It's not as nefarious as you think, but there is considerable value in tracking what you buy as a single consumer, both to you and to the store. The store would rather maximize value per consumer, than necessarily maximize sales. By maximizing sales from a smaller amount of consumers, they can potentially reduce inventory, and reduce labor, thus increasing profit for a given amount of sales. By tracking not just what was sold, but associations between goods sold, you can find out some interesting things about your demographics. That said, I don't know, and cannot tell your penis size from what you buy. Even if you buy the extra large condoms.
There is a value proposition to the customer. What you/we get as a consumer is a more targeted inventory that may contain new goods that we may find interesting. The stores get data about price/purchase behavior, and that encourages them to reduce prices on key items to get you into the store. You actually want them to care about you as a prime customer, because what they do is reduce price on high volume items that you care about, to get you in to entice you to buy other items. You don't have to buy the other items. But you will, because it will be worth it to you to avoid another trip.;-)
And yes, IAADM (I am a data miner). I just did a project like this for a major consumer goods chain.
You are incorrect, and are misinterpreting the investpedia article. The stock market, or more precisely, the issuance of stock shares for purchase, is exactly private investment. It's transferring money from individuals and other non-governmental organizations, to companies in exchange for an ownership interest in the company. It's merely a finer grained transaction than you buying the whole company. You can do the same thing without a stock exchange, but it's much more unwieldy, which is why the stock exchanges have existed for 100's of years.
Private investment is usually distinguished from public investment by governments. The source of the invested wealth is non governmental people and organizations. Public investment is funded out of taxes and other assessments.
Hm-m-m. It's a fine distinction. I'm pretty sure that the definition of ad hominum is attacking the speaker, rather than the idea, and an insult certainly seems contributory to that cause.
You've got a lot of hostility, I'm sorry to have offended you. Sounds like you've got a lot to carry.
Pot, meet kettle. Ad hominum doesn't advance your cause. Your own point was that unix has design flaws, which knowledgable users have worked on. Windows has design flaws, which knowledgable users have worked on.
Microsoft deserves every bit of scorn heaped upon them for ignoring what the rest of the computer industry had known and ignored for decades.
Fixed that for you. You yourself note that *nix community has been designing hacks and exploits, which demonstrates that *nix has it's own issues.
Jeepers, folks. It's about the freaking user. My windows servers are as safe as my Linux servers, for the same reason - I keep peoples' privileges low, and don't run unnecessary services. 15 years, NO problems. It's not that hard.
Except that you'd have to evaluate whether these are cumulative. Not saying they are, but does ME also have the holes that are shown for XP Home, but is simply not evaluated anymore? Does XP pro cure the ills of 2000 pro, and just have new, different holes?
I'm not any of this gets us anywhere, but I'm always suspicious of simple counts.
Ah, that makes sense, and is consistent with our planning. But won't that be using paging, rather than process swapping?
We actually have relatively low query processing requirements for traditional reporting style needs. The DW's primary purpose is for accumulating and constructing datamining source data, which will be processed outside of the database.
To your point, what is the size of the largest thing that needs to get swapped out? If your largest process was 700MB before you went to 8GB, does it grow when you increase the space?
I run some processes that will grow to available assigned memory (Xmx=14000mb on one machine), so I think I need larger swap. Yours might not.
Now, that said, my machines rarely swap, because they're used to run one big data mining job, and we want that job to more or less own the machine while it's running. So I will confess that I really don't have a fricking clue whether the 32GB of swap I have configured matters.
I don't think that's right. Value, or at least utility, exists before the market comes into the picture. What the market does is create a mechanism for comparative value, ie,. this six pack of beer is worth that much of my work time (as measured in wages).
It's possible that the issue was ignored because it was caused by poor USB implementations. I'd guess that you are right. I have a bunch of older HP machines that I have been running under Linux since Fedora Core 2 without USB problems. These machines are about 5 years old now.
You make the same mistake that many do: the stock market is not about growth.
Look into IBM's capitalization over the past 30 years. Or Exxon's, or GE's, or Intel's, or Microsoft's. Look at their headcount, their inflation adjusted sales.
What I think you mean is that the historical returns from the stock market, widely ascribed to be about 10% on average include dividends, which is a true statement.
Yeah, and the labor theory of value is easily falsified. Take two programmers, one capable, one not so capable. They both work on a piece of code for 10 hours. The capable programmer's code works and is maintainable. The boffo prog's code doesn't work and will be difficult to maintain.
The labor theory of value holds that their work is of equal worth. What do you think?
The contrasting theory of value is based on utility. Worth is measured by whomever consumes the product, and that person alone, by whatever matters to them. This explains the I-phone I am Rich app we saw a few weeks back.
Once the supply of fresh money stops, the stock value can only rise artificially. So sooner or later a stock market has to crash.
I'm not an economist, so I'm asking: really?
I thought the whole idea of capitalism is that labor creates value. As long as the amount of labor is increasing, shouldn't the value continue increasing?
Actually, it's more that if one saves produced output, whether that output is the product of labor or capital, one can increase one's productive capacity over time, increasing the potential for real income over time. The money supply is a lubricant for this happening, but is not the sole driver.
As regards stocks, a company's stock can go up, indeed, all companies' stocks can go up, if their real income prospects go up. That is, if they invest in production capacity that is successful in producing goods that people want to buy. Money is primarily relevant in allowing the flow of transactions. A shortage of money can contribute to a price drop in the flow of goods, of which stocks are one, because you need a medium of exchange. The nominal value of the medium of exchange will fluctuate to a level where the amount of the currency is sufficient to allow the transaction flow. So a shortage of money can cause stock prices to fall, just like any other good, and an exces of money can cause stock prices to inflate, just like any other good. Changes in the money supply aren't just going to affect stocks, though. It will affect the general price level, of all goods and services, including the price of labor.
but a lot of people will trust the cloud to have its own redundancy system to protect their data
Which it probably will have at some point in the development of the products/market. Amazon was pretty clear in their TOS about how much resilience to expect when I last looked. If there is a market for higher resilience, I suspect that it will become available. In the meantime, we've experimented with EC2, and could see using it for a shortterm extension of capacity. I don't know that I'd sleep well running a transaction processing business through it for a long time. But for the short term. it handles a lot for a little money.
oh and BTW, the windshield is necessary to allow a human driver to continue breathing at today's highway speeds. it's very hard to properly exhale at 50-60 mph.
Hm-m-m-m. I've never noticed this on my motorcycle, at speeds of 80-100+mph.
False assumption - that welfare recipients are the core of drug use in the USA. The vast majority of drug use, particularly pot, is done by people who have jobs.
At least with Meth we can lock up users and stand a chance of forcing them into a rehabilitation program. Same with cocaine and heroin.
Which is working so well currently.
One thing people lose sight of. Heroin and amphetamines did not become big social problems -until- they were prohibited. When they were legal, people were addicted, but their addiction was treated as a medical issue. Heroin/morphine addicts in particular led generally healthy and productive lives. Amphetamines were available over the counter until I believe 1938, and were easily available via prescription through the 60's. During this time, we didn't see the problems we see today. Many people who study the issue believe that prohibition itself is the primary cause of the harm we see now.
It would take a long time to unravel the illicit-tax-exempt unlicensed dealer structure
I suspect that would be close to instant, because the prohibition profits would disappear. With pot, at least, once everyone starts growing their own, or are able to get it from the 7/11, why are the grow houses going to continue?
The revenue from illegal drugs is probably in the range of 10-30 billion, is my guess. To get this, I'm guessing we have 20 million regular drug users (~7% of the population), who consume on average $500/year in illegal substances. That would put us at $10B a year. Considering that legalized prices would drop, but usage would probably climb, I suspect that the revenue would remain in that range. Taxes from this would be a drop in the bucket.
The big money from legalization would be from reduced enforcement and incarceration costs, which are currently running about $40B/year across the US.
Slashdot Mirror
Any volunteers for thong inspection?
Me, me, me!!!
It's not as nefarious as you think, but there is considerable value in tracking what you buy as a single consumer, both to you and to the store. The store would rather maximize value per consumer, than necessarily maximize sales. By maximizing sales from a smaller amount of consumers, they can potentially reduce inventory, and reduce labor, thus increasing profit for a given amount of sales. By tracking not just what was sold, but associations between goods sold, you can find out some interesting things about your demographics. That said, I don't know, and cannot tell your penis size from what you buy. Even if you buy the extra large condoms.
There is a value proposition to the customer. What you/we get as a consumer is a more targeted inventory that may contain new goods that we may find interesting. The stores get data about price/purchase behavior, and that encourages them to reduce prices on key items to get you into the store. You actually want them to care about you as a prime customer, because what they do is reduce price on high volume items that you care about, to get you in to entice you to buy other items. You don't have to buy the other items. But you will, because it will be worth it to you to avoid another trip. ;-)
And yes, IAADM (I am a data miner). I just did a project like this for a major consumer goods chain.
You are incorrect, and are misinterpreting the investpedia article. The stock market, or more precisely, the issuance of stock shares for purchase, is exactly private investment. It's transferring money from individuals and other non-governmental organizations, to companies in exchange for an ownership interest in the company. It's merely a finer grained transaction than you buying the whole company. You can do the same thing without a stock exchange, but it's much more unwieldy, which is why the stock exchanges have existed for 100's of years.
Private investment is usually distinguished from public investment by governments. The source of the invested wealth is non governmental people and organizations. Public investment is funded out of taxes and other assessments.
Hm-m-m. It's a fine distinction. I'm pretty sure that the definition of ad hominum is attacking the speaker, rather than the idea, and an insult certainly seems contributory to that cause.
You've got a lot of hostility, I'm sorry to have offended you. Sounds like you've got a lot to carry.
Pot, meet kettle. Ad hominum doesn't advance your cause. Your own point was that unix has design flaws, which knowledgable users have worked on. Windows has design flaws, which knowledgable users have worked on.
Microsoft deserves every bit of scorn heaped upon them for ignoring what the rest of the computer industry had known and ignored for decades.
Fixed that for you. You yourself note that *nix community has been designing hacks and exploits, which demonstrates that *nix has it's own issues.
Jeepers, folks. It's about the freaking user. My windows servers are as safe as my Linux servers, for the same reason - I keep peoples' privileges low, and don't run unnecessary services. 15 years, NO problems. It's not that hard.
Hm-m-m. So if Firefox on my windows box is exploited, Linux should be blamed? Maybe this should be attributed to the actual problem, firefox...
Except that you'd have to evaluate whether these are cumulative. Not saying they are, but does ME also have the holes that are shown for XP Home, but is simply not evaluated anymore? Does XP pro cure the ills of 2000 pro, and just have new, different holes?
I'm not any of this gets us anywhere, but I'm always suspicious of simple counts.
I thought it was, "can you roll a tight one?"
Ah, that makes sense, and is consistent with our planning. But won't that be using paging, rather than process swapping?
We actually have relatively low query processing requirements for traditional reporting style needs. The DW's primary purpose is for accumulating and constructing datamining source data, which will be processed outside of the database.
There are only a few applications that actually benefit from swapping (large datawarehouses come to mind)
I'm curious as to why you say that. I ask because I'm tasked with building a new DW running on postgres/linux. Is there anything I should know?
To your point, what is the size of the largest thing that needs to get swapped out? If your largest process was 700MB before you went to 8GB, does it grow when you increase the space?
I run some processes that will grow to available assigned memory (Xmx=14000mb on one machine), so I think I need larger swap. Yours might not.
Now, that said, my machines rarely swap, because they're used to run one big data mining job, and we want that job to more or less own the machine while it's running. So I will confess that I really don't have a fricking clue whether the 32GB of swap I have configured matters.
I don't think that's right. Value, or at least utility, exists before the market comes into the picture. What the market does is create a mechanism for comparative value, ie,. this six pack of beer is worth that much of my work time (as measured in wages).
It's possible that the issue was ignored because it was caused by poor USB implementations.
I'd guess that you are right. I have a bunch of older HP machines that I have been running under Linux since Fedora Core 2 without USB problems. These machines are about 5 years old now.
You make the same mistake that many do: the stock market is not about growth.
Look into IBM's capitalization over the past 30 years. Or Exxon's, or GE's, or Intel's, or Microsoft's. Look at their headcount, their inflation adjusted sales.
What I think you mean is that the historical returns from the stock market, widely ascribed to be about 10% on average include dividends, which is a true statement.
Yeah, and the labor theory of value is easily falsified. Take two programmers, one capable, one not so capable. They both work on a piece of code for 10 hours. The capable programmer's code works and is maintainable. The boffo prog's code doesn't work and will be difficult to maintain.
The labor theory of value holds that their work is of equal worth. What do you think?
The contrasting theory of value is based on utility. Worth is measured by whomever consumes the product, and that person alone, by whatever matters to them. This explains the I-phone I am Rich app we saw a few weeks back.
I'm not an economist, so I'm asking: really?
I thought the whole idea of capitalism is that labor creates value. As long as the amount of labor is increasing, shouldn't the value continue increasing?
Actually, it's more that if one saves produced output, whether that output is the product of labor or capital, one can increase one's productive capacity over time, increasing the potential for real income over time. The money supply is a lubricant for this happening, but is not the sole driver.
As regards stocks, a company's stock can go up, indeed, all companies' stocks can go up, if their real income prospects go up. That is, if they invest in production capacity that is successful in producing goods that people want to buy. Money is primarily relevant in allowing the flow of transactions. A shortage of money can contribute to a price drop in the flow of goods, of which stocks are one, because you need a medium of exchange. The nominal value of the medium of exchange will fluctuate to a level where the amount of the currency is sufficient to allow the transaction flow. So a shortage of money can cause stock prices to fall, just like any other good, and an exces of money can cause stock prices to inflate, just like any other good. Changes in the money supply aren't just going to affect stocks, though. It will affect the general price level, of all goods and services, including the price of labor.
Yes, I am an economist, though not a pro.
but a lot of people will trust the cloud to have its own redundancy system to protect their data
Which it probably will have at some point in the development of the products/market. Amazon was pretty clear in their TOS about how much resilience to expect when I last looked. If there is a market for higher resilience, I suspect that it will become available. In the meantime, we've experimented with EC2, and could see using it for a shortterm extension of capacity. I don't know that I'd sleep well running a transaction processing business through it for a long time. But for the short term. it handles a lot for a little money.
Machines CAN NEVER BE AS GOOD AS THE ONES THAT PROGRAM THEM.
My mother has been saying this about me for years.
oh and BTW, the windshield is necessary to allow a human driver to continue breathing at today's highway speeds. it's very hard to properly exhale at 50-60 mph.
Hm-m-m-m. I've never noticed this on my motorcycle, at speeds of 80-100+mph.
False assumption - that welfare recipients are the core of drug use in the USA. The vast majority of drug use, particularly pot, is done by people who have jobs.
At least with Meth we can lock up users and stand a chance of forcing them into a rehabilitation program. Same with cocaine and heroin.
Which is working so well currently.
One thing people lose sight of. Heroin and amphetamines did not become big social problems -until- they were prohibited. When they were legal, people were addicted, but their addiction was treated as a medical issue. Heroin/morphine addicts in particular led generally healthy and productive lives. Amphetamines were available over the counter until I believe 1938, and were easily available via prescription through the 60's. During this time, we didn't see the problems we see today. Many people who study the issue believe that prohibition itself is the primary cause of the harm we see now.
For some interesting reading, see this.
It would take a long time to unravel the illicit-tax-exempt unlicensed dealer structure
I suspect that would be close to instant, because the prohibition profits would disappear. With pot, at least, once everyone starts growing their own, or are able to get it from the 7/11, why are the grow houses going to continue?
The revenue from illegal drugs is probably in the range of 10-30 billion, is my guess. To get this, I'm guessing we have 20 million regular drug users (~7% of the population), who consume on average $500/year in illegal substances. That would put us at $10B a year. Considering that legalized prices would drop, but usage would probably climb, I suspect that the revenue would remain in that range. Taxes from this would be a drop in the bucket.
The big money from legalization would be from reduced enforcement and incarceration costs, which are currently running about $40B/year across the US.
Hm-m-m. Tin foil hat tight tonight?