Those ambiguities make no difference to the answer. Answering 4.5 just means you forgot that starting a count from 0 gives a different total than starting from 1.
If you're using the set of integers, then [1,9) is equivalent to [1,8]; and that would have a different answer from 5 for "what the center is"; so, it does affect the answer.
... I was using that nomenclature for the short hand of "inclusive/exclusive". 1 to 9 exclusive is 1 to 8 in the integer set. Sorry for the lack of clarity. Perhaps now we can get to my original point?
I smell fear. I am not a Microsoft fan-boy... far from it, but I have been wondering for years if Microsoft is ever going to drop the hammer and get some control on their software distribution by designing hardware with the intention of allowing the software to run as intended.
For many years I watched the bloatware that totally ruined the user experience, especially at the turn of the century.
Can Microsoft make quality hardware to compliment their software and in turn make their software feel "better" to the many of those who have turned away from it? They have the capital to figure it out.
The only "huge negative impact" that I can see from this is pushing the hardware manufacturers to innovate harder and do better with the use and distribution of the software. It is going to thin the herd for sure. I think this is necessary for Microsoft to gain some control over the user experience.
Yes, resellers and hardware manufacturers helped make Microsoft the huge corporation it is today, but the time has come. I think Microsoft only has to gain from this--if they do the hardware right.
>The only "huge negative impact" that I can see from this is pushing the hardware manufacturers to innovate harder and do better with the use and distribution of the software.
MS can't have it both ways unless they want to become Apple. You can't ask an OEM to innovate and take most of their profits away in a race to the bottom market. It's simply not fair.
MS is going to have to make a choice in the future of who they want to become. They can't slam Google a year ago for what they are doing now.
I'm not sure how MS can find a way out but they had better do so soon because the future is being decided during MS's conflicted beliefs and the risk is greater than just losing Windows dominance.
MS can't have it both ways unless they want to become Apple. You can't ask an OEM to innovate and take most of their profits away in a race to the bottom market. It's simply not fair.
Why not, exactly? As long as it increases Microsoft's profits, what prevents them from doing this?
MS is doing the opposite of a race to the bottom. They are raising the bar. Your product must this good to enter the market. Make something better than the Surface and sell it for a 20% margin, instead of the 0.2% margin the current crap makes.
If the Surface is like the Xbox, Microsoft has a problem. The Xbox did cost billions and took years until it made a profit. When the Surface costs billions for years and at the same time Microsoft pisses off the hardware producers they will focus on Ubuntu/Android/ChromeOS devices. This would hurt the big cash cow Windows licenses and make Microsoft weaker than ever.
Xbox did lose Microsoft billion(s) and take years to become profitable. But now it is profitable and one of their key products. They could lose billions on the Surface but they can also afford to lose billions. They have lost billions on terrible acquisitions in the last decade. I think it is better to spend the money on products that could help them be competitive.
The Xbox 360 also had significant hardware problems that weren't alleviated until price did not become an issue for MS which is how it's always been on consoles.
Linux/Android/Chromium are not economically viable alternatives to Windows for hardware manufacturers on a large enough scale.
On the consumer side it's "Not only is it not a Mac, it doesn't even come with Windows."
On the commercial side it's, "Can it run Excel" - some things never change and Visicalc is still the killer application, so to speak.
It is, in my opinion, a mistake to expect corporations to operate on the principles which drive persons. So long as Windows remains a profitable operating system for Acer, Acer will continue to install it. And that will continue to be the case unless Best Buy starts hiring Linux gurus for its sales floor.
That's an entirely different level though. A game console is a far different beast (with arguably a different customer base with wildly different expectations) than a general purpose computer.
As it stands, the only company to have been successful in the consumer sector with that formula has been Apple. It'll be interesting to see if Microsoft can pull it off.
>I have been wondering for years if Microsoft is ever going to drop the hammer and get some control on their software distribution by designing hardware with the intention of allowing the software to run as intended.
But they did not have to decide to make their own hardware: they could have imposed controls on bloatware as a condition of OEM's licensing Windows.
If your math is right, then yes I think anyone would agree that the mind share of each active user on FB is worth even more than $100 bucks.
But, the problem is they have not proven they can monetize those users efficiently and effectively yet.
I remember when everyone questioned how Google was going to monetize on their traffic and they figured it out and hopefully FB will too.
The one interesting thing that is a big difference between Google and FB though is that Google had "traffic" and FB has a group of people hanging out so to speak. You would think that FB has the better potential to maximize monetization of customers, but how remains to be seen.
I wish we could get this on the East Coast. D.C. -> Philadelphia -> NYC -> Boston
I would easily pay $1000 to $1500 a month.
It would as affordable as an Amtrak pass and just as convenient.
The possibilities for those who don't want to move to another city for work but want to broaden their options (or course if your salary range allows--but if you are making 100k or more it is brilliant).
D.C. to Philly is 140 miles. Philly to NYC is 90 miles. NYC to Boston is 220 miles. Is it really necessary to spend $1000-$1500 a month to go that short of a distance? There's 50 year old technology that went into commercial use before man stepped foot on the moon. This is insane.
At some point America is going to realize that it needs a 21st century infrastructure. It's going to cost a lot more in 20-30 years, of course.
For some reason Amtrak is by far the least subsidized form of transport in the US. If cars had so little subsidy gas tax would be 3 dollars a gallon to cover road construction, maintenance, and parking lots etc. Airplanes are less subsidized, but you would still see an extra 20-40% added to the ticket price.
It might not be rational, but we pay a lot more in taxes to make it seem like traveling is far less expensive than it actually is.
You're completely wrong about Federal highway spending: 90+% is funded by gas taxes and other user fee-like sources. In contrast, Amtrak is hugely subsidized on a passenger-miles basis.
Several states impose a fuel tax that's below their sales tax limit. They still need to pay for road maintenance.
"U.S. annual gasoline consumption is 140 billion gallons and growing." The federal tax is 18.4 cents per gallon that's 25.76 billion a year but you need to subtract out the oil company subsidy's, NHTSA's billion a year for safety, federal reconstruction aid after a disaster etc, and not just the new federal construction costs.
While 'free parking' is available in large sections of the country it still takes land and someone needs to maintain it. However, it's vary unusual for federal, state, or local governments to pay for such parking as part of a gas tax, it's generally taken from the budget of the agency providing that parking space.
You are very, very wrong, because not only are you not accounting for state fuel taxes, but toll roads, AND, the extra fees paid by truckers and other commercial vehicles. However I am not goint to write a dissertation for your sole benefit - suffice it to say, that each 18 wheeler you see, is a source of over $25K per year in taxes. Yes, over $2000 per month.
18 wheeler's do significantly more damage than cars or bridges to road surfaces. I could go into it, but I don't think you want to hear that the average 18 wheeler does more than 2k a month in damage to road surfaces. (It's vary weight and speed dependent, but when you look at the average it's well over 2k a month. http://archive.gao.gov/f0302/109884.pdf basically road damage from one 18-wheeler is equivalent to 9600 cars.)
Anyway, I responded to someone making a very specific claim about federal spending so I responded to that, state spending is a far more complex issue so here are some numbers:
Do you really think Alaska magically get's by on 8 cents a gallon or are the diverting funds for somewhere else to pay for roads? They don't have a sales tax so the math is easy on that one.
But, now let's look at Wyoming it has a nice 4% general tax on everything and charges 14 cents a gallon for gas. Let's say gas is around 3.25 a gallon before taxes and at 4% would wait for it be 13 cents. Do you think that single extra cent is going to pay to maintain all their roads? Because if the tax was 12 cents a gallon clearly they would be subsidizing that relative to you buying say cheeseburgers and they don't exactly have a lot of toll roads. Then again, if they spent close to the same percentage on road maintenance as people did on gas then the numbers would work out just fine. But wait for it, they don't.
That's almost exactly the distance between Shinjuku (Tokyo) and Sendai, Japan. $40 cheaper + an hour faster by train. I think that's the alternative. High speed rail.
If you happen to live by Omiya's station (about 30mi closer to Sendai), you'd be there in under 2 hours.
There aren't tens of millions of people living in the Channel blocking the path the train needs to take; digging the Channel tunnel was simple compared to putting straight rail lines between Boston, NYC, Philly, and DC.
Boston's Big Dig project was an incredibly expensive tunnel project. I'm not sure how much of the cost overrun was due to the terrain they were digging through. I think it'll be a long time before another major tunnel project will be approved though.
NYC always has several big tunnel projects going on. The problem here is the very hard granite and the depth of existing infrastructure. New tunnels have to be very deep. At the moment I believe there is a large east-side subway project and a water main project. There was supposed to be a new west side tunnel for Amtrak and NJ Transit trains coming into Penn Station from NJ, but unfortunately NJ's ahole governor killed the project.
I'm not familiar with tunnelling projects in Philly and DC, or the areas between them. I suspect the terrain is a lot more varied than below the Channel though. It'd be challenging to tunnel the whole way.
Just to build on this a bit, the Channel Tunnel's current location was chosen because this way nearly its entire length runs through continuous chalk, which is incredibly easy (especially compared to granite, or wet silt) to tunnel through. It's soft enough to cut through without too much problem, but it's still rigid and dry enough that you don't have to worry too much about collapses.
The fun part is that it's now finally this fast after a lot of hurt British pride when the trains used to have to break when reaching the British side, because the tracks were of too poor quality compared to on the French side. It's taken years for them to upgrade the British side (and moving the terminal to another station where the trains could make am ore direct approach instead of going in a large semi-circle on crappy, congested suburban lines) to let the trains run at full speed.
Taking into account travel time to and from the airports, plus time spent in security, you might be looking at longer than 3.5 hours.
Still, travel along the Northeast corridor would be a lot cheaper if those fares didn't have to subside ridiculous cross-country routes. A one-way ticket from New York to Los Angeles (changing trains in Chicago) costs $266 and takes 62 hours, not including the 5 hour layover. Why are these trains still running?
There are relatively few people that take the cross-country trains end-to-end, and a lot of people that get on or off at some little town along the way. For many of the more rural parts of the country, this is their primary access to long-distance travel. (This is especially true since the various phases of airline deregulation have increasingly caused smaller airports to close.)
There are also strong network effects in play. NYP to BOS is great if you're just going from NYP to BOS. But if you're going from NYP up to Portland, or BOS to Trenton or Pittsburgh or something, the cheap NYP-BOS connection is useless to you unless there are also not-extremely-expensive links from NYP or BOS to your actual endpoints. Part of what makes NYP-BOS so cost-effective as a route is that it's also fed by other lines that A) exist and B) aren't prohibitively expensive.
A political reason is that the keep-Amtrak-alive coalition is basically a mixture of urban transit advocates and representatives from rural areas who want to keep their town's train stop. A system that only served the major cities wouldn't have broad enough support, especially if it were only the major coastal cities (e.g. if you cut the Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, etc. services).
How overbooked does Amtrak get? Maybe Amtrak should be selling subscriptions. Or bulk discounts, but the passes are per person and expire end of the month.
"So, will this model work? That’s a big question. They had originally planned to launch it on the East Coast but quickly realized, with the train service there, it wasn’t a great market."
Kind of funny. We don't even have high-speed rail in this country yet. The distance between LA and San Francisco is less than 400 miles. Someday it'll be a 2 hour train trip, but it's looking like it'll be another 100 years at this point.
I'm in favor of better quality rail service in this country but for various reasons it's not simple.
Acquiring land already developed on to get lines in and out of larger cities isn't simple, and building underground routes like the "Chunnel" to get out of city centers isn't cheap.
And, I agree, there is a cultural perspective of rail travel that changed dramatically once it became affordable for so many to own a car.
Very well done. It would be interesting to have the ability to click on one of the reports and get details--something I'm sure you would have done if it was available or possible.
Toggling each type on/off might be interesting as well.
I was immediately curious if there is a cluster of bicyclist fatalities anywhere. I clicked on the icons in the key expecting to change the visibility of each category, but that did nothing.
It was exciting. Yup, I sound like a complete dork, but for someone who just doesn't have the ability to pick up coding like he used to, this was great. A few explanations in the tutorial confused me from a complete novice standpoint, but I am really looking forward to the "Blog in 30 minutes"! Glad I signed up, and if I'm your target "customer" then feel free to email me if you want feedback, etc. I'd like to see something exactly like this for Objective C and developing iPhone apps.
"The buying and selling of stock by corporate insiders who have access to non-public information that could affect the stock price can be a criminal offense, just ask hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam who recently got 11 years in prison for doing it. But, congressional lawmakers have no corporate responsibilities and have long been considered exempt from insider trading laws, even though they have daily access to non-public information and plenty of opportunities to trade on it."
I'd love one :-) but there are tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of kids that could benefit from devices like these. I have no medical training, but the benefits seem obvious. Someone with some ambition would do well to track down the man that invented this and figure out a way to commercialize them. Physiotherapists are buying treadmills right now - I can't imagine that it would take much to validate these as a replacement.
Yes, I am aware of the alternatives though I haven't looked in a long time. I have always found customization a real pain without advanced PHP knowledge when installing features.
