Since when does "providing customer with a good product" equate with a monopoly?
Google pretty much holds a monopoly in the web marketing segment for pay-per-click advertising. Most web marketing firms will only use Google because their market share is too large it would be stupid not to. The gains from moving on to #2 and #3 players are so small that Yahoo and Microsoft are only thought of if the client has deep pockets for marketing. If Google successfully can maintain the Yahoo deal, they will grab and even large chunk of market share. They are already in snowball mode, it is only a matter of time before the competitors drop out. This deal just accelerates it.
Does that mean that if I am TOO successful in the creation and marketing of my product, I have opened myself up to reprimand/repercussions from the government? Someone help me out here. I simply don't get it.
Yes. The idea is to make it possible for new players to enter the existing markets and competition from the players will benefit consumers through a variety of products and prices. Suppose you held a monopoly on a certain product or service like tires. There is nothing wrong with that. But now suppose anyone that came in and wanted to make tires to compete with you, you suddenly did something to prevent that business from operating because you know it will hurt your business. The new company inevitably fails not because they did something wrong but that you purposely changed the pieces to force them to fail. If you are able to keep this up, nobody will be able to challenge your product/service and you can basically halt all innovation and product quality and charge any price you want.
Now in practice, the legal system may not be enforcing the rules well enough that some monopolies continue to get away with abuses. But the intention is to keep the door open and enough rules in place that it is possible for a new business to compete with a monopoly.
If I make something far superior to my nearest competitor, and the entire customer base switches to my product, I've done something wrong?
No, there is nothing wrong with that. That is what all businesses aspire to attain. But once you achieve that status, a new set of rules apply which may restrict strategies you can utilize to crush your smaller competitors. Think of it as a race. Nobody has anything against the guy in front, but if we want any kind of race, we need to either make it harder for the person in front by giving him new rules so that the other players can catch up or we need to give the other players more support. You might say "that's not fair" and I say the system isn't interested in fairness for the players, but for benefits and protection for the consumers of what the players produce. If no competitor comes into the game to challenge the #1 player, then the consumers lose out because the player can just sit down and do nothing and the consumers will have no choice but to deal with it.
Can someone please explain why this is even an issue for Google?
See my first paragraph. The facade Google has put up for the general public is a good one because everyone automatically associates Google with that free [search|mail|news|etc] service. These people are not Google customers, but rather Google "viewers". Google sets up a service, gives it away for free to attract "viewers". Google then uses the "viewers" as giant advertising board for advertisers. This is the same model as any newspaper, magazine, tv show, radio station, and so on. The real question will be does Google have enough "viewer" market share to be a monopoly to on-line advertisers (probably yes) and have they used that position to prevent competitors from competing (I don't know).
As a Google shareholder, I hope the answer is no, but any lawsuit is usually a losing business proposition (unless you're a patent firm) for a company or individual because the lawyers always get paid win or lose.
They did blow the doors off the competition because they actually have engineers that get it. They were able to make an MLC based flash disk that is not only faster in every manner but has an amazing MTBF. This brings cheaper SSDs within reach. Look at how thorough the assessment of their MTBF calculations are and it really shows they paid attention to every detail.
Power supplies on that list are tested for efficiency at 20% load, 50% load, and 100% load. If they pass they get the 80 Plus efficiency rating. Newer 80 Plus ratings bronze, silver, and gold were added which have even stricter efficiency requirements.
Also sizing your power supply for your needs is critical. If your system is only going to consume 100 watts on load there's little reason why you should be buying a 600 watt power supply. If you're going to buy 4 video cards and/or 6 hard disks, then maybe. But for your standard single cpu, single video card, and one or two hard disk machine, a 400 watt power supply or maybe even less (depending on video card and cpu) might be all you need. That's because efficiency tends to drop-off under 20% of the PSU's load. So if our system consumes say 80 watts idle, then 400 watt PSU would be more efficient than a 500 watt PSU.
Another thing you should be looking at are the listed amps for each voltage line the psu can support. For example let's look at the following two PSUs at newegg:
CHIEFTEC GREEN CTP-350-12G 350W and SeaSonic SS-350ET 350W. Both are rated 80 plus so they're both efficient and both have two 12V lines. But if we look at the output specs the Chieftec has 11A and 14A for the 12V lines while the Seasonic has 17A for each 12V line. In fact, the Seasonic PSU beats the Chieftec on all output voltages except the 3.3V which it loses by only 1amp. In this case the PSUs are rated exactly the same, but I've seen cheaper high wattage models with crappier specs than PSUs rated 50 watts or even 100 watts lower. The total output wattage might be higher but if each line can't handle the fluctuations your system can crash or your PSU can fail (sometimes violently).
I've come to suspect that this in fact doesn't work at all
It may not work for you, but step back for a second and consider your background. You're knowledgeable about computers, probably a geek of some sort, and tend to be subjective of anything. Given that, this ad may not have targeted you at all. Instead, depending on the show, time, location, and where the commercial aired, will give you hint as to who they are targeting. If it was during a mid-day soap opera then they are probably targeting stay-home wives. If it was during an American football game on ESPN then they're probably targeting low to mid income men. My guess (I can't watch the commercial right now) is they are targeting the average Joe who gets his computer from Best Buy. If that's the case, this may already be a success. We'll have to see how sales of computer manufacturers like Apple, HP, Dell, etc fair after this ad campaign to see how effective it really was.
but for the type of application discussed here it is probably overkill in terms of management complexity, etc.
In ZFS, here is how you format a disk device called/dev/ad10, mount it to/storage, and have it automatically mount itself on startup:
zpool create storage/dev/ad10
In linux here's how you format a disk called/dev/sdb, mount it to/storage, and have it automatically mount itself on startup:
fdisk/dev/sdb n p (more fdisk commands etc) mke2fs -j/dev/sdb1 mkdir/storage mount/dev/sdb1/storage echo "/dev/sdb1/storage ext3 defaults 0 2" >/etc/fstab
On my FreeBSD box ZFS is probably the easiest and most intuitive set of commands to use. In addition to that, I also find it much easier to troubleshoot failing hardware. In other systems like linux, I would not know that my hardware is failing until I go back to read the data. With ZFS I can just schedule a scrub or run the scrub every week or so and check the status of my data integrity even while the file system is online and in use.
For the same reason why you can't only sell cars with black paint. Some people show up to buy a car and have wads of cash. Therefore they will purchase anything as long as it has the highest MPG because it is either perceived to be green or perceived to be a good investment. Consumers are rarely logical creatures.
Even the civic is losing it's "economy" status and gaining more of a nicer compact. The price points for civics are higher than most other compacts and even honda's own fit. Meanwhile the fit is targeted at the old hatchback market that wants a functional car at lowest cost. You see similar things in toyota/scion. Toyota's Corolla is still a small car but has grown larger over the years. Now they have a Yaris which is starting to sell really well too. Scion is all cheaper small cars of varying sizes/features just for this younger/cheaper market.
Basically each customer will come to the store with his own unique set of requirements. Based on that, he'll choose one car over another similar car because it fits him better. The trick is to provide the right number of products to ensure the customer buys something he wants and the business still makes a profit. Have too many variations and your manufacturing costs go up. Have to few, your manufacturing costs will be cheap, but your revenues and market share won't be as high as they could be because you'll have fewer customers.
Probably a gold colored box with a question mark on it.
Re:Not a bad thing.
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Advancement in technology means miniaturization, simplification.
So if we take this analogy to life forms then a bacteria is superior to a human? Does that mean the processors of today utilizing millions of transistors are less advanced than the old processors? A single cycle processor is a superior design compared to a pipelined processor? Just because something is smaller doesn't mean it is simpler. And just because something is simpler doesn't mean that it is more advanced. If that were true, bubble sort would rule the world.
The fact that new software requires more CPU cycles, more raw power, is a mark of the immaturity of software technology.
Clearly you're not a computer scientist or a mislead one. It has been proven that with a simplistic set of instructions in a turing machine, that it would be possible to write all software in existence today. The problem of course is all of the complexity moves to software rather than the hardware. For example if I need to do both addition and multiplication, and my hardware only supports addition, then I can implement multiplication in software by using the hardware addition function. However, if I have hardware that does both addition and multiplication, then I don't need to implement multiplication in software. So if I continue to use your logic, then now my software is simpler and more mature but my hardware is now immature because it is more complex?
Your simplistic definition of "miniaturization, simplification" for the advancement of technology, especially information technology, is incorrect. The complexity of doing something in software will always exist somewhere whether it be built in hardware, built as a feature of a software subsystem like the kernel, stuffed into some library, or abstracted away in a programming language and compiler/interpreter. And that will always make sense as long as you want to have the capability of doing the next N+1 function in software whether it be a concept abstraction, scientific simulation, encryption problem, or application like browsing the web. That means software "bloat" is here to stay as long as hardware resources increase and the complexity of today's technology will only increase.
Finally there is no way to "miniaturize" software within software. At some point you will be forced to implement the software function directly in hardware, but for obvious economical reasons we don't go that far because the lower the level the more expensive it gets. That's the whole reason why we have compilers, high level languages, and abstract concepts in software. But no matter what you do, you're always going to increase the complexity somewhere in the system.
I feel like this is more of a "proof of concept" that flash memory as a media can replace something like DVD or BluRay. In other words it is just an attempt by PNY to diversify their product into a new market for hopefully increased revenue.
My opinion is it is still overrated since the internet is quickly proving that you don't even need a media to play a movie. You can just stay connected to the internet and download or stream the video on demand. Just like how MP3s, itunes, and such are quickly making the Audio CD go extinct, I think the same will inevitably happen to movies.
Just because you don't use it doesn't mean the rest of the world doesn't.
Other examples: I never use the "down arrow" for the drop down URL list on the URL bar, but my dad uses it and a bunch of other people and whenever that list gets emptied out for whatever reason, he gets frustrated.
I never use the back button because I always use a mouse with a thumb button. Even if I don't have a mouse with a thumb button I use "alt+left" to go back.
I never use the "new tab" button because I always use ctrl+t.
Interface customization is an obvious point that many users will get frustrated with especially when the default interface is missing something or does not function how the user expects. Sure, in many cases the defaults are usually good enough or most of the battle. But the last part will come from customization. That's why you will see people going back to firefox and others.
Oh yeah, and the Chrome comic is another Google brain-fart. Not only is it dry as a bone for a comic, but it also doesn't adhere to the "back" "forward" buttons because each page is flipped with javascript. Anyone that thinks a "comic" should be used to convey the technical reasoning for developing a new browser needs to be shot.
The inability to win, beat the game, or just finish is the reason MMOs never interested me.
MMOs never define a "win" condition. They leave that up to you the player. But most players have misconceptions that "winning" in a video game means completing all content available in the game just because that's how the "old" video games started.
My recommendation to both players caught in an MMO treadmill and players who simply see ALL MMOs as useless are to reconsider what it means to "win" in a game. If you want to stick to the definition, "winning means completing the last level of the game" then fine. All you are asking for are PvE treadmills.
Personally I either play a game to have fun or have a challenge with other human players. Some game content might be interesting from a PvE perspective. And in those cases I might define "winning" as simply completing the last level of the game because in doing that action I might be entertained. But in most cases I define "win" as having a competitive game with other human players where the challenge and randomness of other player's actions creates a sense of fun or excitement.
If you are able to do that, the sense of "winning" and being tied to a game will no longer affect you. Instead you'll only be after the next close "fight". Of course getting to that next fight might be frustrating if you are too good or too bad for the game and the game has no good method of dividing players into appropriate skill levels.
In this example, the chance of one card failing is 20%. But we are not interested in just one card. We have two cards, therefore there are four possibilities: the first card fails, the second card fails, neither fail, or both fail. If we are interested in at least 1 card failing and the only condition that doesn't include at least one card failing is "neither fails" then we can use the property 1 - P[neither fails] to make the calculation simpler. If neither card can fail, then the probability of neither failing is 0.8 * 0.8 = 0.64 and of course 1 - 0.64 = 0.36.
If you want to go the harder way you would need to calculate the P[1st card failing but not 2nd] + P[2nd card failing but not 1st] + P[both cards failing] = P[at least one card failing]. That calculation would be: (0.2 * 0.8) + (0.8 * 0.2) + (0.2 * 0.2) = 0.36.
If that doesn't make sense then let's take a step back and say we have two coins and each coin is equally weighted so the probability of a coin landing heads or tails is exactly 1/2. If we flip one coin the probability of at least one coin being heads is therefore 1/2. If we flip two coins, the probability of at least one coin turning heads isn't that simple. There are again four possibilities: the first coin can be heads, the second coin can be heads, neither is heads, or both are heads. Therefore if each is equally likely then the probability of the first coin being heads but not the second is 1/4, the probability of the second coin being heads but not the first is 1/4, and finally the probability of both being heads is 1/4. So the probability of at least one coin being heads is 1/4 + 1/4 + 1/4 = 3/4.
Still doesn't make sense? Draw it out on a chart:
coin 1 heads | coin 2 heads | probability of outcome No 1/2 No 1/2 1/4 Yes 1/2 No 1/2 1/4 No 1/2 Yes 1/2 1/4 Yes 1/2 Yes 1/2 1/4
If that's better for you, then the chart for the graphics cards would be:
1st card fails | 2nd card fails | probability of outcome No 0.8 No 0.8 0.64 Yes 0.2 No 0.8 0.16 No 0.8 Yes 0.2 0.16 Yes 0.2 Yes 0.2 0.04
Because often the drug is a direct replacement or "solution" to the problem at hand or the problem that makes the sport or game competitive.
For example I ride a bicycle and I quickly realize that this sport is all about pain. The longer you can get your body and mind to endure the pain of pedaling, the better you will get. But if you side step that and juice yourself up to the point where the pain threshold is higher, what's the point? The point isn't to see who can pedal the fastest and longest, but to see who can pedal the fastest and longest compared to everyone else in the same constraints. In this case, the constraints that matter are your method of training. If everyone was allowed to juice themselves up then it becomes a competition of who can juice themselves up better rather than who can train themselves better.
For games there is little athletic requirements and major mind pressure (stress) requirements. So when you play a game a major factor is how well you are able to deal with the mental pressure and stress. A good deal of this is just training yourself not to get stressed when it counts and to more or less react on less important decisions so your mind can make the decisions that really count. If you're taking a drug to make you less stressed then that could be an advantage because now you've relieved yourself from a good portion of the mental pressure and all it comes down to is how well you can play the game.
But I think stress is a huge factor in games and is what makes certain games fun and exciting. I used to be a big player in DAOC and the non-zergish battles in DAOC were lightning fast. If you performed poorly you could easily be eating dirt in under 15 seconds after "hunting" for 10 or 15 minutes. The "hunting" portion is honestly boring to watch but as the player you should be somewhat elevated in your awareness. That's because some players have stealth which makes them invisible so you could start taking damage without seeing the person. Once that happens your reaction can mean the difference between losing and winning especially if your toon has no special abilities to get you out of the sticky situations. The game really boils down to a "hunting phase" where you run around trying to find someone to fight and a lightning round of a real-time battle of something like chess. One bad choice of moves/actions could easily put the enemy into checkmate or make it very hard to come back.
What I think made that game fun for the people that actually played it (like myself) was the adrenaline rush and the feeling of stress and pressure. When you won a fight that was a close fight it was mainly a victory in dealing with the pressure. Most new players aren't good at dealing with it and despite having all of the tools available to win, lose because they make a few bad decisions when it really counts. But on paper you and in the replays you can easily see what you did wrong, but in play you have tenths of a second to make the right decision. If you could remove that whole element from the competition via a drug then we'd just have people playing like robots rather than overcoming the mental battle on their own will power.
As for disabilities like eye glasses, the point of these "enhancements" is not necessarily to make you a better person than everyone else, but to get you back to the average. For other things like swimsuits and in my case a better bicycle, yes those things do make a difference but usually the playing field is level in that respect. That means everyone has the same bicycle, everyone has the same swimsuit. But the physical and mental constraints (how much you train) are still the same. So sure, you're at a disadvantage if you use a much heavier bicycle or trunks instead of the new speedos, but that's more like playing chess with one fewer piece than really being a poor competitor.
I think some games and sports should have more restrictions or divisions to allow more people to compete. A good example is basketball where height is a major advanta
Get rid of your land line and replace it with something like VOIP.
Get rid of your "cable tv" or "satellite tv" service and replace it with something like video on demand (via internet) or streaming video.
Get rid of most of your personal storage and sign up for something like amazon S3 to store your data (encrypted of course)
Don't bother saving copies of data like buying dvd disks or that p0rn collection of yours, it's easier to just re-download it.
Apps that use the internet can now actually operate fast and be developed without speed limitations in mind.
Net result: your assets for storing data are now useless (good) because the internet can store everything for you. The internet can also provide the data not only at a reasonable speed that is "good enough". Finally, you can access your data and services anywhere the internet is available (which we can almost consider "everywhere" as long as you stay within developed parts of the world).
Marketing, being a politically correct word for propaganda
Until you provide a source I will take that as your opinion. Here is what I have seen as a definition of marketing:
"Marketing is the performance of activities that seek to accomplish an organization's objectives by anticipating customer or client needs and directing a flow of need-satisfying goods and services from producer to customer or client." (Essentials of Marketing 11th edition Perreault, Cannon, McCarthy)
So sure, you could use propaganda to achieve marketing but that is really a short-sited view of marketing in general.
For these people, being able to achieve success without resorting to marketing and economic trickery is a validation of the viability of their world-view.
How? Why? Why does marketing automatically equate to "economic trickery" in your opinion? And why does this imply that their "world-view" is viable?
In other words, let's suppose I build a product or provide a service, and I decide to have zero marketing. None, zip, nothing at all. The product or service has a name, but the name implies nothing of the product's nature. How successful would such a product be? Keep in mind that things like websites, showing the product to others, and simple things like that are forms of marketing. But what I have here is essentially a product in a vault and the only person that knows of the product's existence is myself. Such products do exist but do you honestly expect people to understand that it exists without any form of marketing?
Hell, let's get real. I had such a product, it was a customized user interface for a video game which I thought to be superior in some ways to other interfaces available. Initially I had no intention of releasing the interface or allowing others to use the customized interface. That meant zero marketing for my product and I was the only user. The entire population would not know that I was using the interface and therefore nobody except myself used the product.
Eventually I did "marketing" even though I wasn't aware that it was "marketing". My friends saw my using the interface and eventually wanted to use it as well. Later I posted a video intending to focus on my game-play (not the interface) and people watching the video wanted copies of the interface. Eventually I created a website for the interface (easier to distribute) and before I knew it, a significantly large portion of the players were download and using my interface while I slept. Each of these marketing elements contributed to expand the reach and use of the product. And I'll bet you that most of those people were thankful that they had access to it than to never have had access.
Sure, I never ran an ad, or tried to put out a video convincing people that my interface was superior or that they needed it. I simply did the bare minimum in marketing gestures on "promotion" and "place" (made the interface available, and it was free) and let the product sell itself. But that is still marketing.
I will give you that some forms of marketing such as advertising are not necessarily the greatest or most appreciated and are in fact annoying. But at some point, I am sure you have come across a product that you actually liked or wanted/needed and if it hadn't been for some type of marketing then you would have never known that that product or service existed.
In fact some of these products or services may not even have been from a for-profit mega corporation, but instead from a non-profit organization like a school. All organizations that want to serve a target audience will participate in some form of marketing if they want to be successful.
The theories behind tracing optimization were pioneered by Dr. Michael Franz and Dr. Andreas Gal, research scientists at the University of California, Irvine.
Hey that's my old compilers professor and my school!
This PDF looks like the paper the article is referencing.
I know it's a tomshardware article but compared to what people have been posting in silent pc review forums the results are consistent. I do think with a better chipset and laptop style power supply the atom platform can go down to sub 20watts, but for now Intel is not making those boards or even allowing atom platforms to have fancy features like PCI-Express. In fact with the older AMD 690G chipset, some people at silent pc review were able to build sub 30watt systems.
No, never. Operator overloading is one of the worst features to be added to a typed language. I don't want to have to account for a billion different cases for the + operator because someone thinks a+b looks better than a.add(b) or that the shift operator should somehow be used for streams in addition to bits. Operators belong in the realm of reserved words that should never be redefined from their original purpose. If you are defining your own operation on your own types I expect an identifier with a well chosen name rather than yet another function tacked on to the meaning of '+' that is sorta like addition but not really.
I use Vista and I run in Vista as a normal user. I only get UAC when I install new software or go somewhere on my computer that I shouldn't be like the Windows directory and I start copying files into it. When I do get UAC I have to type the admin password to continue. Sure if I was running as an admin user I would get annoyed with it and probably turn it off, but the point is not to be an admin. So for an average day on Vista doing normal tasks (browsing web, writing documents, play videos, play games) I see the UAC window zero times just as I would see the password box zero times in ubuntu for the same tasks.
The misconception around here that UAC pops up all the time every click is really overblown thanks to Apple sponsorship, ignorance, and the usual anti-MS bias.
Yeah but I'd say the market for CDs is shrinking really fast. It's just like printing paper. Before you used to print something and expect to either have it archived or kept in some file cabinet because that was how you stored data back then. Today, print outs are disposable or even worthless as newer technologies start replacing their functions: screen projectors for meetings, emails and IM for messaging, small electronics for picture viewing. Everything these days is stored digitally in some format and the paper is just seen as the last way to get it onto a cheap display device. Publications like newspapers and magazines are getting burned really hard by this change and are adapting/diversifying to online publications instead of paper delivered ones. The only publications that are staying paper are marketing material like post cards and paper advertisements or brochures and dead tree books. But even those markets are shrinking. I know all of this because I know someone that works at the HP printing division.
So for CDs I'd say the same trend is occurring. It used to be you (everyone) used CDs to archive data. Today people think of them as disposable. Tomorrow they'll probably start thinking of them as useless. Why? Because networking technology like wireless and the internet are taking over the function of data distribution. Even thumb drives might have a run for their money once networking technologies improve. If you can start shoving 10mb down a network within a few seconds in digital form, there's almost no need for the data storage medium. We're already seeing that with smaller media like documents. For example, you don't think "i'll save this document to a disk and hand you a disk" today you say, "I'll email you a copy." There's no disk involved in that transfer of data, just the network connection and some devices at various points to make the transfer occur. Or how about that time when you had to move your document somewhere else and rather than whipping out a thumb drive you figured it would be faster to just email it to yourself and download it at work/school or wherever you need it.
So CDs are eventually going to go extinct as the CD readers get used less and less. For example look at the netbook boom (small computers without CD/DVD drives). Why it is occurring today rather than 5 or 10 years ago? Because there are plenty of alternatives to CDs: wireless networking, thumb drives and most of the applications people use today are based on the internet. So now the CD drive rarely gets used and some people actually think they don't need it. Even desktop PCs will eventually stop shipping with CD/DVD drives just as they stopped with the floppy drives. Probably the biggest thing keeping the CD alive today is the piggy backing of DVD in the same device. A CD ROM by itself is today almost useless, but a DVD ROM still will have merit for a while. But even that is changing with things like video on demand, movie downloads, and of course that bittorrent thing.
In fact I don't see why there is any reason for us not to be there today. You can already watch the olympics on the internet in much better quality than youtube on a 1mbps dsl connection. If our connections were in the 10mbps to 100mbps we'd already be reaching the "good enough" territory for most media and data distribution. At that point you make each device basically a specialized computer with an internet connection and there's little reason to have these things called disks or drives if the internet can store and distribute everything.
Too many systems still use CGI.pm when they could use Catalyst. They use some home-grown system of objects, when they could be using Moose.
I disagree with Catalyst. You need to install a boat load of libraries for Catalyst to work and they don't bundle the packages together. So when one package changes because the maintainer made an update to cpan and breaks something or the installation, whatever, catalyst installation fails. I'm not saying that catalyst is bad for having hundreds of dependencies, but rather that they need to have a better way of distributing the compatible package versions along with their current version.
Also catalyst has little or no documentation on how to get the code running in a plain CGI environment. The only environments recommended are FastCGI and mod_perl. There are still legacy systems out there that haven't gotten up to mod_perl or FastCGI or can't. Therefore you're stuck with plain CGI. In that case, you're stuck with CGI.pm doing the parsing for you.
Finally I like Moose but the author makes a point that it does add a significant amount of overhead to your application. We are stuck on old hardware therefore speed is actually precious to us. We are moving in the direction of eventually getting this system up to mod_perl and off of our current hardware platform but that is not a trivial task considering the code base and resources we're dealing with. So we attack it one step at a time with the resources we have and hope to crawl our way to the "latest" perl and cpan have to offer.
You also have to be a little careful about module use. If the module is not well documented or does not have a significant supporting user base or support history, staying away from the module might be a good idea. The last thing you want is to start using something that is bleeding edge only to find that the next best thing comes out and all development on what you started using halts.
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Since when does "providing customer with a good product" equate with a monopoly?
Google pretty much holds a monopoly in the web marketing segment for pay-per-click advertising. Most web marketing firms will only use Google because their market share is too large it would be stupid not to. The gains from moving on to #2 and #3 players are so small that Yahoo and Microsoft are only thought of if the client has deep pockets for marketing. If Google successfully can maintain the Yahoo deal, they will grab and even large chunk of market share. They are already in snowball mode, it is only a matter of time before the competitors drop out. This deal just accelerates it.
Does that mean that if I am TOO successful in the creation and marketing of my product, I have opened myself up to reprimand/repercussions from the government? Someone help me out here. I simply don't get it.
Yes. The idea is to make it possible for new players to enter the existing markets and competition from the players will benefit consumers through a variety of products and prices. Suppose you held a monopoly on a certain product or service like tires. There is nothing wrong with that. But now suppose anyone that came in and wanted to make tires to compete with you, you suddenly did something to prevent that business from operating because you know it will hurt your business. The new company inevitably fails not because they did something wrong but that you purposely changed the pieces to force them to fail. If you are able to keep this up, nobody will be able to challenge your product/service and you can basically halt all innovation and product quality and charge any price you want.
Now in practice, the legal system may not be enforcing the rules well enough that some monopolies continue to get away with abuses. But the intention is to keep the door open and enough rules in place that it is possible for a new business to compete with a monopoly.
If I make something far superior to my nearest competitor, and the entire customer base switches to my product, I've done something wrong?
No, there is nothing wrong with that. That is what all businesses aspire to attain. But once you achieve that status, a new set of rules apply which may restrict strategies you can utilize to crush your smaller competitors. Think of it as a race. Nobody has anything against the guy in front, but if we want any kind of race, we need to either make it harder for the person in front by giving him new rules so that the other players can catch up or we need to give the other players more support. You might say "that's not fair" and I say the system isn't interested in fairness for the players, but for benefits and protection for the consumers of what the players produce. If no competitor comes into the game to challenge the #1 player, then the consumers lose out because the player can just sit down and do nothing and the consumers will have no choice but to deal with it.
Can someone please explain why this is even an issue for Google?
See my first paragraph. The facade Google has put up for the general public is a good one because everyone automatically associates Google with that free [search|mail|news|etc] service. These people are not Google customers, but rather Google "viewers". Google sets up a service, gives it away for free to attract "viewers". Google then uses the "viewers" as giant advertising board for advertisers. This is the same model as any newspaper, magazine, tv show, radio station, and so on. The real question will be does Google have enough "viewer" market share to be a monopoly to on-line advertisers (probably yes) and have they used that position to prevent competitors from competing (I don't know).
As a Google shareholder, I hope the answer is no, but any lawsuit is usually a losing business proposition (unless you're a patent firm) for a company or individual because the lawyers always get paid win or lose.
They did blow the doors off the competition because they actually have engineers that get it. They were able to make an MLC based flash disk that is not only faster in every manner but has an amazing MTBF. This brings cheaper SSDs within reach. Look at how thorough the assessment of their MTBF calculations are and it really shows they paid attention to every detail.
Go here for a good list of Power Supply part numbers: http://www.80plus.org/manu/psu/psu_join.aspx
Power supplies on that list are tested for efficiency at 20% load, 50% load, and 100% load. If they pass they get the 80 Plus efficiency rating. Newer 80 Plus ratings bronze, silver, and gold were added which have even stricter efficiency requirements.
Also sizing your power supply for your needs is critical. If your system is only going to consume 100 watts on load there's little reason why you should be buying a 600 watt power supply. If you're going to buy 4 video cards and/or 6 hard disks, then maybe. But for your standard single cpu, single video card, and one or two hard disk machine, a 400 watt power supply or maybe even less (depending on video card and cpu) might be all you need. That's because efficiency tends to drop-off under 20% of the PSU's load. So if our system consumes say 80 watts idle, then 400 watt PSU would be more efficient than a 500 watt PSU.
Another thing you should be looking at are the listed amps for each voltage line the psu can support. For example let's look at the following two PSUs at newegg: CHIEFTEC GREEN CTP-350-12G 350W and SeaSonic SS-350ET 350W. Both are rated 80 plus so they're both efficient and both have two 12V lines. But if we look at the output specs the Chieftec has 11A and 14A for the 12V lines while the Seasonic has 17A for each 12V line. In fact, the Seasonic PSU beats the Chieftec on all output voltages except the 3.3V which it loses by only 1amp. In this case the PSUs are rated exactly the same, but I've seen cheaper high wattage models with crappier specs than PSUs rated 50 watts or even 100 watts lower. The total output wattage might be higher but if each line can't handle the fluctuations your system can crash or your PSU can fail (sometimes violently).
I've come to suspect that this in fact doesn't work at all
It may not work for you, but step back for a second and consider your background. You're knowledgeable about computers, probably a geek of some sort, and tend to be subjective of anything. Given that, this ad may not have targeted you at all. Instead, depending on the show, time, location, and where the commercial aired, will give you hint as to who they are targeting. If it was during a mid-day soap opera then they are probably targeting stay-home wives. If it was during an American football game on ESPN then they're probably targeting low to mid income men. My guess (I can't watch the commercial right now) is they are targeting the average Joe who gets his computer from Best Buy. If that's the case, this may already be a success. We'll have to see how sales of computer manufacturers like Apple, HP, Dell, etc fair after this ad campaign to see how effective it really was.
but for the type of application discussed here it is probably overkill in terms of management complexity, etc.
In ZFS, here is how you format a disk device called /dev/ad10, mount it to /storage, and have it automatically mount itself on startup:
In linux here's how you format a disk called /dev/sdb, mount it to /storage, and have it automatically mount itself on startup:
On my FreeBSD box ZFS is probably the easiest and most intuitive set of commands to use. In addition to that, I also find it much easier to troubleshoot failing hardware. In other systems like linux, I would not know that my hardware is failing until I go back to read the data. With ZFS I can just schedule a scrub or run the scrub every week or so and check the status of my data integrity even while the file system is online and in use.
Why not just buy a Civic or a Fit?
For the same reason why you can't only sell cars with black paint. Some people show up to buy a car and have wads of cash. Therefore they will purchase anything as long as it has the highest MPG because it is either perceived to be green or perceived to be a good investment. Consumers are rarely logical creatures.
Even the civic is losing it's "economy" status and gaining more of a nicer compact. The price points for civics are higher than most other compacts and even honda's own fit. Meanwhile the fit is targeted at the old hatchback market that wants a functional car at lowest cost. You see similar things in toyota/scion. Toyota's Corolla is still a small car but has grown larger over the years. Now they have a Yaris which is starting to sell really well too. Scion is all cheaper small cars of varying sizes/features just for this younger/cheaper market.
Basically each customer will come to the store with his own unique set of requirements. Based on that, he'll choose one car over another similar car because it fits him better. The trick is to provide the right number of products to ensure the customer buys something he wants and the business still makes a profit. Have too many variations and your manufacturing costs go up. Have to few, your manufacturing costs will be cheap, but your revenues and market share won't be as high as they could be because you'll have fewer customers.
Probably a gold colored box with a question mark on it.
Advancement in technology means miniaturization, simplification.
So if we take this analogy to life forms then a bacteria is superior to a human? Does that mean the processors of today utilizing millions of transistors are less advanced than the old processors? A single cycle processor is a superior design compared to a pipelined processor? Just because something is smaller doesn't mean it is simpler. And just because something is simpler doesn't mean that it is more advanced. If that were true, bubble sort would rule the world.
The fact that new software requires more CPU cycles, more raw power, is a mark of the immaturity of software technology.
Clearly you're not a computer scientist or a mislead one. It has been proven that with a simplistic set of instructions in a turing machine, that it would be possible to write all software in existence today. The problem of course is all of the complexity moves to software rather than the hardware. For example if I need to do both addition and multiplication, and my hardware only supports addition, then I can implement multiplication in software by using the hardware addition function. However, if I have hardware that does both addition and multiplication, then I don't need to implement multiplication in software. So if I continue to use your logic, then now my software is simpler and more mature but my hardware is now immature because it is more complex?
Your simplistic definition of "miniaturization, simplification" for the advancement of technology, especially information technology, is incorrect. The complexity of doing something in software will always exist somewhere whether it be built in hardware, built as a feature of a software subsystem like the kernel, stuffed into some library, or abstracted away in a programming language and compiler/interpreter. And that will always make sense as long as you want to have the capability of doing the next N+1 function in software whether it be a concept abstraction, scientific simulation, encryption problem, or application like browsing the web. That means software "bloat" is here to stay as long as hardware resources increase and the complexity of today's technology will only increase.
Finally there is no way to "miniaturize" software within software. At some point you will be forced to implement the software function directly in hardware, but for obvious economical reasons we don't go that far because the lower the level the more expensive it gets. That's the whole reason why we have compilers, high level languages, and abstract concepts in software. But no matter what you do, you're always going to increase the complexity somewhere in the system.
I feel like this is more of a "proof of concept" that flash memory as a media can replace something like DVD or BluRay. In other words it is just an attempt by PNY to diversify their product into a new market for hopefully increased revenue.
My opinion is it is still overrated since the internet is quickly proving that you don't even need a media to play a movie. You can just stay connected to the internet and download or stream the video on demand. Just like how MP3s, itunes, and such are quickly making the Audio CD go extinct, I think the same will inevitably happen to movies.
Just because you don't use it doesn't mean the rest of the world doesn't.
Other examples: I never use the "down arrow" for the drop down URL list on the URL bar, but my dad uses it and a bunch of other people and whenever that list gets emptied out for whatever reason, he gets frustrated.
I never use the back button because I always use a mouse with a thumb button. Even if I don't have a mouse with a thumb button I use "alt+left" to go back.
I never use the "new tab" button because I always use ctrl+t.
Interface customization is an obvious point that many users will get frustrated with especially when the default interface is missing something or does not function how the user expects. Sure, in many cases the defaults are usually good enough or most of the battle. But the last part will come from customization. That's why you will see people going back to firefox and others.
Oh yeah, and the Chrome comic is another Google brain-fart. Not only is it dry as a bone for a comic, but it also doesn't adhere to the "back" "forward" buttons because each page is flipped with javascript. Anyone that thinks a "comic" should be used to convey the technical reasoning for developing a new browser needs to be shot.
Burying an agreement to have spyware installed on your machine deep within obscure legalese is not something I'd have expected of Google
While they aren't installing spyware do you really think that the largest US web advertising firm is not spying on you?
The inability to win, beat the game, or just finish is the reason MMOs never interested me.
MMOs never define a "win" condition. They leave that up to you the player. But most players have misconceptions that "winning" in a video game means completing all content available in the game just because that's how the "old" video games started.
My recommendation to both players caught in an MMO treadmill and players who simply see ALL MMOs as useless are to reconsider what it means to "win" in a game. If you want to stick to the definition, "winning means completing the last level of the game" then fine. All you are asking for are PvE treadmills.
Personally I either play a game to have fun or have a challenge with other human players. Some game content might be interesting from a PvE perspective. And in those cases I might define "winning" as simply completing the last level of the game because in doing that action I might be entertained. But in most cases I define "win" as having a competitive game with other human players where the challenge and randomness of other player's actions creates a sense of fun or excitement.
If you are able to do that, the sense of "winning" and being tied to a game will no longer affect you. Instead you'll only be after the next close "fight". Of course getting to that next fight might be frustrating if you are too good or too bad for the game and the game has no good method of dividing players into appropriate skill levels.
In this example, the chance of one card failing is 20%. But we are not interested in just one card. We have two cards, therefore there are four possibilities: the first card fails, the second card fails, neither fail, or both fail. If we are interested in at least 1 card failing and the only condition that doesn't include at least one card failing is "neither fails" then we can use the property 1 - P[neither fails] to make the calculation simpler. If neither card can fail, then the probability of neither failing is 0.8 * 0.8 = 0.64 and of course 1 - 0.64 = 0.36.
If you want to go the harder way you would need to calculate the P[1st card failing but not 2nd] + P[2nd card failing but not 1st] + P[both cards failing] = P[at least one card failing]. That calculation would be: (0.2 * 0.8) + (0.8 * 0.2) + (0.2 * 0.2) = 0.36.
If that doesn't make sense then let's take a step back and say we have two coins and each coin is equally weighted so the probability of a coin landing heads or tails is exactly 1/2. If we flip one coin the probability of at least one coin being heads is therefore 1/2. If we flip two coins, the probability of at least one coin turning heads isn't that simple. There are again four possibilities: the first coin can be heads, the second coin can be heads, neither is heads, or both are heads. Therefore if each is equally likely then the probability of the first coin being heads but not the second is 1/4, the probability of the second coin being heads but not the first is 1/4, and finally the probability of both being heads is 1/4. So the probability of at least one coin being heads is 1/4 + 1/4 + 1/4 = 3/4.
Still doesn't make sense? Draw it out on a chart:
coin 1 heads | coin 2 heads | probability of outcome
No 1/2 No 1/2 1/4
Yes 1/2 No 1/2 1/4
No 1/2 Yes 1/2 1/4
Yes 1/2 Yes 1/2 1/4
If that's better for you, then the chart for the graphics cards would be:
1st card fails | 2nd card fails | probability of outcome
No 0.8 No 0.8 0.64
Yes 0.2 No 0.8 0.16
No 0.8 Yes 0.2 0.16
Yes 0.2 Yes 0.2 0.04
Windows Hot Dog Stand Theme
Because often the drug is a direct replacement or "solution" to the problem at hand or the problem that makes the sport or game competitive.
For example I ride a bicycle and I quickly realize that this sport is all about pain. The longer you can get your body and mind to endure the pain of pedaling, the better you will get. But if you side step that and juice yourself up to the point where the pain threshold is higher, what's the point? The point isn't to see who can pedal the fastest and longest, but to see who can pedal the fastest and longest compared to everyone else in the same constraints. In this case, the constraints that matter are your method of training. If everyone was allowed to juice themselves up then it becomes a competition of who can juice themselves up better rather than who can train themselves better.
For games there is little athletic requirements and major mind pressure (stress) requirements. So when you play a game a major factor is how well you are able to deal with the mental pressure and stress. A good deal of this is just training yourself not to get stressed when it counts and to more or less react on less important decisions so your mind can make the decisions that really count. If you're taking a drug to make you less stressed then that could be an advantage because now you've relieved yourself from a good portion of the mental pressure and all it comes down to is how well you can play the game.
But I think stress is a huge factor in games and is what makes certain games fun and exciting. I used to be a big player in DAOC and the non-zergish battles in DAOC were lightning fast. If you performed poorly you could easily be eating dirt in under 15 seconds after "hunting" for 10 or 15 minutes. The "hunting" portion is honestly boring to watch but as the player you should be somewhat elevated in your awareness. That's because some players have stealth which makes them invisible so you could start taking damage without seeing the person. Once that happens your reaction can mean the difference between losing and winning especially if your toon has no special abilities to get you out of the sticky situations. The game really boils down to a "hunting phase" where you run around trying to find someone to fight and a lightning round of a real-time battle of something like chess. One bad choice of moves/actions could easily put the enemy into checkmate or make it very hard to come back.
What I think made that game fun for the people that actually played it (like myself) was the adrenaline rush and the feeling of stress and pressure. When you won a fight that was a close fight it was mainly a victory in dealing with the pressure. Most new players aren't good at dealing with it and despite having all of the tools available to win, lose because they make a few bad decisions when it really counts. But on paper you and in the replays you can easily see what you did wrong, but in play you have tenths of a second to make the right decision. If you could remove that whole element from the competition via a drug then we'd just have people playing like robots rather than overcoming the mental battle on their own will power.
As for disabilities like eye glasses, the point of these "enhancements" is not necessarily to make you a better person than everyone else, but to get you back to the average. For other things like swimsuits and in my case a better bicycle, yes those things do make a difference but usually the playing field is level in that respect. That means everyone has the same bicycle, everyone has the same swimsuit. But the physical and mental constraints (how much you train) are still the same. So sure, you're at a disadvantage if you use a much heavier bicycle or trunks instead of the new speedos, but that's more like playing chess with one fewer piece than really being a poor competitor.
I think some games and sports should have more restrictions or divisions to allow more people to compete. A good example is basketball where height is a major advanta
Well it is called Universal Serial Bus.
Net result: your assets for storing data are now useless (good) because the internet can store everything for you. The internet can also provide the data not only at a reasonable speed that is "good enough". Finally, you can access your data and services anywhere the internet is available (which we can almost consider "everywhere" as long as you stay within developed parts of the world).
Marketing, being a politically correct word for propaganda
Until you provide a source I will take that as your opinion. Here is what I have seen as a definition of marketing:
"Marketing is the performance of activities that seek to accomplish an organization's objectives by anticipating customer or client needs and directing a flow of need-satisfying goods and services from producer to customer or client." (Essentials of Marketing 11th edition Perreault, Cannon, McCarthy)
So sure, you could use propaganda to achieve marketing but that is really a short-sited view of marketing in general.
For these people, being able to achieve success without resorting to marketing and economic trickery is a validation of the viability of their world-view.
How? Why? Why does marketing automatically equate to "economic trickery" in your opinion? And why does this imply that their "world-view" is viable?
In other words, let's suppose I build a product or provide a service, and I decide to have zero marketing. None, zip, nothing at all. The product or service has a name, but the name implies nothing of the product's nature. How successful would such a product be? Keep in mind that things like websites, showing the product to others, and simple things like that are forms of marketing. But what I have here is essentially a product in a vault and the only person that knows of the product's existence is myself. Such products do exist but do you honestly expect people to understand that it exists without any form of marketing?
Hell, let's get real. I had such a product, it was a customized user interface for a video game which I thought to be superior in some ways to other interfaces available. Initially I had no intention of releasing the interface or allowing others to use the customized interface. That meant zero marketing for my product and I was the only user. The entire population would not know that I was using the interface and therefore nobody except myself used the product.
Eventually I did "marketing" even though I wasn't aware that it was "marketing". My friends saw my using the interface and eventually wanted to use it as well. Later I posted a video intending to focus on my game-play (not the interface) and people watching the video wanted copies of the interface. Eventually I created a website for the interface (easier to distribute) and before I knew it, a significantly large portion of the players were download and using my interface while I slept. Each of these marketing elements contributed to expand the reach and use of the product. And I'll bet you that most of those people were thankful that they had access to it than to never have had access.
Sure, I never ran an ad, or tried to put out a video convincing people that my interface was superior or that they needed it. I simply did the bare minimum in marketing gestures on "promotion" and "place" (made the interface available, and it was free) and let the product sell itself. But that is still marketing.
I will give you that some forms of marketing such as advertising are not necessarily the greatest or most appreciated and are in fact annoying. But at some point, I am sure you have come across a product that you actually liked or wanted/needed and if it hadn't been for some type of marketing then you would have never known that that product or service existed.
In fact some of these products or services may not even have been from a for-profit mega corporation, but instead from a non-profit organization like a school. All organizations that want to serve a target audience will participate in some form of marketing if they want to be successful.
The theories behind tracing optimization were pioneered by Dr. Michael Franz and Dr. Andreas Gal, research scientists at the University of California, Irvine.
Hey that's my old compilers professor and my school!
This PDF looks like the paper the article is referencing.
See here
I know it's a tomshardware article but compared to what people have been posting in silent pc review forums the results are consistent. I do think with a better chipset and laptop style power supply the atom platform can go down to sub 20watts, but for now Intel is not making those boards or even allowing atom platforms to have fancy features like PCI-Express. In fact with the older AMD 690G chipset, some people at silent pc review were able to build sub 30watt systems.
Java: operator overloading
No, never. Operator overloading is one of the worst features to be added to a typed language. I don't want to have to account for a billion different cases for the + operator because someone thinks a+b looks better than a.add(b) or that the shift operator should somehow be used for streams in addition to bits. Operators belong in the realm of reserved words that should never be redefined from their original purpose. If you are defining your own operation on your own types I expect an identifier with a well chosen name rather than yet another function tacked on to the meaning of '+' that is sorta like addition but not really.
I use Vista and I run in Vista as a normal user. I only get UAC when I install new software or go somewhere on my computer that I shouldn't be like the Windows directory and I start copying files into it. When I do get UAC I have to type the admin password to continue. Sure if I was running as an admin user I would get annoyed with it and probably turn it off, but the point is not to be an admin. So for an average day on Vista doing normal tasks (browsing web, writing documents, play videos, play games) I see the UAC window zero times just as I would see the password box zero times in ubuntu for the same tasks.
The misconception around here that UAC pops up all the time every click is really overblown thanks to Apple sponsorship, ignorance, and the usual anti-MS bias.
Yeah but I'd say the market for CDs is shrinking really fast. It's just like printing paper. Before you used to print something and expect to either have it archived or kept in some file cabinet because that was how you stored data back then. Today, print outs are disposable or even worthless as newer technologies start replacing their functions: screen projectors for meetings, emails and IM for messaging, small electronics for picture viewing. Everything these days is stored digitally in some format and the paper is just seen as the last way to get it onto a cheap display device. Publications like newspapers and magazines are getting burned really hard by this change and are adapting/diversifying to online publications instead of paper delivered ones. The only publications that are staying paper are marketing material like post cards and paper advertisements or brochures and dead tree books. But even those markets are shrinking. I know all of this because I know someone that works at the HP printing division.
So for CDs I'd say the same trend is occurring. It used to be you (everyone) used CDs to archive data. Today people think of them as disposable. Tomorrow they'll probably start thinking of them as useless. Why? Because networking technology like wireless and the internet are taking over the function of data distribution. Even thumb drives might have a run for their money once networking technologies improve. If you can start shoving 10mb down a network within a few seconds in digital form, there's almost no need for the data storage medium. We're already seeing that with smaller media like documents. For example, you don't think "i'll save this document to a disk and hand you a disk" today you say, "I'll email you a copy." There's no disk involved in that transfer of data, just the network connection and some devices at various points to make the transfer occur. Or how about that time when you had to move your document somewhere else and rather than whipping out a thumb drive you figured it would be faster to just email it to yourself and download it at work/school or wherever you need it.
So CDs are eventually going to go extinct as the CD readers get used less and less. For example look at the netbook boom (small computers without CD/DVD drives). Why it is occurring today rather than 5 or 10 years ago? Because there are plenty of alternatives to CDs: wireless networking, thumb drives and most of the applications people use today are based on the internet. So now the CD drive rarely gets used and some people actually think they don't need it. Even desktop PCs will eventually stop shipping with CD/DVD drives just as they stopped with the floppy drives. Probably the biggest thing keeping the CD alive today is the piggy backing of DVD in the same device. A CD ROM by itself is today almost useless, but a DVD ROM still will have merit for a while. But even that is changing with things like video on demand, movie downloads, and of course that bittorrent thing.
In fact I don't see why there is any reason for us not to be there today. You can already watch the olympics on the internet in much better quality than youtube on a 1mbps dsl connection. If our connections were in the 10mbps to 100mbps we'd already be reaching the "good enough" territory for most media and data distribution. At that point you make each device basically a specialized computer with an internet connection and there's little reason to have these things called disks or drives if the internet can store and distribute everything.
Too many systems still use CGI.pm when they could use Catalyst. They use some home-grown system of objects, when they could be using Moose.
I disagree with Catalyst. You need to install a boat load of libraries for Catalyst to work and they don't bundle the packages together. So when one package changes because the maintainer made an update to cpan and breaks something or the installation, whatever, catalyst installation fails. I'm not saying that catalyst is bad for having hundreds of dependencies, but rather that they need to have a better way of distributing the compatible package versions along with their current version.
Also catalyst has little or no documentation on how to get the code running in a plain CGI environment. The only environments recommended are FastCGI and mod_perl. There are still legacy systems out there that haven't gotten up to mod_perl or FastCGI or can't. Therefore you're stuck with plain CGI. In that case, you're stuck with CGI.pm doing the parsing for you.
Finally I like Moose but the author makes a point that it does add a significant amount of overhead to your application. We are stuck on old hardware therefore speed is actually precious to us. We are moving in the direction of eventually getting this system up to mod_perl and off of our current hardware platform but that is not a trivial task considering the code base and resources we're dealing with. So we attack it one step at a time with the resources we have and hope to crawl our way to the "latest" perl and cpan have to offer.
You also have to be a little careful about module use. If the module is not well documented or does not have a significant supporting user base or support history, staying away from the module might be a good idea. The last thing you want is to start using something that is bleeding edge only to find that the next best thing comes out and all development on what you started using halts.
Please explain the real benefits of 95 to 98 and 2000 to XP to justify the "insightful" moderation.
If I can recall the only major change in 95 to 98 was FAT32 and in 2000 to XP the blue theme and a fast boot time for maybe the first week.