Why even compare an airline with a social networking site with a video sharing site? How do you even quantify that? When an airline crams me into a small seat for 400 dollars I'm dissatisfied, which is to say I'm always dissatisfied with airlines. When a video sharing site doesn't load a video I become dissatisfied, which almost never happens.
It's like saying hammers are better than cars because more people are satisfied that their hammers do a better job.
Even very knowledgeable people have a hard time predicting how fast a CPU will be. CPUs no longer operate in a single dimension that can be quantified by a single number. You have the architecture, cache size, clock speed, number of cores, FSB, etc. A slower quad core CPU may be faster for me, whereas a faster-clocked dual core may be faster for a gamer. A cheap atom chip may be better for my poor cousin who just surfs the web.
My point is customers should not be using the name of a CPU to decide what to buy. The best thing to do is to find benchmarks that reflect what you want to do and divide by price. The second best thing, great for the typical person, is to find a trustworthy computer builder/seller and let them decide what you need (e.g. buy a "gaming" computer). They can properly market the right CPU to the right person in the "right" price range.
Longevity and reliability are tough to quantify, because for the vast majority of users the median SSD or disk drive will never fail as long as they use it.
Failures of disks occur at the tail end. Perhaps 10% of disk drives and 1% of SSDs fail over two years, but how do you compare them? Do you say the disk is 9% worse, or 10x worse?
This isn't really a identity risk issue. A stolen debit card alone is not enough to steal someone's identity (anymore than having his name is); a SSN or some other source of identity would be needed because a debit card alone is not a source of identity.
The real risk here is debit card fraud - sending active cards over the mail is practically asking for it. In the case of credit card fraud, the customer is barely inconvenienced because money is never taken out of his bank account. With debit cards, it's a lose your money first and prove you deserve it back later situation.
On the bright side, HSBC is ultimately liable for any losses due to fraud. If there is fraud due to the mailings, HSBC will lose a bunch of money and some idiot will probably be fired/reprimanded.
Not quite, the change will actually display signal strength more accurately and will make the grip problem *more* transparent.
As anandtech pointed out, a big issue in this situation is the iPhone's lack of dynamic range in the signal bar representation. The fifth bar is currently used so liberally (takes up so much of the signal strength range), that a 20 dB drop in reception can keep you at 5 bars, but can drop you from 4 bars to 1. This leads people to believe that in some situations the grip problem doesn't exist at all, and in other situations it is far worse than it is.
After the change, gripping the phone should only drop you a bar or two, even in situations where before the change it wouldn't have dropped a bar at all. But now, you shouldn't go from 4 bars to 0/1.
It's easy to forget how much you learn in school, because the knowledge you acquire becomes obvious after you learn it.
After six years of schooling, 400 classroom hours of math classes, 800 classroom hours of CS/engineering classes, and countless hours of studying, I am confident that I know more than I did in high school. In fact, I'm pretty sure if I met my high school self today I would think he's an uneducated moron. Sometimes I like to go through my programs from early college and high school to have a good laugh.
I agree with you. It's not the time slot, it's that shows like Futurama target niche audiences that are hard to market to.
It's a common pattern with these types of shows: its target audience doesn't find out about it, so it doesn't become popular, so the network neglects the show. Then fans of the show do the network marketers' jobs for them, the general public finds out what an awesome show it is, and the network regrets treating the show poorly, after it is too late.
Off the top of my head, this happened to Family Guy, Futurama, Arrested Development, and the Wire. Probably many others. It's not that the networks didn't give these shows a chance (all of my examples were marketed heavily for at least awhile), it's just really hard to get the Average Joe into them for one reason or another. I'm not sure they deserve to be in really coveted time slots, they just deserve the funding they need to keep producing shows. The network needs patience because it won't make its money back until the DVDs are released.
Deepwater Horizon was a series of mistakes with known causes, not a tail-end probabilistic event. Future deep-water drilling will likely be more carefully regulated.
It's not a bad thing that pros are held to a high standard. I realize the bar has been set much higher by the flood of cheap DSLRs, but as you said it takes skill to add value to a photograph. Pros will still be in demand; they will just have to do something more special than they used to, like crawling through the mud to get photos of wildlife or traveling to dangerous parts of the World. Mundane photos that anyone can take are now worth what they always should have been: very little.
This is the same thing that happened to all sorts of other professions, including artisan crafts, manufacturing, and IT. The world moves quickly, and it is each profession's job to stay relevant.
"Would the head of Italy's Civil Protection Agency count as a 3rd party expert? "
Hehe, nope. I can't tell if you are being serious, but for the record it's his agency (and I think mainly him) that is being investigated. He publicly called the guy who made the initial prediction an "imbecile" because he was off by a week. Then a few days later 300 people died.
It's not misleading, transmission of the internet IS the internet; the internet is nothing more than a huge network. By controlling the transmission of the internet, a future, less benign FCC could easily abuse this. Remember how easily the FCC increased it's power unchecked during the Bush years? Even if its was unconstitutional, the Executive Branch protected it from the courts. That is scary.
It helps to keep things in perspective. AMD has a market capitalization of 6 billion dollars. Apple has 4x that in cash alone, and is worth 40x what AMD is. Apple's interest in the CPU market is far less involved than AMD's, so even this isn't a fair comparison. It is a fairly minor investment, considering Apple's size.
Another way of looking at it is that Apple is a company that primarily sells CPUs and other computer components packaged really well. In this context, control over the components is important, especially when the component manufacturers they depend on could one day decide to compete with them. I'd say the security, control, and customization of such an integral part are worth the 1% of their company's value the investment involved.
What if it was due to incompetence? What if it was their job to save lives and instead they were slacking off? From a linked article: "L'Aquila Mayor Massimo Cialente recalled his frustration at receiving no clear reply to his repeated questions and the apparent lack of concern on the part of some present."
As a person of science I think it's great you are giving benefit of the doubt to the scientists, but maybe the prosecutors deserve some too. My intuition is to believe the committee when they say they couldn't have done a better job, but they are clearly biased. I'd like to see what third party experts have to say. It is a good thing this is being investigated, but threats of prosecution should probably wait until the investigation is done.
You're kidding, right? Please provide a citation. When I search for information on the bar all I find are people complaining about it. Most people I personally know complained about it but have gotten used to it or found a way around it - hardly what I would call "successful". I installed adblock largely to get rid of it; this filter worked great: "google.com#TD(class=leftborder)"
Anyway, my comment was a joke, but if this is the kinds of stuff google is getting from bing then perhaps my comment shouldn't be taken as a joke... at least the option to get rid of the bar would have been nice.
I and several other people I know used bing a lot for about a week in late 2008. At the time, Microsoft was literally offering 25-35% off any buy-it-now item on ebay (I'm pretty sure from their own pocket, no way they were making 25% off those purchases).
I bought a new car stereo, camera lens, laptop, and several gifts. I saved over 500 dollars. Then, like a month later, I saw a news release where Microsoft showed off that the number of Bing users had doubled or something over the holiday period. They probably used this to gain traction in advertising and increase their collaboration with companies like Apple.
They literally paid people to use bing over a month-long period to pad some statistics! I wonder if it was worth the 500 dollars they handed me.
"However, if they charge by the byte, then they have to deal with fluctuating income from one quarter to the next"
Not really. Here is my basic analysis (from a comment I made on reddit): The central limit theorem states that if you have some distribution (the number of megabytes that each person uses in a month) and you draw a bunch of samples (megabytes in the month per person) and average them, the resulting distribution is Gaussian (each month you draw from this distribution). Furthermore, it states that every time you quadruple the population you halve the standard deviation. So let's say the average person uses 400 megabytes per month with a standard deviation of 100 megabytes (this is my general pattern). Averaging over 16 million users, the standard deviation of the mean of everybody's usage falls to about 2-3 megabytes out of 400 - less than 1% of mean. This is pretty steady revenue.
"AT&T is about to come to terms with the fact that most users will opt for using less bandwidth and forking over less money per month."
AT&T is fine with this; their problem right now is not a lack of revenue, it is a lack of infrastructure; I'm not sure why you think it is the opposite. AT&T can't even support the iPhone in NYC, the biggest city in the country. They WANT heavy users to use less, and their new pricing scheme clearly reflects this. They are happy that 98% of people will pay less because it helps them remain competitive.
People kept their networks open, Google gathered some probably useless information about them - presumably no more than 15 seconds worth in most cases (because it's a car driving by). Google has far more information on far more people from saved web searches/e-mails/etc. I'm tired of seeing these stories, I really don't care.
If European Governments are actually pursuing this, shame on them.
It is far harder on the system to use a cell tower as your primary internet source than a wire going into your apartment. This pricing change happened exactly because of the inefficiencies that some people introduce.
Who cares when a character was created? The poll should be read as "the greatest character from the past 20 years who was created specifically for television/film".
Slashdot Mirror
Why even compare an airline with a social networking site with a video sharing site? How do you even quantify that? When an airline crams me into a small seat for 400 dollars I'm dissatisfied, which is to say I'm always dissatisfied with airlines. When a video sharing site doesn't load a video I become dissatisfied, which almost never happens.
It's like saying hammers are better than cars because more people are satisfied that their hammers do a better job.
Even very knowledgeable people have a hard time predicting how fast a CPU will be. CPUs no longer operate in a single dimension that can be quantified by a single number. You have the architecture, cache size, clock speed, number of cores, FSB, etc. A slower quad core CPU may be faster for me, whereas a faster-clocked dual core may be faster for a gamer. A cheap atom chip may be better for my poor cousin who just surfs the web.
My point is customers should not be using the name of a CPU to decide what to buy. The best thing to do is to find benchmarks that reflect what you want to do and divide by price. The second best thing, great for the typical person, is to find a trustworthy computer builder/seller and let them decide what you need (e.g. buy a "gaming" computer). They can properly market the right CPU to the right person in the "right" price range.
If you take truly compressed data, which resembles uniform noise, you will see a uniform distribution, not the one described in Zipf's law.
Longevity and reliability are tough to quantify, because for the vast majority of users the median SSD or disk drive will never fail as long as they use it.
Failures of disks occur at the tail end. Perhaps 10% of disk drives and 1% of SSDs fail over two years, but how do you compare them? Do you say the disk is 9% worse, or 10x worse?
This is HSBC USA, not UK.
This isn't really a identity risk issue. A stolen debit card alone is not enough to steal someone's identity (anymore than having his name is); a SSN or some other source of identity would be needed because a debit card alone is not a source of identity.
The real risk here is debit card fraud - sending active cards over the mail is practically asking for it. In the case of credit card fraud, the customer is barely inconvenienced because money is never taken out of his bank account. With debit cards, it's a lose your money first and prove you deserve it back later situation.
On the bright side, HSBC is ultimately liable for any losses due to fraud. If there is fraud due to the mailings, HSBC will lose a bunch of money and some idiot will probably be fired/reprimanded.
Not quite, the change will actually display signal strength more accurately and will make the grip problem *more* transparent.
As anandtech pointed out, a big issue in this situation is the iPhone's lack of dynamic range in the signal bar representation. The fifth bar is currently used so liberally (takes up so much of the signal strength range), that a 20 dB drop in reception can keep you at 5 bars, but can drop you from 4 bars to 1. This leads people to believe that in some situations the grip problem doesn't exist at all, and in other situations it is far worse than it is.
After the change, gripping the phone should only drop you a bar or two, even in situations where before the change it wouldn't have dropped a bar at all. But now, you shouldn't go from 4 bars to 0/1.
It's easy to forget how much you learn in school, because the knowledge you acquire becomes obvious after you learn it.
After six years of schooling, 400 classroom hours of math classes, 800 classroom hours of CS/engineering classes, and countless hours of studying, I am confident that I know more than I did in high school. In fact, I'm pretty sure if I met my high school self today I would think he's an uneducated moron. Sometimes I like to go through my programs from early college and high school to have a good laugh.
I agree with you. It's not the time slot, it's that shows like Futurama target niche audiences that are hard to market to.
It's a common pattern with these types of shows: its target audience doesn't find out about it, so it doesn't become popular, so the network neglects the show. Then fans of the show do the network marketers' jobs for them, the general public finds out what an awesome show it is, and the network regrets treating the show poorly, after it is too late.
Off the top of my head, this happened to Family Guy, Futurama, Arrested Development, and the Wire. Probably many others. It's not that the networks didn't give these shows a chance (all of my examples were marketed heavily for at least awhile), it's just really hard to get the Average Joe into them for one reason or another. I'm not sure they deserve to be in really coveted time slots, they just deserve the funding they need to keep producing shows. The network needs patience because it won't make its money back until the DVDs are released.
Deepwater Horizon was a series of mistakes with known causes, not a tail-end probabilistic event. Future deep-water drilling will likely be more carefully regulated.
That's the funniest part: they are getting rid of that slogan very soon:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/06/10/ap/business/main6569347.shtml
It's not a bad thing that pros are held to a high standard. I realize the bar has been set much higher by the flood of cheap DSLRs, but as you said it takes skill to add value to a photograph. Pros will still be in demand; they will just have to do something more special than they used to, like crawling through the mud to get photos of wildlife or traveling to dangerous parts of the World. Mundane photos that anyone can take are now worth what they always should have been: very little.
This is the same thing that happened to all sorts of other professions, including artisan crafts, manufacturing, and IT. The world moves quickly, and it is each profession's job to stay relevant.
"Would the head of Italy's Civil Protection Agency count as a 3rd party expert? "
Hehe, nope. I can't tell if you are being serious, but for the record it's his agency (and I think mainly him) that is being investigated. He publicly called the guy who made the initial prediction an "imbecile" because he was off by a week. Then a few days later 300 people died.
Turns out you can predict Earthquakes :)
It's not misleading, transmission of the internet IS the internet; the internet is nothing more than a huge network. By controlling the transmission of the internet, a future, less benign FCC could easily abuse this. Remember how easily the FCC increased it's power unchecked during the Bush years? Even if its was unconstitutional, the Executive Branch protected it from the courts. That is scary.
FWIW, the EFF is what convinced me of this. If the EFF (one of the biggest proponents of a neutral internet) are skeptical, than so am I.
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2009/09/net-neutrality-fcc-perils-and-promise
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/04/court-rejects-fcc-authority-over-internet
It helps to keep things in perspective. AMD has a market capitalization of 6 billion dollars. Apple has 4x that in cash alone, and is worth 40x what AMD is. Apple's interest in the CPU market is far less involved than AMD's, so even this isn't a fair comparison. It is a fairly minor investment, considering Apple's size.
Another way of looking at it is that Apple is a company that primarily sells CPUs and other computer components packaged really well. In this context, control over the components is important, especially when the component manufacturers they depend on could one day decide to compete with them. I'd say the security, control, and customization of such an integral part are worth the 1% of their company's value the investment involved.
What if it was due to incompetence? What if it was their job to save lives and instead they were slacking off? From a linked article:
"L'Aquila Mayor Massimo Cialente recalled his frustration at receiving no clear reply to his repeated questions and the apparent lack of concern on the part of some present."
As a person of science I think it's great you are giving benefit of the doubt to the scientists, but maybe the prosecutors deserve some too. My intuition is to believe the committee when they say they couldn't have done a better job, but they are clearly biased. I'd like to see what third party experts have to say. It is a good thing this is being investigated, but threats of prosecution should probably wait until the investigation is done.
Ah never mind, I meant the igoogle sidebar.
But everything else I said also applies to the search sidebar :)
You're kidding, right? Please provide a citation. When I search for information on the bar all I find are people complaining about it. Most people I personally know complained about it but have gotten used to it or found a way around it - hardly what I would call "successful". I installed adblock largely to get rid of it; this filter worked great: "google.com#TD(class=leftborder)"
Anyway, my comment was a joke, but if this is the kinds of stuff google is getting from bing then perhaps my comment shouldn't be taken as a joke... at least the option to get rid of the bar would have been nice.
You know something has gone seriously wrong in your company when your employees are ripping off Microsoft's ideas.
I and several other people I know used bing a lot for about a week in late 2008. At the time, Microsoft was literally offering 25-35% off any buy-it-now item on ebay (I'm pretty sure from their own pocket, no way they were making 25% off those purchases).
I bought a new car stereo, camera lens, laptop, and several gifts. I saved over 500 dollars. Then, like a month later, I saw a news release where Microsoft showed off that the number of Bing users had doubled or something over the holiday period. They probably used this to gain traction in advertising and increase their collaboration with companies like Apple.
They literally paid people to use bing over a month-long period to pad some statistics! I wonder if it was worth the 500 dollars they handed me.
"However, if they charge by the byte, then they have to deal with fluctuating income from one quarter to the next"
Not really. Here is my basic analysis (from a comment I made on reddit):
The central limit theorem states that if you have some distribution (the number of megabytes that each person uses in a month) and you draw a bunch of samples (megabytes in the month per person) and average them, the resulting distribution is Gaussian (each month you draw from this distribution). Furthermore, it states that every time you quadruple the population you halve the standard deviation. So let's say the average person uses 400 megabytes per month with a standard deviation of 100 megabytes (this is my general pattern). Averaging over 16 million users, the standard deviation of the mean of everybody's usage falls to about 2-3 megabytes out of 400 - less than 1% of mean. This is pretty steady revenue.
"AT&T is about to come to terms with the fact that most users will opt for using less bandwidth and forking over less money per month."
AT&T is fine with this; their problem right now is not a lack of revenue, it is a lack of infrastructure; I'm not sure why you think it is the opposite. AT&T can't even support the iPhone in NYC, the biggest city in the country. They WANT heavy users to use less, and their new pricing scheme clearly reflects this. They are happy that 98% of people will pay less because it helps them remain competitive.
People kept their networks open, Google gathered some probably useless information about them - presumably no more than 15 seconds worth in most cases (because it's a car driving by). Google has far more information on far more people from saved web searches/e-mails/etc. I'm tired of seeing these stories, I really don't care.
If European Governments are actually pursuing this, shame on them.
It is far harder on the system to use a cell tower as your primary internet source than a wire going into your apartment. This pricing change happened exactly because of the inefficiencies that some people introduce.
Learn your facts. There was no bait and switch, the changes only affect new customers.
Existing customers now have *the option* to pay less per month if they stay under 2 GB. I don't know anyone who uses more than 800 MB of 3G a month.
Who cares when a character was created? The poll should be read as "the greatest character from the past 20 years who was created specifically for television/film".