American Express and Citibank both have a virtual account feature. You get a new temporary CC#. You can set the credit limit and duration (at least at Citibank you can). It is a very nice feature when buying from shady places. I think we can classify the AOL 1000 hour account as shady, don't you?
The thing is, if you release it six months after the theatrical release, you can capitalize on the marketing bucks you've already spent.
If you release it in the springtime, as Lucas did, you can bet you'll have finished getting the theatrical revenues by the time the DVD is released in the winter time, coincidentally right around the holiday shopping season. So the alternate distribution and all the merchandising has a second run at revenues, all in the same year.
There's always that time value of money, too. Get as many bucks as soon as you can, because their value declines the farther out you push them.
CD-R archive of the site. Sell those at cafepress if they'll let 'em. I'd rather shell out $10 for that than wait to download 650MB of.mov files. Have multiple volumes. Have best of. Sell the '01 Superbowl commercials on a CD by themselves. The '00 election commercials. C'mon, it's too damn easy to make money . . .
How many/.ers have worked for a pharmaceutical company? How many have seen 7 years of research go down the tubes after promising studies find that the drug has a serious adverse effect on.5% of the people taking it and the last 7 years of your life were for naught.
Does anyone around here understand how business works anymore? Where do you think retirement funds get funded from? Corporations are not run by some maniacal CEO hellbent on a conspiracy for world domination. I'm not out for world dominatino. I know my manager isn't. I've met his boss and his bosses boss. At what level do people instantly turn evil?
Why do you think companies spend, on average, $1 billion to develop each new marketable drug? For fun? A drug spends as much as 10 years in the research phase before going to market. Anywhere along the way it may be found to be a) not as affective as hoped or b) not safe enough to market. Rinse, lather, repeat. Assuming it does make it to market, it may only have 5-7 years before generic competition forces the original research company to stop selling the drug for any kind of profit. The government, btw, does not contribute any measurable percentage of the research cost to the private company.
Don't like marketing? I hate it more than anyone else out there, I assure you. I see it every day and it makes me ill. But it helps make sales, and it subsidizes low income patients (free samples to doctors from sales reps mainly go to elderly and those without health insurance). And all those revenues go back to, guess what, research for more drugs.
Don't like the pharmaceutical companies and their high prices? Don't buy their drugs. I will help keep them in business. I'm paying for a service (research). A drug's price isn't the price of materials or shipping really. It's payment for the service they did by spending time and money researching and refining a single compound out of tens of thousands that may help me live longer or better. But to turn around and say thanks and not be willing to pay for it is asking thousands of people to work for free and without reward for all their hard work.
As much as I would like to think that helping my fellow man is enough of a reward, I know that it isn't. It doesn't pay my light bill or put food on the table or get me any of those nice shiny computers I play with. I work to make a living to pay for things that I need (and the extra goes to things I want). Extrapolate that up from the individual and you have corporations. That's just the way it is. They need money to pay the light bills, run their supercomputers, and pay the scientists. And you need to survive the drug pipeline (go talk to Bayer and Merck about how much those suck right now).
[Disclaimer: none of this is representative of my employer, my clients, or anyone but myself. Two cents.]
If you are trying to prepare high school students for college, take a look around at the local University for what they do with CS101.
As a side note, the University I attended taught us a complete impractical language as a learning tool, Scheme -- the bastard stepchild of Lisp. I do not remember any of it, but the point of it was to teach concepts which it was good for.
My second CS language class was C++ (replaced by Java now methinks). In terms of good OO design it was certainly lacking and was meant to translate the concepts from the first CS class to the real world.
All of the rest of the theory classes reverted to Scheme or assembly language. You could subsitute C for the assembly language part and get nearly the same effect for educational purposes.
If you are going to teach Java, please keep in mind it is more than GUI window programs or web applets. I have seen too many reviews of books on websites that complained because Java educational books and courses focused too much on the non-GUI parts. Ugh.
Lastly, I think Java is excellent in terms of teaching the fundamentals of OO programming and patterns. You'll need to decide if you're up to the task of teaching programming and OO.
Well, mostly. It did basically index the SMB shares in the world, but it certainly didn't promote "customers" from using other peoples' shares for their own storage facility...
Perhaps one of the problems with online advertising is the fact that you can absolutely track the number of clickthroughs per impression. If a company shows a commercial during the Superbowl and sends out a mailing and receives a 10% jump in sales, do they attribute it to the direct mail campaign or to the TV viewership?
Blanket advertising without demographics can be done to build brand recognition, which seems to be what most of the online advertising is for. Product promotion using the shotgun (scattered) versus rifle (single projectile) seems to be a wasted effort. The rifle approach will always command a higher price because the marketers will know they are getting the most bang for their buck.
I know of an (offline) newspaper that tripled their ad revenue after hiring a market research firm to nail down their readership demographic. Don't be too surprised when they start doing this to web sites.
I see. No one has ever had a bug in their program or a database corruption problem. Here's how I read their email:
Sorry, we've had some internal problems in the past and we can't tell what your email setting were. We default everyone to be notified, so we are setting the users we believe got corrupted back to the default. You have two weeks to take the 1 minute to log into our site before we start sending you our "spam".
How horrible is this? Most places would've just turned the spam faucet back to full and left you wondering how it happened. I am sure at the IT level someone wrote it as I did, but by the time it got through the legal and marketing departments, it looks like the email you got. And just for reference, I have all my email prefs turned off as well and did not get this message, so it definitely isn't happening to all their users. If I had to guess, it was probably the early adopters that are getting these messages because their email choices probably changed somewhere along the way.
The article said of the approximately 200 days a worker spends at work, 47 days are spent developing new code and the other 150 are spent fixing bugs and doing testing. This gets back to the statistics about how few lines per code a person generates a year.
What would be more interesting to learn is how many those other 150 days are broken down into design, testing, and bug fixing. Working on a large project myself I would certainly agree that not enough testing is done and the brightest aren't always the same set of people doing the design.
I'm not sure if, however, all the labor shortage could be avoided by designing things in the first place. I believe the Mythical Man Month postulates that as software projects and their teams grow in size, their complexity grows disproportionately faster. Sure it is easier to design something that is small that work just as you intended. Try throwing 40 people together each doing that with a mediocre architect and I'll tell you the results aren't pretty. Even worse are the people usually put on maintenance.
Everyone should go read the Big Ball of Mud. Really. Everyone that has ever worked on a big project will be able to relate to its contents.
All depends on the elasticity of CD pricing. I believe it goes a little something like this. A price inelastic commodity, people buy it no matter what the price. So lowering the price wouldn't increase sales that much. I believe the argument is, and I agree with it, CD prices are elastic. If you drop the price by 50%, sales will go up by more than 100%. Unfortunately, that only discusses the end pricing schema.
If I sell something for $10 that costs $1 to make, I profit $9. If I sell it for $5, I only make $4. Therefore, if I cut my price to $5, I need to sell 9/4 as many widgets as I was before to make the same amount of money.
I'm not sure CD pricing is that elastic. Maybe someone should go ask mp3.com. Their model of DAM CDs is intriguing because it removes a number of those pesky middlemen that the RIAA employs. Artists get more money; consumers get less expensive CDs. As far as I can tell, everyone good wins. Only the RIAA loses. That's a shame.
Slashdot Mirror
Or it means that it is always recording a la Tivo and when you press record it starts the spooling to file from the beginning of the buffer.
http://www.spheralsolar.com/
Somewhat old really. July 17th they announced this and their 20 megawatt pilot plant came online October 31st it looks like.
American Express and Citibank both have a virtual account feature. You get a new temporary CC#. You can set the credit limit and duration (at least at Citibank you can). It is a very nice feature when buying from shady places. I think we can classify the AOL 1000 hour account as shady, don't you?
The thing is, if you release it six months after the theatrical release, you can capitalize on the marketing bucks you've already spent.
If you release it in the springtime, as Lucas did, you can bet you'll have finished getting the theatrical revenues by the time the DVD is released in the winter time, coincidentally right around the holiday shopping season. So the alternate distribution and all the merchandising has a second run at revenues, all in the same year.
There's always that time value of money, too. Get as many bucks as soon as you can, because their value declines the farther out you push them.
Google search: logitech pen
It's new. It looks promising. And now your pen will be networked.
CD-R archive of the site. Sell those at cafepress if they'll let 'em. I'd rather shell out $10 for that than wait to download 650MB of .mov files. Have multiple volumes. Have best of. Sell the '01 Superbowl commercials on a CD by themselves. The '00 election commercials. C'mon, it's too damn easy to make money . . .
How many /.ers have worked for a pharmaceutical company? How many have seen 7 years of research go down the tubes after promising studies find that the drug has a serious adverse effect on .5% of the people taking it and the last 7 years of your life were for naught.
Does anyone around here understand how business works anymore? Where do you think retirement funds get funded from? Corporations are not run by some maniacal CEO hellbent on a conspiracy for world domination. I'm not out for world dominatino. I know my manager isn't. I've met his boss and his bosses boss. At what level do people instantly turn evil?
Why do you think companies spend, on average, $1 billion to develop each new marketable drug? For fun? A drug spends as much as 10 years in the research phase before going to market. Anywhere along the way it may be found to be a) not as affective as hoped or b) not safe enough to market. Rinse, lather, repeat. Assuming it does make it to market, it may only have 5-7 years before generic competition forces the original research company to stop selling the drug for any kind of profit. The government, btw, does not contribute any measurable percentage of the research cost to the private company.
Don't like marketing? I hate it more than anyone else out there, I assure you. I see it every day and it makes me ill. But it helps make sales, and it subsidizes low income patients (free samples to doctors from sales reps mainly go to elderly and those without health insurance). And all those revenues go back to, guess what, research for more drugs.
Don't like the pharmaceutical companies and their high prices? Don't buy their drugs. I will help keep them in business. I'm paying for a service (research). A drug's price isn't the price of materials or shipping really. It's payment for the service they did by spending time and money researching and refining a single compound out of tens of thousands that may help me live longer or better. But to turn around and say thanks and not be willing to pay for it is asking thousands of people to work for free and without reward for all their hard work.
As much as I would like to think that helping my fellow man is enough of a reward, I know that it isn't. It doesn't pay my light bill or put food on the table or get me any of those nice shiny computers I play with. I work to make a living to pay for things that I need (and the extra goes to things I want). Extrapolate that up from the individual and you have corporations. That's just the way it is. They need money to pay the light bills, run their supercomputers, and pay the scientists. And you need to survive the drug pipeline (go talk to Bayer and Merck about how much those suck right now).
[Disclaimer: none of this is representative of my employer, my clients, or anyone but myself. Two cents.]
If you are trying to prepare high school students for college, take a look around at the local University for what they do with CS101.
As a side note, the University I attended taught us a complete impractical language as a learning tool, Scheme -- the bastard stepchild of Lisp. I do not remember any of it, but the point of it was to teach concepts which it was good for.
My second CS language class was C++ (replaced by Java now methinks). In terms of good OO design it was certainly lacking and was meant to translate the concepts from the first CS class to the real world.
All of the rest of the theory classes reverted to Scheme or assembly language. You could subsitute C for the assembly language part and get nearly the same effect for educational purposes.
If you are going to teach Java, please keep in mind it is more than GUI window programs or web applets. I have seen too many reviews of books on websites that complained because Java educational books and courses focused too much on the non-GUI parts. Ugh.
Lastly, I think Java is excellent in terms of teaching the fundamentals of OO programming and patterns. You'll need to decide if you're up to the task of teaching programming and OO.
-mjg
Well, mostly. It did basically index the SMB shares in the world, but it certainly didn't promote "customers" from using other peoples' shares for their own storage facility...
Perhaps one of the problems with online advertising is the fact that you can absolutely track the number of clickthroughs per impression. If a company shows a commercial during the Superbowl and sends out a mailing and receives a 10% jump in sales, do they attribute it to the direct mail campaign or to the TV viewership?
Blanket advertising without demographics can be done to build brand recognition, which seems to be what most of the online advertising is for. Product promotion using the shotgun (scattered) versus rifle (single projectile) seems to be a wasted effort. The rifle approach will always command a higher price because the marketers will know they are getting the most bang for their buck.
I know of an (offline) newspaper that tripled their ad revenue after hiring a market research firm to nail down their readership demographic. Don't be too surprised when they start doing this to web sites.
How horrible is this? Most places would've just turned the spam faucet back to full and left you wondering how it happened. I am sure at the IT level someone wrote it as I did, but by the time it got through the legal and marketing departments, it looks like the email you got. And just for reference, I have all my email prefs turned off as well and did not get this message, so it definitely isn't happening to all their users. If I had to guess, it was probably the early adopters that are getting these messages because their email choices probably changed somewhere along the way.
The article said of the approximately 200 days a worker spends at work, 47 days are spent developing new code and the other 150 are spent fixing bugs and doing testing. This gets back to the statistics about how few lines per code a person generates a year.
What would be more interesting to learn is how many those other 150 days are broken down into design, testing, and bug fixing. Working on a large project myself I would certainly agree that not enough testing is done and the brightest aren't always the same set of people doing the design.
I'm not sure if, however, all the labor shortage could be avoided by designing things in the first place. I believe the Mythical Man Month postulates that as software projects and their teams grow in size, their complexity grows disproportionately faster. Sure it is easier to design something that is small that work just as you intended. Try throwing 40 people together each doing that with a mediocre architect and I'll tell you the results aren't pretty. Even worse are the people usually put on maintenance.
Everyone should go read the Big Ball of Mud. Really. Everyone that has ever worked on a big project will be able to relate to its contents.
-mjgAll depends on the elasticity of CD pricing. I believe it goes a little something like this. A price inelastic commodity, people buy it no matter what the price. So lowering the price wouldn't increase sales that much. I believe the argument is, and I agree with it, CD prices are elastic. If you drop the price by 50%, sales will go up by more than 100%. Unfortunately, that only discusses the end pricing schema.
If I sell something for $10 that costs $1 to make, I profit $9. If I sell it for $5, I only make $4. Therefore, if I cut my price to $5, I need to sell 9/4 as many widgets as I was before to make the same amount of money.
I'm not sure CD pricing is that elastic. Maybe someone should go ask mp3.com. Their model of DAM CDs is intriguing because it removes a number of those pesky middlemen that the RIAA employs. Artists get more money; consumers get less expensive CDs. As far as I can tell, everyone good wins. Only the RIAA loses. That's a shame.