Heat sink design as well as case airflow is critical. Too many machines rely on a tiny fan or have situations where the video card is crammed in a small case.(almost all laptops never were meant to play games like this for any length of time) Add into the equation the issue of most OEM heat sinks being poorly designed rubbish and you've got problems.
My machine handles games just fine, but it has a massive heat sink that's larger than the entire card that I added. No issues whatsoever. I bought my card and also bought the new heat sink and fan at the same time. Unfortunately, it's pretty much a requirement now to do this(along with extra memory)
Concerning the explosives, you're correct. But, in the movie, he also didn't pack it in(neither did Mythbusters). Of course, looking at the movie, I suspect that they actually used dynamite(or detonation cord plus gasoline - a Hollywood favorite) buried a few feet down as the holes are too large and I can't imagine even Hollywood getting their hands on that much (actual) C4 easily.
The problem with C4 is that it's too explosive. If you watch the show frequently, you see them talk about how it feels for each type of explosive. C4 is a very sharp and quick jolt, and as a result, won't do anything much to the ground and surrounding area at long distances. Gunpowder or something much slower, though, would have had the desired effect. Yet again, Hollywood goes for high-tech and fancy when low-tech and simple actually is how it should be. To be honest, if the guy had a few barrels of gunpowder(or dynamite) and fertilizer in the movie nobody would have cared. IMO, it would have been more realistic as well, since one could see him legally obtaining the items in question as a part of his job.
Perhaps a realistic solution would be for all of the companies to band together and instead of fighting the trolls one at a time, send all of that money - figure a billion+ dollars at Congress to solve this idiocy once and for all. 36 major companies surely can cough up 20-30 million each. They probably spend that much every few years on dealing with trolls and other legal issues surrounding patents anyways. The downside, of course, is *of course* they would make it favor them.
Other options of course would involve similar actions against the inane judge, such as funding his opponent's campaign(come on, you KNOW it happens all the time - nothing new about this tactic), ads on tv, and so on. Even 10 million in "public information" TV ads about his pro patent troll rulings would likely tank any chance of his getting re-elected. It's mean and nasty, but it's a known issue with any public official. You don't bite the public and businesses who got you into office unless you want to risk the same public and businesses helping someone *ELSE* get into office.
Don't go after the trolls. Go straight to the lawyers and judges and people in Congress who made the silly laws in the first place and get them to fix the mess that they created.
Seriously. Read how it works. Any band can make their song, do the mastering process and submit it to Harmonix. If it is a hit, well, you can sell a half million songs in a few months. If not, well, so be it - it ends up in the recycle bin/deleted from consideration and you try again. But it's not even necessary to have CDs or burn anything anymore.
Only fools sign anything with the RIAA or the major labels these days, since it's never been easier to do it yourself.
http://www.discmakers.com/duplicators/automated/DiscproducerPP100.asp This is pretty much all you need if you want to churn out a few thousand CDs. Basic units run $300-$500 last I checked, but the professional units are well worth the money. Put a stack of labels and CDs in and come back in two hours - 100 ready to put in cases or sleeves. With a bunch of coffee and a friend to do some work for you, that's an easy thousand in a 18-20 hour long "shift" before a concert. Total cost is way under $1 per CD. (the above 5K for $2000 or so is fairly spot-on if you go to a firm that does this sort of thing). But you can also do it at home as well.
- You can produce yourself. Write, record, mix, and all the rest at home in your own private studio.
- You can promote yourself.(or let others do it for you - some only charge a flat percentage fee per CD (CD Baby comes to mind), which means the artists gets the majority of the money(after duplication costs unless they deliver the goods to the company's warehouse of course)
- You can burn/copy the media yourself if all else fails. Make them at home for 50 cents each and sell them at the concert for $5. Almost anyone will buy a CD at a concert for $5 these days.
There's simply no need to waste time with contracts any more if you have even a little skill and moxie.
True, but the real issue is that he entered into a contract and then "forgot" about it in the past few years, probably either legitimately forgetting about it, or more likely, but hoping that that mistake would not ever see the light of day. Given Zuckerberg's apparent fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants style, and his ego, he's probably invented a whole litany of reasons in his own head already about why it didn't actually happen. But it looks like he really did do something he shouldn't have. (talk about one expensive skeleton in the closet!)
1 - It appears to be legitimate and typical of the idiocy one does in College or as a small DIYer who knows jack all about legal matters. They split it 50/50 at first(this part is iron-clad in any court) and then the other 25+% clause kicked in. In this case, you'll see Zuckerberg in court being asked one question by the judge - "is this your signature"? And that's it - done deal. The punitive clause might be removed as unenforceable or as usurious, but the original 50/50 split is valid.
2 - And, no, while I'm not a lawyer, any basic book on copyright law(my focus was music as I was a professional musician after college, so I'm fairly up to date with the basics at least) tells you that you sign agreements like this as if they were in blood(if you ever do, that is), because even if it literally is on a napkin, you're SOL if it gets to court. Barring illegal clauses and so on, naturally. 1% a day might not be enforceable. But that's all that is really up for discussion as I see it.
The worst case that he can see out of this is that he still owns 50% of Facebook and can block any sale.(all he has to do is buy one share on the open market to get control). Either way, he can ream Zuckerberg if he wants to - or maybe he won't and Facebook will just have to split its stock and give the entire split to him. Welcome the new CEO. (not going to make it any better, but whatever...)
The moral of the story is quite simple, and all too often repeated. Don't sell patents or parts of your start-up business if you ever plan to use it in a commercial manner. Because it will come back to haunt you. Crying, whining, and complaining won't help you in front of a judge later on.(if I had a dime for every sob story I heard from fellow musicians over the years, I could write an encyclopedia)
The real reason for this move is because China is planning to reach the Moon and then get a base on it before we can. So the Senators, in their infinite stupidity, are trying to figure out a way to make it happen and beat the Chinese at their game.
Which won't happen. We'll waste a lot of money and end up even further behind the technological curve. Instead of just giving up on manned space exploration(the point of which is?), they are going to spend every last penny that we have in a last-ditch attempt to keep up with China's juggernaut.
Simply put, the U.S. is soon to be a second-world nation and just has to learn to deal with it like the U.K. did after WWI when its empire pretty much just collapsed and they went from #1 to just another player. On a side note, I wonder how many unemployment checks one shuttle launch would pay for?
DX11 has one major difference to it that will require that type of speed and power, and that is real-time ray-tracing.
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=334 An older article on it. Hollywood almost exclusively uses ray-tracing, so once it is an option for games and consoles, well, even games like Final Fantasy 13 will look quaint and computer-generated.
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=506 But there is some hope. If you have enough cores and enough cards, you can manage. ie - it's a matter of raw analyzing and math-crunching power versus pipes or textures.
Current computers cheat, essentially, and do a pretty good job of faking it(Halflife 2 lighting effects, for example). It's not "required", but it will exist as a feature to utilize. Over time the industry will transition to ray-tracing, since once one title does it acceptably well, the others will have to as well to not like bitmapped graphics by comparison. Estimates are that it will require up to 75x the processing power of DX9/XBox 360 titles to ray-trace the exact same game. Thankfully we've made a lot of progress in video cards in the last few years, but there's still 4-10x more to go. Nvidia's new card should get quite a bit closer. Two together might be able to actually pull it off.
And, of course, five years from now, when it's commonplace(the code is surprisingly easy to add to the games in question), it will be another "feature" to turn on in the menus.
It's plainly obvious that they are making it look exactly like the crud Lucas glued together for his movies, so it's a no-brainer case against them.
But they are in China. Short of the U.N. knocking on their door, there is nothing that can be done as they lack jurisdiction. It's not just a disbelief in copyrights and patents by China in general (which interestingly enough was the SAME position the U.S. took in the 1700 and 1800s against Europe), but that it's nearly impossible to bring any legal action against a company in China anyways unless you are based in China. It is well known that in the legal world that China is a black hole and not worth even sending a letter to the company in question.
The only way I can think of this would be to yank some strings with the government(I wonder how many toys Lucas makes in China...) and hope that they actually care or listen.
You forget about the fact that the ground underneath the collector acts as a heat sink and enables the tower to continue to run throughout the night(although at a *much* lower efficiency). It's its own heat-sink, in effect. They can greatly mitigate this, though, by placing heat absorbing materials in the ground as well(oil or water filled pipes has been suggested) Compared to a tower filled with molten salt, this is backyard-engineering simple. You could even place solar arrays underneath the main canopy/surface to collect even more of the energy. (me, I'd be tempted to pave it with blacktop to increase the heat absorption - lol)
It really is a zero-tech approach to power that can work 24 hours a day. It's also very inexpensive relative to the KW generated. But it does require absolutely huge areas of land. Then again, a square mile is hardly a blip out in Arizona or Nevada.
The issue is that the panels are fairly to very toxic and costly to produce up-front. Sure, they work for small-scale roofs and so on, but they are useless for large-scale power. Solar-thermal has been tried and the problem is that it requires a lot of water, plumbing, and maintainance compared to a passive design like a typical hydro-electric dam or solar tower.
Basically for a small farm, we're talking about converting a large silo to generate power instead. The large-scale projects, though, would generate up to 100MW.
Fuel and pollution is a big problem with large-scale power production. We can't build more coal plants, as they pollute and cause acid rain and other ills. We don't have massive amounts of extra natural gas - we're using a lot already. Oil prices keep increasing and oil spills are a monstrous problem. Wind is good, but it only works part of the day. Solar is not good at night/on overcast days and uses up our supply of rare earth elements, which would mean we'd end up all having to but them from China and other places eventually. Hydro-electric has a nasty way of flooding large canyons and areas and taking years to build - that is, IF you can get the eco-nuts to actually let it be approved. Wave powered generation offshore is good, but sea water erodes everything eventually. Hydrogen power is too costly to use on a large scale as it take a LOT more energy to produce than we get back out of it.
And lastly nuclear power has a cost, political, and fuel issue - it's dangerous(though not horribly so) to mine and refine, and there is only one company in the U.S. that is producing fuel for reactors any more. We're essentially "out" of fuel or will be in a decade or less and then have to buy it from overseas. Most of the new "fuel" that's being produced is going to the military and not commercial reactors. Politically, it's as touchy a subject to most liberals as abortion is to most conservatives - and as such, it is essentially impractical to make new facilities.
They all have issues, yet this amazingly has only one - it requires a lot of land(far more than anything other than maybe hydro-electric). But it uses no fuel, limited upkeep, simple and environmentally friendly construction, works 24 hours a day, and best of all, it can also be used as a radio tower or other purposes. Sure, it's 1-3% efficient, but it's a great long-term solution, IMO. We could put 50 or 100 of these out in the Arizona and New Mexico deserts quite easily.
It's not the environment, either. It's that yet again we have a "breakthrough" that uses difficult to obtain elements and compounds. Large scale adoption would lead to a incredible shortage of yet another rare earth and as a result, large price increases. Not to mention, of course, the problems with mining and refining the stuff.
What we really need is a way to be able to make these out of common, cheap materials that don't deplete our already stressed rare earth supplies.
Note - my personal favorite solar power plant design is a simple updraft tower. It is about as efficient as a typical large solar array - and about the same size as well. But the environmental impact is very slight. In fact, the greenhouse type environment underneath it is a great place to grow crops.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_updraft_tower Most working prototypes to date have been under 500 ft tall, and have as a result been fairly easy to design and build, being held up by wires and supports like a radio tower. Talk of a half mile high one is quite silly - they just don't need to be that large to work. ie - it's better to build hundreds of 300-400ft tall ones that need a few dozen acres to run, and 5-10 million dollars each(land cost in a desert for 10-20 acres is assumed to be fairly negligible) than a massive multi-billion dollar monstrosity.
A small scale test was done in 2005 in Botswana as well, with a ~75 foot tall tower and a collection area of 160M^2. This scale would be perfect for a typical small farm, as an example.
I suspect that a large part of this was due to their desire to go after and shut down providers that peddle spam, child porn, warez, and other services that aren't legal. I'm all for that. To be honest, the net has been a little too free and "wild west" like - to the point where the bandits and claim-jumpers have all but taken over.
And it's not like they don't scan and know everything already that you or I do online anyways. This just gives them the means to regulate the service providers and force them to do their job properly.
Of course, you're not thinking that one step further here.:) The first thing that happens once it has been invalidated is HP will apply for the exact or nearly exact same patent. HP essentially gets the same patent for free/does a huge in-your-face to Amazon. IIRC, I don't think there were any patents for IP concerning BBSs and the like back issued in the 80s. First off, nobody did it as the concept of IP in today's context was silly to them(or just plain unknown legally), and secondly, they were a bunch of geeks and nerds having fun using other people's technology.
But Digital/DEC certainly did take networking and the like seriously. I am 100% certain DEC patented everything it touched. Maybe they're not the first example, but they are the first patented, done by a major corporation for commercial purposes example that I know of.
*who knew that a bonus feature they added(and thought of as almost a gimmick) to help corporations exchange information and chat between servers a bit easier would turn into something like Facebook 30 years later?
True, but I mentioned this because while the founder of the original BBS probably never patented his "invention", you can be sure that DEC(later HP who bought Compaq out) holds a patent on this technology somewhere in their portfolio. It would be simple enough to for them provide proof that it was used as social networking similar to a BBS. And it did use the actual "Internet", in case they claim that a bunch of phones calling into a single server isn't a "network" in a normal sense.
I actually have physical proof from 1992/93 showing this, since I never throw out any of my old data, email, and logs. Some goes back to 1990, in fact - way before anything was archived online. I took a snapshot of my account when I left the university I was at. Pretty standard for us older computer guys to do with our personal data. I still have the files, though of course there's no VMS system that I know of operating that I can put it on. But it is in simple ASCII format, so it's pretty easy to read and figure out(whole thing takes 2-3MB, so why NOT keep it for nostalgia?)
Some guy who ran a BBS doesn't have the funds to fight this. But HP does. Now, of course, what it would mean is that HP would own this patent. That might be just as bad, depending upon what they do with it. But at least this might slow down the patent trolling and idiocy a little bit if they start finding themselves doing all the work only to have to repeatedly hand the patents over to these older companies.
To be honest, I'd not dare "patent" anything in such vague terms considering what an enormous chaotic mess computing was in the 70s and 80s before there were online records of it all. Someone did what you are thinking about doing or are doing long long ago and it's only a matter of time before they figure it out. Just because your lawyers can't find anything online doesn't mean it never happened. Most of the time, the company is dead and gone, so you're fairly safe. Something like this, with the headlines it is generating, is sure to get HP to notice. And last I checked, yeah, they're still in business. Oops.
(Sorry for the double-post, but perhaps this can help some smart lawyer to help get this inane patent revoked)
A more in-depth explanation of VMS Net and VMS is required: - The original intent was to create a version of an early Internet by linking VMS machines/clusters together like a super BBS. Eventually that fell away to where by the mid 80s or so, standard Internet/TCP IP/etc protocols had taken over and were being used. What it meant was that any university or major corporation that allowed access could link their machines to others and create a "web" of sites. These universities and corporations/government sites were the major original backbone of the Internet, so by definition it "used the Internet".
- How this worked in practice when I was at college in 1991 and first saw it(it had been implemented a year or two earlier, IIRC) was that each user had a space where they could program and make their own home page/space to use. Almost everyone had ASCII BBS type front-ends, complete with links, menus, and personal areas. This was a few years before the first web browsers came out, but functionally identical.
- The VMS link/Notes system usually was organized by areas, so that it was common to see a smaller discussion area devoted to each person. (in addition to the normal BBS/board type chat areas. So this was where everyone talked about their life, and so on, a lot like Facebook. You usually linked to your account's main page so that others could see and go there as well. (It was less thread driven and more topic driven by nature) ie - Ed's Corner/Life with Sandy/and so on... The admin found it easier to keep personal stuff limited to each main person/give them their own thread.
- There also was a live chat option as well. I remember getting online, checking out people's "pages" and so on when I was in Northern California for people who were in San Diego. And then logging into their local chat area and talking to them. In 1991.
Nothing really like it existed until much later, though, and so it's highly likely that nobody at these newer companies realized that a nearly identical thing to Facebook/etc existed that long ago on the Internet.(and of course BBS systems, but those technically didn't use the "Internet" until much later.(still early 90s - way before this patent's time-frame.)
Prior Art can be found going back as early as the 1970s:
***grabbed this from wikipedia** The first public dial-up Bulletin Board System was developed by Ward Christensen. According to an early interview, while he was snowed in during the Great Blizzard of 1978 in Chicago, Christensen along with fellow hobbyist Randy Suess, began preliminary work on the Computerized Bulletin Board System, or CBBS. CBBS went online on February 16, 1978 in Chicago, Illinois. [2] **
If he's talking about the Internet, though, that award goes to VMS Notes - (don't have exact date - early to mid 1980s), which functioned similar to a stripped-down version of Usenet, but in a live chat manner.
The answer seems to be that either one or more of the assumptions we are making about values in the Drake equation is wildly out of touch with reality or there is another factor to the equation that we are overlooking. ***** Several of the typical assumptions in the Drake equation *are* off by a couple of orders of magnitude. My astronomy class back in the early 90s decided to figure out a more reasonable number and only concentrate on planets that could support any form of life (only variable we were really looking for was liquid water) The estimate came out to something like 1/50 stars. I felt it was closer to 1/20 myself if you added moons and so on.
But that's a big difference compared to "Hi, how are you?" Almost all of it would be microbes and simple plants and so on.
We plugged that back into the equation and added in the fact that we would be looking for a slice of 200 years, tops, for radio waves(the assumption was that they would figure out FTL/point-to-point communication * by then), and then a 25% chance that they didn't blow themselves up/have a disaster/etc before they got there, we came up with 4 or 5 in our galaxy. Anything more advanced would not be using means to communicate that we can detect or will avoid us if they are ever aware of us, that is. Given the raw materials in the outer solar system (Ort cloud, Kupier Belt, etc) it's likely that most civilizations also wouldn't leave their solar system for many thousands of years except to maybe send a probe to check something out. And only if it's close by. (if you scaled the galaxy to the size of your living room wall, you'd hardly see 50-100LY as a movement at all, which is as far as most conventional/slower than light exploration is likely to happen)
*Note - this was more than a decade before theories about quantum entanglement and micro-wormholes became well-known, but we felt it was reasonable that any advanced civilization would have a super-sized version of the internet even if they couldn't ever physically travel faster than light.
No, the interesting thing is, that for us normal people, the worse it gets for the big firms and traders, the better it is for us. I'd love to see prices yo-yo-ing all aver the place 1-2% in a vicious feedback cycle.
Now, WHY is it possible for small guys to beat the big firms? Because they won't touch small companies beyond a certain lower limit(med and large cap only) and also it takes them several days to move entire chunks of their portfolios around. But it takes minutes for smaller investors to do a trade. It's actually very easy to make a decent return on the stock market if you are very small and patient. What you have to do is wait for the big firms to screw up, like what happened last month when the market glitched and dropped several hundred points. The fallout took 1-2 days to completely recover across all sectors and that represented a prime opportunity to make 3-5%. All you need is a scenario like that every six months. Or have some giant firm tanking and taking out non-related stocks as institutions try to dump (now) worthless shares and reorganize their portfolios.
Their problem is that they are required to handle billions in money and investments at a time, over hundreds or thousands of stocks, with hundreds or thousands of employees, managers, and so on. And always keep the money working or moving somewhere. You and I can hold onto it as cash or a mutual fund at 1-2% and wait for the few events like this that happen every year, target one stock, and then move it back a day later.
In essence, you don't try to beat the market, you let it beat itself for you. And the more they rely on computers to do the work for them, the easier it will become.
The issue is that the silly bloated *DESKTOP* requires a DX9 128MB card as a minimum. That's a decision by Microsoft. It just won't boot up without a compliant card or a special driver to get around it. And, as that response I posted shows, ATI and Nvidia aren't concerned at all with doing that. It *could* boot and run, but like PAE and other features, Microsoft has artificially set DX9 and 128MB ram as a hard lower limit for Windows 7.
Anything that isn't PCIe already will require a hardware replacement of most of the system to at least a DX10 compliant video card. Yes I know you can hack some DX9 cards to work with Windows 7(for now), but that's a kludge that no serious business would make standard policy. The OS simply is anal and requires a major upgrade with Windows 7. If you take a bone stock Windows 7 install and try to run a DX 8 video card in it, it just says no.
***I found this on Microsoft's support website in response to a DX9 (X800XT) video card question) Thank you for posting. You will have to use the default Windows 7 Video card drivers, because ATI no longer has new drivers that support your card. Catalyst 9.4 and 9.5 drivers do not support your card. They don't support mine and I have the Radeon x1950 pro. You might be able to try the older Vista drivers as Windows 7 will also use most Vista drivers as well. ***(also on their site - direct from MS) If you want to run Windows 7 on your PC, here's what it takes:
* DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver (note - checking elsewhere, this translates to 128MB video, minimum to just load the desktop) *******
Even if the video card won't be used in 3D mode, the 2D and 3D drivers are integrated since long long ago and come as a package deal. If one isn't there, the whole thing kills itself and you need to upgrade your drivers. Round and round you go. If you hit anything along the path that requires a video upgrade, then you require the whole thing to be upgraded, because one upgrade necessitates another and so on. Nvidia doesn't even have individual drivers on its site any more. You get your Forceware application and it installs what it thinks it wants. I've tried several times in fact to get past this exact problem with clients and NVidia cards just brick during a W7 install because the drivers immediately require an upgrade, which requires the Forceware app to run, which won't complete the install process on their ancient video cards. Halfway installed video drivers result in a BSOD on startup as a result.
ATI, as mentioned above, simply doesn't even have drivers any more for cards that old on its site - or at least stopped updating them long ago. That's virtually 100% of the market, so if you're running older hardware and trying to get Windows 7 to even install, you'll hit a brick wall in minutes that you can't get past.
Also, if you check out Adobe's site on Flash 10's requirements, it requires DirectX/Active X 9 compatible cards and drivers. I've already run into quite a few websites that won't work correctly with Flash 9.x The sites' admins are overzealous and upgrade-happy, and suddenly your Itunes or similar(Myspace/Youtube/etc) also hit that same brick wall.(technically you don't need that for a workplace, but no web/no IM/no music/etc is an extremely archaic business practice that leads to extremely unhappy employees)
Any serious system admin at a large company knows this already, though, and it's why they are so reticent to upgrade. And we're not even talking the new bugs, glitches, training, patching, and other insanity that goes along with a new OS that the IT department has to deal with. That's a lot of time and headache as well.
Sure the OS can technically start up on a DX8 card, but all but the most basic applications assume or require updates(as do the video card drivers) that essentially forces the issue. Even if they don't use DX9 graphics features by some miracle. At least one application that you want will require DX9 to run in W7. AGP cards just aren't made any more, and there are a few PCI cards, but they are a joke that can't hardly even handle streaming video or a DVD.
And that's the problem. One upgrade requires another and so on and you're toast - new motherboard, new video card, and so on, unless you have a fairly modern PC to begin with. Oops, except for one other thing... I'd wager that 90% of XP corporate PCs don't have 3d video cards, a PCIe slot, or most of the modern features that are required. They almost always are budget 2D or integrated graphic cheap overblown terminals.
So you buy another cheap PC-in-a-box from Dell. Or you would, except that your IT guy keeps whispering "free" and "no new hardware required" in your ear. More and more people keep listening to that little voice, because free is hard to ignore when you're already barely keeping your business in the black.(or they just don't upgrade at all and say come back in a year)
I think his upgrade math is off. It's actually far too low.
1: The back-end is horrendous in terms of new security apps and firewalls and mail programs and so on - all needing new versions. Then there's the licensing requirements for everything as well as for each copy of the new OS. (this is the largest expense - possibly over $500 per employee)
2: It's not just memory. It's video, since every Windows 7 app assumes that you have a Direct X 9 capable card. If you go the route of integrated video, you need a new cheap motherboard, memory, a CPU, and all the rest. A new power supply, of course, and lastly, SATA hard drives. I suppose you might find a modern card that will run in a 6-7 year old PC, but that's not going to last very long. I've done this for clients and it's cheaper to buy a budget Dell box for $400 and be done with it.
But in any case, it's not just "upgrade the memory". ANd that's why it's meeting with such slow sales and resistance. Because to be honest, Windows always was the option you had to use instead of what you wished existed. Except, there are other options now.
My take on this is that when the U.S. economy runs out of steam and everyone is pinching pennies in a year or so(18 months, tops - that's when our debt will be more than our yearly GDP, which triggers a slew of ugly financial things), not having to upgrade your hardware will be a very attractive proposition. I think this will be what finally puts the nail in Windows (and Apple's) coffins. Very few people will be able to afford a new computer. See the auto industry for a perfect example of this. 40%+ loss in sales is going to destroy a lot of computer related companies.
True, but 1.5 Trillion is such a silly amount that no sane judge will even consider that amount. $750 a song is far and above reasonable damages. To the point where it exceeds normal sense, even.
But, you know, if I was the accused, I'd force the case to go forward and get them to recover "actual" damages. The problem that the RIAA has is that they are counting on nobody actually taking the fall and forcing an actual damages award to be decided. $200 million is the same as 1.5 trillion - impossible to deal with. But setting the amount to, say. $1 a song, that would be an immense change in the law.(and one that rightfully should be changed).
It is a civil case and you should only be able to sue in a civil case for the following, money lost, time lost, litigation fees for having to take you to court.
And this case is likely to get thrown out because of that.
See, New York and California(those two I know for sure) do not award punitive damages or for "pain and suffering" or anything like that. Just actual damages. Now, a case could be made for $200,000,000 since it is possible to find sites selling songs for $1 each. I'm frankly amazed that they didn't think of this (200 million might as well be a quadrillion to any business - it just bankrupts them outright). But as usual, they went for the huge headline.
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Heat sink design as well as case airflow is critical. Too many machines rely on a tiny fan or have situations where the video card is crammed in a small case.(almost all laptops never were meant to play games like this for any length of time) Add into the equation the issue of most OEM heat sinks being poorly designed rubbish and you've got problems.
My machine handles games just fine, but it has a massive heat sink that's larger than the entire card that I added. No issues whatsoever. I bought my card and also bought the new heat sink and fan at the same time. Unfortunately, it's pretty much a requirement now to do this(along with extra memory)
Concerning the explosives, you're correct. But, in the movie, he also didn't pack it in(neither did Mythbusters). Of course, looking at the movie, I suspect that they actually used dynamite(or detonation cord plus gasoline - a Hollywood favorite) buried a few feet down as the holes are too large and I can't imagine even Hollywood getting their hands on that much (actual) C4 easily.
The problem with C4 is that it's too explosive. If you watch the show frequently, you see them talk about how it feels for each type of explosive. C4 is a very sharp and quick jolt, and as a result, won't do anything much to the ground and surrounding area at long distances. Gunpowder or something much slower, though, would have had the desired effect. Yet again, Hollywood goes for high-tech and fancy when low-tech and simple actually is how it should be. To be honest, if the guy had a few barrels of gunpowder(or dynamite) and fertilizer in the movie nobody would have cared. IMO, it would have been more realistic as well, since one could see him legally obtaining the items in question as a part of his job.
Perhaps a realistic solution would be for all of the companies to band together and instead of fighting the trolls one at a time, send all of that money - figure a billion+ dollars at Congress to solve this idiocy once and for all. 36 major companies surely can cough up 20-30 million each. They probably spend that much every few years on dealing with trolls and other legal issues surrounding patents anyways. The downside, of course, is *of course* they would make it favor them.
Other options of course would involve similar actions against the inane judge, such as funding his opponent's campaign(come on, you KNOW it happens all the time - nothing new about this tactic), ads on tv, and so on. Even 10 million in "public information" TV ads about his pro patent troll rulings would likely tank any chance of his getting re-elected. It's mean and nasty, but it's a known issue with any public official. You don't bite the public and businesses who got you into office unless you want to risk the same public and businesses helping someone *ELSE* get into office.
Don't go after the trolls. Go straight to the lawyers and judges and people in Congress who made the silly laws in the first place and get them to fix the mess that they created.
And of course, there are places like CD Baby and others that you can sell your CDs on.
And, the best new way to promote your band that I know of:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock_Band_Network
Seriously. Read how it works. Any band can make their song, do the mastering process and submit it to Harmonix. If it is a hit, well, you can sell a half million songs in a few months. If not, well, so be it - it ends up in the recycle bin/deleted from consideration and you try again. But it's not even necessary to have CDs or burn anything anymore.
Only fools sign anything with the RIAA or the major labels these days, since it's never been easier to do it yourself.
http://www.discmakers.com/duplicators/automated/DiscproducerPP100.asp
This is pretty much all you need if you want to churn out a few thousand CDs. Basic units run $300-$500 last I checked, but the professional units are well worth the money. Put a stack of labels and CDs in and come back in two hours - 100 ready to put in cases or sleeves. With a bunch of coffee and a friend to do some work for you, that's an easy thousand in a 18-20 hour long "shift" before a concert. Total cost is way under $1 per CD. (the above 5K for $2000 or so is fairly spot-on if you go to a firm that does this sort of thing). But you can also do it at home as well.
- You can produce yourself. Write, record, mix, and all the rest at home in your own private studio.
- You can promote yourself.(or let others do it for you - some only charge a flat percentage fee per CD (CD Baby comes to mind), which means the artists gets the majority of the money(after duplication costs unless they deliver the goods to the company's warehouse of course)
- You can burn/copy the media yourself if all else fails. Make them at home for 50 cents each and sell them at the concert for $5. Almost anyone will buy a CD at a concert for $5 these days.
There's simply no need to waste time with contracts any more if you have even a little skill and moxie.
True, but the real issue is that he entered into a contract and then "forgot" about it in the past few years, probably either legitimately forgetting about it, or more likely, but hoping that that mistake would not ever see the light of day. Given Zuckerberg's apparent fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants style, and his ego, he's probably invented a whole litany of reasons in his own head already about why it didn't actually happen. But it looks like he really did do something he shouldn't have.
(talk about one expensive skeleton in the closet!)
1 - It appears to be legitimate and typical of the idiocy one does in College or as a small DIYer who knows jack all about legal matters. They split it 50/50 at first(this part is iron-clad in any court) and then the other 25+% clause kicked in. In this case, you'll see Zuckerberg in court being asked one question by the judge - "is this your signature"? And that's it - done deal. The punitive clause might be removed as unenforceable or as usurious, but the original 50/50 split is valid.
2 - And, no, while I'm not a lawyer, any basic book on copyright law(my focus was music as I was a professional musician after college, so I'm fairly up to date with the basics at least) tells you that you sign agreements like this as if they were in blood(if you ever do, that is), because even if it literally is on a napkin, you're SOL if it gets to court. Barring illegal clauses and so on, naturally. 1% a day might not be enforceable. But that's all that is really up for discussion as I see it.
The worst case that he can see out of this is that he still owns 50% of Facebook and can block any sale.(all he has to do is buy one share on the open market to get control). Either way, he can ream Zuckerberg if he wants to - or maybe he won't and Facebook will just have to split its stock and give the entire split to him. Welcome the new CEO. (not going to make it any better, but whatever...)
The moral of the story is quite simple, and all too often repeated. Don't sell patents or parts of your start-up business if you ever plan to use it in a commercial manner. Because it will come back to haunt you. Crying, whining, and complaining won't help you in front of a judge later on.(if I had a dime for every sob story I heard from fellow musicians over the years, I could write an encyclopedia)
The real reason for this move is because China is planning to reach the Moon and then get a base on it before we can. So the Senators, in their infinite stupidity, are trying to figure out a way to make it happen and beat the Chinese at their game.
Which won't happen. We'll waste a lot of money and end up even further behind the technological curve. Instead of just giving up on manned space exploration(the point of which is?), they are going to spend every last penny that we have in a last-ditch attempt to keep up with China's juggernaut.
Simply put, the U.S. is soon to be a second-world nation and just has to learn to deal with it like the U.K. did after WWI when its empire pretty much just collapsed and they went from #1 to just another player. On a side note, I wonder how many unemployment checks one shuttle launch would pay for?
DX11 has one major difference to it that will require that type of speed and power, and that is real-time ray-tracing.
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=334
An older article on it. Hollywood almost exclusively uses ray-tracing, so once it is an option for games and consoles, well, even games like Final Fantasy 13 will look quaint and computer-generated.
http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=506
But there is some hope. If you have enough cores and enough cards, you can manage. ie - it's a matter of raw analyzing and math-crunching power versus pipes or textures.
Current computers cheat, essentially, and do a pretty good job of faking it(Halflife 2 lighting effects, for example). It's not "required", but it will exist as a feature to utilize. Over time the industry will transition to ray-tracing, since once one title does it acceptably well, the others will have to as well to not like bitmapped graphics by comparison. Estimates are that it will require up to 75x the processing power of DX9/XBox 360 titles to ray-trace the exact same game. Thankfully we've made a lot of progress in video cards in the last few years, but there's still 4-10x more to go. Nvidia's new card should get quite a bit closer. Two together might be able to actually pull it off.
And, of course, five years from now, when it's commonplace(the code is surprisingly easy to add to the games in question), it will be another "feature" to turn on in the menus.
It's plainly obvious that they are making it look exactly like the crud Lucas glued together for his movies, so it's a no-brainer case against them.
But they are in China. Short of the U.N. knocking on their door, there is nothing that can be done as they lack jurisdiction. It's not just a disbelief in copyrights and patents by China in general (which interestingly enough was the SAME position the U.S. took in the 1700 and 1800s against Europe), but that it's nearly impossible to bring any legal action against a company in China anyways unless you are based in China. It is well known that in the legal world that China is a black hole and not worth even sending a letter to the company in question.
The only way I can think of this would be to yank some strings with the government(I wonder how many toys Lucas makes in China...) and hope that they actually care or listen.
You forget about the fact that the ground underneath the collector acts as a heat sink and enables the tower to continue to run throughout the night(although at a *much* lower efficiency). It's its own heat-sink, in effect. They can greatly mitigate this, though, by placing heat absorbing materials in the ground as well(oil or water filled pipes has been suggested) Compared to a tower filled with molten salt, this is backyard-engineering simple. You could even place solar arrays underneath the main canopy/surface to collect even more of the energy. (me, I'd be tempted to pave it with blacktop to increase the heat absorption - lol)
http://www.sbp.de/de/fla/contact/download/The_Solar_Updraft.pdf
This is the best paper that I can find for free(no access idiocy/cost) about it.
It really is a zero-tech approach to power that can work 24 hours a day. It's also very inexpensive relative to the KW generated. But it does require absolutely huge areas of land. Then again, a square mile is hardly a blip out in Arizona or Nevada.
The issue is that the panels are fairly to very toxic and costly to produce up-front. Sure, they work for small-scale roofs and so on, but they are useless for large-scale power. Solar-thermal has been tried and the problem is that it requires a lot of water, plumbing, and maintainance compared to a passive design like a typical hydro-electric dam or solar tower.
Basically for a small farm, we're talking about converting a large silo to generate power instead. The large-scale projects, though, would generate up to 100MW.
Fuel and pollution is a big problem with large-scale power production. We can't build more coal plants, as they pollute and cause acid rain and other ills. We don't have massive amounts of extra natural gas - we're using a lot already. Oil prices keep increasing and oil spills are a monstrous problem. Wind is good, but it only works part of the day. Solar is not good at night/on overcast days and uses up our supply of rare earth elements, which would mean we'd end up all having to but them from China and other places eventually. Hydro-electric has a nasty way of flooding large canyons and areas and taking years to build - that is, IF you can get the eco-nuts to actually let it be approved. Wave powered generation offshore is good, but sea water erodes everything eventually. Hydrogen power is too costly to use on a large scale as it take a LOT more energy to produce than we get back out of it.
And lastly nuclear power has a cost, political, and fuel issue - it's dangerous(though not horribly so) to mine and refine, and there is only one company in the U.S. that is producing fuel for reactors any more. We're essentially "out" of fuel or will be in a decade or less and then have to buy it from overseas. Most of the new "fuel" that's being produced is going to the military and not commercial reactors. Politically, it's as touchy a subject to most liberals as abortion is to most conservatives - and as such, it is essentially impractical to make new facilities.
They all have issues, yet this amazingly has only one - it requires a lot of land(far more than anything other than maybe hydro-electric). But it uses no fuel, limited upkeep, simple and environmentally friendly construction, works 24 hours a day, and best of all, it can also be used as a radio tower or other purposes. Sure, it's 1-3% efficient, but it's a great long-term solution, IMO. We could put 50 or 100 of these out in the Arizona and New Mexico deserts quite easily.
It's not the environment, either. It's that yet again we have a "breakthrough" that uses difficult to obtain elements and compounds. Large scale adoption would lead to a incredible shortage of yet another rare earth and as a result, large price increases. Not to mention, of course, the problems with mining and refining the stuff.
What we really need is a way to be able to make these out of common, cheap materials that don't deplete our already stressed rare earth supplies.
Note - my personal favorite solar power plant design is a simple updraft tower. It is about as efficient as a typical large solar array - and about the same size as well. But the environmental impact is very slight. In fact, the greenhouse type environment underneath it is a great place to grow crops.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_updraft_tower
Most working prototypes to date have been under 500 ft tall, and have as a result been fairly easy to design and build, being held up by wires and supports like a radio tower. Talk of a half mile high one is quite silly - they just don't need to be that large to work. ie - it's better to build hundreds of 300-400ft tall ones that need a few dozen acres to run, and 5-10 million dollars each(land cost in a desert for 10-20 acres is assumed to be fairly negligible) than a massive multi-billion dollar monstrosity.
A small scale test was done in 2005 in Botswana as well, with a ~75 foot tall tower and a collection area of 160M^2. This scale would be perfect for a typical small farm, as an example.
I suspect that a large part of this was due to their desire to go after and shut down providers that peddle spam, child porn, warez, and other services that aren't legal. I'm all for that. To be honest, the net has been a little too free and "wild west" like - to the point where the bandits and claim-jumpers have all but taken over.
And it's not like they don't scan and know everything already that you or I do online anyways. This just gives them the means to regulate the service providers and force them to do their job properly.
Of course, you're not thinking that one step further here. :) The first thing that happens once it has been invalidated is HP will apply for the exact or nearly exact same patent. HP essentially gets the same patent for free/does a huge in-your-face to Amazon. IIRC, I don't think there were any patents for IP concerning BBSs and the like back issued in the 80s. First off, nobody did it as the concept of IP in today's context was silly to them(or just plain unknown legally), and secondly, they were a bunch of geeks and nerds having fun using other people's technology.
But Digital/DEC certainly did take networking and the like seriously. I am 100% certain DEC patented everything it touched. Maybe they're not the first example, but they are the first patented, done by a major corporation for commercial purposes example that I know of.
*who knew that a bonus feature they added(and thought of as almost a gimmick) to help corporations exchange information and chat between servers a bit easier would turn into something like Facebook 30 years later?
True, but I mentioned this because while the founder of the original BBS probably never patented his "invention", you can be sure that DEC(later HP who bought Compaq out) holds a patent on this technology somewhere in their portfolio. It would be simple enough to for them provide proof that it was used as social networking similar to a BBS. And it did use the actual "Internet", in case they claim that a bunch of phones calling into a single server isn't a "network" in a normal sense.
I actually have physical proof from 1992/93 showing this, since I never throw out any of my old data, email, and logs. Some goes back to 1990, in fact - way before anything was archived online. I took a snapshot of my account when I left the university I was at. Pretty standard for us older computer guys to do with our personal data. I still have the files, though of course there's no VMS system that I know of operating that I can put it on. But it is in simple ASCII format, so it's pretty easy to read and figure out(whole thing takes 2-3MB, so why NOT keep it for nostalgia?)
Some guy who ran a BBS doesn't have the funds to fight this. But HP does. Now, of course, what it would mean is that HP would own this patent. That might be just as bad, depending upon what they do with it. But at least this might slow down the patent trolling and idiocy a little bit if they start finding themselves doing all the work only to have to repeatedly hand the patents over to these older companies.
To be honest, I'd not dare "patent" anything in such vague terms considering what an enormous chaotic mess computing was in the 70s and 80s before there were online records of it all. Someone did what you are thinking about doing or are doing long long ago and it's only a matter of time before they figure it out. Just because your lawyers can't find anything online doesn't mean it never happened. Most of the time, the company is dead and gone, so you're fairly safe. Something like this, with the headlines it is generating, is sure to get HP to notice. And last I checked, yeah, they're still in business. Oops.
(Sorry for the double-post, but perhaps this can help some smart lawyer to help get this inane patent revoked)
A more in-depth explanation of VMS Net and VMS is required:
- The original intent was to create a version of an early Internet by linking VMS machines/clusters together like a super BBS. Eventually that fell away to where by the mid 80s or so, standard Internet/TCP IP/etc protocols had taken over and were being used. What it meant was that any university or major corporation that allowed access could link their machines to others and create a "web" of sites. These universities and corporations/government sites were the major original backbone of the Internet, so by definition it "used the Internet".
- How this worked in practice when I was at college in 1991 and first saw it(it had been implemented a year or two earlier, IIRC) was that each user had a space where they could program and make their own home page/space to use. Almost everyone had ASCII BBS type front-ends, complete with links, menus, and personal areas. This was a few years before the first web browsers came out, but functionally identical.
- The VMS link/Notes system usually was organized by areas, so that it was common to see a smaller discussion area devoted to each person. (in addition to the normal BBS/board type chat areas. So this was where everyone talked about their life, and so on, a lot like Facebook. You usually linked to your account's main page so that others could see and go there as well. (It was less thread driven and more topic driven by nature) ie - Ed's Corner/Life with Sandy/and so on... The admin found it easier to keep personal stuff limited to each main person/give them their own thread.
- There also was a live chat option as well. I remember getting online, checking out people's "pages" and so on when I was in Northern California for people who were in San Diego. And then logging into their local chat area and talking to them. In 1991.
Nothing really like it existed until much later, though, and so it's highly likely that nobody at these newer companies realized that a nearly identical thing to Facebook/etc existed that long ago on the Internet.(and of course BBS systems, but those technically didn't use the "Internet" until much later.(still early 90s - way before this patent's time-frame.)
Prior Art can be found going back as early as the 1970s:
***grabbed this from wikipedia**
The first public dial-up Bulletin Board System was developed by Ward Christensen. According to an early interview, while he was snowed in during the Great Blizzard of 1978 in Chicago, Christensen along with fellow hobbyist Randy Suess, began preliminary work on the Computerized Bulletin Board System, or CBBS. CBBS went online on February 16, 1978 in Chicago, Illinois. [2]
**
If he's talking about the Internet, though, that award goes to VMS Notes - (don't have exact date - early to mid 1980s), which functioned similar to a stripped-down version of Usenet, but in a live chat manner.
The answer seems to be that either one or more of the assumptions we are making about values in the Drake equation is wildly out of touch with reality or there is another factor to the equation that we are overlooking.
*****
Several of the typical assumptions in the Drake equation *are* off by a couple of orders of magnitude. My astronomy class back in the early 90s decided to figure out a more reasonable number and only concentrate on planets that could support any form of life (only variable we were really looking for was liquid water) The estimate came out to something like 1/50 stars. I felt it was closer to 1/20 myself if you added moons and so on.
But that's a big difference compared to "Hi, how are you?" Almost all of it would be microbes and simple plants and so on.
We plugged that back into the equation and added in the fact that we would be looking for a slice of 200 years, tops, for radio waves(the assumption was that they would figure out FTL/point-to-point communication * by then), and then a 25% chance that they didn't blow themselves up/have a disaster/etc before they got there, we came up with 4 or 5 in our galaxy. Anything more advanced would not be using means to communicate that we can detect or will avoid us if they are ever aware of us, that is. Given the raw materials in the outer solar system (Ort cloud, Kupier Belt, etc) it's likely that most civilizations also wouldn't leave their solar system for many thousands of years except to maybe send a probe to check something out. And only if it's close by. (if you scaled the galaxy to the size of your living room wall, you'd hardly see 50-100LY as a movement at all, which is as far as most conventional/slower than light exploration is likely to happen)
*Note - this was more than a decade before theories about quantum entanglement and micro-wormholes became well-known, but we felt it was reasonable that any advanced civilization would have a super-sized version of the internet even if they couldn't ever physically travel faster than light.
No, the interesting thing is, that for us normal people, the worse it gets for the big firms and traders, the better it is for us. I'd love to see prices yo-yo-ing all aver the place 1-2% in a vicious feedback cycle.
Now, WHY is it possible for small guys to beat the big firms? Because they won't touch small companies beyond a certain lower limit(med and large cap only) and also it takes them several days to move entire chunks of their portfolios around. But it takes minutes for smaller investors to do a trade. It's actually very easy to make a decent return on the stock market if you are very small and patient. What you have to do is wait for the big firms to screw up, like what happened last month when the market glitched and dropped several hundred points. The fallout took 1-2 days to completely recover across all sectors and that represented a prime opportunity to make 3-5%. All you need is a scenario like that every six months. Or have some giant firm tanking and taking out non-related stocks as institutions try to dump (now) worthless shares and reorganize their portfolios.
Their problem is that they are required to handle billions in money and investments at a time, over hundreds or thousands of stocks, with hundreds or thousands of employees, managers, and so on. And always keep the money working or moving somewhere. You and I can hold onto it as cash or a mutual fund at 1-2% and wait for the few events like this that happen every year, target one stock, and then move it back a day later.
In essence, you don't try to beat the market, you let it beat itself for you. And the more they rely on computers to do the work for them, the easier it will become.
The issue is that the silly bloated *DESKTOP* requires a DX9 128MB card as a minimum. That's a decision by Microsoft. It just won't boot up without a compliant card or a special driver to get around it. And, as that response I posted shows, ATI and Nvidia aren't concerned at all with doing that. It *could* boot and run, but like PAE and other features, Microsoft has artificially set DX9 and 128MB ram as a hard lower limit for Windows 7.
Anything that isn't PCIe already will require a hardware replacement of most of the system to at least a DX10 compliant video card. Yes I know you can hack some DX9 cards to work with Windows 7(for now), but that's a kludge that no serious business would make standard policy. The OS simply is anal and requires a major upgrade with Windows 7. If you take a bone stock Windows 7 install and try to run a DX 8 video card in it, it just says no.
***I found this on Microsoft's support website in response to a DX9 (X800XT) video card question)
Thank you for posting. You will have to use the default Windows 7 Video card drivers, because ATI no longer has new drivers that support your card. Catalyst 9.4 and 9.5 drivers do not support your card. They don't support mine and I have the Radeon x1950 pro. You might be able to try the older Vista drivers as Windows 7 will also use most Vista drivers as well.
***(also on their site - direct from MS)
If you want to run Windows 7 on your PC, here's what it takes:
* DirectX 9 graphics device with WDDM 1.0 or higher driver
(note - checking elsewhere, this translates to 128MB video, minimum to just load the desktop)
*******
Even if the video card won't be used in 3D mode, the 2D and 3D drivers are integrated since long long ago and come as a package deal. If one isn't there, the whole thing kills itself and you need to upgrade your drivers. Round and round you go. If you hit anything along the path that requires a video upgrade, then you require the whole thing to be upgraded, because one upgrade necessitates another and so on. Nvidia doesn't even have individual drivers on its site any more. You get your Forceware application and it installs what it thinks it wants. I've tried several times in fact to get past this exact problem with clients and NVidia cards just brick during a W7 install because the drivers immediately require an upgrade, which requires the Forceware app to run, which won't complete the install process on their ancient video cards. Halfway installed video drivers result in a BSOD on startup as a result.
ATI, as mentioned above, simply doesn't even have drivers any more for cards that old on its site - or at least stopped updating them long ago. That's virtually 100% of the market, so if you're running older hardware and trying to get Windows 7 to even install, you'll hit a brick wall in minutes that you can't get past.
Also, if you check out Adobe's site on Flash 10's requirements, it requires DirectX/Active X 9 compatible cards and drivers. I've already run into quite a few websites that won't work correctly with Flash 9.x The sites' admins are overzealous and upgrade-happy, and suddenly your Itunes or similar(Myspace/Youtube/etc) also hit that same brick wall.(technically you don't need that for a workplace, but no web/no IM/no music/etc is an extremely archaic business practice that leads to extremely unhappy employees)
Any serious system admin at a large company knows this already, though, and it's why they are so reticent to upgrade. And we're not even talking the new bugs, glitches, training, patching, and other insanity that goes along with a new OS that the IT department has to deal with. That's a lot of time and headache as well.
Sure the OS can technically start up on a DX8 card, but all but the most basic applications assume or require updates(as do the video card drivers) that essentially forces the issue. Even if they don't use DX9 graphics features by some miracle. At least one application that you want will require DX9 to run in W7. AGP cards just aren't made any more, and there are a few PCI cards, but they are a joke that can't hardly even handle streaming video or a DVD.
And that's the problem. One upgrade requires another and so on and you're toast - new motherboard, new video card, and so on, unless you have a fairly modern PC to begin with. Oops, except for one other thing... I'd wager that 90% of XP corporate PCs don't have 3d video cards, a PCIe slot, or most of the modern features that are required. They almost always are budget 2D or integrated graphic cheap overblown terminals.
So you buy another cheap PC-in-a-box from Dell. Or you would, except that your IT guy keeps whispering "free" and "no new hardware required" in your ear. More and more people keep listening to that little voice, because free is hard to ignore when you're already barely keeping your business in the black.(or they just don't upgrade at all and say come back in a year)
I think his upgrade math is off. It's actually far too low.
1: The back-end is horrendous in terms of new security apps and firewalls and mail programs and so on - all needing new versions. Then there's the licensing requirements for everything as well as for each copy of the new OS. (this is the largest expense - possibly over $500 per employee)
2: It's not just memory. It's video, since every Windows 7 app assumes that you have a Direct X 9 capable card. If you go the route of integrated video, you need a new cheap motherboard, memory, a CPU, and all the rest. A new power supply, of course, and lastly, SATA hard drives. I suppose you might find a modern card that will run in a 6-7 year old PC, but that's not going to last very long. I've done this for clients and it's cheaper to buy a budget Dell box for $400 and be done with it.
But in any case, it's not just "upgrade the memory". ANd that's why it's meeting with such slow sales and resistance. Because to be honest, Windows always was the option you had to use instead of what you wished existed. Except, there are other options now.
My take on this is that when the U.S. economy runs out of steam and everyone is pinching pennies in a year or so(18 months, tops - that's when our debt will be more than our yearly GDP, which triggers a slew of ugly financial things), not having to upgrade your hardware will be a very attractive proposition. I think this will be what finally puts the nail in Windows (and Apple's) coffins. Very few people will be able to afford a new computer. See the auto industry for a perfect example of this. 40%+ loss in sales is going to destroy a lot of computer related companies.
True, but 1.5 Trillion is such a silly amount that no sane judge will even consider that amount. $750 a song is far and above reasonable damages. To the point where it exceeds normal sense, even.
But, you know, if I was the accused, I'd force the case to go forward and get them to recover "actual" damages. The problem that the RIAA has is that they are counting on nobody actually taking the fall and forcing an actual damages award to be decided. $200 million is the same as 1.5 trillion - impossible to deal with. But setting the amount to, say. $1 a song, that would be an immense change in the law.(and one that rightfully should be changed).
It is a civil case and you should only be able to sue in a civil case for the following, money lost, time lost, litigation fees for having to take you to court.
And this case is likely to get thrown out because of that.
See, New York and California(those two I know for sure) do not award punitive damages or for "pain and suffering" or anything like that. Just actual damages. Now, a case could be made for $200,000,000 since it is possible to find sites selling songs for $1 each. I'm frankly amazed that they didn't think of this (200 million might as well be a quadrillion to any business - it just bankrupts them outright). But as usual, they went for the huge headline.