Teenager Proves Point

Cops bust 'root beer kegger' Teenagers were suspended from sports for pictures of them drinking from red cups, so one teenager staged a keg party at his home, a keg of root beer. They had fun until the police raided the party. Even once the police confirmed it was root beer they continued to test and harass the kids. Here is the quote of the officer from the story; “It was a tremendous waste of time and manpower, but we still had a job to do, and our officers did it," Joling said. "If one kid had come there, even hadn't drank there, but had come there and had been drinking and had left and crashed and burned, then what would the sentiment be? Why didn't the police check everybody out?" School officials and police officers are only human and it is good that the kids protested peacefully. What is funny is that the teenagers and officers both had the same problem. The teenagers thought the red cup pictures were unfair. True they do not represent proof, but the real question is whether the teenagers were drinking in the pictures, which it appears they were. The police quickly realized it was root bear, but continued to treat it otherwise. Both failed to go past rules and make a judgment call. Rules will only take you so far. Otherwise we would only need the Old Testament.

Early 1860 recording found

Before Edison invented sound recording in 1877 a French typesetter recorded his daughter singing in 1860. It is a good example of the difference in marketing and inventing. It is also of interest that a museum had the recording in its archives. The recording was done on a carbon covered piece of paper. A paper record not unlike modern photocopies. 'Magical' song from 1860 knocks Edison off the chart

Ultimate Metal Detector

Metal detectors are like exercise equipment and boats. They sound great at the time but rarely get used. While I have bought neither, I have bought a metal detector, the top of the line at the time. I found some interesting trash including a skeleton key and the tip of a plow. It ultimately ended up in the closet. I came across this detector and found the web site very appealing. http://www.minelab.com/consumer/page.php?section=268#1 Unfortunately these are the same claims I heard fifteen years ago and though I found a nugget by panning I never found one with a detector. It is difficult to describe something technical and keep it interesting and easy to read so I include this link as a good example of a sales pitch.

Massive Ice Shelf Collapse

I find the symmetry amazing. Notice how clean the lines are and how square the blocks. Like how crystals form. National Geographic satellite and a close up from a Sydney newspaper.

Who Pays for Commercial Free

Sony Retracts Bloatware Removal Fee in response to complaints by customers, though only for business customers who buy more than one computer. Sony was charging $49.99 to remove the trial software. This reveals two important things. If you as a customer raise a fuss you will sometimes get your way. Customers do not like advertising, but do not want to pay for the difference.

Dust Bowl

In 1933 a cool and wet summer led to a record harvest of corn. In November of 1933 a series of bad dust storms hit. These winds caused massive dust storms that continued until 1940. The result was a mass migration of people and a disruption in agriculture. What was unusual about 1933 is that the wet and cool weather formed over the Midwest and not the South.

In 2007 we have seen the same weather conditions and another record corn harvest. We have seen a number of wind storms this winter. A couple of trees have fallen in my neighborhood and my backyard is littered with small limbs. It is not unusual to have a front pass through and bring some wind at this time of year. But this year they have been more frequent. The biggest wind storm had only a small amount of dust comparable to the smog on hot summer days. Improvements in crop rotation and ground cover have prevented the wind storm from becoming dust storms.

So it will be interesting to see how 2008 agriculture plays out in the Midwest. The dust bowl has been blamed on farming practices. It appears that it was not an act of God, but an act of man.

Gold

The price of gold stocks plummeted today. One stock I own is down over twenty percent this week. The reason is a smaller than expected interest rate cut by the Fed and rhetoric that the government is concerned with inflation. This caused the largest dollar drop in the price of gold ever. I was reading some of the Wall Street Journals that had piled up. An article from last week said people were selling jewelry since gold had reached $940 an ounce. Now that gold has plunged back to $942 it is cheap. Sure $1030 was really high. But how is the record high price a few days ago now low? What happened to low being is under $400. I guess the same as ever seeing gasoline under $1 a gallon.

How much data is 1 Meg?

I wanted to know how much data you can store in a database if you have 1 Meg of space. I searched the web and found formulas and how to query the database for memory size. No general estimate. So I built a query and sampled about a hundred tables.

The column count and data types are going to change the memory for a row. I took a small table of twenty rows and one hundred columns with a mix of numbers and Varchar. It took 60k of space, which scales up to 333 rows. But 634 rows in the same table took up 912K. So there must be some base memory.

Approximately 700 rows of a 100 column database table is 1 Meg. A table with just a few columns could be over 1000 rows (Microsoft 2005 SQL Server).

Ad Words

Sometimes it can be difficult to find what search words to advertise with. SpyFu allows you to see competitors and the ad words they are using. It also has interesting lists of top web sites.

Inflation Held Steady in February

Inflation Held Steady in February is a top story today. I work out of my home and once a month I trek to the grocery store for my monthly supplies. The only two bills that did not go up in February were phone and rent. I do not heat with electricity and I shut lights off when I leave a room as my parents taught. So a record electric bill for this time of year has me worried about the coming summer. At the grocery store I am a creature of habit. I buy the same things and also use my outing to fill the gas tank. My February bill was higher than January on almost everything. Yesterday was a real shocker. I made my monthly run for March and wow. When did gasoline go over three dollars? The dollars on the pump move like the cents once did. My bill at Sam’s was the largest ever and the largest percent increase. So how did the government come up with their number? They excluded all the things that most Americans use everyday, like electricity, gasoline, and food. Whoops they are right, rent and phone costs did not go up, there is no inflation.

Saving Consumating.com

Consumating originally a dating site that became more like a Myspace.com is shutting down today. I thought about making a bid for it from CNET. Estimates put the user group at 20,000, though some think the active users may be 350. Assume one page view per month per user and multiply that by (0.5/100), which is a conservative click per page view (see previous blog). That comes to a grand total of $75 month ad revenue. Retail for hosting is about $1000 a month. Even if you reduce hosting costs to wholesale and maximize ad clicks five fold you do not break even. Then there is the big cost of a developer. My software for writing software could easily build and support a new Consumating.com, but it lacks a few features. I would have to devote a developer three months to migrating the site and pay something to CNET for their data. The only way to make money is to offer a service. But what service would any of these users want? CNET did not find it and I could not think of anything either.

Carbon credit could be causing global warming

Europe has embraced the trading of carbon credits and the practice is expected to be adopted by other counties such as the United States. It allows government officials to give valuable contracts to pollute to companies they select. When a company does not use all their pollution credits they sell them to a company who can. This assures that all the pollution that the government allows is created. It also allows government officials to give the equivalent of money to companies that support their election. There are many ways to reduce pollution. If fines and regulations are not working how is a system more susceptible to corruption going to work? The same system for carbon credits was applied to tobacco during the depression. It was recently eliminated at great cost and after billions of dollars of subsidies.
Wall Street Journal Carbon Credits
New York Times tobacco subsidies

Is Microsoft .Net better than JBoss SEAM?

Better is subjective and is like the Olympic Pentathlon, where athletes compete in five track and field events. .Net is the Microsoft web development environment and JBoss SEAM is an open-source Java environment. I use another environment which I consider better. One of the most powerful development methods is to use script (JavaScript) and server side processing combined with a generic and powerful server language (C#, ASP, etc.). This is the way Google built Web 2.0 applications until last year. Google abandoned this method and embraced open-source Java. The reason is that writing code is only one event and the above method does not scale well to a large development group. If you have a small development group then you want to win that event. Large development groups must balance events so they win the pentathlon. IT departments see JBoss SEAM as well rounded in promoting standards, communication, and management. .Net programmers are happier programmers (based on blog communities), but Microsoft gave in some on the management and organization to win over developers. So which delivers a better product? I am not sure. IT management and not developers increasingly make the decision on what platform to use. This means platforms like JBoss SEAM are winning adoption. I think that over the next three years that the different aspects of development will become less dependent on each other. Meaning that IT will not need to commit to one platform and instead combine different tools and methods. That means that JBoss SEAM and .Net could both be best.

Barriers to Innovation

I occasionally see articles for which my research offers a solution. For example yesterday Wired has an article about Boeing’s software development for the Future Combat System having problems. They are trying to manage 95 million lines of code. I developed technology to manage such a system automatically. I have only tested it for a few hundred thousand lines but it never hit the wall. It was a design to allow a single developer to manage deploying a repository and managing terabits of information within minutes for a disaster. Because of its design it actually becomes easier to manage as it gets larger and loses the need for any developers. Trying to contact Boeing was like looking at a high security prison. I was directed to the supplier web page where I needed to apply for a DUNS number, which can take thirty days. I gave up after failing to get over the first fence. I imagine they receive as much junk mail every few minutes as I receive in a life time. We live in a brief moment in technology when a small development group can actually develop broad solutions. But unlike blogs, the one percent of viable technologies does not have Adsense to sort them out from the other 99%.

Earthworms

Every time it rains here the earthworms commit mass suicide by wiggling onto the sidewalks and street where they dry out. So I wondered how much the earthworms are worth, apparently about $30 a thousand, retail. Several sites advertise with Google Ads, which is surprising with the high cost of Adsense. This may be because of a higher number of actual customers and the potential for repeat customers. Most earthworms appear to be imported and many parts of the US originally did not have earthworms. It is amazing how the internet has allowed market places for these niche markets.

Top One Percent or Bust

With five billion in ad revenue every three months available to online entrepreneurs it would seem that everyone can make money with a web site. It is the top one percent that makes most of the revenue. They make almost as much as all the sites combined. So if you plan on quitting your job and putting up a web site or writing a blog it better make it to the top one percent.

Facebook can only imagine a CTR of 0.5%.

Several articles such as the one at BizReport say that Facebook has a CTR of 0.04%. Assuming there are five ads, that is 0.25% for a page view. Half of what I predicted for a web site. Reason given for Facebook’s problem is instant messages and an audience that is not interested in other products. I have not used Facebook, but I assume each IM is loading a new ad. So Facebook may actually be close to 0.5% and be diluting the ads by increasing the number of page views. The real problem is that Facebook is losing money and they may already have maximized revenue for text ads.

Generated Ad Revenue Estimate

I searched the internet to find a range I could expect to earn from ads if I created a web site. I did not find much, but given the information I have I can make a guess. I ran ads in January 2008 using Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft so I know the CTR for a particular set of ads. So what do I mean by a web site? I had an idea last summer to put up a web site about web worms. There was a large infestation in my neighborhood, and I saw a little bit of buzz online, but no good source of information about them. They could eat a leaf pretty fast and a video could have been interesting. I thought such a web site could generate about 11,000 hits over three months. So how much would I make for the two days to build such a site? Web Marketing Today has a guess from 1999. For 28,572 impressions they estimate you will make $1,000. So if we have about three ads that sounds good. Unfortunately a CTR of $35 is unrealistic unless you are Google search. Webmaster has a blog that suggest taking average click payout and multiplying it by 2% to 5%. Then I realized I have another piece of information, this blog. It has a click rate of about 0.5%. So 0.5% of 11,000 equals 55. If Google pays $.50 for each click that is a grand total of $27.50. If somehow through ad placement, buzz, and a really great site it does somehow achieve 2% then we make $110. Junk mail has a success rate of about 1%, which is another piece of information to confirm this estimate. Anyone with a blog or web site please post a comment if this percentage is close to your ad click compared to views.