Google results typically find three kinds of content
Real Stuff related to what you're looking for,
Astroturfed content spam posted by people trying to sell stuff, attract advertising views, or manipulate link ratings, and
Unrelated stuff collected by accident.
Google's quality regarding Real Stuff is as high as ever, and their ratios of Real Stuff and Unrelated Stuff are still pretty good, though the Web may have a higher noise-to-signal ratio than it used to. The problems I've seen have been the radical increase in content spam by people whose business models consist of littering the web and monetizing it, and it's an arms race between them and Google to keep it under control. It's probably worst with medications (especially if you're looking for drug interactions between Medicine A and Medicine B, which tends to lead to sites selling both of them, even though neither one of them is Medicine V where you're expecting mostly spam...), but I've even gotten content-farm trash when looking for design information on electronic circuits.
A couple of things have surprised me - it sometimes seems like Google must be collecting data that's generated in real time, given the number of results I've seen like http://www.example.com/keywordA-keywordB-keywordC/article.html, where I wouldn't have expected that combination to be frequent enough to pre-stage it all. Also, there are a lot of sites that seem to basically be imitation search engines, where if you're looking for a topic, they'll have a page that's a pointer to a bunch of links about the content, rather than the content itself; it's almost as if they randomly picked some Google results and fed them back to Google, except that many of them aren't actually useful. Is it possible that they just keep a bunch of keywords around, and robogenerate dynamic pages when Google crawls their site? Music lyrics are really a minefield for this kind of thing; it seems very few sites have actual lyrics, even if they're offering to sell you ringtones for songs.
Good luck to Google downrating most of this tripe.
Isn't brisket topologically congruent to ham? Reubens, yeah, they're more complex, especially with the potential for knots in the sauerkraut, but ham and brisket are usually just slices....
The oil business have been users of supercomputers for a long time. A typical technique is to stick a bunch of audio sensors in the ground, blow up some explosives down in a well, and signal-process all the echoes to see what's going on geologically, in hopes that some of the structures look like the kind that have oil in them. There are lots of other petroleum applications that used to need supercomputers, such as scheduling problems, but I went to college back when "supercomputer" meant a Cray-1, which could do a blazing 136 MFLOPs, and you've probably got a cellphone that fast by now, so many of them can use more conventional hardware by now.
The pictures of their computer system looks like a Beowulf Cluster of boxes, maybe 64 or 128 of them, depending on whether it's one or two rows of racks. So they're probably a fairly conventional blade-server design with a few blades per box.
If the video cameras detect the cats acting weird, then that means there's going to be an earthquake soon. It was easy to verify its accuracy - small earthquakes happen all the time in various parts of California, and they checked the video recordings and the cats had been acting weird just before the quakes.
The original Opera was wonderful - the install image only used half a floppy disk, and it was really fast! It took me a while to accept tabbed browsing (Opera's original tabbed-only was annoying, but being able to have tabs and windows both is great.)
"Mindless consumers" upgraded, either because they bought new PCs that came with IE7 or IE8, or because Windows Update would update their browser for them, or because they'd get a dialog box offering to upgrade their browser, click Yes, install some piece of malware toolbarness and have to uninstall IE entirely and upgrade to a new version to kill it off.
Corporate desktops, yeah, because the corporations were using applications developed for IE6 (using toolsets that were specifically incompatible with Mozilla so you had to keep IE6) which didn't work any more under IE7 or IE8, and the IT department didn't want to go through the pain of replacing them, while the corporate security standards bureaucrats didn't trust IE7 (they didn't trust IE6 either, but they were stuck with it.) I finally got to upgrade to IE7 last summer, though of course I use Firefox and Chrome for anything that doesn't insist on running IE.
If you think they're not genius viral marketers, you haven't been paying attention to how you heard of them or why you know what they claim to stand for or why TV covers them when they're standing out there with signs. They're not just dumb bigots, they're a sociopathic family of lawyers, who go out and make themselves as publicly offensive as they can, so that people will attack them and towns will ban them and they can make money by sueing them. They're also happy to get donations from actual knuckle-draggers and from right-wing politicians who profit from the Culture Wars, but it's really about the lawsuits and the publicity.
When Firefly first came out, my local Comcast service didn't include the Sci-Fi channel in their standard cable service, only in extra-price bundles where that was the only station I cared about. A couple of years ago, it was even part of the standard package on the other side of town, but not my side, though it finally started working most of the time, and hasn't bounced off and on the list in a couple of months.
Now that Firefly might be showing up on Science Channel, does Comcast carry it? Nope, "Channel 272 Not Authorized"....
And my Tivo's DVD player can't play the standard DVD sets, because they've got some stupid copy protection that it can't cope with.
If they're providing you with SMTP service, these days they'll typically use one of the authenticated mail submission protocols instead of Port 25. But there's no reason for a business that knows how to run a mail server themselves to use that, as opposed to sending their email directly. Not only is it a security issue, but it's a huge reliability and transmission-speed issue, and consumer-oriented services like that often limit how many messages you can send per day, which doesn't work for businesses.
Rackspace's customer "Traders Business Network" tbnonline.com (website) decided to send me their spam newsletter daily. The first message to their abuse@ email got me a robo-response with a ticket number, but there's no obvious way to look up the tickets to see if they've done anything, and the spam didn't stop. Subsequent emails to their abuse desk with the following few days' complaints got no response, calling their tech support desk got me forwarded to their abuse desk, who still didn't answer after several days, and after more than a week I eventually got annoyed and looked up their corporate general counsel. Email to him did get a response, but the spammers still have a working website.
Rackspace does some things quite well, but my opinion about their service went way down this past month; you shouldn't have to harass corporate officers to get a half-assed response from their abuse desk.
Broadband access ISPs have several different policies about outbound port 25
Block it entirely, to discourage spammers and Linux users. Those bogus ISPs are clueless cretins, and many of them have Acceptable Use Policies that don't let you run mail or web servers at home (though that shouldn't apply if you've got a business-priced service), so you're sort of warned if you deal with them.
Block it by default, but turn it on for customers who ask them. I'm as hard-core an end-to-end-principle fanatic as anybody, but I'm fine with this. Once almost everybody made the transition to using SSL/TLS or at least authenticated mail submission protocols a few years back, the only people sending out Port 25 from home are a very small percentage of legitimate mail server users, who can be expected to know what they're doing, and a very large percentage of people who don't realize that malware has infected their system and is using it to send out spam.
Force it through their outbound "smart" mail system, which may be doing some useful outbound spam filtering, but is usually dumber than the mailer you'd run yourself for home use, and much dumber than a business needs. For instance, many of them used to limit you to 100 messages per day or per hour - not only does that obviously fail for a business, but I'm part of a social group that sends out email with party and dinner announcements to 200-300 people a couple of times a week, and since the guy whose home computer has a Real ISP, it's not a problem. ISP smart mailers were a very convenient and necessary service back when most of the world was on dialup; they're a lot less useful now.
Allow it, because what you bought was Real Internet Service, have terms of service that hit spammers very hard, have an abuse desk that takes spam complaints seriously, have a help desk that actually has a clue, maintains reverse DNS entries and SWIP registrations for static IP customers, and keeps their customers happy. (Ok, fine, not every ISP is sonic.net.... and I think they actually do the "block port 25 but provide a convenient web form for unblocking it" approach; I run my outgoing mail through the mail service I use for my inbound.)
Yup. Now, if Anonymous can start sending them fake announcements of *lots* of funerals of dead gay soldiers, maybe that'll make it hard for them to find the real ones, but simple antagonism isn't going to interfere with them, because they thrive on that stuff.
"Change their minds"? "Make it clear that WBC protests won't work"? They're professional trolls, and if you're not offended by what they say, and you've got deep enough pockets to be worth a lawsuit, they'll come up with something that'll offend you too, so you can attack them and violate their civil rights and lose in court. They're not trying to convert you, they're trying to piss you off. They don't actually care how you feel about gays, God, or America's Brave Troops - those are merely popular enough topics to get people to fight over so that town councils will try to run them out of town in ways that are slam-dunk unconstitutional interference with free speech.
"Shame them"? A couple of the kids have left the family business, or never gotten into it, but Fred and at least one daughter don't seem susceptible to shame.
As long as the press covers them, they don't need to run websites themselves. They *need* publicity, but they don't care how they get it, as long as people hate them and do things that they can sue them for.
It's not just "in some fashion". They're professional trolls, finding the most offensive messages they can come up with so people will attack them and towns will ban them, and they can sue for civil rights violations and win. It's kept them in business for a long time.
If Anonymous can interfere with their cash flow and encourage the press not to publicize them, great. But if Anonymous gets them more publicity, which is more likely to be the case, they fail. WBC aren't like the Scientologists, who need to keep their real nature secret to avoid scaring away suckers; they're a family business that doesn't need to recruit new converts, and the suckers are town governments that unconstitutionally ban their demonstrations, lose lawsuits, and have to pay them. Anonymous isn't going to win by revealing their secret beliefs - if the public isn't offended enough to get into a fist-fight with the WBC, they haven't done their job, and they'll think up something new to say that'll tweak people even more.
Bad enough that I have to watch The Comedy Channel to get TV news, but now I have to read FARK to get the updated stories on the causes of the Iraq war.
I just did a Google search for "samsonite carry on luggage". While the text link for JCPenney's is about five or six pages down, Google starts off with a row of Shopping images, and JCPenney's one of them.
The job of a search engine is to find web pages that are interesting to people, and it does that job by using a lot of robots with models about what's interesting. If you've got a web site you want the search engine to tell people is interesting, you can either do that honestly, by making it actually interesting, or dishonestly, by lying to the robots so they'll tell the humans that it's interesting, and sometimes that's cheaper and easier because robots only have models.
To the extent that there are "white hat SEOs", they're either doing the basic web design jobs of making sure that your information is findable (e.g. putting the keywords in text, not in images played by flash animation that other web designers told you would look cool), or else they're doing editorial work by telling you to write more interesting web content. For the most part, those people don't call themselves "SEOs", they call themselves "web designers" or "editors" or "graphic designers", though there are some companies that really do need to hire somebody to clean up bad web design.
Real SEOs are the black-hat types, who'll offer to get results for you by methods other than making your web site actually more interesting. They're lying scum, but sometimes they're good enough at lying to robots that they get results. Unfortunately, one of the big results they get is garbage all over the web, from link spam in blog comments to garbage that search engines find that's really just copying bits of content to attract advertising. Makes the web as a whole a lot less interesting.
Documentary about Arduino - subtitles in English or Spanish, 28 minutes. Talks with the original Arduino development team about their goals and their development process, Sparkfun and Makezine who sell it, the Makerbot people about using their cheap 3D printer for open hardware, various sets of educators and design people about what they're doing, how much fun it was, teaching kids to understand the world they live in, etc. From pretty much the beginning it was an open source project, partly because they wanted to get the social involvement of people helping each other and partly because the school they were working at was going to be closing so they wanted to have their work survive past that, rather the way people do open source at startups.
Various people have complained about the TI MSP430's crippled compilers, which limit you to something like 4KB of code. It turns out that for the TI Launchpad and their other cheap development boards, that's really not a problem, because the processor chips they come with only go up to 2KB of memory anyway. TI makes some similar chips with more memory and some with less, and the free crippleware compilers may not handle the biggest ones, but they're fine for the basic platforms.
On the other hand, as far as I can tell from really brief experience, the TI development environment seems a bit closer to the metal than Arduino's is, and because there's even less memory than in the AVRs, sometimes you need that. For example, if you want to tweak Pin 4 on an Arduino, you can tell it "digitalwrite(pin4,1);" and it'll work. With the TI, you have to tell it something like "mask=0x08; port1.register |= mask; port1.output;", which is pretty much what the Arduino environment was doing behind the scenes anyway, and if your Arduino project is going too slow, you'll find lots of commentary that you need to tweak the bits yourself the way the TI does.
If you're trying to make $10 alarm clocks as a production product, you won't be using a full-scale Arduino system, you'll design a circuit board and use exactly the parts you need, and rather than the Atmel AVRmega 328 you'll use whichever of its relatives has just enough pins, RAM and flash to do the job, and you'll have to pay people (or yourself) for the production work and figure the labor costs as well.
If you're a hobbyist, you're doing it for the learning experience and coolness factor, and once you've figured out how it works, using the Arduino, you might very well make a custom one using perf-board and the chip and whatever blinky-lights and power supplies you'll need.
I ended up ordering about $100 worth of stuff including the basic Arduino, breadboards, and random things to plug in to them,. but once I got started, I've found that Radio Shack actually still carries electronic components! (:-) It's only about 5 feet of their shelf space, but the standard store has a bunch of drawers of LEDs, resistors, capacitors, alligator clips, a few simple ICs like 555s and op-amps, etc., and they've got another few feet of wall space with breadboards and soldering irons and such.
Of course, since this is Silicon Valley, I've also gotten components at Fry's, and there's HSC Electronic Supply for a huge assortment of components and tools, but Radio Shack's been a surprisingly convenient place to stop by and pick up the occasional bag-o'-resistors or replace the LED that you smoked.
I ordered the Launchpad a week or two after ordering my Arduino, and it took about two months to arrive:-) You're expected to know a bit more about what you're doing to use the MSP430, the programming environment's less friendly, the chip has even less memory, and installing the timer chip on the board requires surface-mount soldering, which is a lot harder to learn than regular through-hole. I'll get around to it in a couple of months, after my Arduino projects. (And the wristwatch version is amazingly cool.) There are also a couple of other cool boards to play with, such as the Atmel-designed AVR Butterfly which includes an LCD, some Freescale stuff, and a few others.
This month, however, I'm working with 555 timer chips, because sometimes an Arduino or MSP430 is just way too powerful and you need an even more minimal environment to work on, plus there's a contest and it's amazing what you can do with such a simple tool, and I've got the breadboards and LEDs and resistors around from the Arduino anyway. And the Arduino's a convenient power supply and voltmeter while I work on it.
Arduino's a nice programming environment, and it comes packaged with enough software, hardware, and examples that you can pretty much do anything you want at whatever balance of complexity you want. It's complete enough to get started and see how much you can do. You can start off high-level, try the examples, and then either go for larger projects or head down to the bare silicon, and once you've done stuff at the Arduino-board level, if you want to build more stuff with raw AVRs you've got all the tools you need.
Slashdot Mirror
Google results typically find three kinds of content
Google's quality regarding Real Stuff is as high as ever, and their ratios of Real Stuff and Unrelated Stuff are still pretty good, though the Web may have a higher noise-to-signal ratio than it used to. The problems I've seen have been the radical increase in content spam by people whose business models consist of littering the web and monetizing it, and it's an arms race between them and Google to keep it under control. It's probably worst with medications (especially if you're looking for drug interactions between Medicine A and Medicine B, which tends to lead to sites selling both of them, even though neither one of them is Medicine V where you're expecting mostly spam...), but I've even gotten content-farm trash when looking for design information on electronic circuits.
A couple of things have surprised me - it sometimes seems like Google must be collecting data that's generated in real time, given the number of results I've seen like http://www.example.com/keywordA-keywordB-keywordC/article.html, where I wouldn't have expected that combination to be frequent enough to pre-stage it all. Also, there are a lot of sites that seem to basically be imitation search engines, where if you're looking for a topic, they'll have a page that's a pointer to a bunch of links about the content, rather than the content itself; it's almost as if they randomly picked some Google results and fed them back to Google, except that many of them aren't actually useful. Is it possible that they just keep a bunch of keywords around, and robogenerate dynamic pages when Google crawls their site? Music lyrics are really a minefield for this kind of thing; it seems very few sites have actual lyrics, even if they're offering to sell you ringtones for songs.
Good luck to Google downrating most of this tripe.
Isn't brisket topologically congruent to ham? Reubens, yeah, they're more complex, especially with the potential for knots in the sauerkraut, but ham and brisket are usually just slices....
The oil business have been users of supercomputers for a long time. A typical technique is to stick a bunch of audio sensors in the ground, blow up some explosives down in a well, and signal-process all the echoes to see what's going on geologically, in hopes that some of the structures look like the kind that have oil in them. There are lots of other petroleum applications that used to need supercomputers, such as scheduling problems, but I went to college back when "supercomputer" meant a Cray-1, which could do a blazing 136 MFLOPs, and you've probably got a cellphone that fast by now, so many of them can use more conventional hardware by now.
The pictures of their computer system looks like a Beowulf Cluster of boxes, maybe 64 or 128 of them, depending on whether it's one or two rows of racks. So they're probably a fairly conventional blade-server design with a few blades per box.
If the video cameras detect the cats acting weird, then that means there's going to be an earthquake soon. It was easy to verify its accuracy - small earthquakes happen all the time in various parts of California, and they checked the video recordings and the cats had been acting weird just before the quakes.
The original Opera was wonderful - the install image only used half a floppy disk, and it was really fast! It took me a while to accept tabbed browsing (Opera's original tabbed-only was annoying, but being able to have tabs and windows both is great.)
"Mindless consumers" upgraded, either because they bought new PCs that came with IE7 or IE8, or because Windows Update would update their browser for them, or because they'd get a dialog box offering to upgrade their browser, click Yes, install some piece of malware toolbarness and have to uninstall IE entirely and upgrade to a new version to kill it off.
Corporate desktops, yeah, because the corporations were using applications developed for IE6 (using toolsets that were specifically incompatible with Mozilla so you had to keep IE6) which didn't work any more under IE7 or IE8, and the IT department didn't want to go through the pain of replacing them, while the corporate security standards bureaucrats didn't trust IE7 (they didn't trust IE6 either, but they were stuck with it.) I finally got to upgrade to IE7 last summer, though of course I use Firefox and Chrome for anything that doesn't insist on running IE.
If you think they're not genius viral marketers, you haven't been paying attention to how you heard of them or why you know what they claim to stand for or why TV covers them when they're standing out there with signs. They're not just dumb bigots, they're a sociopathic family of lawyers, who go out and make themselves as publicly offensive as they can, so that people will attack them and towns will ban them and they can make money by sueing them. They're also happy to get donations from actual knuckle-draggers and from right-wing politicians who profit from the Culture Wars, but it's really about the lawsuits and the publicity.
When Firefly first came out, my local Comcast service didn't include the Sci-Fi channel in their standard cable service, only in extra-price bundles where that was the only station I cared about. A couple of years ago, it was even part of the standard package on the other side of town, but not my side, though it finally started working most of the time, and hasn't bounced off and on the list in a couple of months.
Now that Firefly might be showing up on Science Channel, does Comcast carry it? Nope, "Channel 272 Not Authorized"....
And my Tivo's DVD player can't play the standard DVD sets, because they've got some stupid copy protection that it can't cope with.
If they're providing you with SMTP service, these days they'll typically use one of the authenticated mail submission protocols instead of Port 25. But there's no reason for a business that knows how to run a mail server themselves to use that, as opposed to sending their email directly. Not only is it a security issue, but it's a huge reliability and transmission-speed issue, and consumer-oriented services like that often limit how many messages you can send per day, which doesn't work for businesses.
Yeah, and then your ISP stops providing a News server, so you end up having to fetch it with Google Groups anyway...
Rackspace's customer "Traders Business Network" tbnonline.com (website) decided to send me their spam newsletter daily. The first message to their abuse@ email got me a robo-response with a ticket number, but there's no obvious way to look up the tickets to see if they've done anything, and the spam didn't stop. Subsequent emails to their abuse desk with the following few days' complaints got no response, calling their tech support desk got me forwarded to their abuse desk, who still didn't answer after several days, and after more than a week I eventually got annoyed and looked up their corporate general counsel. Email to him did get a response, but the spammers still have a working website.
Rackspace does some things quite well, but my opinion about their service went way down this past month; you shouldn't have to harass corporate officers to get a half-assed response from their abuse desk.
Broadband access ISPs have several different policies about outbound port 25
Yup. Now, if Anonymous can start sending them fake announcements of *lots* of funerals of dead gay soldiers, maybe that'll make it hard for them to find the real ones, but simple antagonism isn't going to interfere with them, because they thrive on that stuff.
"Change their minds"? "Make it clear that WBC protests won't work"? They're professional trolls, and if you're not offended by what they say, and you've got deep enough pockets to be worth a lawsuit, they'll come up with something that'll offend you too, so you can attack them and violate their civil rights and lose in court. They're not trying to convert you, they're trying to piss you off. They don't actually care how you feel about gays, God, or America's Brave Troops - those are merely popular enough topics to get people to fight over so that town councils will try to run them out of town in ways that are slam-dunk unconstitutional interference with free speech.
"Shame them"? A couple of the kids have left the family business, or never gotten into it, but Fred and at least one daughter don't seem susceptible to shame.
As long as the press covers them, they don't need to run websites themselves. They *need* publicity, but they don't care how they get it, as long as people hate them and do things that they can sue them for.
It's not just "in some fashion". They're professional trolls, finding the most offensive messages they can come up with so people will attack them and towns will ban them, and they can sue for civil rights violations and win. It's kept them in business for a long time.
If Anonymous can interfere with their cash flow and encourage the press not to publicize them, great. But if Anonymous gets them more publicity, which is more likely to be the case, they fail. WBC aren't like the Scientologists, who need to keep their real nature secret to avoid scaring away suckers; they're a family business that doesn't need to recruit new converts, and the suckers are town governments that unconstitutionally ban their demonstrations, lose lawsuits, and have to pay them. Anonymous isn't going to win by revealing their secret beliefs - if the public isn't offended enough to get into a fist-fight with the WBC, they haven't done their job, and they'll think up something new to say that'll tweak people even more.
According to a report by ABC News, the National Academy of Science just released a report saying he may not have actually done it.. That's after the Feds had accused a previous scientist who didn't cooperatively kill himself.
Also, Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, codenamed "Curveball", admits he made up the WMD story so Bush would attack Saddam Hussein, and says he'd do that again (in spite of how well it worked out for everybody..)
Bad enough that I have to watch The Comedy Channel to get TV news, but now I have to read FARK to get the updated stories on the causes of the Iraq war.
I just did a Google search for "samsonite carry on luggage". While the text link for JCPenney's is about five or six pages down, Google starts off with a row of Shopping images, and JCPenney's one of them.
The job of a search engine is to find web pages that are interesting to people, and it does that job by using a lot of robots with models about what's interesting. If you've got a web site you want the search engine to tell people is interesting, you can either do that honestly, by making it actually interesting, or dishonestly, by lying to the robots so they'll tell the humans that it's interesting, and sometimes that's cheaper and easier because robots only have models.
To the extent that there are "white hat SEOs", they're either doing the basic web design jobs of making sure that your information is findable (e.g. putting the keywords in text, not in images played by flash animation that other web designers told you would look cool), or else they're doing editorial work by telling you to write more interesting web content. For the most part, those people don't call themselves "SEOs", they call themselves "web designers" or "editors" or "graphic designers", though there are some companies that really do need to hire somebody to clean up bad web design.
Real SEOs are the black-hat types, who'll offer to get results for you by methods other than making your web site actually more interesting. They're lying scum, but sometimes they're good enough at lying to robots that they get results. Unfortunately, one of the big results they get is garbage all over the web, from link spam in blog comments to garbage that search engines find that's really just copying bits of content to attract advertising. Makes the web as a whole a lot less interesting.
Documentary about Arduino - subtitles in English or Spanish, 28 minutes. Talks with the original Arduino development team about their goals and their development process, Sparkfun and Makezine who sell it, the Makerbot people about using their cheap 3D printer for open hardware, various sets of educators and design people about what they're doing, how much fun it was, teaching kids to understand the world they live in, etc. From pretty much the beginning it was an open source project, partly because they wanted to get the social involvement of people helping each other and partly because the school they were working at was going to be closing so they wanted to have their work survive past that, rather the way people do open source at startups.
Various people have complained about the TI MSP430's crippled compilers, which limit you to something like 4KB of code. It turns out that for the TI Launchpad and their other cheap development boards, that's really not a problem, because the processor chips they come with only go up to 2KB of memory anyway. TI makes some similar chips with more memory and some with less, and the free crippleware compilers may not handle the biggest ones, but they're fine for the basic platforms.
On the other hand, as far as I can tell from really brief experience, the TI development environment seems a bit closer to the metal than Arduino's is, and because there's even less memory than in the AVRs, sometimes you need that. For example, if you want to tweak Pin 4 on an Arduino, you can tell it "digitalwrite(pin4,1);" and it'll work. With the TI, you have to tell it something like "mask=0x08; port1.register |= mask; port1.output;", which is pretty much what the Arduino environment was doing behind the scenes anyway, and if your Arduino project is going too slow, you'll find lots of commentary that you need to tweak the bits yourself the way the TI does.
If you're trying to make $10 alarm clocks as a production product, you won't be using a full-scale Arduino system, you'll design a circuit board and use exactly the parts you need, and rather than the Atmel AVRmega 328 you'll use whichever of its relatives has just enough pins, RAM and flash to do the job, and you'll have to pay people (or yourself) for the production work and figure the labor costs as well.
If you're a hobbyist, you're doing it for the learning experience and coolness factor, and once you've figured out how it works, using the Arduino, you might very well make a custom one using perf-board and the chip and whatever blinky-lights and power supplies you'll need.
I ended up ordering about $100 worth of stuff including the basic Arduino, breadboards, and random things to plug in to them,. but once I got started, I've found that Radio Shack actually still carries electronic components! (:-) It's only about 5 feet of their shelf space, but the standard store has a bunch of drawers of LEDs, resistors, capacitors, alligator clips, a few simple ICs like 555s and op-amps, etc., and they've got another few feet of wall space with breadboards and soldering irons and such.
Of course, since this is Silicon Valley, I've also gotten components at Fry's, and there's HSC Electronic Supply for a huge assortment of components and tools, but Radio Shack's been a surprisingly convenient place to stop by and pick up the occasional bag-o'-resistors or replace the LED that you smoked.
I ordered the Launchpad a week or two after ordering my Arduino, and it took about two months to arrive :-) You're expected to know a bit more about what you're doing to use the MSP430, the programming environment's less friendly, the chip has even less memory, and installing the timer chip on the board requires surface-mount soldering, which is a lot harder to learn than regular through-hole. I'll get around to it in a couple of months, after my Arduino projects. (And the wristwatch version is amazingly cool.) There are also a couple of other cool boards to play with, such as the Atmel-designed AVR Butterfly which includes an LCD, some Freescale stuff, and a few others.
This month, however, I'm working with 555 timer chips, because sometimes an Arduino or MSP430 is just way too powerful and you need an even more minimal environment to work on, plus there's a contest and it's amazing what you can do with such a simple tool, and I've got the breadboards and LEDs and resistors around from the Arduino anyway. And the Arduino's a convenient power supply and voltmeter while I work on it.
Arduino's a nice programming environment, and it comes packaged with enough software, hardware, and examples that you can pretty much do anything you want at whatever balance of complexity you want. It's complete enough to get started and see how much you can do. You can start off high-level, try the examples, and then either go for larger projects or head down to the bare silicon, and once you've done stuff at the Arduino-board level, if you want to build more stuff with raw AVRs you've got all the tools you need.