sent2null space

As the US economy continues to suffer the doldrums of stagnant investment in many industries, belt tightening budgets in many of the largest cities and continuous rounds of lay offs at some of the oldest of corporations, it is little comfort to those suffering through economic problems that what is happening now, has happened before. True, the severity of the downturn might have been different but the common factors of people and businesses being forced to do more with less is the theme of the times. Like environmental shocks to an ecosystem, stresses to the economic system lead to people hunkering down to last the storm, but it is instructive to realize that during the storm, all that idle time in the shelter affords people the ability to solve previous or existing problems. Likewise, economic downturns enable enterprising individuals and corporations the ability to make bold decisions with regard to marketing , sales or product focus that can lead to incredible gains as the economic ...

I've noticed in the last year or so an increase in the number of calls I receive where instead of being greeted by a living agent I am greeted by an automated one. Usually these calls start with an annoying 2 second gap where I say "hello" several times before the machine begins to play its recorded spiel. Today, I received another of many calls I've taken from a company that claims (through the robotic voice) to want to provide me with a better rate on my auto insurance. The only problem is that I don't have a car, and haven't had one since 2002. The automated message is interested as it goes something like this: "If you wish to speak to an agent about our package please press 1. If you do not wish to take advantage of this offer and wish to be removed from our call list please press 2." Unfortunately, the company in question is deceptive in both options. In the several times I've received this call (often at the most inopportune times) I've...

The current economic crisis provides a sobering reality check to the western developed countries on the viability of their current economic models. The continued rise of standard of living in the west, gained on the backs of exploiting cheap labor or resources in other parts of the world has run its course. The last 60 years, western countries have been forced to relinquish the colonial control over the lands and economies of their former colonial possessions and instead turned to capitalism to exact a measure of control over those former states. The establishment of the world bank and the IMF have allowed western nations to establish , often very favorable monetary relationships in the form of loans, and to enable exchanges of goods, resources and services between western countries and the still resource rich countries of the third world. At the same time, active or passive attempts to maintain control of these areas by securing favorable governments into power through political and ...

In a recent post , I ranted about the fact that media companies just don't realize how much money they are leaving on the table by not making their old tv shows available online for free (ad supported) so that people can watch them any time they wish. I am a sci fi fan and during the last 15 years have missed a few really good series because I was so focused on my career and most recently the software for my company. One of the shows that I recently took an interest in , is the Sci Fi channel's "Stargate SG-1". During the late 90's it was on showtime and I never took an interest in it, but since appearing on Sci-fi , I've been able to get into the universe and it is pretty good. Just a few days ago I was searching hulu.com to see if SG-1 was there, and I could only find Stargate Atlantis (which is the spin off series from SG-1) It just turns out while searching for the Late Night with Jimmy Fallon show clips, hulu had on their main page a splash advertising ...

In a conversation I had with a friend last night, I mentioned that I understood much of the mathematics and physics that I learned as an undergraduate engineering student by approaching the problems from the perspective of my visual sense. I have used this sense to understand areas of mathematical complexity that I probably would understand differently or not at all, had I not had the art related visual ability to create shapes of the abstract ideas that I could then use to relate and form an understanding. During the conversation I mentioned the stock market and described it as a "chaotically damped exponential" system. What follows is a rational for that description that I wrote up to flesh out this idea that I had otherwise not fully explored other than visually. In mathematics, the term "chaos" is used to describe signals or ensembles (collections of signals) that are varying in a random way across an infinitely long sample or wide enough space. Exponential'...

http://www.businessinsider.com/watchmen-opening-credits-are-on-the-internet-forever-now-clip-2009-3 Touching on this blog post a few days ago...

The original idea behind the design of my distributed web application framework started from the idea to create a content management system with a generalized compositional design paradigm. In my work at TheStreet.com I designed an ad management system that used the rudiments of this idea, the compositional structure of the design was pretty simple, the ad management tool simply needed to manage collections of advertisements in blocks known on the system as "tiles", the collection of the tile code into groups called "tilex" groups allowed the management of the collection as one, which included dynamic replacement of various strings to match parameters for the pages to which the "tilex" groups were joined. This simple relationship between specific ad management Entities and the associated relational tables, took a month to design and build. Months before I thought of a solution that could use a similar design idea but be generalized to manage any Entity at ...

I am a big science fiction fan, as a kid I spent hours watching shows of the late 70's and early 80's. From the original Battle Star Galactica to Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, being a baby of the 70's. I was just old enough to be absolutely awed by the new age of sci fi films ushered in by George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg and then to have a front seat for the many block busters of the 80's. Most of my viewing came from tv, cable (remember WHT?) and then VHS. Today, the internet has made many of the shows from the 80's and 90's a stones throw away IF the media companies that own them would only get wize to the possibilities. Just a minute ago I was at tv.com , watching episodes of Star Trek, what I noticed was that the episodes available are only a subset of the show's total run. Why? Why are the media companies blind to the potential of allowing anyone , anywhere to watch the complete series online? The conventional explanation is that they are unable t...