Filed under: PC, MMO

Read | Permalink | Email this | Linking Blogs | Comments

Döverim Seni :) Hepinizi Döverim ülen :) www.forumhaylaz.com

Auteur : haylazcom
Tags : döverim ülen cüneyt arkın malkoçoÄŸlu son osmanlı ottomans dünyayı kurtaran adam the man who saves world hepinizi ulen ulan dayak kick i beat you fear haylaz
Envoyé : 07 septembre 2008
Note :0.0
Votes :0

Nick Cohen / Guardian:
When Barack's berserkers lost the plot  —  My colleagues in the American liberal press had little to fear at the start of the week.  Their charismatic candidate was ahead in virtually every poll.  George W Bush was so unpopular that conservatives were scrambling around for reasons not to invite …

“Some say Google is God,” Sergey Brin once said. “Others say Google is Satan.”

The confusion about Google’s identity may not be quite that Manichean, but it does run deep. The company, which today celebrates the tenth anniversary of its incorporation, remains an enigma despite the Everest-sized pile of press coverage that has been mounded around it. People can’t even agree what industry it’s in. The many businesses that see the young company as an actual or potential competitor include software houses, advertising agencies, telephone companies, newspapers, TV networks, book publishers, movie studios, credit card processors, and Internet firms of all stripes. If your business involves information, you probably fear (and admire) Google.

The sheer breadth of Google’s influence and activity - just this past week it unveiled its own Web browser, introduced face-recognition software, and shot a satellite into orbit - can easily be interpreted as evidence that it is an entirely new kind of business, one that transcends and redefines all traditional categories. But while Google is an unusual company in many ways, when you boil down its business strategy, you find that it’s not quite as mysterious as it seems. The way Google makes money is straightforward: It brokers and publishes advertisements through digital media. More than 99 percent of its sales have come from the fees it charges advertisers for using its network to get their messages out on the Internet.

Google’s protean appearance is not a reflection of its core business. Rather, it stems from the vast number of complements to its core business. Complements are, to put it simply, any products or services that tend be consumed together. Think hot dogs and mustard, or houses and mortgages. For Google, literally everything that happens on the Internet is a complement to its main business. The more things that people and companies do online, the more ads they see and the more money Google makes. In addition, as Internet activity increases, Google collects more data on consumers’ needs and behavior and can tailor its ads more precisely, strengthening its competitive advantage and further increasing its income. As more and more products and services are delivered digitally over computer networks — entertainment, news, software programs, financial transactions — Google’s range of complements expands into ever more industry sectors. That's why cute little Google has morphed into The Omnigoogle.

Because the sales of complementary products rise in tandem, a company has a strong strategic interest in reducing the cost and expanding the availability of the complements to its core product. It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that a company would like all complements to be given away. If hot dogs became freebies, mustard sales would skyrocket. It’s this natural drive to reduce the cost of complements that, more than anything else, explains Google’s strategy. Nearly everything the company does, including building big data centers, buying optical fiber, promoting free Wi-Fi access, fighting copyright restrictions, supporting open source software, launching browsers and satellites, and giving away all sorts of Web services and data, is aimed at reducing the cost and expanding the scope of Internet use. Google wants information to be free because as the cost of information falls it makes more money.

There’s one more twist. Because the marginal cost of producing and distributing a new copy of a purely digital product is close to zero, Google not only has the desire to give away informational products; it has the economic leeway to actually do it. Those two facts — the vast breadth of Google’s complements, and the company’s ability to push the price of those complements toward zero — are what really set the company apart from other firms. Google faces far less risk in product development than the usual business does. It routinely introduces half-finished products and services as online “betas” because it knows that, even if the offerings fail to win a big share of the market, they will still tend to produce attractive returns by generating advertising revenue and producing valuable data on customer behavior. For most companies, a failed launch of a new product is very costly. For Google, in general, it’s not. Failure is cheap.

But while Google has an odd business model, it's not an unprecedented one. The company it most resembles is, ironically, its archrival, Microsoft. Just as Google controls the central money-making engine of the Internet economy (the search engine), Microsoft controlled the central money-making engine of the personal computer economy (the PC operating system). In the PC world, Microsoft had nearly as many complements as Google now has in the Internet world, and Microsoft, too, expanded into a vast number of software and other PC-related businesses - not necessarily to make money directly but to expand PC usage. Microsoft didn't take a cut of every dollar spent in the PC economy, but it took a cut of a lot of them. In the same way, Google takes a cut of many of the dollars that flow through the Net economy. The goal, then, is to keep expanding the economy.

God or Satan? When you control the economic chokepoint of a digital economy and have complements everywhere you look, it can be difficult to distinguish between when you're doing good (giving the people what they want) and when you're doing bad (squelching competition). Both Google and Microsoft have a history of explaining their expansion into new business areas by saying that they're just serving the interests of "the users." And there's usually a good deal of truth to that explanation - though it's rarely the whole truth.

Google differs from Microsoft in at least one very important way. The ends that Microsoft has pursued are commercial ends. It's been in it for the money. Google, by contrast, has a strong messianic bent. The Omnigoogle is not just out to make oodles of money; it's on a crusade - to liberate information for the masses - and is convinced of its righteousness in pursuing its cause. Depending on your point of view as you look forward to the next ten years, you'll find that either comforting or not.

This post draws on my article The Google Enigma, which was published last year in Strategy & Business.

When it comes to application and publicity, anthropologists are in a bit of a bind. On the one hand they want to be ‘applied’ (typically: implement their left-populist agenda) and ‘public’ (be found fascinating by a wide readership). At the same time, they fear collaboration with sources of power (curtailing implementation options) and don’t want their work to be considered exotic, titillating, or otherwise interesting to the public. Walking the line between accessibility and exoticism, engagement and cooptation, can be tricky.

And then there is Bella Ellwood-Clayton, sexual anthropologist. Ellwood-Clayton got written up some time ago at Antropologi.info because her work is open access. But I think the site, and her career, might take the prize as the most public, applied anthropologist that I’ve seen in quite some time.

She treks through mud and sleeps with pigs to discover traditional tattooing practices in the jungle. She writes poetry. She is multiply-orgasmic (link to PDF of a relationship column—sfw). And of course she also publishes about cell phones.

I am not quite sure what I think of Ellwood-Clayton’s website, or the way that she is spinning her career. But I have to admit that in an era when anthropologists spend more time arguing about what they can do to become relevant than becoming relevant, it is sort of refreshing to see someone hanging out their shingle in a highly… shall we say… unambivalent way. Carrie Bradshaw, move over.

ShareThis

 

People who fear a powerful atom-smashing machine, due to start operations next Wednesday, will cause Earth to be gobbled up or reduced to grey goo can rest assured, according to a study released on Friday.

(more…)

The main stream media (MSM) is all abuzz today about the lie that Governor Palin told in her acceptance speech on Wednesday evening. I thought to myself, as I read all of these accusations, "I do not recall her saying she sold the jet on e-Bay" but rather that she listed it there and sold it. But one commentator after another is writing about her lie. So I decided to go back and read her speech and find the offensive line that is being debated so heatedly.

Here is what she actually said:

"That luxury jet was over the top. I put it on eBay."

Read her words slowly. She doesn't say she sold it on eBay but that she "put it on eBay." The truth is that is exactly what she did. It did not sell on eBay so it was sold later and thus she said nothing untruthful or misleading at all. If this is how we hear speakers I fear we can never recover anything like civility in the election.

Why do I sense a desperate attempt here to try to show that Sarah Palin is a liar so that she can be discredited in this silly kind of plea?

This is why I do not trust the Internet "rumors" and the news media analysis in general. Someone ought to go back and listen to what she said and read the text itself. In the day of instant Internet accessibility it is not that hard to do.

I was also sent a You Tube copy of a short message Governor Palin gave to a Christian school that meets at First Assembly of God in Wasilla. I can see how the media will truly pounce on this when it gets circulated. I watched it very carefully. The pastor some things about the "last days" that I found rather typically off base and Governor Palin offered no response. Does this prove she is dangerous because of "last days" theology of this pastor who is not even her pastor now? (I can see a tit-for-tat going here. Obama had a pastor say some crazy things for sure so now we will try to dig out something a pastor related to Sarah Palin also said. It made me wonder what I might have said over the years that could be clipped and used against me.) There is no hard evidence I have seen that Palin is a "last days" zealot in her personal views but I would expect this will make the rounds as well since the MSM has next to no ability to discern Pentecostalism in any serious sense at all. I expect this clip will freak out a lot of non-Christians who see it.

This is based on a xanga entry I wrote three years ago... --- BTW, if you want to be a part of a collaboration channel check out www.youtube.com/user/coast2coastfive we are looking for a new member. :D -- ...i mumble a lot in this one...

Author: inanimatepers0n Keywords: inanimatepers0n xanga fear afraid thoughts rambles Added: September 6, 2008

In response to my last political post, the subject of High Road vs. Low Road was brought up. One comment suggested that I thought Obama’s was the former while McCain’s was the latter. In fact I was suggesting that both roads were tactics used by both candidates, and that I feared the election would be won and lost, as it usually is, by fighting along the low road to election day.

My current favorite reporting about road-taking comes from the St. Petersburg Times, which keeps up with both campaigns via the Politifact.com Truth-o-Meter. To each statement by each candidate and their campaigns (including emailings by candidates and parties), they sort statements into True, Mostly True, Half True, Barely True, False and Pants on Fire. Currently those3 sort out this way :

Some of the rulings are generous. For example, they found Sarah Palin’s claim that she put the state’s jet up for sale on eBay is true, even though it wasn’t sold on eBay.

As H.L. Mencken said, Looking for an honest politician is like looking for an ethical burglar. (More good quotes — all correct — here.*)

For what it’s worth, I favor Obama for two main reasons. One is that I’d rather see the country run on the ethics of empathy rather than those of fear. The other is that McCain and Palin are both warriors at heart (McCain was ready for war with Iraq right after 9/11, and Palin preached that the Iraq war was part of God’s “plan”) — and we’ve had eight bad years of that already.

I also think Obama is more likely to nominate top-notch non-ideological judges and to reform government in general. Also that he is less likely to screw up the Internet, which is the single best thing the world has going for itself. Finally, that he’ll restore the faith of the rest of the world in the sanity of the U.S. electorate and its government.

As for the economy, I think McCain understands the private sector — and the good it does — far better than Obama. If I were voting by my economically consevative and Libertarian sympathies alone, I’d favor McCain. But this election isn’t about that. This election is about throwing the old bums out and trying some new ones.

Back to the War Issue.

A few decades back Penelope Maunsell said of a former employer that “His management style was to find a problem and intensify it”. Same goes for politicians. There are exceptions, but that’s close to a rule.

I don’t doubt that John McCain is a first-rate military man. His experiences as a prisoner of war obviously strenghtened his character and equipped him with a high degree of sympathy for those suffering injustice, as well as for members of the armed forces. But John McCain shared with George W. Bush the urge to solve the problem of terrorism with the use of force, and lots of it. I don’t doubt that this response was exactly what Osama Bin Laden and other terrorist leaders were looking for.

Even if the Surge is working (and I’m inclined to agree that, on the whole, it is), that does not excuse McCain from having supported the Iraq War in the first place. That war has not only killed countless thousands (beyond the counted thousands of our own casualties), but put the country terribly in debt, weakened our military positions elsewhere, and diminished our reputation throughout the world. It was strategically wrong, in a huge way. McCain’s bad judgement on this count alone is reason enough not to elect him.

[Later...] Calvin Dodge points to RedState’s take on FactCheck.org’s take on Palin’s acceptance address.

http://www.PublicSpeakingWizard.com Free articles, tips & workshops on public speaking, conquering fear, anxiety, nervousness & stage fright, & quickly master effective expert presentation skills.

Author: pswizard33 Keywords: Public speaking training justawizard David Portney Added: September 6, 2008