Would buying out these companies do them any good though? Many of their customers and employees would simply go elsewhere. New top distros would pop up almost instantly and as those fleeing customers and employees moved to them all the value in what Microsoft could buy would have gone with them. It's really a pointless exercise unless Microsoft can first convince the community that they aren't the enemy. The only real way to do that is to stop making threats and to donate more code, open more specs, and grant 100% free use of their patents.
I think Microsoft can benefit from open souce and that they can become a good member of the community but I'm not sure they can do it without a major changing of the guard amongst their upper management. I don't think it'll really happen until open source starts to really weaken their position and certain people decide to retire.
Most people are just theives. Sounds harsh but it's true. The kind of people that will download a Linux distro rather than buying it but never donate to any of the projects they make use of or donate their own time or skills - would we expect these people to bother donating to musicians?
Mostly I use plain text or HTML but when I use an Office Suite I use OpenOffice and save in it's native formats. I avoid using M$ Office whenever I can although it's installed on my work computer. I don't really care for OpenOffice but M$ Office is even worse.
I tried looking at their website and it was just a confusing mess. Very artsy and not very usable. Any way about it I was always just going to use Bit Torrent to download it but I would have donated a couple bucks if I could have figured out how. To me, it seems they should want me to download it with BT and just throw some cash at them as it keeps them from having to make any effort or pay for bandwidth. Even if I only gave them $1 for the album I don't think it'd be embarrassing because I probably won't listen to it very much anyway.
It'd be awesome if MP3's could be tagged with a donation URL that would work automatically with smart players to track how much you played the file and would let you define how much you wanted to pay per play and just take care of making the donations for you. So if I was willing to pay $0.001 per play and the song came up in my play list daily I'd donate around $0.37 a year to the artist just for that song. If I had ten of their songs in my play list then maybe I'd donate $3.65 a year. If I listen to 160 songs a day, a song every three minutes for the eight hours a day I listen to music, then I only pay $0.16/day for my music habit while still supporting artists.
I'm looking for several yards of the material. Buying eBooks and taking them apart to attain the material isn't a price conscience method. One of the points of ePaper is to be nearly as cheap as paper.
I use both Linux and OSX. As long as I have a Linux computer that I can do most of my real work on I don't mind OSX but I wouldn't want it to be my only computer. I do hope some of my complaints are fixed in Leopard but a few problems I have with OSX are that it is noticeably slower and less reliable than Linux on the same hardware, they've done something weird with the key mappings which never seem to be completely fixable and they aren't as useful, and OSX just doesn't handle a lot of open windows as well as Linux does. I think OSX is great for your average user that is going to run two programs at a time and never do anything hardcore but for power users it can seem a little wimpy.
I do like the active corners and dashboard though and would like to see better support for a similae feature in Linux. My wish list still includes the desire for them to sell a 30" model - hopefully not in the new ugly 90's chrome style but instead in the clean white look. The quality and look of Apple's hardware is why I buy their product.
Use open source instead. I plan to update my work computer to Leopard but most of my work actually gets done in Linux. My work computer is a 24" iMac, bought because of the quality and size of the screen mostly, that I run VMWare Fusion on. In Fusion I run several versions of Windows and Linux. The Mac mostly is just used for managing my virtual machines and testing software and websites to make sure they work well with OSX. Windows is of coursed used only for testing the same in different versions of Windows. Linux is where the real work gets done.
Of course if you're not a programmer the apps you're most familiar with might not be open source but if you're a starving student you can save a bundle by bothering to learn the free equivalents. I do like OS X, for certain uses, but I've yet to find any proprietary program for it that is so good or so unique I couldn't replace it's functionality with something free and cross platform.
Somehow I think designing a search engine so that another search engine would rank it highly would be moot. What would be the point of searching for a search engine? What keywords would you want and why would you put them on pages?
On any website the basic concept is to make the site usable by human visitors. If you do that well then getting a decent search engine ranking isn't that hard. It may take time but eventually it'll happen. Put appropriate levels of descriptive text on every page and in your text use the keywords human visitors will be looking for. Don't put a lot of crap that doesn't benefit the user or that is difficult to access - such as putting important content inside of a Flash movie where it can only be found by waiting 15 seconds and clicking three pretty Flash buttons.
Sure, you need to make strategic links to your website. It's called advertising and is a common practice in business. My experience is that ad banners aren't very effective but will work if they are highly targeted. Low key text links tend to work better for creating casual traffic. Advertise on websites with related content or some other connection to you. While you're at it put some money into other forms of advertising such as print or radio.
There really isn't anything mysterious about getting people to your website or getting search engine placement. Bother putting things in a format human and spider visitors can both use and do a little advertising and your pretty good. Avoid spamming or doing other bad things because the majority of the time you'll just mess up and get banned by Google.
On the site I'm working on right now my current project is to go through the product database and make the descriptions more descriptive. Hardly a weird idea. Most of use don't know what a FLN is while many more of us know what a flange is. That and fixing typos such as there is no such thing as a 3.8" pipe but there are 3/8" pipes. Such minor changes make a major difference in the traffic received from search engines and in converting that traffic to buyers.
Having recently tried to find a company that could sell me any economical form of electronic paper I can tell you it's damn near impossible. I had a special project I wanted to use it in. I didn't need color or high resolution. I just needed a really cheap, low power, thin, flexible, screen. The best response I got offered me a tiny bit of paper for around $3500. Hardly the stuff they could be making cereal boxes out of. *sighs*
It'd be overwhelming to actually look at it all. If I was going to look tho I'd be looking for the amateur stuff people didn't realize a third party, such as myself, would be able to find.;)
Could have been '98 or maybe even '99. I just remember it was sometime in the late 90's and was 20GB and I know my price range would have been around $250. It's a foggy memory. Regardless, we've jumped from a gigabyte to a terabyte for around the same price in around a decade.
Not at all. Processing the data is the fun part if you're a geek. As for consuming it - that is something I'll leave to others. I'm just enjoying myself indexing the data and making it searchable.
It seems we were at around 20GB for $250 in 1997 (going from memory - may not have been the best deal). I can currently buy 1TB for around $200. I could live with it if the next 10 years has a similar jump in hdd progress.
I don't really believe that CPU speeds, hdd space, etc are going to stop skyrocketing. There is no reason they would until consumers lose interest in buying bigger and better. When on avenue of improvement runs out there will always be another waiting to be investigated so long as there is money to pay for the research. For the most part so long as new apps are being written to take advantage of the more power and storage our computers have people will keep demanding more and more will keep being offered.
It's definitely becoming easier than when I started messing around with the concept. Those 200MB disks just didn't go very far.;)
Think we'll be able to buy a petabyte for $100 in ten years? Much cheaper than the ~$200,000 price tag now. Of course then I'll be working on setting up my exabyte system.
Which is why I suggest using user serviceable parts, miniature hdds, inside an enclosure the size of a typical hdd or at least the size of a 5.25" bay. It's just your typical RAID 5 system but made miniture enough that it won't scare your average user away when they look at the front of their computer and see it there. Somehow I think the massive grid of removable drive bays that I have, each with a sucking maw of fans and indicator lights, would turn off your average user. So make it fit into a single normal bay and make the lights clearly indicate drive failure and it'd be easy to sell to your average Joe. We have hdds small enough to do this with now - those used by things such as an iPod being an example. So why not do it?
Ever really tried looking at your average security tape? Usually the bad thing you want to see is in one of the frames skipped or is so blurry you can't see what the heck went on. Better to keep at least several frames per second and to use high enough resolution that everything is clear. No point in doing it if you're not going to do it right. Or maybe I'm just paranoid after having several bad things happen in places that are supposed to have video surveillance only to find out they didn't get a clear enough image to do anything useful with.:)
I write auto-sorting programs as a hobby which is part of why I download so much. I used to have the image portion tied into the system so users could browse images, rate them, keyword them, etc but it became sort of pointless once Flickr came out so I stopped pushing my own image indexing and search tool.
I have a toy, which I keep considering turning into a business, that would make it easy for users to backup their files to a central server farm that'd keep redundant copies in different locations, make files easy to restore, share, index, search, etc. It's meant to work with files of all types and is built on top of a file-system I wrote that makes storing files space efficient by removing duplicates and using compression. I personally think it's sort of a killer app since it combines network backup, file sharing (with built-in BT), file tagging, powerful search, live previews, forums, an open API so other web apps can use it's functionality, etc all into one but I don't think it's the kind of thing most financiers would grok. I wish I had a buddy that was into business. For fellow geeks, or people that have at least read Cryptonomicon, an Avi.:)
Besides, what if I wanted to record every channel at the same time 24/7? Then I could go back and re-watch episodes of shows I didn't know I wanted to watch until I saw a random episode months later. I often will get into a show a couple seasons into the show. It'd be great to be able to go back to episode 1 and just watch from there until I catch up with the current episode.
Or one thing I've actually experimented with is recording my video surveillance cameras 24/7 and keeping a record for my own protection. With a personal video camera that records what I'm doing all the time I can always defend myself against any claim that I was committing a crime. I have very good evidence that I wasn't out robbing, raping, or murdering. I'd like to have a drive small enough and with enough space that I could easily carry it around and record a whole day at a time before needing to upload it to my main hdd which I'd like to be big enough to keep my record forever. I'd also like it to be big enough to record all my other security cameras forever.
Actually I do use it all although I don't view most of it. I use it for training AI-ish programs I write. I enjoy writing AI type stuff and trying to make it as good at identifying images, video, and audio content as possible so I keep training my programs with bigger data sets and tweaking my code and then re-training, and so on. It's just a hobby I have with no real purpose other than to waste time coding stuff.
No, I mean they need to figure out how to fit multiple disks and a RAID-5 controller in the size of a single disk so that it can be installed as a single disk and only worried about if something goes wrong. It needs to be extremely easy to use. Maybe make each mini-disk from the RAID so that it can be ejected and replaced without opening the case and with a little light on the front of the case for each mini-disk so if it turns from green to red you'll know it's broken.
They've squeezed enough space into that size for now - now I'd rather they work on reliability. For most people reliability is more important than hdd size or speed. I'm actually surprised Dell or one of those big name sellers hasn't started pushing the reliability angle as it seems such an easy upsell. "You wouldn't want to lose your family photos or important documents would you?"
Us geeks already know enough to use RAID, and a lot of us do use Linux's RAID 5 support, but they need to make it the default option, and really easy, so that everyone uses it. Even if they could make a multi-hdd unit with built-in RAID 5 that would fit in a 5.25" external bay it'd be useful.
Most of it I never look at myself. Some of it might be porn but that isn't my objective. I collect media files of all types and run them through my own AI code to train my toys in processing visual/audio information. So not only do I download 100's of gigs at a time but then I process it and save the resulting data.
I process DVDs, CDs, and my own collected images too so again that takes up a lot of hdd space also.
I use a custom file system, that I wrote myself (woot FUSE), that hides duplicates, so that only one real copy exists but the file system behaves as if multiple copies can exist, and compresses files that will have 10% or greater reduction in size. Not that it matters to this discussion, but in case anyone is going to comment, it caches read files in memory so it doesn't have to constantly have to decompress files. It caches file writes on disc and only compresses the files once there have been no further writes for a given amount of time. It also does versioning. I'm working on making it flag rapidly changing files, such as bit torrent downloads, so that they won't be processed to save space or keep versions, until they've finished downloading.
Slashdot Mirror
Would buying out these companies do them any good though? Many of their customers and employees would simply go elsewhere. New top distros would pop up almost instantly and as those fleeing customers and employees moved to them all the value in what Microsoft could buy would have gone with them. It's really a pointless exercise unless Microsoft can first convince the community that they aren't the enemy. The only real way to do that is to stop making threats and to donate more code, open more specs, and grant 100% free use of their patents.
I think Microsoft can benefit from open souce and that they can become a good member of the community but I'm not sure they can do it without a major changing of the guard amongst their upper management. I don't think it'll really happen until open source starts to really weaken their position and certain people decide to retire.
Most people are just theives. Sounds harsh but it's true. The kind of people that will download a Linux distro rather than buying it but never donate to any of the projects they make use of or donate their own time or skills - would we expect these people to bother donating to musicians?
No no no. OS X is okay but not great whereas their hardware is first rate. I buy a Mac not for OS X but for the beautiful monitor and high quality.
Mostly I use plain text or HTML but when I use an Office Suite I use OpenOffice and save in it's native formats. I avoid using M$ Office whenever I can although it's installed on my work computer. I don't really care for OpenOffice but M$ Office is even worse.
I tried looking at their website and it was just a confusing mess. Very artsy and not very usable. Any way about it I was always just going to use Bit Torrent to download it but I would have donated a couple bucks if I could have figured out how. To me, it seems they should want me to download it with BT and just throw some cash at them as it keeps them from having to make any effort or pay for bandwidth. Even if I only gave them $1 for the album I don't think it'd be embarrassing because I probably won't listen to it very much anyway.
It'd be awesome if MP3's could be tagged with a donation URL that would work automatically with smart players to track how much you played the file and would let you define how much you wanted to pay per play and just take care of making the donations for you. So if I was willing to pay $0.001 per play and the song came up in my play list daily I'd donate around $0.37 a year to the artist just for that song. If I had ten of their songs in my play list then maybe I'd donate $3.65 a year. If I listen to 160 songs a day, a song every three minutes for the eight hours a day I listen to music, then I only pay $0.16/day for my music habit while still supporting artists.
I'm looking for several yards of the material. Buying eBooks and taking them apart to attain the material isn't a price conscience method. One of the points of ePaper is to be nearly as cheap as paper.
Do they actually sell the paper by itself or just as an eBook? I need the paper itself.
I use both Linux and OSX. As long as I have a Linux computer that I can do most of my real work on I don't mind OSX but I wouldn't want it to be my only computer. I do hope some of my complaints are fixed in Leopard but a few problems I have with OSX are that it is noticeably slower and less reliable than Linux on the same hardware, they've done something weird with the key mappings which never seem to be completely fixable and they aren't as useful, and OSX just doesn't handle a lot of open windows as well as Linux does. I think OSX is great for your average user that is going to run two programs at a time and never do anything hardcore but for power users it can seem a little wimpy.
I do like the active corners and dashboard though and would like to see better support for a similae feature in Linux. My wish list still includes the desire for them to sell a 30" model - hopefully not in the new ugly 90's chrome style but instead in the clean white look. The quality and look of Apple's hardware is why I buy their product.
Use open source instead. I plan to update my work computer to Leopard but most of my work actually gets done in Linux. My work computer is a 24" iMac, bought because of the quality and size of the screen mostly, that I run VMWare Fusion on. In Fusion I run several versions of Windows and Linux. The Mac mostly is just used for managing my virtual machines and testing software and websites to make sure they work well with OSX. Windows is of coursed used only for testing the same in different versions of Windows. Linux is where the real work gets done.
Of course if you're not a programmer the apps you're most familiar with might not be open source but if you're a starving student you can save a bundle by bothering to learn the free equivalents. I do like OS X, for certain uses, but I've yet to find any proprietary program for it that is so good or so unique I couldn't replace it's functionality with something free and cross platform.
Somehow I think designing a search engine so that another search engine would rank it highly would be moot. What would be the point of searching for a search engine? What keywords would you want and why would you put them on pages?
On any website the basic concept is to make the site usable by human visitors. If you do that well then getting a decent search engine ranking isn't that hard. It may take time but eventually it'll happen. Put appropriate levels of descriptive text on every page and in your text use the keywords human visitors will be looking for. Don't put a lot of crap that doesn't benefit the user or that is difficult to access - such as putting important content inside of a Flash movie where it can only be found by waiting 15 seconds and clicking three pretty Flash buttons.
Sure, you need to make strategic links to your website. It's called advertising and is a common practice in business. My experience is that ad banners aren't very effective but will work if they are highly targeted. Low key text links tend to work better for creating casual traffic. Advertise on websites with related content or some other connection to you. While you're at it put some money into other forms of advertising such as print or radio.
There really isn't anything mysterious about getting people to your website or getting search engine placement. Bother putting things in a format human and spider visitors can both use and do a little advertising and your pretty good. Avoid spamming or doing other bad things because the majority of the time you'll just mess up and get banned by Google.
On the site I'm working on right now my current project is to go through the product database and make the descriptions more descriptive. Hardly a weird idea. Most of use don't know what a FLN is while many more of us know what a flange is. That and fixing typos such as there is no such thing as a 3.8" pipe but there are 3/8" pipes. Such minor changes make a major difference in the traffic received from search engines and in converting that traffic to buyers.
Having recently tried to find a company that could sell me any economical form of electronic paper I can tell you it's damn near impossible. I had a special project I wanted to use it in. I didn't need color or high resolution. I just needed a really cheap, low power, thin, flexible, screen. The best response I got offered me a tiny bit of paper for around $3500. Hardly the stuff they could be making cereal boxes out of. *sighs*
An example of what I usually see:
;)
60471 done.
60482 done.
60470 done.
60494 done.
60483 done.
60476 done.
60488 done.
It'd be overwhelming to actually look at it all. If I was going to look tho I'd be looking for the amateur stuff people didn't realize a third party, such as myself, would be able to find.
Could have been '98 or maybe even '99. I just remember it was sometime in the late 90's and was 20GB and I know my price range would have been around $250. It's a foggy memory. Regardless, we've jumped from a gigabyte to a terabyte for around the same price in around a decade.
Not at all. Processing the data is the fun part if you're a geek. As for consuming it - that is something I'll leave to others. I'm just enjoying myself indexing the data and making it searchable.
It seems we were at around 20GB for $250 in 1997 (going from memory - may not have been the best deal). I can currently buy 1TB for around $200. I could live with it if the next 10 years has a similar jump in hdd progress.
I don't really believe that CPU speeds, hdd space, etc are going to stop skyrocketing. There is no reason they would until consumers lose interest in buying bigger and better. When on avenue of improvement runs out there will always be another waiting to be investigated so long as there is money to pay for the research. For the most part so long as new apps are being written to take advantage of the more power and storage our computers have people will keep demanding more and more will keep being offered.
It's definitely becoming easier than when I started messing around with the concept. Those 200MB disks just didn't go very far. ;)
Think we'll be able to buy a petabyte for $100 in ten years? Much cheaper than the ~$200,000 price tag now. Of course then I'll be working on setting up my exabyte system.
It's what happens when a petaphile attacks you.
Which is why I suggest using user serviceable parts, miniature hdds, inside an enclosure the size of a typical hdd or at least the size of a 5.25" bay. It's just your typical RAID 5 system but made miniture enough that it won't scare your average user away when they look at the front of their computer and see it there. Somehow I think the massive grid of removable drive bays that I have, each with a sucking maw of fans and indicator lights, would turn off your average user. So make it fit into a single normal bay and make the lights clearly indicate drive failure and it'd be easy to sell to your average Joe. We have hdds small enough to do this with now - those used by things such as an iPod being an example. So why not do it?
Ever really tried looking at your average security tape? Usually the bad thing you want to see is in one of the frames skipped or is so blurry you can't see what the heck went on. Better to keep at least several frames per second and to use high enough resolution that everything is clear. No point in doing it if you're not going to do it right. Or maybe I'm just paranoid after having several bad things happen in places that are supposed to have video surveillance only to find out they didn't get a clear enough image to do anything useful with. :)
I write auto-sorting programs as a hobby which is part of why I download so much. I used to have the image portion tied into the system so users could browse images, rate them, keyword them, etc but it became sort of pointless once Flickr came out so I stopped pushing my own image indexing and search tool.
:)
I have a toy, which I keep considering turning into a business, that would make it easy for users to backup their files to a central server farm that'd keep redundant copies in different locations, make files easy to restore, share, index, search, etc. It's meant to work with files of all types and is built on top of a file-system I wrote that makes storing files space efficient by removing duplicates and using compression. I personally think it's sort of a killer app since it combines network backup, file sharing (with built-in BT), file tagging, powerful search, live previews, forums, an open API so other web apps can use it's functionality, etc all into one but I don't think it's the kind of thing most financiers would grok. I wish I had a buddy that was into business. For fellow geeks, or people that have at least read Cryptonomicon, an Avi.
Besides, what if I wanted to record every channel at the same time 24/7? Then I could go back and re-watch episodes of shows I didn't know I wanted to watch until I saw a random episode months later. I often will get into a show a couple seasons into the show. It'd be great to be able to go back to episode 1 and just watch from there until I catch up with the current episode.
Or one thing I've actually experimented with is recording my video surveillance cameras 24/7 and keeping a record for my own protection. With a personal video camera that records what I'm doing all the time I can always defend myself against any claim that I was committing a crime. I have very good evidence that I wasn't out robbing, raping, or murdering. I'd like to have a drive small enough and with enough space that I could easily carry it around and record a whole day at a time before needing to upload it to my main hdd which I'd like to be big enough to keep my record forever. I'd also like it to be big enough to record all my other security cameras forever.
Actually I do use it all although I don't view most of it. I use it for training AI-ish programs I write. I enjoy writing AI type stuff and trying to make it as good at identifying images, video, and audio content as possible so I keep training my programs with bigger data sets and tweaking my code and then re-training, and so on. It's just a hobby I have with no real purpose other than to waste time coding stuff.
No, I mean they need to figure out how to fit multiple disks and a RAID-5 controller in the size of a single disk so that it can be installed as a single disk and only worried about if something goes wrong. It needs to be extremely easy to use. Maybe make each mini-disk from the RAID so that it can be ejected and replaced without opening the case and with a little light on the front of the case for each mini-disk so if it turns from green to red you'll know it's broken.
They've squeezed enough space into that size for now - now I'd rather they work on reliability. For most people reliability is more important than hdd size or speed. I'm actually surprised Dell or one of those big name sellers hasn't started pushing the reliability angle as it seems such an easy upsell. "You wouldn't want to lose your family photos or important documents would you?"
Us geeks already know enough to use RAID, and a lot of us do use Linux's RAID 5 support, but they need to make it the default option, and really easy, so that everyone uses it. Even if they could make a multi-hdd unit with built-in RAID 5 that would fit in a 5.25" external bay it'd be useful.
Most of it I never look at myself. Some of it might be porn but that isn't my objective. I collect media files of all types and run them through my own AI code to train my toys in processing visual/audio information. So not only do I download 100's of gigs at a time but then I process it and save the resulting data.
I process DVDs, CDs, and my own collected images too so again that takes up a lot of hdd space also.
I use a custom file system, that I wrote myself (woot FUSE), that hides duplicates, so that only one real copy exists but the file system behaves as if multiple copies can exist, and compresses files that will have 10% or greater reduction in size. Not that it matters to this discussion, but in case anyone is going to comment, it caches read files in memory so it doesn't have to constantly have to decompress files. It caches file writes on disc and only compresses the files once there have been no further writes for a given amount of time. It also does versioning. I'm working on making it flag rapidly changing files, such as bit torrent downloads, so that they won't be processed to save space or keep versions, until they've finished downloading.
:)
I still need terabytes of disk space.