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Then why don't I have to pay AOL a huge upfront fee to buy their disc since they put so much dev work into all their new versions? AOL's monthly fee is only double the cost of most of the online games, and they have to pay for phonelines to provide a dial up connection plus the backend connection, and they offer a lot of their own content that has to be paid for.

It costs a lot more to build a cellular phone network than make a video game, and yet the cell companies will allow me to connect to their networks without paying a startup fee to offset the costs to build their network. If I don't have a phone that will work with their network, they'll even provide me with one at a heavily subsidized price, or even for free.

Earthlink's email station hardware is free even though it must cost them the first 6 months of your service cost.

These companies and most others understand that their main revenue stream is from the service. Initial costs such as activation fees or hardware and software costs are barriers to people becoming customers and that is a bad thing.

What is better for the software company: if 100,000 people buy the software for $30 and 50% decide to keep the account for a year at $10/month, or 2 million people sign up for free and just 10% keep their accounts for a year? That's exactly why barriers are bad; even if you have a lower turnover rate, you still have less total customers

Jason
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How about giving me the option to play the game without having to pay for a useless box and manual that I don't have the shelf space for? All I need is the CD. For a simple CD in a Jewel case they could charge the price of the first month's service and include a month of service. If they did that, I'd have played several MMORPGs by now. Instead, I've never even tried one.

I've bought all 3 WarCraft games and StarCraft, and they're my favourite games since the Sierra adventure games. WoW looks like it will be the best one yet, but I refuse to buy into that model on principle, and I am definately their target audience, I still spend about 10 hours/week playing WC3.

Jason
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My objection to MMORPGs is that you have to buy the software and pay a monthly fee. I will pay one or the other, but not both.

Jason
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You're not factoring in the 4 hours waiting in line. That brings it down to 25 cents/minute.

Jason
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Whirring is the key word. Hard disks have gotten bigger. But they haven't gotten faster. They haven't gotten quieter.

But they have gotten warmer. My computer is starting to take over the job of my heater in the winter.

Jason
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Just like fair use protected my rights to use DeCSS to rip some DVDs to my notebook HD so I can play them on a trip? Oh, you must have meant the way fair use protects my rights to use p2p software to distribute music I record or even download mp3s of songs on CDs I have.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Then I meant the Genesis campaign and not the master campaign.

I didn't even remember the phrase "Genesis does was Nintendo don't", but it makes me cringe in the a way the words alone shouldn't, so some part of me must remember it. As I said the Soul Edge series were my favourite arcade games. I would have bought the DC at launch if it weren't for those genesis commercials setting up a subconscious sega=evil link in my mind. Consciously I liked sega and thought the DC sounded great.

On a related note, 90% of commercials make me less likely to buy the product, 5% don't affect my opinion, and 5% make me more likley. With the "bam" campaign, it will be a lot of years before I buy pop-tarts again, if ever. I can't be the only person who feels this way.

Jason
ProfQuotes

When they launched their first console, Sega had some horrible commercials with people singing a horrible song about their hedgehog. I could never think about sega without those commercials bringing up bad associations so I never bought any of their systems. Since Soul Edge was one of my favourite arcade games, I would have bought a DC just for Soul Calibur if it weren't for that.

Jason
ProfQuotes

If you're a large company (10,000+) machines it is a lot cheaper to hire that consultant to keep your open source code up to date than it will be to keep your MS licenses up to date. Added bonuses are that you don't have to worry about an MS audit, and all the slashdotter's will rally around your company and buy your products even if they aren't as good.

Jason
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MS has stopped releasing security updates for NT4, so companies using it are forced to decide between having security holes or paying MS for a newer version that locks them into a more draconian license agreement. How long until your company faces the same problem with whatever version of windows they use?

With open source, you can patch whatever version you're running, or just upgrade whatever is necessary without the draconian eulas.

Jason
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It's just revenge for all the other sites we've slashdotted.

Jason
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the rest of Canada is frontier land that is there to be exploited.

How is transfering billions of dollars a year from Ontario to Alberta exploiting you? Forcing you to spend our money must be such a hardship.

Jason
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You only ship the amount you don't use there (that you might want to export elsewhere). What do you mean you buy it back from higher prices? from who? We don't want or get any of you wheat anyway, Ontario produces plenty for our own use and to export to other provinces.

You're on shaky ground to begin with with agriculture as an example. Most farming in Canada is subsidized by the federal goverment, and most of that money comes from Ontario.

What is this hatred you Westerners have against being a part of Canada? My comment was that you give cheap oil to a foreign country instead of your fellow countrymen, and your response is that you are forced to sell your surplus wheat within your own country instead of outside as if that were a bad thing.

Jason
ProfQuotes

This is exactly why the US is lagging in technical innovation. The Japanese engineer instantly knows there are a million milimeters in a kilometer and a million grams in a tonne.

When the American engineer wants to know how many 16ths of an inch in a mile or ounces in a ton, he has to pull out his Japanese made calculator.

Jason
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We have vast oil resources in Western Canada. It is exported to the US very cheaply, and here in Eastern Canada, we import oil from the Middle East at much higher prices.

Jason
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Have we narrowed the possible range for the Hubble Constant any more? It seems like it's been converging on 42 for the past few decades.

Jason
ProfQuotes

The question though is why should I work around it? As the consumer, I want to buy a music player that works the way I want, not one that's designed to actively work against me so I have to look for work-arounds.

I didn't know about the lack of high speed uploading to PC. Does that mean if you do use it to record your lectures and you want to load them onto your PC, it's very slow?

Jason
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At least until they fall off their motorcycle.

Jason
ProfQuotes

I still run Quicken 5. It's a lot faster and more intuitive than the newer versions, and I don't have to deal with Intuit's new DRM and spyware. I back up the whole program and all 6 years of data on a single floppy.

Jason
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iPod's can't record, but if you really want something that does, then get a Sony Mini-disk player/recorder

They way Sony is going, you'll probably have to pay a royalty to play back the lecture; there's always the chance of it being used to acoustically copy CDs.

Go with the old fashioned analog microcassette recorder. The only problem I had with that is getting the mic to actually pick up the lecture, but you'll have the same problem with a digital solution.

Just write a program that interprets the 'next' button on the remote as microphone data.

Yep, I'm sure iPod is capable of picking up pushbutton presses fast enough. Coming from the mic, you'll have PCM data, the lowest that's acceptable for speech will still need 1 megabyte/minute. That's over 100,000 keypresses per second.

Jason
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But now you can have your house pre-sort your snail mail to remove spam.

Jason
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With over 500 hours of content, the Trek universe is very rich and deep. There is a lot of potential to have a good sci-fi show and set it in the Star Trek.

Jason
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What Trek needs is to dump Berman and his lackeys.

Jason
ProfQuotes

There's a lot of suggestions here about how to set up the network, but nobody seems to be covering the more difficult aspects.

How will you get the condo board to go for any such proposal. Chances are most people in your building don't know anything about networking and will be happy with their dial-ups...if they have internet access at all.

I'm finding it hard enough to get my condo to start a DVD library.

Jason
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They didn't shorten it to SML because everyone will pronounce it smell. Then half their FAQ will have to explain that smell sensors don't exist yet.

Jason
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Hormel sure got their $100 worth out of the term.

Jason
ProfQuotes

People say this a lot here, but can you cite a source. A super-bright (2 candella) LED takes 15mA at 1.7 volts, that's about 25mW of power, so 1 Watt powers 40 LEDs. A standard 4-foot fluorescent tube is 40 Watts, so you can power 1,600 super-bright LEDs with the same power as the 40 Watt tube. I've never used more than 50 of the LEDs at once, but it sure seems like a few hundred would match the light output of the fluorescent.

From what I said, we know 40 Watts gives us 3,200 candella with the LEDs. What's the output of the 40 Watt tube? I have a 20 Watt ring-shaped compact fluoresent that gives under 1000 candella, so the LEDs are more efficient than that.

Jason
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ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI.

Jason
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How did you solve the halting problem? Or does it not check for potential infinite loops?

Jason
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I don't over-clock because it's not worth it. I ran my K6-2-300 at 350 for a while, and every time I ran anything CPU intensive it crashed. When I went back down to 300 everything worked perfectly and it seemed faster. 2 GHz is so fast now, I'd rather have it run cooler by running it at 1500MHz than deal with overheating by running it at 2200MHz.

The warranty doesn't have anything to with over-heating. I've used thermal compound since my 486 CPUs. With an early pentium I had to explain to the person at the store that it wasn't glue. (The parallel port blew on a 2 week old MB).

All other factors being equal (no over-clocking), using thermal compound is better for the CPU than not using it. Every heatsink I've ever installed on anything (going back to power transistors in the 70's) used it. Now this stupid company says it voids the warranty. WHY?

Jason
ProfQuotes

AMD does not have the legal right to prevent you from using 3rd party heatsinks as long as they're designed for the AMD CPUs. This is the same as saying using 3rd party ink in the printer will void the warranty. In both cases, the company is still legally obligated to honor the warranty, but fighting them in court for it is another matter.

Jason
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It looks like the lawsuit is totally justified. The Strawberry Shortcake comic is damaging to the trademark-holder's reputation, and the US has an enforce it or lose it trademark system.

The follow-up strip is just so pathetically stupid that it's almost funny that the writers are such idiots.

Jason
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If you're a whistleblower, they have a reason not to trust you. If you tell their secrets to the government, maybe you'll tell them to the competition for money. Since they can't trust you and can't fire you, they have to shift you to something where you don't have access to their secrets...like scrubbing toilets.

It's like the ADA, they can't fire you, but if you can't do the job, they can find something else for you.

Jason
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Sure, but do you want to work at a company where you've blown the whistle? Management can make life very miserable for you. They can't fire you, but they can re-assign you to scrub toilets with a toothbrush.

Jason
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As long as the employees were getting a big enough piece of the pie, they kept quiet. They should be charged with aiding in the crime.

Jason
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They get paid with a cheque for some small token amount, and most don't cash the cheque, they frame it and put it on their wall.

Jason
ProfQuotes

If a letter costs $20k, a catalog will be a lot more. It might be cheaper to pay the $20 Million to have it hand delivered. Maybe by one of the models :).

Jason
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The poster said cars were a more efficient means of transportation, not more energy efficient.

I asked in what way he meant they were more efficient and then listed responses to is various possibilities.

If roads and parking lots are a huge waste, what would you prefer in their place?

How about bicycle trails and places to lock the bikes? That would take up so much less space that most things within a city would be within biking range. For things that aren't, there are busses with bike racks. There would be a system of roads between cities for the busses and acting as major arteries within the cities.

Jason
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How are you measuring efficiency? Horses are far more energy efficient, they are just slower and require more work to keep "operational".

The automobile is one of the least efficient things ever made. It needs more calories of energy to go 5 miles than an average person used in a day 200 years ago. It also is a huge waste of land for roads and parking lots. The wasted land also has the side effect of spreading everything out so you waste more fuel and time going farther to get where you're going. That also cuts into the speed advantage since it now takes you longer to get where you're going.

Jason
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More tonnes of water evaporate off the oceans every day than man pumps CO into the air. A few million tonnes of water is nothing to the oceans. The water level wouldn't even measurably change.

Jason
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Good points, when I read Asimov's earlier works, I found it hard to believe people would really be that stupid, and with robots, they don't seem to be. But you're right, that's exactly how people react to GM foods.

As far as one person making a difference in a sample group of billions, what about Hussein, Bin Laden, and Hitler? On the good side, Gorbechov and Einstein?

Jason
ProfQuotes.com

Psychohistory is essentially Econometric Modeling, I took an undergrad course on that. The prof even mentioned that it was the same idea as Asimov's Psychohistory.

Even if Econometrics is much less precise or sophisticated, it is still a lot more than a first step towards it, and compared to Econometrics, the article is nothing.

Jason
ProfQuotes

When do the bookies start taking bets on which chain will be the first to expand to the moon? Hilton Storms? Best Western - Sea of Tranqulity?

Jason
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Amazon.com can get out of this just by using their normal business strategy. Patent protecting children online. Then they can counter-sue all these groups for violating the patent.

I hope Bezos doesn't read slashdot, I don't want to give him any ideas.

Jason
ProfQuotes

The only way to get 75% to the artists is to cut out the middlemen. I've recently gotten involved in the board game development industry. The numbers I've seen are that 50% of the retail price goes to the retailer, 25% goes to the wholesaler, the rest has to go into manufacturing, and possibly paying an agent. You're lucky to see a 5% royalty.

If out of a $15 CD, 75% goes to the artist that means there's only $3.75 to cover the cost of manufacturing, and profits along the distribution channel. Even if you deal directly with resellers so there's only one link in the chain, that means the retailer is paying $$12.25 (75% plus a $1 manufacturing fee) for an item they can only make $2.75 on. Out of the $2.75, the retailer still has to pay their costs to keep the store open. Rental of the location, employees, cash register ink, etc. If the artist takes 75%, the retailers will go bankrupt, then the artists won't have anywhere to sell their material and they will get 0%.

Jason
ProfQuotes

Those database people should've never named their program the same thing as the browser

They should have never named it after the car and then expected that nobody would do the same to them.

Jason
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MS has more advertising dollars. If we reclaim the language and make trusted computing mean something good, it makes palladium sound good.

Jason
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Secure Debian sounds like a good name for it. The first thing I thought of when I read Trusted Debian was that it will be like palladium.

Jason
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I cancelled my subscription to the star years ago. They have turned into a very bitter, ultra-left wing rant page. Just read some of the other articles up there now. Lots of articles blaming people for SARS, Critisizing the government for causing a double load of students entering university, an article saying how abusive the government is for having enforced quarantines.

The breaking point for me was when they had an article pretending to be a list of all the great stuff you can do at the CNE that turned out to be a very rude insult saying the CNE can't do anything right so they should abolish it (the CNE was great that year).

Jason
ProfQuotes

How does that improve on the current system. The only disadvantage is that we have a leapday every 4 years. Your way sounds confusing; how will you make an appointment for 2:30pm on Sept 19th when it's April?

Jason
ProfQuotes