We just rented a Minolta digital photocopier (DiALTA Di351f) for our training department. It is a 35ppm copier, with stapling, punching and sorting, a network printer and a scanner that ftp's or emails TIFFs and PDFs. Obviously it is B&W only, but it does a very passable job on text. If you wanted to buy one, they are quite expensive, but when you consider that you are also getting a photocopier, fax and A3 printer in one, it starts to look attractive.
Furthermore, a Google-Bar is needed. Can't work without that anymore.
Can't you just change the default search engine to google (one of the first things I did with Mozilla) then just type your search into the address bar, and click the "Search Google for..." button that pops up at the end of the address list?
I think the analogy breaks down when you consider what happens to the car after it has been stolen: the original owner no longer has the car. This is not so with an ebook, where the original content still resides on the owner's hard drive (indeed, he may not even know that it has been copied).
If someone asks you if they can borrow your car, you say "sure, but I need it back in an hour". If someone asks you to borrow an ebook, you say, "hold on, I'll run you off your own copy". Until something exists that takes the copyrighted content away from the original owner, real world analogies don't apply.
Which way do you make more money, subscription or by serving these big ads? If we click on the ads, do you make more money? If we don't click on the ads, do you make any money at all?
Personally I am loathe to subscribe to any websites. I don't subscribe to magazines (there are a couple that I pick up only infrequently). I do pay for digital satellite, and that is where most of my entertainment comes from (metered 56K modem connectivity is the only real way to connect to the internet here at the moment).
However, if it helps/. out, I am willing to click on adverts. But only if it helps. If you get the same payoff whether I click on the ad or not, fine. After the last few years of advertising expanding all over the internet, I am immune. Hell, I use Opera, I have ads even if I am looking at our intranet site!
The airport authority over here in Ireland is called Aer Rianta. A friend of mine worked for their Support Services division. They got a load of packing tape delivered. It was the first time anyone had seen the abbreviation together. A.R.S.S. Apparently the boss just shrugged and walked away...
It's the queers. They're in it with the aliens. They're building landing strips for gay Martians, I swear to God
Dear God I loved the Dead Milkmen. Stuart, Punk Rock Girl, the whole left-handed, midget, eskimo albino thing...
You know that kid delivers papers in the neighbourhood, the Worstwood kid, he's a good kid, a fine kid, all he ever wanted was a burrow owl, kept buggin his old man, "Dad, get me a burrow owl". So the guy breaks down and buys him a burrow owl. The other night, I go out into my back yard, and there's the Worstwood kid looking up in my tree, I said "what're ya looking for", he said " I'm looking for my burrow owl", I said "Jumpin Jesus on a pogo stick, everybody knows that burrow owls live in hole! In the ground!" Now Stuart, do you think a kid like that knows what the queers are doing to our soil? - classic. Off the top of my head, and its been a while since I listened to it (I have it on vinyl) so that may not be perfect, but I can still hear it rattling around in my head some days.
I have seen this argument time and time again. Sure it costs a lot of money to run, say, Slashdot. And the advertisers aren't bringing in the bucks anymore. So, subscriptions are seen as the way to go, but if everyone charges $6 a month, then people balk at paying $60 a month just to look at ten sites. What is needed is a new way for websites to calculate their charges.
How about this:
Figure out your costs per month. Hosting, rent, beer money. Start your subscription service based on people paying a percentage of that figure. The more people that sign up, the less they pay (you would need to cap it at something reasonable until it takes off). That way you get friends telling other friends to sign up. If your monthly subscriptions start to go below what would be chargable to a credit card, give people the option of either paying $10 up front, or waiting until the $10 is used up before automatically debiting the card (send them an email every month, explaining the state of play).
MT broke a million hits this month. Most people just read the front page every day. 1,000,000 hits / 28 days gives you 35,214 users. MT being the site it is, 70% of those are regulars (25000). 50 of those % agree that Piro and Largo deserve their money (12,500). Now you and I both know that Largo would like 12,500x$6 per month, but Piro knows that he wouldn't get it. However, if 12,500 people paid for 1/12500th of the operating costs+b33r money, then you might actually get them.
The only way to do this without bending over is to have an iron-clad contract which states that if the company does not want your code after the 45 days, then they are not to develop a competing system for the next 5 years, otherwise they will incur a payout that is 5 times the cost of the software in the first place. The same contract is to be signed by the individual engineers that read the code.
The 8100 (also the same case as the 8000 and 2500) feels extremely flimsy.
I just bought 3 8100's for some of the managers here. They were so badly made, I actually cut my thumb on the corner of the case where they had neglected to remove any of the flashing from the edge of the moulding. We had to take sandpaper to them!
That's if you can get it. I live in Shannon on the west coast, and I am not likely to see ADSL this year either.
Couple that with the high local call costs (no such thing as free local calls) - the cheapest rate is about 0.60 an hour. During the daytime this is much more, closer to 3.00 an hour. At work, I have 60+ users hanging off a 128K ISDN connection, which costs around 900 a month in call costs alone (not to mention 750 for the ISP)
You pay a yearly fee. You can download any book you like. It has everything that is feared with DRM: you can't copy it to another computer. You can't print it. You can't sell it. It deletes itself after 2 weeks.
But who cares: you just download it again and start reading. The library makes money by keeping the subscriptions alive (how many people pay their fees to have library cards and then maybe go once or twice a year?). I would pay £20 a year just to be able to read recent books on my palm pilot.
Hmmm. Anyone know any VC guys that haven't gottne completely paranoid about dotcoms?
We bought 5 Symbol SPT 1500's about 2 years ago at UKP350 each. They were the fragilest little things you ever saw. All 5 are now sitting on my desk, with absolutely no hope of getting them running. Moral? You at least need the more sturdy SPT1700 (UKP600+) There is even the CDPD enabled 1733 and GSM based 1734 for wireless WAN applications
As for getting GPS working with them, they are fully functional palm pilots, so any GPS software available for them will work. Palms aren't big on expansion slots, so they will have to plug into the cradle port.
Symbol do have a PocketPC based unit, the SPT2700 (UKP1200+). These have the same options (802.11(&.11b), CDPD, GSM) however they unfortunately run PocketPC;-)
Recently I have found This, the Psion Teklogix 7510. It is a full PC with a 586 133MHz chip and a hard drive. It has built in scanner and RF options, and 2 internal / 1 external PCMCIA slots. With a 6" screen, it is a perfect little box. You can run whatever operating system you like, and write whatever code you like for them. They are ruggedised and waterproof, and are built for use on forklifts etc, so they should take a bashing and keep working.
The only problem? At $4300 a piece with barcode and 802.11b, they ain't cheap...
Heh. Ever try to buy McAfee for Unix of their website? <voice tone=deeper>"McAfee VirusShield for Unix! Click here for more information".
*click*
McAfee for Windows is a marvellous product...</voice>
Slashdot Mirror
We just rented a Minolta digital photocopier (DiALTA Di351f) for our training department. It is a 35ppm copier, with stapling, punching and sorting, a network printer and a scanner that ftp's or emails TIFFs and PDFs. Obviously it is B&W only, but it does a very passable job on text. If you wanted to buy one, they are quite expensive, but when you consider that you are also getting a photocopier, fax and A3 printer in one, it starts to look attractive.
It's all beginning to look like a TAN curve, getting infinitely close to 1 without ever touching it.
Ordinarily, I wouldn't do this, but I saw the opportunity
Heh. How do you think we feel when English, Welsh OR Scottish people refer to us as part of the "British Isles"?
I can do it too:
a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a a - See, "a" is a word! I only have to type two "a"'s a second to beat 120 wpm, so 140 will be easy!
Yawn
This is only the first time it has been done in England. If you read THIS article, you will see at the bottom that the French did this TWO YEARS AGO.
Furthermore, a Google-Bar is needed. Can't work without that anymore.
Can't you just change the default search engine to google (one of the first things I did with Mozilla) then just type your search into the address bar, and click the "Search Google for..." button that pops up at the end of the address list?
I think the analogy breaks down when you consider what happens to the car after it has been stolen: the original owner no longer has the car. This is not so with an ebook, where the original content still resides on the owner's hard drive (indeed, he may not even know that it has been copied).
If someone asks you if they can borrow your car, you say "sure, but I need it back in an hour". If someone asks you to borrow an ebook, you say, "hold on, I'll run you off your own copy". Until something exists that takes the copyrighted content away from the original owner, real world analogies don't apply.
Which way do you make more money, subscription or by serving these big ads? If we click on the ads, do you make more money? If we don't click on the ads, do you make any money at all?
/. out, I am willing to click on adverts. But only if it helps. If you get the same payoff whether I click on the ad or not, fine. After the last few years of advertising expanding all over the internet, I am immune. Hell, I use Opera, I have ads even if I am looking at our intranet site!
Personally I am loathe to subscribe to any websites. I don't subscribe to magazines (there are a couple that I pick up only infrequently). I do pay for digital satellite, and that is where most of my entertainment comes from (metered 56K modem connectivity is the only real way to connect to the internet here at the moment).
However, if it helps
The airport authority over here in Ireland is called Aer Rianta. A friend of mine worked for their Support Services division. They got a load of packing tape delivered. It was the first time anyone had seen the abbreviation together. A.R.S.S. Apparently the boss just shrugged and walked away...
It's the queers. They're in it with the aliens. They're building landing strips for gay Martians, I swear to God
Dear God I loved the Dead Milkmen. Stuart, Punk Rock Girl, the whole left-handed, midget, eskimo albino thing...
You know that kid delivers papers in the neighbourhood, the Worstwood kid, he's a good kid, a fine kid, all he ever wanted was a burrow owl, kept buggin his old man, "Dad, get me a burrow owl". So the guy breaks down and buys him a burrow owl. The other night, I go out into my back yard, and there's the Worstwood kid looking up in my tree, I said "what're ya looking for", he said " I'm looking for my burrow owl", I said "Jumpin Jesus on a pogo stick, everybody knows that burrow owls live in hole! In the ground!" Now Stuart, do you think a kid like that knows what the queers are doing to our soil? - classic. Off the top of my head, and its been a while since I listened to it (I have it on vinyl) so that may not be perfect, but I can still hear it rattling around in my head some days.
I have seen this argument time and time again. Sure it costs a lot of money to run, say, Slashdot. And the advertisers aren't bringing in the bucks anymore. So, subscriptions are seen as the way to go, but if everyone charges $6 a month, then people balk at paying $60 a month just to look at ten sites. What is needed is a new way for websites to calculate their charges.
How about this:
Figure out your costs per month. Hosting, rent, beer money. Start your subscription service based on people paying a percentage of that figure. The more people that sign up, the less they pay (you would need to cap it at something reasonable until it takes off). That way you get friends telling other friends to sign up. If your monthly subscriptions start to go below what would be chargable to a credit card, give people the option of either paying $10 up front, or waiting until the $10 is used up before automatically debiting the card (send them an email every month, explaining the state of play).
MT broke a million hits this month. Most people just read the front page every day. 1,000,000 hits / 28 days gives you 35,214 users. MT being the site it is, 70% of those are regulars (25000). 50 of those % agree that Piro and Largo deserve their money (12,500). Now you and I both know that Largo would like 12,500x$6 per month, but Piro knows that he wouldn't get it. However, if 12,500 people paid for 1/12500th of the operating costs+b33r money, then you might actually get them.
Ha-ha
The only way to do this without bending over is to have an iron-clad contract which states that if the company does not want your code after the 45 days, then they are not to develop a competing system for the next 5 years, otherwise they will incur a payout that is 5 times the cost of the software in the first place. The same contract is to be signed by the individual engineers that read the code.
IANAL
The 8100 (also the same case as the 8000 and 2500) feels extremely flimsy.
I just bought 3 8100's for some of the managers here. They were so badly made, I actually cut my thumb on the corner of the case where they had neglected to remove any of the flashing from the edge of the moulding. We had to take sandpaper to them!
That's if you can get it. I live in Shannon on the west coast, and I am not likely to see ADSL this year either.
Couple that with the high local call costs (no such thing as free local calls) - the cheapest rate is about 0.60 an hour. During the daytime this is much more, closer to 3.00 an hour. At work, I have 60+ users hanging off a 128K ISDN connection, which costs around 900 a month in call costs alone (not to mention 750 for the ISP)
For instance, how many employees do you think might have unregistered copies of Winzip on their computers?
That's why I install PowerArchiver on everyone's computer as soon as it arrives...
Heh. What will the actual last Final Fantasy game be called? Final Final Fantasy? Final Fantasy: The Final Fantasy?
How about this: The Library Model
You pay a yearly fee. You can download any book you like. It has everything that is feared with DRM: you can't copy it to another computer. You can't print it. You can't sell it. It deletes itself after 2 weeks.
But who cares: you just download it again and start reading. The library makes money by keeping the subscriptions alive (how many people pay their fees to have library cards and then maybe go once or twice a year?). I would pay £20 a year just to be able to read recent books on my palm pilot.
Hmmm. Anyone know any VC guys that haven't gottne completely paranoid about dotcoms?
Can I've a job?
Heh.
According to the Eolach Open Source News Worth Knowing newsletter that I received yesterday, they just went tits up.
Easy.
$me = "Hello house"
$house = "Hello $me. Say Pig." or any random word from a dictionary.
We bought 5 Symbol SPT 1500's about 2 years ago at UKP350 each. They were the fragilest little things you ever saw. All 5 are now sitting on my desk, with absolutely no hope of getting them running. Moral? You at least need the more sturdy SPT1700 (UKP600+) There is even the CDPD enabled 1733 and GSM based 1734 for wireless WAN applications
.11b), CDPD, GSM) however they unfortunately run PocketPC ;-)
As for getting GPS working with them, they are fully functional palm pilots, so any GPS software available for them will work. Palms aren't big on expansion slots, so they will have to plug into the cradle port.
Symbol do have a PocketPC based unit, the SPT2700 (UKP1200+). These have the same options (802.11(&
Recently I have found This, the Psion Teklogix 7510. It is a full PC with a 586 133MHz chip and a hard drive. It has built in scanner and RF options, and 2 internal / 1 external PCMCIA slots. With a 6" screen, it is a perfect little box. You can run whatever operating system you like, and write whatever code you like for them. They are ruggedised and waterproof, and are built for use on forklifts etc, so they should take a bashing and keep working.
The only problem? At $4300 a piece with barcode and 802.11b, they ain't cheap...
Heh. Ever try to buy McAfee for Unix of their website?
<voice tone=deeper>"McAfee VirusShield for Unix! Click here for more information".
*click*
McAfee for Windows is a marvellous product...</voice>
A clear sign of penis envi...