...more recent posts
Apple reported some very high fourth quarter earnings yesterday after the market closed, and, uh, Wall St. liked what they heard. I swear I saw it rise 10% in less than an hour. Apple now has a larger market cap than Intel and IBM. What a world.
The iPhone "is a game-changing product," said Stephen Coleman, chief investment officer at Daedalus Capital LLC.But I think it was really Mac sales that drove the stock up. They were incredibly strong. Over 2 million Macs sold - 400,000 more than in any previous quarter. And that's in a quarter immediately preceding a huge OS release (often people put off computer purchases until a new OS is released since you get it free with a new computer.) Apple is now the number three computer retailer in the U.S. (behind Dell and HP who, sure, sell a lot more but on *much* lower margins.)
Based on income from the iPhone alone, he said, "I expect Apple's earnings to continually grow materially at 50 percent a year, for the next three years."
I think they are at the tipping point, especially with their laptop sales. They can easily gobble up market share percentage points from here. 10% of the global market doesn't seem out of reach. And then, yeah, there's that whole iPod thing. Still, I don't trust the market in general right now and I think I'm going to sell my rather tiny holdings. It's been a very fun ride.
Sensible rules for dealing with broadband congestion and QOS. "So there's your solution."
It just occurred to me that I should record distinct useragents who request robots.txt in the database, and then I could run the referrer logs against this list and come up with, I think, sort of okay human traffic numbers. Maybe filter the robot inserts through a black list of real browser useragents to cut down on the chances incorrect robot identifications.
Would any real robots obeying the robots.txt provision identify themselves with actual broser useragent strings? And how many robots don't request robots.txt? And how many human browsers do? (Hackers seeing where you don't want robots to look? noob web developers looking for examples? Can't amount to much.)
Blacklist (of known human browser useragent) could be compiled similarly by inserting distinct useragents of account holders into the database.
Probably not worth it, but as another barier against false robot id you could check if new identified-as-robot useragent subsequently request javascript files, as probably robots don't request those.
And while I'm thinking about this, distinct IP total numbers might be improved by having distinct IP plus distinct useragents within the same IP. So, for instance, a page requested from the same IP by 2 different useragents should probably be counted as 2 people, not 1 as the "by distinct IP" view would give it. This might be wrong, as I could use Safari today and FireFox tomorrow while still being one person, but I think it's at least as possible that I actually am two people behind a NAT. Distinct IP really gives something more akin to number of households (or businesses) requesting, not number of people.