I'll bet that some training would make some significant differences. The person who correctly identified the cymbal differences may have spent some time listening for the differences. Just as young musicians are given tonal training early on, if you know what to listen for, I imagine the test subjects scores would have improved.
I would also wonder how each subjects personal histories impact their preferences. I have heard that blind people tend to have more sensitive hearing, perhaps those who mostly listen to MP3s already won't be as sensitive to compression distortion.
Another slashdotted story highlighted that people are growing increasingly fond of the hiss of MP3 noise (see link below). Perhaps subjects have a unconscious bias that makes it difficult assess what is better. It would have been neat if they had run test where both were MP3s or both were lossless.
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/11/153205
I was thinking about underwater turbines. Dams have huge issues with barnacles attaching themselves to water intake pipes and to turbine blades. But if it only works on polyester.. ?
Third world roofing (assuming it's cheap, it might be better than tin)
This press release is really misleading. In the last two years, RSA only surveyed these three cities, no others. So London is the world's wireless capital when they only surveyed NYC, Paris, and London? Not really.
Besides, the gross number of wireless network doesn't tell us much. A per capita figure would have been a more useful comparison. NYC metro has 17 million people, London 8 million and Paris is at 9.6 million. It also looks like they only focused on the city's "financial hubs."
If you read further into the press release, you see this other interesting note, most networks are closed:
However, New York City remains the leader in regards to its concentration of hotspots. At 15%, New York City is well clear of London where just 5% of wireless access points were found to be hotspots. In Paris, hotspots represented 6% of all the access points we located.
From what I understand, maintaining fiber networks isn't all that hard. In many cases, it's lower maintenance than existing infrastructures.
Switching from copper to fiber is a big deal in heavy manufacturing and especially in electric plants. Most electric plants are heavily wired with copper. Problem is that copper is more prone to interference. When copper fails, it can be quite difficult to isolate the failure. Copper is also several orders of magnitude lighter (weight wise) than copper and a lot less bulky. Vendors usually quote a "50%" cost reduction from copper.
In the building trades, fiber only construction saves a good amount of space and labor. I've read that medium size office buildings can sometimes shave $300,000 off their construction costs.
I can't recall exactly, but I believe most new airplanes are being built with fiber. It's much easier to install and maintain than the copper it replaces. I remember reading years ago that some lab at MIT (I believe) developed a device to allow fiber optic cable to directly replace the copper wiring coming out of the instrument panels. I am afraid I can't remember reading if this was ever implemented.
I'm not an expert, but I think the rational for this lawsuit is rather weak. I don't know what else their town is working on, but I doubt they expect their parks and recreation staff to maintain their fiber network. They'll hire a subcontractor, probably the same people the telcos were going to hire and be done.
We should give them some credit. Dell ignored their issue until Jarvis really hammered them. I'd seen a least a dozen incidents of dell's starting fires. At least Sony admitted the problem and initiated the recall before their customers started having real issues.
Speaking of places touchscreen would be useful, I'd love to have a touchscreen in my kitchen, maybe fold up under the cabinet and pop down when I want it. I could hook it up into my home network, maybe even have a wireless keyboard option. Or perhaps even have a keyboard built into the counter - looks like ordinary counter when the keyboard is off. Press a button to activate and a back light underneath the ceramic of the counter pops on and you can see the keyboard.
Seems strange to me. They don't need to go as far as a nag screen. My parents have been using FF2 not because they don't want to upgrade, but they've never even received a notice that FF3 exists. When I click to check for updates, I'm told none are available. Maybe before they nag they could notify the least tech savvy that there is even an upgrade.
I completely agree with you. As much as I love CL, and still find use from it, there are so many sections of the site that are all but broken.
If I post into CL gigs, I get 50 responses from India and then my posts gets flagged down to legit responses can't get through.
At a certain point, any new start-up gets to a place where the original founders do not have the capabilities to grow or even sustain the business. The skill sets that make a good entrepreneur rarely translate into the skills necessary to run a 20+ person organization.
I love that CL is trying to maintain community un-monetized focus, but I think this focus is blinding them to the fact a lot is wrong on CL.
It's a good piece on some of the challenges prediction markets have: small trading populations, mostly community insiders trading on things they care/know a lot about, small stakes.
It's an interesting read!
Yes, but many 8800's have their GPS disabled. Verizon + AT&T both disable the GPS unless you fork over the $10 for their proprietary navigation systems.
More like a 10,000 fold. The slashdot community is all tech eager nerds. We probably 1% of the population but, make 10% of the purchases. Plus, we're what advertisers would call the "influential" crowd - those other's turn to for advice.
Changing the impression and attitudes of we "influencers" would be quite a challenge, assuming Best Buy's marketing people were to even to stumble upon even one intelligent decision. A campaign to reach us and those we influence over the 2-3+ years it would take to change our attitude, would probably cost them somewhere along the lines of $80 million. But that assume that they stop screwing over their customers and invest in having decently trained tech support people who don't just go in and reformat your hard drive w/o permission.
Unfortunately, the impact of these sorts of stories and any resulting behavioral change is indirect and extremely expensive and difficult to measure. Thus, best buy's executives are unlikely to understand what's going on until years of poor customer relations manifest themselves in ways that are blindingly obvious. They won't know until it's almost too late to prevent the collapse of their company, and even that idea may be wishful thinking.
As I understand it, this sounds a lot like the road that Mambo/Joomla went down. I don't remember all the details, but basically the company that controlled Mambo was also keeping close watch/pseudo-control of the project. As the community grew, the value of controlling Mambo grew, but resistance to corporate control also grew. Eventually the temptation became too much. The company tried to assert itself by changing the rules and taking over the board of Mambo. The community revolted. Mambo began to die. After all, without talented volunteers Mambo, was worthless. And so it is becoming.
So began the fork from Mambo to Joomla. Now, Joomla.org is more heavily trafficked than drupal.org. Mambo has fallen to "also ran" status. Joomla is preparing to release an entirely restructured CMS in their version 1.5. Last I heard, Mambo released a major version that was premature and buggy.
Hopefully, Sun will learn from the mistakes of others, but I wouldn't bet on it.
The author of the links doesn't really make a compelling argument. He pretty much states his opinion, but fails to offer any specific analysis to back up his claims. He talks about the numbers support his argument, but fails to offer up any such numbers. While I happen to agree with the guy, I don't know why he didn't take a few minutes to add in some numbers, rather than just penning some long opinion piece. Bla....
When referencing front page, I think he is looking for a good WYSIWYG type editor - not something that can only be used by someone who already knows how to code.
Interesting, but no mention of cost. Plus, based on the articles figures, you'd need 1.1 billion of these by 2025.
I'd guess these costs around $25,000 each, but let's just assume a modest $5,000 each. That's $5.5 trillion dollars, not including maintenance.
I think it would costs less to rebuild our energy from scratch using renewable energy resources. More generally, the figures I've seen to make major differences are in the few hundred billion dollar range.
"Unprepared" is an understatement. The article's implicit assumption is that the attitudes of customers can be contorlled the same way a Chief Marketing Officer approves every commercial and media budget.
Given the general contempt I feel most companies have for their customers, should they really be surprised that this pent-up anger is finally getting expressed? Poor little corporations getting picked on? Are they kidding? Most of the "nastiness" that really mushrooms is the direct result of some corporate gaff - a fake in-store website, denying rebates, refusing account cancellation requests, batteries that are known to catch fire but aren't recalled, etc. etc.
It's assumed that negative info online can be suppressed the same way these big companies can spam editorial departments with their PR spin. They assume they can still control the message, but that's not the case anymore. Major advertising agencies (I only recently used to work for one such agency) struggle to hold on to the ultra-profitable TV model. While their clients are mystified, most big shot advertising execs are in denial. They think they're searching for right approach for changing customer tastes or the right media mix for younger generations. While they struggle to "think out of the box," but they can't even fathom that the their one-size-fits-all business metaphors no longer apply. The nature of the game itself is changing dramatically.
Commercial competition is no longer "$X advertising + minimum customer service + cheapest product possible = profit" (or something of the sort). The whole chain, going back as far as raw materials suppliers, is coming under scrutiny by their customers like never before - if ever before - and these trends are only likely to accelerate.
While some dramatic, game changing event may yet take place - i.e. regulation of speech on the interweb - I doubt we can even see the tip of the iceberg from where we are now.
Re:This happens all the time...
on
Faking a Company
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Not quite. While Oakleys, Rolexis and other knock-offs have been manufactured for a while, this is a whole different ball game. These individuals actually lease property, negociate with suppliers and establish sales relationships in the name of NEC. They do all this under the flag of the firm's proper brand name, not some mispelling. Those are two very different scenarios.
It's kind of a neat scam. It will probably inspire con-artists everywhere to try something similar. I could just imagine someone faking Hilton. They could order a large quantity of samples from a few suppliers - and pay upfront for the samples to build trust. The scammer later says they love the product and then order 5 cargo containers from each supplier on 30 days credit terms with a forged letter of credit. And then Bam! They disappear with a few million in goods to never appear again.
This would be great if telecos were benevelent entities looking after the share interests of society, but they're not. No copetition elimenates the incentive to innovate, the incentive to drive develop cost lowering efficiencies. Of course telco's are willing to put aside their competative differences to create a high-profit monopoly on wireless.
I admit, There would still be competition in other forms and the telco's couldn't continuously raise their prices. However, I would imagine that the same telco's would also own most of those other means to get broadband.
I'm a little rusty on my business law, but isn't this overt collusion.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll bet that some training would make some significant differences. The person who correctly identified the cymbal differences may have spent some time listening for the differences. Just as young musicians are given tonal training early on, if you know what to listen for, I imagine the test subjects scores would have improved. I would also wonder how each subjects personal histories impact their preferences. I have heard that blind people tend to have more sensitive hearing, perhaps those who mostly listen to MP3s already won't be as sensitive to compression distortion. Another slashdotted story highlighted that people are growing increasingly fond of the hiss of MP3 noise (see link below). Perhaps subjects have a unconscious bias that makes it difficult assess what is better. It would have been neat if they had run test where both were MP3s or both were lossless. http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/11/153205
Wow, already past 62,000
I was thinking about underwater turbines. Dams have huge issues with barnacles attaching themselves to water intake pipes and to turbine blades. But if it only works on polyester.. ?
I got it from here: http://www.citymayors.com/statistics/largest-cities-population-125.html Maybe not the best source. It was the first thing I found that was from the last two years.
This press release is really misleading. In the last two years, RSA only surveyed these three cities, no others. So London is the world's wireless capital when they only surveyed NYC, Paris, and London? Not really.
Besides, the gross number of wireless network doesn't tell us much. A per capita figure would have been a more useful comparison. NYC metro has 17 million people, London 8 million and Paris is at 9.6 million. It also looks like they only focused on the city's "financial hubs."
If you read further into the press release, you see this other interesting note, most networks are closed:
Press Release: http://www.rsa.com/press_release.aspx?id=9725
Survey Results: http://www.rsa.com/node.aspx?id=3268
Whoops. You are correct. :)
From what I understand, maintaining fiber networks isn't all that hard. In many cases, it's lower maintenance than existing infrastructures.
Switching from copper to fiber is a big deal in heavy manufacturing and especially in electric plants. Most electric plants are heavily wired with copper. Problem is that copper is more prone to interference. When copper fails, it can be quite difficult to isolate the failure. Copper is also several orders of magnitude lighter (weight wise) than copper and a lot less bulky. Vendors usually quote a "50%" cost reduction from copper.
In the building trades, fiber only construction saves a good amount of space and labor. I've read that medium size office buildings can sometimes shave $300,000 off their construction costs.
I can't recall exactly, but I believe most new airplanes are being built with fiber. It's much easier to install and maintain than the copper it replaces. I remember reading years ago that some lab at MIT (I believe) developed a device to allow fiber optic cable to directly replace the copper wiring coming out of the instrument panels. I am afraid I can't remember reading if this was ever implemented.
I'm not an expert, but I think the rational for this lawsuit is rather weak. I don't know what else their town is working on, but I doubt they expect their parks and recreation staff to maintain their fiber network. They'll hire a subcontractor, probably the same people the telcos were going to hire and be done.
Good for them.
We should give them some credit. Dell ignored their issue until Jarvis really hammered them. I'd seen a least a dozen incidents of dell's starting fires. At least Sony admitted the problem and initiated the recall before their customers started having real issues.
What laptops were the good ones? I'd love to get your input!
Speaking of places touchscreen would be useful, I'd love to have a touchscreen in my kitchen, maybe fold up under the cabinet and pop down when I want it. I could hook it up into my home network, maybe even have a wireless keyboard option. Or perhaps even have a keyboard built into the counter - looks like ordinary counter when the keyboard is off. Press a button to activate and a back light underneath the ceramic of the counter pops on and you can see the keyboard.
We had 640 employees, 4 locations and 9 IT staff.
Seems strange to me. They don't need to go as far as a nag screen. My parents have been using FF2 not because they don't want to upgrade, but they've never even received a notice that FF3 exists. When I click to check for updates, I'm told none are available. Maybe before they nag they could notify the least tech savvy that there is even an upgrade.
I completely agree with you. As much as I love CL, and still find use from it, there are so many sections of the site that are all but broken.
If I post into CL gigs, I get 50 responses from India and then my posts gets flagged down to legit responses can't get through.
At a certain point, any new start-up gets to a place where the original founders do not have the capabilities to grow or even sustain the business. The skill sets that make a good entrepreneur rarely translate into the skills necessary to run a 20+ person organization.
I love that CL is trying to maintain community un-monetized focus, but I think this focus is blinding them to the fact a lot is wrong on CL.
"Ironically, one of the reasons that contributed to Flooz's demise in 2001 was rampant money laundering."
That's really just coincidental.
If you interested in prediction markets, check out this wired article:
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-06/st_essay
It's a good piece on some of the challenges prediction markets have: small trading populations, mostly community insiders trading on things they care/know a lot about, small stakes. It's an interesting read!
Yes, but many 8800's have their GPS disabled. Verizon + AT&T both disable the GPS unless you fork over the $10 for their proprietary navigation systems.
More like a 10,000 fold. The slashdot community is all tech eager nerds. We probably 1% of the population but, make 10% of the purchases. Plus, we're what advertisers would call the "influential" crowd - those other's turn to for advice. Changing the impression and attitudes of we "influencers" would be quite a challenge, assuming Best Buy's marketing people were to even to stumble upon even one intelligent decision. A campaign to reach us and those we influence over the 2-3+ years it would take to change our attitude, would probably cost them somewhere along the lines of $80 million. But that assume that they stop screwing over their customers and invest in having decently trained tech support people who don't just go in and reformat your hard drive w/o permission. Unfortunately, the impact of these sorts of stories and any resulting behavioral change is indirect and extremely expensive and difficult to measure. Thus, best buy's executives are unlikely to understand what's going on until years of poor customer relations manifest themselves in ways that are blindingly obvious. They won't know until it's almost too late to prevent the collapse of their company, and even that idea may be wishful thinking.
As I understand it, this sounds a lot like the road that Mambo/Joomla went down. I don't remember all the details, but basically the company that controlled Mambo was also keeping close watch/pseudo-control of the project. As the community grew, the value of controlling Mambo grew, but resistance to corporate control also grew. Eventually the temptation became too much. The company tried to assert itself by changing the rules and taking over the board of Mambo. The community revolted. Mambo began to die. After all, without talented volunteers Mambo, was worthless. And so it is becoming.
So began the fork from Mambo to Joomla. Now, Joomla.org is more heavily trafficked than drupal.org. Mambo has fallen to "also ran" status. Joomla is preparing to release an entirely restructured CMS in their version 1.5. Last I heard, Mambo released a major version that was premature and buggy.
Hopefully, Sun will learn from the mistakes of others, but I wouldn't bet on it.
The author of the links doesn't really make a compelling argument. He pretty much states his opinion, but fails to offer any specific analysis to back up his claims. He talks about the numbers support his argument, but fails to offer up any such numbers. While I happen to agree with the guy, I don't know why he didn't take a few minutes to add in some numbers, rather than just penning some long opinion piece. Bla....
"Click here to get the latest prices on Linux distributions!"
When referencing front page, I think he is looking for a good WYSIWYG type editor - not something that can only be used by someone who already knows how to code.
Interesting, but no mention of cost. Plus, based on the articles figures, you'd need 1.1 billion of these by 2025.
I'd guess these costs around $25,000 each, but let's just assume a modest $5,000 each. That's $5.5 trillion dollars, not including maintenance.
I think it would costs less to rebuild our energy from scratch using renewable energy resources. More generally, the figures I've seen to make major differences are in the few hundred billion dollar range.
I think prevention is the economical way to go.
"Unprepared" is an understatement. The article's implicit assumption is that the attitudes of customers can be contorlled the same way a Chief Marketing Officer approves every commercial and media budget. Given the general contempt I feel most companies have for their customers, should they really be surprised that this pent-up anger is finally getting expressed? Poor little corporations getting picked on? Are they kidding? Most of the "nastiness" that really mushrooms is the direct result of some corporate gaff - a fake in-store website, denying rebates, refusing account cancellation requests, batteries that are known to catch fire but aren't recalled, etc. etc. It's assumed that negative info online can be suppressed the same way these big companies can spam editorial departments with their PR spin. They assume they can still control the message, but that's not the case anymore. Major advertising agencies (I only recently used to work for one such agency) struggle to hold on to the ultra-profitable TV model. While their clients are mystified, most big shot advertising execs are in denial. They think they're searching for right approach for changing customer tastes or the right media mix for younger generations. While they struggle to "think out of the box," but they can't even fathom that the their one-size-fits-all business metaphors no longer apply. The nature of the game itself is changing dramatically. Commercial competition is no longer "$X advertising + minimum customer service + cheapest product possible = profit" (or something of the sort). The whole chain, going back as far as raw materials suppliers, is coming under scrutiny by their customers like never before - if ever before - and these trends are only likely to accelerate. While some dramatic, game changing event may yet take place - i.e. regulation of speech on the interweb - I doubt we can even see the tip of the iceberg from where we are now.
Not quite. While Oakleys, Rolexis and other knock-offs have been manufactured for a while, this is a whole different ball game. These individuals actually lease property, negociate with suppliers and establish sales relationships in the name of NEC. They do all this under the flag of the firm's proper brand name, not some mispelling. Those are two very different scenarios. It's kind of a neat scam. It will probably inspire con-artists everywhere to try something similar. I could just imagine someone faking Hilton. They could order a large quantity of samples from a few suppliers - and pay upfront for the samples to build trust. The scammer later says they love the product and then order 5 cargo containers from each supplier on 30 days credit terms with a forged letter of credit. And then Bam! They disappear with a few million in goods to never appear again.
I admit, There would still be competition in other forms and the telco's couldn't continuously raise their prices. However, I would imagine that the same telco's would also own most of those other means to get broadband.
I'm a little rusty on my business law, but isn't this overt collusion.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collusion