Never ever rely primarily on a single large contract. Several smaller ones are more reliable. Contracts will go south, and when they do the impact on you depends on how large a fraction of your business that contract is. See the Wal-Mart/record-labels post below for example. CD sales are 2% of Wal-Mart's business, Wal-Mart sales are 20% of the labels' business. If that deal goes south, the impact on Wal-Mart will be negligible. The impact on the labels, however, is going to be major. The same thing with consulting deals. If a contract that goes bad is 10% of your business, you only lose 10% of your income while you find a replacement (and a replacement will be easier to find, there's more small deals out there than large ones). If that contract's 75% of your business, you're out 75% of your income if it goes bad. Which would you rather deal with?

Current Mood: productive

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/6558540/walmart_wants_10_cds

Wal-Mart pays about $12 for a hit CD. They sell them for $9.72 to attract customers. They're tired of that. And they're doing something about it: they're demanding that the labels sell them CDs at a low enough price to make that $9.72 retail price profitable. The implicit threat: if the labels don't, Wal-Mart will stop carrying their music. And that's a big threat. Wal-Mart alone is 20% of the labels' sales every year, but music CDs are only 2% of Wal-Mart's sales. Wal-Mart could drop CDs entirely and devote the space to more profitable DVDs and video games and actually come out ahead. The labels essentially have absolutely no leverage here, and this isn't a position they're used to being in.

Sorry, record labels, you ain't gettin' no sympathy from me.

Current Mood: bored

Don't we wish.

Ganked from Caprine over on LJ:

http://eeknight.livejournal.com/334981.html

Current Mood: amused

Carousel: solving the Social Security problem once and for all.

Current Mood: silly

Hotel room block opens April 2nd. I'm going to get my reservation in early this year, since the hotel seems to sell out very early on. The only question is whether to get a single or double.

Current Mood: working

Yielding such gems as "milled breastanium".

Current Mood: amused

"I don't *think* we've got pentagrams chalked on any of the servers yet." -- Peter Corlett

Current Mood: amused

Respectable religion: a wacko cult with a sufficiently large and well-armed following.

Current Mood: amused

We ran Vaults of Eternal Sleep last night in EQ2. This is our first real tier-8 instance. All the T8 instances are regarded as being overly hard.

I have to disagree. The instance itself isn't really hard. It's not a cakewalk but, handled properly, none of the mobs in it are really a tough fight. What it is is terribly unforgiving. You need a mezzer to lock down mobs so the tank can take them on one at a time. And you need to have everyone on the ball and doing their job right, all the time, no mistakes, no goofing off, no screw-ups. You do it on the bounce and by the numbers or you die, plain and simple. But once you've figured out how to handle each encounter, as long as you do do it by the numbers you can steamroll the place handily.

The raiders are just annoyed that they can't swarm the place, do their usual half-arsed job and still come out ahead.

Current Mood: working

G-Archiver harvesting passwords.

G-Archiver is a service that backs up your GMail account. To do this it needs you to give it the password to your GMail account. It sounds good, but G-Archiver was also saving all the account names and passwords given to it and mailing them to it's author, who then could do anything he wanted with those accounts. Including selling them on for other people to use. He says he's not doing anything bad with the information, that this was an accident, some debugging code that shouldn't have been in the release. I don't believe him, but it doesn't matter. Whether the passwords got harvested deliberately or by accident, they were still harvested and sent to someone and the victims don't know what's happened to their passwords after that and have to assume they've been compromised.

This is the pitfall of software-as-a-service, of having software you use hosted by someone else and running on their machines outside your control: you must give information to them that you should never ever give to them. The correct response to this is "No.". Yes, that means you can't use their service. That's the nature of the beast.

For myself, I'll continue to apply my rule: my passwords get given only to the service my account is on and to software running on my own machine accessing that service directly. And I'll continue to not have my accounts hacked, hijacked or compromised.

Current Mood: annoyed

Trent Reznor tried an experiment: offering his latest album in a variety of DRM-free downloadable formats ranging from absolutely free to a $300 ultra-deluxe package. Now, the anti-piracy forces keep saying that people won't pay for what's available for free. So, let them explain how, despite the songs being available for free, the $300 ultra-deluxe offering sold out. 2500 copies available, 2500 sold, that's $750,000 in revenue for Trent off that alone, not counting any other sales. And that's a lot more than Trent makes off royalties from his label-released albums, I'll bet.

Current Mood: amused

"You must be able to walk from the train station to the office without being arrested."

I wish.

Current Mood: amused

We may be looking down the barrel of a stellar rifle, the universe's biggest gamma-ray laser. Aimed roughly at Earth. Fortunately it doesn't seem primed to fire soon.

Current Mood: busy

MurmurHash. Fast non-cryptographic hash function, pointer here for reference.

Current Mood: geeky

Well, it was found years ago, but observed under laboratory conditions. Basically when one car brakes suddenly, it triggers a self-amplifying shockwave traveling backwards through traffic until a complete stop occurs.

Current Mood: working

This photo captures an avalanch in progress on Mars. The first photo of it's kind. We've seen evidence of avalanches before, but this is the first one showing the dust cloud that indicates this avalanch is either happening or had just ended as the photo was taken.

Current Mood: awake

They're looking now at the twin spectres of a stagnant or shrinking economy coupled with rising inflation, aka "stagflation". This is a problem for the Fed because these two problems require opposing solutions: a shrinking economy calls for lowered interest rates, while rising inflation calls for higher interest rates.

Except that interest rates won't work. We had this in the 70s and early 80s, caused by the same thing then as now: rising oil prices. Oil and it's direct derivatives factor into the price of everything, either as a required raw material or as fuel to transport materials and products from where they are to where they're needed. And raising or lowering interest rates won't do jack to the price of oil.

I'm seriously thinking of getting heavily into Web-related stuff and looking at what's available in San Diego in relatively recession-proof industries. People are always going to want sex regardless of how bad the economy gets, after all, and adult entertainment has taken to the Web like gangbusters.

Current Mood: blah

The Republican party leadership is annoyed at John McCain because they feel he doesn't represent the Republican party's positions on things, that he's closer to a Democrat than a Republican. I think the Republican party leadership better get a clue: if McCain wasn't closer to Republican party member's positions than Huckabee, he wouldn't be trashing Huckabee by better than 3:1 in the primaries. My opinion: either the Republican party's going to modify it's positions more to the left, in particular on religious issues, or it's going to find it's membership dwindling and it's ability to get people elected wiped out.

Oh, and a comment directed at a number of religious conservatives who've been going on about how the liberals are going to damage their country: it's not your country, guys. It's our country, and you're not in the majority by a long shot. We were content to let you do your thing in peace, but you had to go and start forcing it on everybody else whether they agreed with you or not. Well, guess what, after a while people get annoyed at that. And in a democracy like the US, they can do something about that annoyance.

Current Mood: amused

Well, it was a sinus infection. They've got me on antibiotics now, a 5-day course of azithromycin. I took the first dose at noon, it seems to be helping already. Hopefully I'll be in decent shape in the morning. The blurry vision from the crud leaking through my tear ducts is also starting to go away. Although I really need to get my eyes checked and get a new set of glasses once I get my tax refund.

I hate being sick. It's been 15 years or more since anything hit me this bad. Well, being run over by a car took me out longer, but that's a whole 'nother level of badness there and shouldn't really count.

Current Mood: blah