them. When downloading several hundred files, I would get timeouts and have to restart the FTP transfer several times. With Comcast FTP server - it doesn't happen. Yes, I could get a different FTP service, but it comes with the ISP service, so why spend the extra money for an extra service?