Monday, January 10, 2011

Making Money Online With




or if you aim big you can even advertise with Google Adwords and pay only if someone clicks your add:http://google.com/adwords4. Consider me your real business friend and start your first link exchange with my blog: ad my link to your blog or website and I shell do the same adding your link over here on  http://realbucksonline.blogspot.com/ Also consider that I will post a new method of making real bucks online every week so stay connected here via bookmark or RSS feed. 
 Ok: I am just a average guy like you, who aims to make a real buck on the net.
Now let*s face it: it is hard enough to put cents on cents in a few ptc sites and expect to earn a decent living by that. Plus that all this so called business to be payed to click it*s like rolling the dice: you*re never sure finally you get the money. So what*s the catch with this game?
The most important thing in it is to get referrals : directly or rented ones. And the second important thing is to relay on the most trusted and stable sites. This is like betting on the most probable winner with a Team of Betters behind you.
Now,the first rule in business is to MEAN it. Not necessarily to be mean but to be serious about it. So if you think to make a living online you must be serious, hard working and learn it every step of the way. By all means you will get to SUCCEED IN TIME. With the second important thing, related to paying and stable sites you can get help from average experience or custom search on the net for top paying sites on Google. The really heavy duty thing is to build a Team of Referrals. According to this, the most affordable approach is to rent them with the amount of money you already earned on a site. The difficult part is to convince a direct referral to join in your   downline and be active on every day. This is like direct-sales in the real world: 50% chances (or less) to make them buy something which is more a game than a business. The rest of 50% is advertising or make believe (super-fantasizing) that something is useful and generates a sort of monthly real income. This fantasies go from promises of other great deals to even promises of 10(ten!) dollars per click:) And believe me, there are sites which ”offer” more than that, even the moon from the sky, just to get you join their scam. There are two kind of experiences related to this ”make believes”: one is to be a realistic guy by nature and the second is to try things until they prove lies. Everyone is preferring the first category except the advertisers, who are preferring the second one. Well, if you want to really be in the first category, and play this ptc game, you have to discern between a real buck and a promised one, in Neverland. You may say that each and every dime is just a promise in the ptc virtual world, until that dime profs it*s real in your pocket. It*s true but that does not mean you stop discerning reality from dreams. You must keep your goal to make real money online, gather experience and build a system that really works keeping you satisfied with your decent earnings and little, indecent losses.  
That is why I thought of a system for everyone to get referrals. Scroll down and find out how much you will pay for it!
(just kidding Stay tuned on this site and you will found it soon. Have a winning day everyone! 







No one at Trion Worlds has promised that the company’s first fantasy role-playing online game, Rift: Planes of Telara, will be a World of WarCraft killer. Indeed, many makers of massively multiplayer online games have tried to knock out Blizzard Entertainment’s online subscription game, but WoW has ruled for six years and it just got a major upgrade with World of WarCraft: Cataclysm, which sold 3.3 million units in a day. But that doesn’t intimidate the folks at Trion Worlds, which has raised more than $100 million and has more than 200 people working on a variety of MMOs. Of course, beating WoW is the ultimate prize, since WoW has more than 12 million paying subscribers and it generates more than $1 billion in revenue per year for Activision Blizzard.


Rift is in the midst of closed beta testing, and I’ve had a look at the beta version up close. The graphics are beautiful and the unscripted dynamic events, where the world can change in an instant, are working as advertised. We had a chance to catch up with David Reid, head of marketing at Trion Worlds in Redwood City, Calif. (and former marketing chief for Microsoft’s Xbox 360) about the upcoming game, and here’s what he had to say:


VB: You’ve been working for a long time on this game — more than five years. What are you doing with the beta testing now?


DR: The beta process is about testing scalability. How many players can we support? It’s about getting some feedback from a number of real users so that we can tune some of these last knobs. But in a lot of ways, beta will be almost like a launch for us. We know that a number of MMO companies have made the mistake of going out with the beta with a product that really should not have been characterized as a beta. They paid for it. We are not doing that kind of a beta. [Laughs]


VB: You’re getting close to release?


DR: We feel like we are very close to release-level quality. We are tuning. We are polishing. We are scaling.


VB: So after five years, you’re not making money on this game yet.


DR: Not yet, but really darn soon. What day of the month is it?


VB: How will the launch proceed?


DR: Here’s probably how it works. The best game companies launch their newest titles with a presale program. That is the point where the consumer can put money down for the game. Technically, when that happens, the game won’t be formally live. It will still be in testing. But we are going to treat it as if it were the real launch. We will have 24/7 support in all languages. We will treat these players as if they are paying customers. We’re very close to that right now. We’ll open it up to the public for a large beta test soon.


VB: At that point, you will have tens of thousands of people playing?


DR: Absolutely. I can’t disclose specific numbers of the beta, but we are in the midst of some very large beta test events now and we just keep scaling it up. The first beta event was just the data center in Dallas, and so Europeans were in the beta, but they were playing on Dallas servers. We are opening a data center in Amsterdam for the European users. Operationally, that’s very important for us. We’ll bring up the different languages over time.


VB: The whole idea of a “Rift” is that you can open up a portal into the world and flood it with monsters. Then the players all go to that area and fight off the invasion. How many people can you concentrate in one place in the world?


DR: That’s a question with many potential answers. Because there’s the geographic point of it and then there is the hardware server part of it. The servers have multiple sections, or shards. Right now, we are figuring out how many people on a shard is too many. But what is unique about our game is that you can have a very large number of players all in one place and you can interact with all of them. You don’t have to worry that you can’t find your friends because they are in a different region or a different server. When a Rift opens, it is a dynamic event. The Rifts can happen in any geographic location and you can have lots of them at once. We have shown in our beta testing that all of that is working properly. We will ramp this up to an industrial scale.


VB: Is the game designed to be split into shards at all?


DR: It is a game with shards. But we are being very careful about not locking people to particular servers and things like that. MMOs have always had that kind of problem. MMO’s, by their nature, are incredibly social experiments, right? And people in Europe want to play with people in North America, and people in North America want to play with people in Australia, and that’s just how these communities have been built online as opposed to a pick-up basketball game in your neighborhood.


So if you lock those servers and you’re not letting those people play with friends, then you are, by definition, fracturing those communities. We have to do this well because we are going into a territory where there are well-established brands that already have communities rallied around them. We want to win with the people who play these games regularly. If they have a guy in their group who is in New Zealand, you have to bring them all into the game together. This is something we’ve been really focused on.


VB: So you can manage this game by throwing in more servers when you have peak usage?


DR: In full transparency, I’m probably not the ideal guy to answer that level of question. But what I can tell you is that we do have with both the Dallas data center and the Amsterdam data center. We have servers operating in a beta process and we can fire more of them up as the population grows. We can add more firepower to the servers if there are more people or if we are going to amp up the events in the game, such as create sharper artificial intelligence, better physics, or more Rifts. One thing we are looking at is how many Rifts should be occurring in a given zone of the game so that a player can feel like they have a lot to choose from. What level of that is fun? One thing we want to communicate to the player is that they will start with all of the features that they expect to have in a AAA quality game. You have your zones, dungeons, quests, character classes, fashions, monsters — and on top of that is this dynamic layer where the Rifts open in the world and change the environment of the game dynamically. The dynamic layer is what causes the social play, because you have to rally with your friends to stop the Rifts. It impacts your decisions as a gamer and the decisions of the groups of gamers as well.


VB:  What is your marketing message these days about your game being the “WOW killer”?


DR: Well, to be clear, no one in Trion has ever said that, and I don’t think anybody in Trion ever will. If you look at the lineage of great MMOs, starting with Ultima Online, you see generational improvements. Ultima Online was the first commercial success in the MMO business, but it was two-dimensional and weighted toward players fighting other players. That wasn’t much fun for the new players. EverQuest came along with 3D animation and players fighting against the environment. It was a real commercial success and it was prettier. Still, it had its bugs. World of WarCraft came along in 2004. It was an improvement on what came before and it was very polished. Within that game, you could have some great solo experiences. Other games have tried to emulate it.


We think of Rift as the next step in that evolution of product. We’ve taken a look at what World of WarCraft and others in that generation of MMOs have done and done really well. There were really innovative things that happened in Warhammer Online and in the Age of Conan. But those two products, in particular, didn’t, of course, capture everything that a World of Warcraft player was looking for. The players didn’t migrate from WoW.


In part, Rift is our love letter to the players who played the games that came before us. We love those games and we think this is the next generation, much like players move on to a new console with every generation.


VB: So WoW just went through that big change with Cataclysm. I guess you can do the same kind of upgrade just about every day?


DR: Yes. And that is a bit of what the engine of the Rift game and our End of Nations game is about. For all of the interconnected play that you have in an MMO, those worlds are still remarkably static. There isn’t much to do until a patch or a giant expansion comes out. And what the portal mechanic in Rift does is add a level of real life variability. It’s the first time really that in an MMO, you have the beginnings of emergent game play of things that will happen in this game that the developers aren’t able to predict and that the players are going to have a real hand in deciding. If a Rift opens on a town, you can help save it or you can wait for it to do its work.


VB: Is the audience for these games as large as ever, or are the free games sucking out a lot of the paying players?


DR: It has been fun to watch the industry evolve. We sit right here next door to one of the world’s largest publishers (Electronic Arts). Those kinds of publishers are putting  a lot of focus on what I’ll call the shallow end of online gaming: the casual, the mobile, the social. Those are all really fine businesses, but at the end of the day, we still think that it is the gamer who spends the most money especially in tough economic times. These are people who will forego other things and will eat ramen noodles for weeks if that’s what it takes to pay for their Xbox Live subscription or their MMO subscription. That audience is very demanding. For them, you have to build a great, immersive product. In the past couple of years, the MMO businesses have not served this customer well. They have launched games that needed more time or innovation or just better quality.


We are capitalized well enough here that we’re not making that same mistake. As I said, for us, the beta test is really like a launch in a lot of ways. We’re not bringing a half-finished product to market.


VB: You made a reference to All Points Bulletin, which failed miserably after five years of development. You don’t interpret that failure as bad for the whole MMO market?


DR: No, we don’t. I think a lot of people could see those things coming and it wasn’t just APB. Final Fantasy XIV had a very rough start. There are other games over the past few years. It isn’t that the market isn’t there. It just comes down the fact that if you have quality product, gamers are willing to pay for it. But don’t try to convince them your product is high quality and charge them a high price if it’s not. That is the road to death.


VB: Are you tempted to play around with different business models because the industry has changed so much?


DR: Sure. There is a lot to think about there. It is, you know, from a business perspective, a very exciting time. Innovation is important, in both the game, the marketing and the business model. With Rift, we will use the standard approach. We will sell a premium product in digital form as a download or in a retail store. We will charge an appropriate price and have a monthly service fee that you pay after your first 30 days have passed.


VB: You have developed a flexible server infrastructure for your game. How will you make use of that?


DR: We can do updates. We will do some handcrafted design and launch it on a regular basis. But we can also change just a bit every single day, every couple of hours, whatever, as players react to and encounter dynamic content. Now, we have big plans on this front because this is part of what’s really new and special about what we’re doing. Those plans are nothing I can talk directly about yet, but I will tell you that it is something that makes you think hard about how the customer encounters your product and experiences it. There are critical moments in a consumer’s mindset of, ‘Am I having enough fun to continue paying for this game?’ and we think very hard about when to uncork more awesomeness in our dynamic layer of things to satisfy a very difficult customer who is used to some very high quality product.


VB: I saw a report that said someone had reached the highest level possibly in Cataclysm on the day it came out.


DR: That kind of gamer is going to be part of our audience. I am not surprised. Again, it only added five new levels. I’m impressed with that player, but I’m not shocked. People take a lot of pride in being the first to race through the content. As a publisher, that terrifies you. It means your work is never done. But it’s also something you admire in the audience.


VB: So, that’s the kind of thing you will be ready for?


DR: It is different for us. We have a very different kind of MMO with dynamic content. When you hit the highest level, you haven’t finished all the content. When you hit our level cap, you don’t have to leave the game. The challenge for the publisher is that once someone hits the highest level, they will still have awesome game play experiences.


VB: If you look back on the five-plus years, how would you say you made good use of that time? Sometimes when a game takes that long to finish, it’s a bad sign because of the cost overruns or because the design becomes outdated.


DR: That’s right. It’s a hard business, right? And you look back and there’s probably any number of small things you look at and say, “Yes, we could have squeezed that a little more efficiently. But a large amount of what you get with the time and the financing that the time gives you is the ability to bring in a great team of people. Then you give them the time to get the chemistry right and build what they want to build. The soul of this product is the ambition behind it and the polishing that has gone into making it right. You can’t do these games without huge investments, awesome talent, and a lot of time. For venture financing, $100 million sounds like a lot. But these are really ambitious projects, and you have to be in this league to be competitive. We have used that money to build not one game but to commission a number of games that are all very groundbreaking.


VB: Did you guys get some benefit from seeing Blizzard’s leaked release schedule?


DR: It got headlines everywhere and we looked at it like everyone else. But I don’t think we would change any of our plans based on internet rumor.


Check out a video recording of one of the unscripted Rift scenes in action below.



Next Story: Where will the location superstars check in this New Year’s? Previous Story: Founder Institute’s Adeo Ressi says you can’t teach entrepreneurship (video)




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News organizations have lately opted to hire fewer reporters, and to cut newsrooms' Saturday staffs. As NPR and Reuters issued erroneous reports of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' death this weekend, the downside of such cuts seems clear.

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This Week&#39;s Health Industry <b>News</b> - NYTimes.com

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Harry Shearer: The <b>News</b> Doesn&#39;t Sleep -- Except on Weekends

News organizations have lately opted to hire fewer reporters, and to cut newsrooms' Saturday staffs. As NPR and Reuters issued erroneous reports of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' death this weekend, the downside of such cuts seems clear.

The State <b>News</b> :: The Snyder Effect

Gov. Rick Snyder, who took office Jan. 1, repeatedly has said K-12 and higher education and retaining young people in the state are priorities for his administration. But until Snyder releases concrete numbers as part of his budget ...


bench craft company reviews bench craft company reviews

This Week&#39;s Health Industry <b>News</b> - NYTimes.com

An F.D.A. panel considers what to do about menthol flavoring in cigarettes.

Harry Shearer: The <b>News</b> Doesn&#39;t Sleep -- Except on Weekends

News organizations have lately opted to hire fewer reporters, and to cut newsrooms' Saturday staffs. As NPR and Reuters issued erroneous reports of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' death this weekend, the downside of such cuts seems clear.

The State <b>News</b> :: The Snyder Effect

Gov. Rick Snyder, who took office Jan. 1, repeatedly has said K-12 and higher education and retaining young people in the state are priorities for his administration. But until Snyder releases concrete numbers as part of his budget ...


bench craft company reviews bench craft company reviews

This Week&#39;s Health Industry <b>News</b> - NYTimes.com

An F.D.A. panel considers what to do about menthol flavoring in cigarettes.

Harry Shearer: The <b>News</b> Doesn&#39;t Sleep -- Except on Weekends

News organizations have lately opted to hire fewer reporters, and to cut newsrooms' Saturday staffs. As NPR and Reuters issued erroneous reports of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' death this weekend, the downside of such cuts seems clear.

The State <b>News</b> :: The Snyder Effect

Gov. Rick Snyder, who took office Jan. 1, repeatedly has said K-12 and higher education and retaining young people in the state are priorities for his administration. But until Snyder releases concrete numbers as part of his budget ...


bench craft company reviews bench craft company reviews

This Week&#39;s Health Industry <b>News</b> - NYTimes.com

An F.D.A. panel considers what to do about menthol flavoring in cigarettes.

Harry Shearer: The <b>News</b> Doesn&#39;t Sleep -- Except on Weekends

News organizations have lately opted to hire fewer reporters, and to cut newsrooms' Saturday staffs. As NPR and Reuters issued erroneous reports of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' death this weekend, the downside of such cuts seems clear.

The State <b>News</b> :: The Snyder Effect

Gov. Rick Snyder, who took office Jan. 1, repeatedly has said K-12 and higher education and retaining young people in the state are priorities for his administration. But until Snyder releases concrete numbers as part of his budget ...


bench craft company reviews bench craft company reviews

This Week&#39;s Health Industry <b>News</b> - NYTimes.com

An F.D.A. panel considers what to do about menthol flavoring in cigarettes.

Harry Shearer: The <b>News</b> Doesn&#39;t Sleep -- Except on Weekends

News organizations have lately opted to hire fewer reporters, and to cut newsrooms' Saturday staffs. As NPR and Reuters issued erroneous reports of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' death this weekend, the downside of such cuts seems clear.

The State <b>News</b> :: The Snyder Effect

Gov. Rick Snyder, who took office Jan. 1, repeatedly has said K-12 and higher education and retaining young people in the state are priorities for his administration. But until Snyder releases concrete numbers as part of his budget ...


bench craft company reviews bench craft company reviews

This Week&#39;s Health Industry <b>News</b> - NYTimes.com

An F.D.A. panel considers what to do about menthol flavoring in cigarettes.

Harry Shearer: The <b>News</b> Doesn&#39;t Sleep -- Except on Weekends

News organizations have lately opted to hire fewer reporters, and to cut newsrooms' Saturday staffs. As NPR and Reuters issued erroneous reports of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' death this weekend, the downside of such cuts seems clear.

The State <b>News</b> :: The Snyder Effect

Gov. Rick Snyder, who took office Jan. 1, repeatedly has said K-12 and higher education and retaining young people in the state are priorities for his administration. But until Snyder releases concrete numbers as part of his budget ...


bench craft company reviews bench craft company reviews

This Week&#39;s Health Industry <b>News</b> - NYTimes.com

An F.D.A. panel considers what to do about menthol flavoring in cigarettes.

Harry Shearer: The <b>News</b> Doesn&#39;t Sleep -- Except on Weekends

News organizations have lately opted to hire fewer reporters, and to cut newsrooms' Saturday staffs. As NPR and Reuters issued erroneous reports of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' death this weekend, the downside of such cuts seems clear.

The State <b>News</b> :: The Snyder Effect

Gov. Rick Snyder, who took office Jan. 1, repeatedly has said K-12 and higher education and retaining young people in the state are priorities for his administration. But until Snyder releases concrete numbers as part of his budget ...


bench craft company reviews bench craft company reviews

This Week&#39;s Health Industry <b>News</b> - NYTimes.com

An F.D.A. panel considers what to do about menthol flavoring in cigarettes.

Harry Shearer: The <b>News</b> Doesn&#39;t Sleep -- Except on Weekends

News organizations have lately opted to hire fewer reporters, and to cut newsrooms' Saturday staffs. As NPR and Reuters issued erroneous reports of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' death this weekend, the downside of such cuts seems clear.

The State <b>News</b> :: The Snyder Effect

Gov. Rick Snyder, who took office Jan. 1, repeatedly has said K-12 and higher education and retaining young people in the state are priorities for his administration. But until Snyder releases concrete numbers as part of his budget ...


bench craft company reviews bench craft company reviews

This Week&#39;s Health Industry <b>News</b> - NYTimes.com

An F.D.A. panel considers what to do about menthol flavoring in cigarettes.

Harry Shearer: The <b>News</b> Doesn&#39;t Sleep -- Except on Weekends

News organizations have lately opted to hire fewer reporters, and to cut newsrooms' Saturday staffs. As NPR and Reuters issued erroneous reports of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' death this weekend, the downside of such cuts seems clear.

The State <b>News</b> :: The Snyder Effect

Gov. Rick Snyder, who took office Jan. 1, repeatedly has said K-12 and higher education and retaining young people in the state are priorities for his administration. But until Snyder releases concrete numbers as part of his budget ...


bench craft company reviews bench craft company reviews

This Week&#39;s Health Industry <b>News</b> - NYTimes.com

An F.D.A. panel considers what to do about menthol flavoring in cigarettes.

Harry Shearer: The <b>News</b> Doesn&#39;t Sleep -- Except on Weekends

News organizations have lately opted to hire fewer reporters, and to cut newsrooms' Saturday staffs. As NPR and Reuters issued erroneous reports of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' death this weekend, the downside of such cuts seems clear.

The State <b>News</b> :: The Snyder Effect

Gov. Rick Snyder, who took office Jan. 1, repeatedly has said K-12 and higher education and retaining young people in the state are priorities for his administration. But until Snyder releases concrete numbers as part of his budget ...


bench craft company reviews bench craft company reviews

This Week&#39;s Health Industry <b>News</b> - NYTimes.com

An F.D.A. panel considers what to do about menthol flavoring in cigarettes.

Harry Shearer: The <b>News</b> Doesn&#39;t Sleep -- Except on Weekends

News organizations have lately opted to hire fewer reporters, and to cut newsrooms' Saturday staffs. As NPR and Reuters issued erroneous reports of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' death this weekend, the downside of such cuts seems clear.

The State <b>News</b> :: The Snyder Effect

Gov. Rick Snyder, who took office Jan. 1, repeatedly has said K-12 and higher education and retaining young people in the state are priorities for his administration. But until Snyder releases concrete numbers as part of his budget ...


bench craft company reviews bench craft company reviews

This Week&#39;s Health Industry <b>News</b> - NYTimes.com

An F.D.A. panel considers what to do about menthol flavoring in cigarettes.

Harry Shearer: The <b>News</b> Doesn&#39;t Sleep -- Except on Weekends

News organizations have lately opted to hire fewer reporters, and to cut newsrooms' Saturday staffs. As NPR and Reuters issued erroneous reports of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords' death this weekend, the downside of such cuts seems clear.

The State <b>News</b> :: The Snyder Effect

Gov. Rick Snyder, who took office Jan. 1, repeatedly has said K-12 and higher education and retaining young people in the state are priorities for his administration. But until Snyder releases concrete numbers as part of his budget ...

Friday, January 7, 2011

Who's Making Money



Too many lousy movies are centered around two strangers getting married in Las Vegas. Now, an Oregon Ducks fan is already planning on making this the plot of his real-life trip to Sin City. Ryan Tharp recently posted an ad on Craigslist—complete with a shirtless photo of himself—involving a wager in which he marries an Auburn Tigers fan.


Auburn and Oregon are facing off for the BCS college football championship on Monday, and Tharp and his friends are heading to Vegas after the game. The wager he wants to make is that the person whose team loses the game has to pay for the annulment the next day. Oh, how many ways this can go wrong. Just think of the possibilities!


From his ad, via Fox Oregon 12


“So, if you are going to be in Vegas after the National Championship, believe in your Tigers and want to have stories to tell your grandchildren (won’t be mine) then shoot me an e-mail with a pic,” he writes.


It’s a good thing we all have our priorities straight when it comes to the “sanctity of marriage.” This sounds more like a story to tell to your frat brothers than your grandchildren. It seems like nothing but an attempt at a guaranteed way to enjoy the—how shall we put it?—benefits of the wedding night with an attractive girl from across the country. If the Ducks win, Tharp better hope he and his new wife don’t throw all their money away at the blackjack table. Then who’s going to pay for the annulment?


What to make of Bill Cohan’s big Vanity Fair piece on a slightly skeevy lawsuit where a pair of Democratic party operatives are trying to pull a Winklevoss on Arianna Huffington? Arianna’s flack, Mario Ruiz, is clearly enjoying being asked to comment on it:


It’s a great story — if you read it backwards. At the end of the article, the writer takes apart Boyce and Daou’s case piece by piece, leaving it in tatters — and rendering everything that has come before it pointless.


Meanwhile, the plaintiffs’ attorney seems much more well-disposed towards the story, despite the fact that — as Ruiz says — it’s almost impossible to read the whole thing and think that they have any case at all.


The question of who’s got the stronger moral and legal case is pretty clear, from Cohan’s reporting: it’s Arianna. As Jay Yarow says about the Winklevii, “ideas are a dime-a-dozen. It’s execution that counts. Mark Zuckerberg executed. The Winklevosses didn’t.” Similarly here: Peter Daou and James Boyce had an idea for a “liberal Drudge Report” in late 2004, at much the same time as about a million other people had exactly the same idea. (Even Gawker launched one such site, Sploid, in April 2005; it closed in August 2006.)


The idea was, as Larry David says in the piece, “terrible”: the site was to be called fourteensixty.com, after the number of days between presidential elections. It had hypocrisy baked in to its business plan:


www.fourteensixty.com will be a Democratic-leaning site with enough non-partisan news so as to appear more mainstream than it truly is; this is critical for credibility and for advertising revenue.


And rather than build one big site, the idea was to build lots of little ones, including (I’m not making this up) mamadonkey.com, “a blog aimed at Democratic supporters over the age of forty”.


On top of that, the site was envisaged as a way to sell the services of political operatives:


1460’s staff technical and web-communication strengths will enable 1460 to offer candidates a full range of strategic and technological tools…


1460 will also help shape a candidate’s overall communication strategy, develop television and radio communications and coordinate that strategy through the Internet. Utilizing Peter’s extensive knowledge of online political communication, 1460 will develop and manage a candidate’s web site, email acquisition and communication strategy, blog communication strategy, volunteer acquisition and deployment, and more.


The plan goes on to detail all the different ways this would make money for the site, including taking “a percentage of monies raised, online and off”, as well as a percentage of all media buys.


No wonder that, when he saw the plan, Kenny Lerer told Arianna that “this doesn’t work for me on many levels”; the two of them went on to do something much smarter, much more innovative and, as befits a news site, much less beholden to party-political interests. And, I daresay, much less likely to ever dream of writing the words “blog communication strategy”.


But what of Cohan’s story? Given that this entire lawsuit seems to be a nonevent, is it reasonable for the Huffington Post to criticize Vanity Fair for printing it in the first place?


There are certainly good reasons why VF might have spiked the story, or buried it on VF.com somewhere. Rich and successful people get sued opportunistically all the time. There’s little new news in the piece. And the conflicts are enormous: not only has VF’s editor hosted Arianna’s book party, one of the plaintiffs has actually worked as a consultant for the magazine.


On top of that, Cohan overstretches in his attempt to demonstrate that there even might be a real story in the lawsuit:


The questions raised are profound: Did Huffington and Huffington Post co-founder Kenneth Lerer take ideas from Daou and Boyce—ideas the two men call “groundbreaking”—without properly compensating or acknowledging them? Or is this just a case of sour grapes, with Daou and Boyce looking to cash in on the hard work of Huffington and Lerer now that the site is successful and valuable?


Er, no, those aren’t profound questions at all. Even if Arianna and Lerer did take an idea or two, it’s hard to see that the plaintiffs would have any claim to compensation — and indeed neither of them asked for compensation or even the opportunity to invest in Huffington Post for six years, before they suddenly decided that they had been so egregiously wronged that they had no choice but to sue.


But the fact is that Vanity Fair loves nothing more than a gossipy tale of celebrity entanglements and the name-dropping in this piece is truly something to behold: Larry David, David Geffen, Brian Grazer, Aaron Sorkin, Meg Ryan, Tom Freston. Graydon Carter simply isn’t capable of passing up a story which includes a sentence like this one:


On Election Day 2004, after attending a Bruce Springsteen concert for Kerry the night before, he, the Davids, and Kristen Breitweiser, a 9/11 widow and political activist, were visiting polling places in Ohio before boarding a private jet to fly to Boston.


The biggest celebrity of all in this piece, is Arianna herself, a blow-dried visionary in a glamorous large-format portrait by Robyn Twomey. The picture speaks much more loudly than the words: she’s clearly the winner, not the men wearing suits lent to them for the duration of the photoshoot by VF staffer Peter Holleran.


This story isn’t bad publicity for Arianna then — the vast majority of VF readers will look at her picture but not read the article. And most of the ones who do read the article will come to the obvious conclusion. My guess is that when Arianna next bumps into Graydon, it’ll be kisses all round, like nothing happened. Especially if he agrees to write something for her website.


(Cross-posted at CJR)



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Fujfilm 'Surprised and delighted' by reaction to X100: In an exclusive meeting with dpreview.com at this year's CES, Adrian Clarke of Fujifilm told us that the company has been 'surprised and delighted' by reaction to the X100 - the ...

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CBS News correspondent Susan Roberts named new Eyewitness News anchor,

Denver Broncos <b>News</b>: Horse Tracks - 1/7/11 - Mile High Report

Your daily cup of Orange and Blue coffee .. Horse Tracks!


Thursday, January 6, 2011

Making Money Software


10 Best Creative Apps of 2010


2010 has seen some really inspiring creative apps become available and here’s our round-up of some of the best. We’re not including expensive pro software here, just mobile and web apps that are either free or available for pocket money. Have your tried all of these?


Instagram


iOS: While there was nothing new about adding cool filters to mobile photos in 2010, Instagram and the similar PicPlz did something a little different with the idea by attaching a social network to the concept.


Being able to view, ‘like’ and comment on other users’ photos in a newsfeed format has turned often throwaway mobile photos into a cult obsession for some, especially on Instagram. Matching a great photo with the perfect filter is a fine art. The ‘Popular’ board on Instagram is full of examples of that delicate balance and trying to match their efforts is truly a joy.


We said: “So why is Instagram so popular? I suspect its a combination of the app’s ease of use, simple design, and artsy filters that make crappy iPhone photos look beautiful, mysterious and engaging.


Buildor


Browser: The idea that a browser could run a Web design application packed with pro-level features would have sounded insane but this year Buildor achieved it with its Buildor Pro app.


Currently in private beta, you’ll need an invite to try this or you can sign up for the waiting list from the website. For Web coders, the app allows you to start a new project from scratch or (most impressively) edit live sites just by pulling up the URL. You’ll need the FTP details for the site if you want to save the results though. For designers meanwhile, Buildor Pro is being pitched as a powerful way of creating HTML mock-ups with full interaction design and font rendering. All of that in a browser – impressive.


We said: “While it remains to be seen whether pro developers will take to browser-based development en masse, there’s a real chance of Buildor disrupting the market if it gains traction.


Soundcloud


iOS and Android: Instant mobile podcasting apps like Audioboo and Cinch are a useful and fun way of recording interviews, speeches or random thoughts and sharing them online from wherever you are. Soundcloud took things a step further with the launch of its iPhone and Android apps this year.


Not only can you instantly record audio and share it to your social networks immediately, by uploading to Soundcloud you get the benefit of the service’s platform. This means that your mobile audio can instantly be used with the wide range of apps that are built to use the Soundcloud API, which opens up a world of possibilities. This is especially useful for musicians, as the service has primarily been music-focused to date. However, with mobile recording, there’s real potential for it to be adopted by a wider range of users.


We said: “SoundCloud has developed into what is now a highly flexible way of working online with any type of audio.


Camera+


iOS: As great as the iPhone 4′s camera is, Camera+ does an excellent job of making it even better. Taking good-looking photos is made easier with the app’s stabilizer, timer and burst features and a fantastic array of image editing and effects tools are built right in.


While it may have been unavailable for much of its life (thanks to an Apple-displeasing ‘Easter egg’ feature that allowed you to use the phone’s volume rocker as a zoom control) that only added to the allure of this app which has been reaping healthy financial rewards for its creators since it returned to the App Store earlier this month.


We said: “The favorite camera app of many is back in the app store and ready to rock your photography world again.


Whiteboard


iOS: Finger-drawing app Whiteboard became a universal iOS app this year, opening it up to use on the iPad and making collaborative drawing even more fun.


Yes, Whiteboard’s greatest appeal is drawing with friends, either via WiFi or by working together on the same screen – something that’s much easier on the large iPad screen. While you’re never going to paint a masterpiece of contemporary art with this app, it’s possible to lose yourself for hours while you scribble away creating cartoon characters or “improving” photos of friends by adding comedy moustaches and the like.


Air Harp


iOS: Plenty of musical instrument apps have been released for the iPad this year, but one that really caught our eye early on was Air Harp. Offering ample on-screen space for the harp’s fifteen strings, for the first time on a mobile device this really felt like a real instrument.


With its slightly melancholy sound, its can feel a little like a lone minstrel on a hillside at sunset while playing Air Harp. Unlike novelty instrument apps, Air Harp feels like something that you can take the time to learn properly before serenading a loved one with your musical skills. Easy-to-read sheet music makes it simple to play well-known tunes even if you’re far from being a virtuoso.


Nanostudio


iOS: Squeezing an entire music production studio into an iPhone app is a huge achievement, and that’s exactly what Blip Interactive has done with Nanostudio.


Unlike many of the apps on the list, it assumes a certain amount of prior knowledge of how music production works if you want to dive right into it. However, even if you’re a rookie you can get a lot out of this app – you’ll be creating fantastic sounding electronic music in no time.


We said: “The level of control on this app is amazing, every imaginable parameter can be easily edited and controlled – you can even easily move sound files from your PC or Mac via a wireless connection.”


Adobe Photoshop Express


iOS and Android: While a mobile photo editor isn’t going to rival a full desktop experience any time soon, Photoshop Express does a brilliant job of covering the basics of tweaking photos on the go, and for free.


Multitouch gestures let you rotate, crop, straighten or flip images and there are controls for adjusting the tint, saturation, contrast among its useful tools. As with many mobile apps on this list, the iPad version offers more space for controlling your edits while on iPhone and Android handsets it’s simply more convenient as that’s where most of the photos you’ll need it for will be created.


We said: “For a free app, it’s great.


Soundation


Browser: If it looks like there are a lot of audio-related apps, it’s because there’s simply been so much happening in the space this year. Soundation is a cloud-based multitrack recording app and what really makes it stand out is that it offers audio recording right from the browser.


Yes, in addition to importing audio and using the many thousands of loops available within the app, you can plug a microphone right into your computer and sing, play or speak whatever audio you like – another leap forward in what’s possible in the humble Web browser.


SumoPaint


Browser: There are plenty of browser-based image editing tools out there and SumoPaint is up there with the best of them.


Regularly updated with new features, this app is pure pleasure to use and you’ll have to keep reminding yourself that you’re not running a separate app. Layers, blending modes, drop shadows and a wide range of brushes are among the features you might not be used to seeing in browser-based image editors. While professional Photoshop users won’t be ready to switch to the cloud just yet, most beginner and intermediate users will find everything they need here.


Don’t miss our 10 Best Productivity Apps of 2010 and 10 Best Social Mobile Apps of 2010.












[CES 2011] It’s been exactly one year since NVIDIA announced and showed Tegra 2 to the world, and NVIDIA did not win a whole lot of contract (“design-wins”) with handset and tablet makers – until recently. If you follow this site regularly, you have probably noticed that Tegra 2 devices have been a common occurrence in the past couple of months, and you can expect this to continue going forward.


Why?


First of all, NVIDIA used to focus their software (drivers) efforts on Windows CE. It turns out that it was a mistake, although one that might be explained by the fact that an alliance with Microsoft and its early DirectX made NVIDIA successful in the past (RIVA 128 days).


NVIDIA has since turned its efforts towards Android, the Operating System (OS) that OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) really want. This new direction, combined with the realization by wireless carriers that multimedia and gaming capabilities do generate money, have propelled NVIDIA from being a marginal player to being a real threat for arch-rivals like  Qualcomm, Ti, Freescale, Marvell and others players in that space.


Multimedia and Gaming Matter


Two years ago, people were reasonably happy with their smartphones if they could browse the web decently, and even that is still a challenge for some platforms… Today, games are the type of content that brings the most money in the eco-system (app stores), so all the sudden, carriers want to have a great gaming phones. And guess who has been powering gaming graphics for a couple of decades?


Master the basics first



Being a “fast gaming machine” is not good enough. First, Tegra 2 has to prove that it is good at the basic things: battery life, web browsing. According to NVIDIA, Tegra-equipped phones browse the web a whole lot faster than established (but also older) competitors out there. The graph above shows its relative performance in an array of web benchmarks. This is basically a demonstration of the multi-core nature of Tegra 2, as web browsing is something that can be made to be multi-core friendly. Other multi-core architecture should exhibit similar improvements.


Tegra 2 also uses a known principle: “perform the task quickly, and get back to sleep”. The idea is to allow the chip to enter a very “fast” mode (which consumes more power), so that it comes back to a “rest” state more rapidly. NVIDIA says that Tegra’s rest state is lower-power than many competitors. Although this might help battery life, the primary goal is to increase performance significantly – without making the battery situation worse. It might be counter intuitive, but using multiple cores at a lower frequency can lead to a significant power consumption reduction for a given task.


Then go to the next level


Flash



With basic stuff out of the way, the Tegra 2 team has identified two areas where they can make a big difference: Flash and 3D gaming. As you have seen, Flash might be available in select phones, but it doesn’t mean that it is usable at all. In fact, Flash (in the browser) is mostly unusable at this point.


Adobe Flash performance is typically slow and it is a CPU (and power) “hog”. On PC, Adobe, Intel, and many companies like AMD or NVIDIA have contributed to the Flash player code (or low-level portions) to make it what it is today. In the mobile world, this has not really happened yet – until now. If a company isn’t capable of optimizing Flash itself, it’s just not going to happen – that’s the bottom-line. With Tegra, NVIDIA has managed to accelerate the whole Flash pipeline in hardware. Years of working with Adobe Flash on the “PC” side is paying dividends here.


3D Gaming


Most people expect NVIDIA to do well here, so it’s not really a surprise, but is it still a technological feat. OpenGL ES 2.0 found on mobile phones is equivalent to DirectX 9, so that’s hardly new for a company like NVIDIA. However, there are a few details that are particularly interesting, like the use of an “Early-Z” (a technique to quickly discard unseen pixels), programmable blending, or cache memory that reduces memory traffic (and therefore power). Some of these techniques are used to simply increase performance in discrete PC graphics, but here, there’s also a huge focus on power preservation.



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PHP: <b>News</b> Archive - 2011

Latest news. For the latest news, check the homepage, or our Atom feed. Archives by year. 1998 � 1999 � 2000 � 2001 � 2002 � 2003 ... News Archive - 2010. Here are the most important news items we have published in 2010 on PHP.net. ...

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PHP: <b>News</b> Archive - 2011

Latest news. For the latest news, check the homepage, or our Atom feed. Archives by year. 1998 � 1999 � 2000 � 2001 � 2002 � 2003 ... News Archive - 2010. Here are the most important news items we have published in 2010 on PHP.net. ...

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Latest news. For the latest news, check the homepage, or our Atom feed. Archives by year. 1998 � 1999 � 2000 � 2001 � 2002 � 2003 ... News Archive - 2010. Here are the most important news items we have published in 2010 on PHP.net. ...

Major Deal: Fashionista Readers Recieve 20% Off Chanel at <b>...</b>

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PHP: <b>News</b> Archive - 2011

Latest news. For the latest news, check the homepage, or our Atom feed. Archives by year. 1998 � 1999 � 2000 � 2001 � 2002 � 2003 ... News Archive - 2010. Here are the most important news items we have published in 2010 on PHP.net. ...

Major Deal: Fashionista Readers Recieve 20% Off Chanel at <b>...</b>

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PHP: <b>News</b> Archive - 2011

Latest news. For the latest news, check the homepage, or our Atom feed. Archives by year. 1998 � 1999 � 2000 � 2001 � 2002 � 2003 ... News Archive - 2010. Here are the most important news items we have published in 2010 on PHP.net. ...

Major Deal: Fashionista Readers Recieve 20% Off Chanel at <b>...</b>

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Latest news. For the latest news, check the homepage, or our Atom feed. Archives by year. 1998 � 1999 � 2000 � 2001 � 2002 � 2003 ... News Archive - 2010. Here are the most important news items we have published in 2010 on PHP.net. ...

Major Deal: Fashionista Readers Recieve 20% Off Chanel at <b>...</b>

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PHP: <b>News</b> Archive - 2011

Latest news. For the latest news, check the homepage, or our Atom feed. Archives by year. 1998 � 1999 � 2000 � 2001 � 2002 � 2003 ... News Archive - 2010. Here are the most important news items we have published in 2010 on PHP.net. ...

Major Deal: Fashionista Readers Recieve 20% Off Chanel at <b>...</b>

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PHP: <b>News</b> Archive - 2011

Latest news. For the latest news, check the homepage, or our Atom feed. Archives by year. 1998 � 1999 � 2000 � 2001 � 2002 � 2003 ... News Archive - 2010. Here are the most important news items we have published in 2010 on PHP.net. ...

Major Deal: Fashionista Readers Recieve 20% Off Chanel at <b>...</b>

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Wednesday, January 5, 2011

why internet marketing

Parlor Showroom, a fast growing mens and womens fashion showroom/sales office, seeks full-time and part time INTERNS. THIS IS AN INTERNSHIP POSITION with growth opportunities for the right candidate. Parlor is looking for organized, educated, team-players, with the desire to learn about the fashion industry. This is an excellent opportunity to learn in a fast-paced, fun environment.

As a sales/marketing Intern you will be able to see how contemporary designers sale team works from the inside out, from initial design concepts through sales and production. You will also be working with top department stores and hundreds of specialty boutiques worldwide! Note: This internship is unpaid, but college credit is offered.

Responsibilities include but are not limited to:/> /> •Maintaining calendar of incoming and outgoing sales orders/appointments merchandising showroom/> •Updating line sheets and look books/> •Administrative duties such as phone answering, copying, fax and file./> •Scheduling market appointments with the leading Mens & Womens buyers in the US and around the world./> •Assisting in tradeshows and showroom appointments assisting sales team with updating and maintaining databases and excel spreadsheets/> •Prepare and analyze sales reports/> /> Required Skills:/> One of the following:

•One year of wholesale showroom or marketing experience,/> •Retail sales experience for a high-end specialty boutique/> •A college major in fashion merchandising or marketing/> /> A good reason we should hire you without one of the above:/> - Some fashion experience/> - Knowledge of all Microsoft office applications (Mac skills a/> plus)/> - Great working knowledge of internet applications as well as some Photoshop or illustrator experience/> - Positive attitude and good at following directions/> - Meticulous and organized (you will be dealing with major accounts in the fashion industry)/> • Knowledge of Photoshop or Illustrator is a plus/> • Must have excellent verbal and written communication skills/> • Must have a personable and friendly personality/> • If you speak any foreign languages, please write this in your cover letter./> • Interest in fashion a must.

To Apply:/> Please email the following with the subject line “ Sales/Marketing Internship” to Jessica@parlorshowroom.com:/> 1. Resume/> 2. Cover letter/> 3. How many days a week you can intern and your start date/end date for the internship, MINIMUM of 3 DAYS PER WEEK FOR 2 MONTHS/> 4. Why you want to intern the fashion industry

I have to agree that in the past, Opera’s promotional efforts have been shady. However, in the recent past they have been doing really well. They have had a few viral successes, especially on Reddit (I covered that over here, earlier).
But, promotion is just one of the many reasons behind Opera’s failure. I had articulated my views in this Quora discussion thread. I am quoting what I previously wrote below:

In my opinion, here are the significant factors

i) Remained ad-supported for too long: It is the security scares in Internet Explorer that helped kickstart the Firefox revolution. Back then while people were looking for alternate browsers, Opera was not free. Hence, while the Fx movement caught on, Opera languished.
ii) Opera is different: I believe that Opera’s UI is the best – elegant, simple yet powerful. However, new users might find it too complicated.
iii) Rendering issues: Opera can’t render many websites properly. I am not saying that this is solely Opera’s fault. I am very much aware of the browser sniffing issues. However, to the end user this is a big turnoff.
iv) Lack of extensions: Opera has just added extensions. I believe that this has had a significant effect on adoption.
Yes, most average users don’t use extensions. However, power users do. And these power users are often journalists, bloggers or simply the techie friend everyone listens to. Thus, Opera never really stood a chance of convincing the opinion makers.
Firefox on the other hand impressed these elite users. They in turn reccomended it to their friends and family members and helped spread the word.
v) Lack of promotion: Already discussed in-depth. Google has been spending millions to promote Chrome. This is simply not possible for Opera.

Even the EU Ballot screen failed to help Opera. Yes, it increased the download counts and increased the no. of active users in Q1 2010. However, the no. of users decreased in Q2 and Q3. In the end Opera’s % market share in EU remains largely unchanged.

You said:

So, don’t tell me you don’t make money!

It’s true. Opera is a publicly traded company, so all their finances are in the public domain. They suffered losses a few quarters back, and now are again in the black. But, their profits aren’t huge. Remember that they have 700 employees and numerous offices. Mozilla, by comparison has only about 350 employees. So, Opera can’t afford to spend millions on an advertising campaign like Microsoft or Google. Google has been doing print ads and putting up hording in India. That is something not feasible for Opera.

A few years back, there were loads of Firefox ads on the web. However, a majority of them were actually Adsense referral unit, where Google was paying webmasters. But, Asa from Mozilla revealed in the aforementioned Quora discussion, Google’s drive didn’t really bring in that many Firefox users. Spreadfirefox.com was way more successful. That suggests that what Opera really missed out on was the word of mouth. And the reasons behind that are probably things like extensions and website compatibility.
Firefox had loads of opinion makers (vocal advocates) behind it. Opera only had a handful number of dedicated fans.

Tl;dr: Bad promotion may be one of the contributing factors, but I don’t believe that it is the main reason behind Opera’s poor marketshare.


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<b>News</b> Corp. Online Gaming Head Sean Ryan to Head Facebook&#39;s Social <b>...</b>

Sean Ryan, who arrived at News Corp. mid-year to set up a new online gaming unit, is moving to Facebook to head partnerships at its key gaming platform, according to sources. Currently, Facebook does not create social games, ...

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Police in a small town in Texas are looking for a 13-year-old cheerleader missing for more than a week, but state officials say the case doesn't meet the criteria for an Amber Alert.


Tuesday, January 4, 2011

How to Making Money











Capacity vs. Usage



Kepes emphasizes the following financial benefits of Infrastructure-as-a-Service:




  • Economies of scale - IaaS vendors can offer cheaper access to infrastructure by purchasing equipment in bulk.

  • Pay as you go for what you use - With cloud computing, you can pay for what you use, like a utility, instead of investing in a fixed capacity infrastructure that may either exceed or fall short of your organization's needs.

  • Cloud services can be paid for out of the operating expenditures budget - And because computing resources are paid for like a utility, they can be paid for out of the operating expendetures budget instead of capital investments.



Kepes then emphasizes the need for organizations to select IaaS vendors that allow them to actually take advantage of these benefits. For example, it's important that customers make sure than billing for cloud services is as granular as possible.



Kepes also looks at issues such as Service Level Agreements, support and compliance. This is the first of a series of free white papers by Kepes. Hopefully we'll see further depth and some papers for more advanced practitioners.



Photo credits: Flickr user Kevin Dooley

















The Weekly Standard blows the lid off another non-scandal -- and, in the process, all but begs House Republicans to conduct a wasteful and inane investigation:




HHS is Paying Google with Taxpayer Money to Alter 'Obamacare' Search Results (Updated)



The brazenness of the Obama administration never ceases to amaze. Try typing "Obamacare" into Google, and you'll find that the first entry is now the Obama administration's www.healthcare.gov. If you don't particularly like that result, you'll probably hate the fact that you're paying for it.



...



Using taxpayers' money to alter the results of search engines and to control the flow of information is disturbing on multiple levels. It's particularly disturbing when it's done to promote a massive expansion of government power, like Obamacare. And one wonders how – or if – it's even legal. 



Perhaps the new House of Representatives will want to ask the unelected Secretary Sebelius to explain how, or why, she thinks such use of taxpayers' money to promote a particular -- and highly unpopular -- political agenda is legally or substantively justifiable.




This is dumb, even for the Weekly Standard (though not too dumb to get Townhall in a lather.) 



"Obamacare" isn't a "political agenda," it's a government program, passed by Congress and signed into law by the President. The government has a natural and appropriate interest in making sure the public knows how a new government program works. The public, quite obviously, has such an interest as well.



Buying ads on Google isn't "control[ing] the flow of information," it's buying ads. It isn't a nefarious bribe to get Google to alter search results; it's how Google ads work. Here's the first example that popped into my head:







See what happened there? I typed "the weekly standard" into Google's search box, and Google put an ad for the Weekly Standard atop my search results. That's exactly what happened with the www.healthcare.gov ads in question. Here's a screenshot, from Politico's Ben Smith:







So, this is nothing more than the government buying ads, exactly -- exactly -- like The Weekly Standard does. Is that a scandal? Of course not. The government buys ads all the time. Like those military recruitment commercials you probably see a few hundred times a year. I haven't seen the Weekly Standard denounce that as an illegal use of taxpayer money to promote a political agenda by controlling the flow of information. Good thing, too: Such a complaint would be stupid.



robert shumake

Study: US Bumblebee Population in Sharp Decline - AOL <b>News</b>

The population of bumblebees in the United States is in a kind of free fall, dropping 96 percent over the past two decades, according to a new study that has scientists alarmed. Four species of bumblebees are in a rapid decline, ...

Weirdest Finding of 2010? Balmain Hair Extensions – Fashionista <b>...</b>

Fashion Industry News, Designers, Runway Shows, Style Advice. Send Tips � Advertise � About Us � Network � Above the Law � AltTransport � Breaking Media � Fashionista. Search for: ... Posted in: Beauty, News ...

Are Korea&#39;s “Bending” away from Bluster? « Liveshots

LONDON After a 2010 that saw the Korean peninsula edge towards the brink of nuclear Armageddon,


robert shumake

Study: US Bumblebee Population in Sharp Decline - AOL <b>News</b>

The population of bumblebees in the United States is in a kind of free fall, dropping 96 percent over the past two decades, according to a new study that has scientists alarmed. Four species of bumblebees are in a rapid decline, ...

Weirdest Finding of 2010? Balmain Hair Extensions – Fashionista <b>...</b>

Fashion Industry News, Designers, Runway Shows, Style Advice. Send Tips � Advertise � About Us � Network � Above the Law � AltTransport � Breaking Media � Fashionista. Search for: ... Posted in: Beauty, News ...

Are Korea&#39;s “Bending” away from Bluster? « Liveshots

LONDON After a 2010 that saw the Korean peninsula edge towards the brink of nuclear Armageddon,


robert shumake detroit










Capacity vs. Usage



Kepes emphasizes the following financial benefits of Infrastructure-as-a-Service:




  • Economies of scale - IaaS vendors can offer cheaper access to infrastructure by purchasing equipment in bulk.

  • Pay as you go for what you use - With cloud computing, you can pay for what you use, like a utility, instead of investing in a fixed capacity infrastructure that may either exceed or fall short of your organization's needs.

  • Cloud services can be paid for out of the operating expenditures budget - And because computing resources are paid for like a utility, they can be paid for out of the operating expendetures budget instead of capital investments.



Kepes then emphasizes the need for organizations to select IaaS vendors that allow them to actually take advantage of these benefits. For example, it's important that customers make sure than billing for cloud services is as granular as possible.



Kepes also looks at issues such as Service Level Agreements, support and compliance. This is the first of a series of free white papers by Kepes. Hopefully we'll see further depth and some papers for more advanced practitioners.



Photo credits: Flickr user Kevin Dooley

















The Weekly Standard blows the lid off another non-scandal -- and, in the process, all but begs House Republicans to conduct a wasteful and inane investigation:




HHS is Paying Google with Taxpayer Money to Alter 'Obamacare' Search Results (Updated)



The brazenness of the Obama administration never ceases to amaze. Try typing "Obamacare" into Google, and you'll find that the first entry is now the Obama administration's www.healthcare.gov. If you don't particularly like that result, you'll probably hate the fact that you're paying for it.



...



Using taxpayers' money to alter the results of search engines and to control the flow of information is disturbing on multiple levels. It's particularly disturbing when it's done to promote a massive expansion of government power, like Obamacare. And one wonders how – or if – it's even legal. 



Perhaps the new House of Representatives will want to ask the unelected Secretary Sebelius to explain how, or why, she thinks such use of taxpayers' money to promote a particular -- and highly unpopular -- political agenda is legally or substantively justifiable.




This is dumb, even for the Weekly Standard (though not too dumb to get Townhall in a lather.) 



"Obamacare" isn't a "political agenda," it's a government program, passed by Congress and signed into law by the President. The government has a natural and appropriate interest in making sure the public knows how a new government program works. The public, quite obviously, has such an interest as well.



Buying ads on Google isn't "control[ing] the flow of information," it's buying ads. It isn't a nefarious bribe to get Google to alter search results; it's how Google ads work. Here's the first example that popped into my head:







See what happened there? I typed "the weekly standard" into Google's search box, and Google put an ad for the Weekly Standard atop my search results. That's exactly what happened with the www.healthcare.gov ads in question. Here's a screenshot, from Politico's Ben Smith:







So, this is nothing more than the government buying ads, exactly -- exactly -- like The Weekly Standard does. Is that a scandal? Of course not. The government buys ads all the time. Like those military recruitment commercials you probably see a few hundred times a year. I haven't seen the Weekly Standard denounce that as an illegal use of taxpayer money to promote a political agenda by controlling the flow of information. Good thing, too: Such a complaint would be stupid.



robert shumake detroit

The Coolest Way To Make More Money With iPhone Apps by Aqif


robert shumake

Study: US Bumblebee Population in Sharp Decline - AOL <b>News</b>

The population of bumblebees in the United States is in a kind of free fall, dropping 96 percent over the past two decades, according to a new study that has scientists alarmed. Four species of bumblebees are in a rapid decline, ...

Weirdest Finding of 2010? Balmain Hair Extensions – Fashionista <b>...</b>

Fashion Industry News, Designers, Runway Shows, Style Advice. Send Tips � Advertise � About Us � Network � Above the Law � AltTransport � Breaking Media � Fashionista. Search for: ... Posted in: Beauty, News ...

Are Korea&#39;s “Bending” away from Bluster? « Liveshots

LONDON After a 2010 that saw the Korean peninsula edge towards the brink of nuclear Armageddon,


robert shumake

Study: US Bumblebee Population in Sharp Decline - AOL <b>News</b>

The population of bumblebees in the United States is in a kind of free fall, dropping 96 percent over the past two decades, according to a new study that has scientists alarmed. Four species of bumblebees are in a rapid decline, ...

Weirdest Finding of 2010? Balmain Hair Extensions – Fashionista <b>...</b>

Fashion Industry News, Designers, Runway Shows, Style Advice. Send Tips � Advertise � About Us � Network � Above the Law � AltTransport � Breaking Media � Fashionista. Search for: ... Posted in: Beauty, News ...

Are Korea&#39;s “Bending” away from Bluster? « Liveshots

LONDON After a 2010 that saw the Korean peninsula edge towards the brink of nuclear Armageddon,


robert shumake

Money, children seem to think it grows on trees and want to spend it like it does. As a parent how many times have you told your child you couldn't afford to purchase something they wanted only to have them say, "You can get more at the bank." If it were only that easy we'd all be rich. Until they get older and start making their own money and paying their own bills many kids just don't understand the value of money and will often spend it as soon as they get it. Teaching children how to handle money responsibly valuable lesson that will shape their financial future. Playing games together that teach the concepts of saving money and spending wisely are a great way parents can help their children learn about money and become financially responsible adults. To help parents pick the best games that teach children about money here are my top three choices.

Three Games That Teach Children About Handling Money Responsibly

1. Moneywise Kids by Talicor

This fun game that teaches the value of money is actually two games in one. The first game is called Bill Maker and gives children the opportunity to earn money and practice turning small denominations of money into larger ones. The second game called Bill Breaker gives children the opportunity to earn and spend money on real life expenses such as food, housing costs and taxes. It also gives them the chance to learn about making payments when they draw a hard luck chip which means a big bill. Both games are fun, fast paced and teach children about earning money,making change and budgeting. Moneywise is available on Amazon and retails for $10.75 and is recommended for ages 7 and up.

2. Learning Resources Money Bags A Coin Value Game by Learning Resources

In this fun board game children have the opportunity to earn pretend money for common household chores and learn to combine and count out change. Instead of allowing the child to choose what combination of coins they will take as payment the game further challenges children by giving them a direction such as take .27 without using nickels. This is a great way to teach children the values of different denominations of coins and how different coin combinations can add up to the same amount. Money Bags A Coin Value Game is appropriate for children 6 and up and is designed for two to four players. It retails for $13.76 and is available on Amazon.

3. Shopping Spree by John N. Hansen

In this and educational game children learn the concepts of earning, spending and planning ahead as they head to a local shopping mall with a pocketful of money. As they stop at each store they make a purchase. They have to decide how much they will spend in order to make it to the end of the game. If they overspend then they have to earn more money before they can continue on their shopping spree. Because it only uses denominations of .50 and a $ 1.00 Shopping Spree makes an excellent first game to teach young children about be responsible with money. Its recommended for ages 4 and up and can be played by two to four players. Shopping Spree can be purchased from Amazon and retails for $19.05

Games are a fun way to teach children about money and how to handle it responsibly. With a little knowledge of how earning and spending work maybe they won't bug their parents to buy every item they see or at the very least they will have an appreciation of how hard money is to earn and how quickly it goes.

Source:
Amazon


robert shumake

Study: US Bumblebee Population in Sharp Decline - AOL <b>News</b>

The population of bumblebees in the United States is in a kind of free fall, dropping 96 percent over the past two decades, according to a new study that has scientists alarmed. Four species of bumblebees are in a rapid decline, ...

Weirdest Finding of 2010? Balmain Hair Extensions – Fashionista <b>...</b>

Fashion Industry News, Designers, Runway Shows, Style Advice. Send Tips � Advertise � About Us � Network � Above the Law � AltTransport � Breaking Media � Fashionista. Search for: ... Posted in: Beauty, News ...

Are Korea&#39;s “Bending” away from Bluster? « Liveshots

LONDON After a 2010 that saw the Korean peninsula edge towards the brink of nuclear Armageddon,


robert shumake detroit

The Coolest Way To Make More Money With iPhone Apps by Aqif


robert shumake










Capacity vs. Usage



Kepes emphasizes the following financial benefits of Infrastructure-as-a-Service:




  • Economies of scale - IaaS vendors can offer cheaper access to infrastructure by purchasing equipment in bulk.

  • Pay as you go for what you use - With cloud computing, you can pay for what you use, like a utility, instead of investing in a fixed capacity infrastructure that may either exceed or fall short of your organization's needs.

  • Cloud services can be paid for out of the operating expenditures budget - And because computing resources are paid for like a utility, they can be paid for out of the operating expendetures budget instead of capital investments.



Kepes then emphasizes the need for organizations to select IaaS vendors that allow them to actually take advantage of these benefits. For example, it's important that customers make sure than billing for cloud services is as granular as possible.



Kepes also looks at issues such as Service Level Agreements, support and compliance. This is the first of a series of free white papers by Kepes. Hopefully we'll see further depth and some papers for more advanced practitioners.



Photo credits: Flickr user Kevin Dooley

















The Weekly Standard blows the lid off another non-scandal -- and, in the process, all but begs House Republicans to conduct a wasteful and inane investigation:




HHS is Paying Google with Taxpayer Money to Alter 'Obamacare' Search Results (Updated)



The brazenness of the Obama administration never ceases to amaze. Try typing "Obamacare" into Google, and you'll find that the first entry is now the Obama administration's www.healthcare.gov. If you don't particularly like that result, you'll probably hate the fact that you're paying for it.



...



Using taxpayers' money to alter the results of search engines and to control the flow of information is disturbing on multiple levels. It's particularly disturbing when it's done to promote a massive expansion of government power, like Obamacare. And one wonders how – or if – it's even legal. 



Perhaps the new House of Representatives will want to ask the unelected Secretary Sebelius to explain how, or why, she thinks such use of taxpayers' money to promote a particular -- and highly unpopular -- political agenda is legally or substantively justifiable.




This is dumb, even for the Weekly Standard (though not too dumb to get Townhall in a lather.) 



"Obamacare" isn't a "political agenda," it's a government program, passed by Congress and signed into law by the President. The government has a natural and appropriate interest in making sure the public knows how a new government program works. The public, quite obviously, has such an interest as well.



Buying ads on Google isn't "control[ing] the flow of information," it's buying ads. It isn't a nefarious bribe to get Google to alter search results; it's how Google ads work. Here's the first example that popped into my head:







See what happened there? I typed "the weekly standard" into Google's search box, and Google put an ad for the Weekly Standard atop my search results. That's exactly what happened with the www.healthcare.gov ads in question. Here's a screenshot, from Politico's Ben Smith:







So, this is nothing more than the government buying ads, exactly -- exactly -- like The Weekly Standard does. Is that a scandal? Of course not. The government buys ads all the time. Like those military recruitment commercials you probably see a few hundred times a year. I haven't seen the Weekly Standard denounce that as an illegal use of taxpayer money to promote a political agenda by controlling the flow of information. Good thing, too: Such a complaint would be stupid.



robert shumake

Study: US Bumblebee Population in Sharp Decline - AOL <b>News</b>

The population of bumblebees in the United States is in a kind of free fall, dropping 96 percent over the past two decades, according to a new study that has scientists alarmed. Four species of bumblebees are in a rapid decline, ...

Weirdest Finding of 2010? Balmain Hair Extensions – Fashionista <b>...</b>

Fashion Industry News, Designers, Runway Shows, Style Advice. Send Tips � Advertise � About Us � Network � Above the Law � AltTransport � Breaking Media � Fashionista. Search for: ... Posted in: Beauty, News ...

Are Korea&#39;s “Bending” away from Bluster? « Liveshots

LONDON After a 2010 that saw the Korean peninsula edge towards the brink of nuclear Armageddon,


robert shumake

The Coolest Way To Make More Money With iPhone Apps by Aqif


robert shumake