At Harrah's, CRM is so strategic that the company has won seven patents for various parts of its customer tracking systems.
One critical patent covers Harrah's method for consolidating gambling and hospitality data from its 21 properties. If someone visits Harrah's Las Vegas, then the nearby Rio, then Showboat Atlantic City -- all owned by Harrah's -- information about those activities is culled from local databases and consolidated into a central patron database. This gives Harrah's a fuller view of individual customers, Boushy said.... Any competitor that wants to consolidate data from their own multiple properties "has to come talk to us or run the risk of a lawsuit," Boushy said. "We created a strategy that others thought was nuts at the time, and [we] want to garner benefits from it."
What I find more troubling is that Harrah's was able to patent the consolidation of data among properties. Good grief, what's so unique about that? It would seem to be the logical use of data, else why would you gather it?
The suit by the company selling meditation music is obviously a big marketing ploy.
Little podunk company brinks suit against one of the most highly-trafficked sites on the 'net, 'cept to make their suit stand out, they throw in some extra marketing razzmatazz about how their music is so effective in putting people to sleep that it needs warning labels.
Yeah, right.
Why didn't they just contact Napster and tell them to add their songs to the filtering system? I wonder if even a single one of their songs is being traded...
Still, though... they are going to reap a lot of recognition out of this. Too bad they're doing it at the expense of our already-overburdened court system.
I work for a smaller company (i.e., >50 people); I wouldn't say that the educational benefits are non-existent, but they are rather slim. My employer will pay for the occasional week-long class and getting self-study materials is not a problem. However, there are no reimbursments for working on my masters degree, so I'm having to pay for my MBA totally out-of-pocket.
A larger corporation would no doubt give me a significant reimbursement on a degreed program.
I guess it all comes out in the wash, though...shopping around for a small company afforded me the opportunity to command a higher salary and more responsibiliity for my current skills set than a larger company would have given me.
What are your plans regarding Linux and desktop PowerPC systems? Currently, Apple is the only vendor of desktop PowerPC systems, but not too long ago IBM released the specs for generic motherboard based around the PowerPC (CHRP). Does IBM envision a future for CHRP-based Linux systems, or have they forfeited the desktop market to Intel?
FreeBSD is *not* the basis of MacOS X. The kernel is different and the utilities are a hodgepodge from a number of BSD distribs.
Darwin is essentially FreeBSD running on top of Mach, much the same as NextStep/OpenStep did. From Apple's website:
"The BSD portion of the Mac OS X kernel is derived from FreeBSD, a version of 4.4BSD that offers advanced networking, performance, security, and compatibility features. Specifically, the BSD layer is based on the 4.4BSD-Lite2 release from Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California at Berkeley."
Is the apple/PPC line going to be getting some of this new-IBM-technology goodness?
Pro'lly not.
IMHE (in my humble estimation), IBM could easily vault desktop-based PowerPC systems ahead of Intel and AMD within 6 months, if they so chose. They can rebuild it. They have the technology. They can make it stonger...faster... better. (que 70's TV theme music) For some reason, they choose not to.
Even though they've been at odds with MS and Intel from time to time, IBM still wants to support the Wintel hegemony on the low-end, and is trying to beat them down on the high-end. Why not erode their financial base on the low-end as well? I don't know.
My guess is that IBM is still smarting from the infamous deal made with Bill Gates two decades ago. The one that made Bill the richest man in the history of the planet and left IBM with a struggling PC business. Because Apple would be the one to benefit the most from IBM's desktop PPC line, and perhaps they don't want to risk being on the losing side of the equation again.
Arcades are simply going the way of the BBS's. For most of us, I'm sure that BBS's were our first online experience. They built local communities of computer users. Email could take a day or a week to reach the recipient, depending on how far away they were and how many hops the messages had to make. Door games were cool, because everybody played them and they were text-based; you could use your favorite macro program to give you a competitive edge in games like Trade-Wars. When you logged onto a BBS, you were a guest in someone's home. And, more often than not, the sysop's BBS was a labor of love, an expense that they probably couldn't afford if they were honest about it.
Then the internet came along, and screwed all of that up. Yes, the internet is a thousand times better than the BBS scene, though many of the charms of the BBS's have yet to be duplicated. You're not special anymore, you're just a number. Instead of being the person tying up the phone line for an hour, now you're just user x of 10,000 hits this hour. Goodbye, Smallville, hello Metropolis.
Arcades are suffering the same fate. The demand of the home gaming market has simply blown away the arcades, and it's time for the arcade to go the way of the BBS.
What he's saying is that there's no exploration in arcade games. What Time Crisis does is it allows you to duck behind something, not explore the map.
The problem with taking a game like Half-Life and turning it into an arcade game is that if you get more than 5 minutes of play per token, the arcade owner is not maximizing his profit on the machine. So, rather than have you spend lots of time going off on some time-wasting exploration, the arcade game just pushes you along the path to give you the most action and the most chance to get killed faster. Arcade games can't compete with games like Half-Life and Metal Gear Solid, nor should they try.
Governor Gray Davis belives he can solve California's energy crisis, if he can a) get all Californians to wear these shoes, and b) organize a state-wide conga line.
"HAL killed the ['2001'] crew because it had been told not to lie to them, but also to lie to them about the mission," he observes. "No one ever told HAL that killing is worse than lying. But we've told Cyc."
But have they told Cyc not to use humans as batteries?
(if you don't believe me, try using gold to buy a coke from a coke machine on an abandoned university campus in the middle of the night. it doesn't matter how much gold you have, if no one is there to exchange it)
a) Take your gold bar
b) Smash it through the front of the machine
c) Enjoy all the soda you can drink
d) When the police arrest you, offer to give the gold bar to the owner of the machine.
Are there any success stories from micropayments? Has it really been proven to be an effective business model for online magazines? There's probably a few small ones, but I'm not familiar with any big successes
OTOH, there are a number of successful sites that sell subscriptions for premium content, such as the Wall Street Journal and Consumer Reports.
Honestly...this is a free market economy. The MARKET (not "Big Media") decides who thrives and who dies. The real beauty of the internet is that anyone can launch their own word-of-mouth marketing campaign to build traffic. I mean, honestly, getting a write up on a site like Slashdot can do wonders; no doubt the traffic at Feed and Suck has spiked in the last week, and too bad for them that it was because of a story about their demise.
Actually, Feed is still hanging around, isn't it? Ok, so they've had their "Slashdot experience," will they continue to get a boost in traffic from it? More importantly, how are they changing to capture their target market?
Besides, with Dot Coms crashing to earth all around us, mostly because of poor business execution, is this really that big of a story? They're just one more Dot Com that couldn't figure out how to have fun AND make money.
Nope. There's a cap to the price because of substitution effects. For example, you can create alternative petroleum products by conversion of organic material. Or, you can get power from other sources.
The effect is still the same; you have substitute products that will at some point be cheaper and more attractive than oil; at that point, people stop buying oil and thus we never truely run out, which was my point.
I'm speaking as someone who isn't deploying any WAP apps, so this is just some observations. WAP has yet to find a "killer app," and that was the most damaging blow. There was such a great rush to bring the WWW to cell phones that it seems no one bothered to ask "Why?".
Last time I checked, 8 of the top 10 WAP sites were porn. PORN, fer cryin out loud, on a 1 bit, B&W, stamp-sized display. Wow, how hard-up for a woman do you have to be to surf WAP porn sites?
Granted, a large part of the problem is that there aren't enough WAP-enabled devices in the hands of consumers. But so far, I just don't see anything productive materializing from WAP.
I guess what it comes down to is that if you're using the MBA to complement an already kickass skill-set, then more power to you. If you're using the MBA as a cover-up of piss-poor technical skills, then i suggest finding another area to work in.
For most people who are working for someone else (i.e., not self-employed), I would imagine that the whole point of getting an MBA is to move out of the hands-on tech stuff.
After all, if you get your MBA, and you remain a staff programmer, then it really hasn't benefitted you, has it?
The local branch of the state college here has 3 electives in their MBA program focused on IT management. If all you want is to manage other programmers, it would make more sense to just sign up for a class or two, not to enroll in a degree program.
all the busted dot-coms with poor business plans were lead by legions of MBA's. And ironically, the most successful computer businesses are being run by those who never even received their undergraduate degree.
Just goes to show, there's no substitute for common sense, no matter what your educational background is.
Also goes to show that a lot of B-school grads dove head-first into the "New Economy" with hardly any understanding of the underlying technology.
he "skills" from an MBA are pretty trivial. You could pick them up from about two dozen books in less than the two years for an MBA program. A non top-tier MBA program will also teach these. You can go to the local university and learn these skills. If you want to go into business for yourself, learning accounting, etc., will be helpful.
Now, an MBA from a top program is a different animal. At those programs, you will be in the program with career executives needing the MBA for the next level, people changing careers after a reasonable degree of success, and people coming from well-known companies out of a pre-MBA job (the grunts in consulting firms, investment banking, etc).
I think that that's an unfair assessment. I work in systems administration, and I'm currently getting my MBA at a local college via night school. I find that, like my undergraduate experience, the classroom discussions are the richest part of my education right now (which is one of the major reasons why I don't think online education programs are worth very much, but that's another topic...). I'm only in my third semester, and it's pretty rewarding so far. Could I have learned it all from reading books for two years? Well, you can't exactly debate a book to help you get at a kernel of truth about a subject. Nor will a book give you the perspectives of your classmates, who come from a wide variety of industries.
I'm meeting a lot of folk who may not be senior management, but but are middle managers with ambition. Ok, so the fruitful networking opportunites aren't as abundant as they would be at an ivy-league school, but there ARE people in my class who will be CEO's, CFO's, CIO's, etc; just not as many. It's up to you to identify who the movers and shakers are and stick to them like glue.
Sure, I may not be able to command the starting salary of a Harvard grad when I finish; but then again, I' won't have to spend 15 years paying for it, either.
If want to move out of the basement and into management, and you can afford to go full-time for two years to a top-tier school, then by all means, do it. However, an MBA from a good local school and a lot of ambition will take you pretty far, too; don't sell it short.
California, for the ~34 million people living out here, is more energy efficient than the rest of the country. Our local generators are run on natural gas, not oil. Caps have been requested because 700-1500% increases in prices have less to do with supply and demand than a public utility which is required to provide power and not being able to and being gouged as it attempts to meet its commitments.
Whether it's local or imported from another state, Califonia is buying energy produced from oil. 700-1500% increases are PRECISELY because of supply and demand, because it's all relative to price. If you've ever looked at an S&D chart, the intersection of supply and demand is at the market price, and the market price is very high in CA right now. If you force businesses to sell below the market price, demand increases and supply is exhausted faster. If the government forces businesses to sell product above the market price, demand decreases and supply increases. In the end, what may sound like corporate greed to you is simply the energy companies responding to market demand . If Bush imposed a price cap, he would also have to force utilities outside of CA to sell all of their available power and bankrupt supply; the energy crisis would at that point spill out of CA and into other states.
As someone astutely pointed out on Slashdot a while back, we will never truely run out of oil, because as supply diminishes (the supply curve shifts to the right on the chart), the market price goes up accordingly to stabilize demand. As the flow of oil is reduced to a trickle, we would eventually reach a point where a barrel of oil costs $10,000 or more, thus ensuring that it becomes prohibitively expensive to exhaust it.
That's how supply and demand works, Charlie Brown...
Slashdot Mirror
Where do they get this information, I wonder? Is it publicly available somewhere? I wouldn't mind looking through that raw file.
One critical patent covers Harrah's method for consolidating gambling and hospitality data from its 21 properties. If someone visits Harrah's Las Vegas, then the nearby Rio, then Showboat Atlantic City -- all owned by Harrah's -- information about those activities is culled from local databases and consolidated into a central patron database. This gives Harrah's a fuller view of individual customers, Boushy said.... Any competitor that wants to consolidate data from their own multiple properties "has to come talk to us or run the risk of a lawsuit," Boushy said. "We created a strategy that others thought was nuts at the time, and [we] want to garner benefits from it."
What I find more troubling is that Harrah's was able to patent the consolidation of data among properties. Good grief, what's so unique about that? It would seem to be the logical use of data, else why would you gather it?
The suit by the company selling meditation music is obviously a big marketing ploy.
Little podunk company brinks suit against one of the most highly-trafficked sites on the 'net, 'cept to make their suit stand out, they throw in some extra marketing razzmatazz about how their music is so effective in putting people to sleep that it needs warning labels.
Yeah, right.
Why didn't they just contact Napster and tell them to add their songs to the filtering system? I wonder if even a single one of their songs is being traded...
Still, though... they are going to reap a lot of recognition out of this. Too bad they're doing it at the expense of our already-overburdened court system.
A larger corporation would no doubt give me a significant reimbursement on a degreed program.
I guess it all comes out in the wash, though...shopping around for a small company afforded me the opportunity to command a higher salary and more responsibiliity for my current skills set than a larger company would have given me.
What are your plans regarding Linux and desktop PowerPC systems? Currently, Apple is the only vendor of desktop PowerPC systems, but not too long ago IBM released the specs for generic motherboard based around the PowerPC (CHRP). Does IBM envision a future for CHRP-based Linux systems, or have they forfeited the desktop market to Intel?
Darwin is essentially FreeBSD running on top of Mach, much the same as NextStep/OpenStep did. From Apple's website:
"The BSD portion of the Mac OS X kernel is derived from FreeBSD, a version of 4.4BSD that offers advanced networking, performance, security, and compatibility features. Specifically, the BSD layer is based on the 4.4BSD-Lite2 release from Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California at Berkeley."
Pro'lly not.
IMHE (in my humble estimation), IBM could easily vault desktop-based PowerPC systems ahead of Intel and AMD within 6 months, if they so chose. They can rebuild it. They have the technology. They can make it stonger...faster... better. (que 70's TV theme music) For some reason, they choose not to.
Even though they've been at odds with MS and Intel from time to time, IBM still wants to support the Wintel hegemony on the low-end, and is trying to beat them down on the high-end. Why not erode their financial base on the low-end as well? I don't know.
My guess is that IBM is still smarting from the infamous deal made with Bill Gates two decades ago. The one that made Bill the richest man in the history of the planet and left IBM with a struggling PC business. Because Apple would be the one to benefit the most from IBM's desktop PPC line, and perhaps they don't want to risk being on the losing side of the equation again.
Then the internet came along, and screwed all of that up. Yes, the internet is a thousand times better than the BBS scene, though many of the charms of the BBS's have yet to be duplicated. You're not special anymore, you're just a number. Instead of being the person tying up the phone line for an hour, now you're just user x of 10,000 hits this hour. Goodbye, Smallville, hello Metropolis.
Arcades are suffering the same fate. The demand of the home gaming market has simply blown away the arcades, and it's time for the arcade to go the way of the BBS.
There's nothing quite like grabbing a joystick that's slick with kid-sweat, or walking across a sticky theater floor.... ;-)
The problem with taking a game like Half-Life and turning it into an arcade game is that if you get more than 5 minutes of play per token, the arcade owner is not maximizing his profit on the machine. So, rather than have you spend lots of time going off on some time-wasting exploration, the arcade game just pushes you along the path to give you the most action and the most chance to get killed faster. Arcade games can't compete with games like Half-Life and Metal Gear Solid, nor should they try.
Governor Gray Davis belives he can solve California's energy crisis, if he can a) get all Californians to wear these shoes, and b) organize a state-wide conga line.
But have they told Cyc not to use humans as batteries?
If you put Freenet in the same speed category as erosion and tectonic shifts, then, yes, I think you've got it...
Now if only I had some fricken power to run my computer...
a) Take your gold bar
b) Smash it through the front of the machine
c) Enjoy all the soda you can drink
d) When the police arrest you, offer to give the gold bar to the owner of the machine.
Hollywood is lost in its own little world...
OTOH, there are a number of successful sites that sell subscriptions for premium content, such as the Wall Street Journal and Consumer Reports.
Honestly...this is a free market economy. The MARKET (not "Big Media") decides who thrives and who dies. The real beauty of the internet is that anyone can launch their own word-of-mouth marketing campaign to build traffic. I mean, honestly, getting a write up on a site like Slashdot can do wonders; no doubt the traffic at Feed and Suck has spiked in the last week, and too bad for them that it was because of a story about their demise.
Actually, Feed is still hanging around, isn't it? Ok, so they've had their "Slashdot experience," will they continue to get a boost in traffic from it? More importantly, how are they changing to capture their target market?
Besides, with Dot Coms crashing to earth all around us, mostly because of poor business execution, is this really that big of a story? They're just one more Dot Com that couldn't figure out how to have fun AND make money.
The effect is still the same; you have substitute products that will at some point be cheaper and more attractive than oil; at that point, people stop buying oil and thus we never truely run out, which was my point.
Once Fred and Barney got SUV's, it was all over for Dino.
Last time I checked, 8 of the top 10 WAP sites were porn. PORN, fer cryin out loud, on a 1 bit, B&W, stamp-sized display. Wow, how hard-up for a woman do you have to be to surf WAP porn sites?
Granted, a large part of the problem is that there aren't enough WAP-enabled devices in the hands of consumers. But so far, I just don't see anything productive materializing from WAP.
For most people who are working for someone else (i.e., not self-employed), I would imagine that the whole point of getting an MBA is to move out of the hands-on tech stuff.
After all, if you get your MBA, and you remain a staff programmer, then it really hasn't benefitted you, has it?
The local branch of the state college here has 3 electives in their MBA program focused on IT management. If all you want is to manage other programmers, it would make more sense to just sign up for a class or two, not to enroll in a degree program.
Just goes to show, there's no substitute for common sense, no matter what your educational background is.
Also goes to show that a lot of B-school grads dove head-first into the "New Economy" with hardly any understanding of the underlying technology.
Now, an MBA from a top program is a different animal. At those programs, you will be in the program with career executives needing the MBA for the next level, people changing careers after a reasonable degree of success, and people coming from well-known companies out of a pre-MBA job (the grunts in consulting firms, investment banking, etc).
I think that that's an unfair assessment. I work in systems administration, and I'm currently getting my MBA at a local college via night school. I find that, like my undergraduate experience, the classroom discussions are the richest part of my education right now (which is one of the major reasons why I don't think online education programs are worth very much, but that's another topic...). I'm only in my third semester, and it's pretty rewarding so far. Could I have learned it all from reading books for two years? Well, you can't exactly debate a book to help you get at a kernel of truth about a subject. Nor will a book give you the perspectives of your classmates, who come from a wide variety of industries.
I'm meeting a lot of folk who may not be senior management, but but are middle managers with ambition. Ok, so the fruitful networking opportunites aren't as abundant as they would be at an ivy-league school, but there ARE people in my class who will be CEO's, CFO's, CIO's, etc; just not as many. It's up to you to identify who the movers and shakers are and stick to them like glue.
Sure, I may not be able to command the starting salary of a Harvard grad when I finish; but then again, I' won't have to spend 15 years paying for it, either.
If want to move out of the basement and into management, and you can afford to go full-time for two years to a top-tier school, then by all means, do it. However, an MBA from a good local school and a lot of ambition will take you pretty far, too; don't sell it short.
Whether it's local or imported from another state, Califonia is buying energy produced from oil. 700-1500% increases are PRECISELY because of supply and demand, because it's all relative to price. If you've ever looked at an S&D chart, the intersection of supply and demand is at the market price, and the market price is very high in CA right now. If you force businesses to sell below the market price, demand increases and supply is exhausted faster. If the government forces businesses to sell product above the market price, demand decreases and supply increases. In the end, what may sound like corporate greed to you is simply the energy companies responding to market demand . If Bush imposed a price cap, he would also have to force utilities outside of CA to sell all of their available power and bankrupt supply; the energy crisis would at that point spill out of CA and into other states.
As someone astutely pointed out on Slashdot a while back, we will never truely run out of oil, because as supply diminishes (the supply curve shifts to the right on the chart), the market price goes up accordingly to stabilize demand. As the flow of oil is reduced to a trickle, we would eventually reach a point where a barrel of oil costs $10,000 or more, thus ensuring that it becomes prohibitively expensive to exhaust it.
That's how supply and demand works, Charlie Brown...