A gram of coke for $.94? 94 cents(I assume, not.94) buys.05, then 20 bucks buys 1 ounce. Which also means that $320 buys 1 pound of cocaine. Which, if I can recall my days as a runner for the columbian mafia, is a really good deal. Or was that TV?
Agreed. Some of the tracks from The Lord of the Rings soundtrack, sound horrible at 128. There's one track on there that doesn't sound right no matter what bitrate it's encoded as. I think it's the bridge to Kazad Dhoum or something. It gets quite loud, very busy, and the encoder just can't handle it. Maybe it's a settings thing, but I will admit that for over, say, 75% of music, I can't tell the difference at 128kbps with LAME.
640x480, or if you go on the website it also says it takes 1162x864 (or some such resolution) shots, is just not enough. Actually, 1162x864 might squeak in, but if I'm taking pictures, I want the resolution of my picture to be at least as big as my monitor, which is going to be the primary means of viewing the picture. So while this is really cool, it doesn't fit my needs, which are desktops/screen saver pictures that take up the entire screen, without resizing and making it less precise.
I live in the mountains. My primary concern is being able to listen to music in the mountains. Your input has clinched the deal for Sirius for me, or at least the deal against XM... Thanks.
I'm curious: could a well-configured firewall and lots of bandwidth outside the firewall take care of most of the/. effect? I know ppl like to DOS a lot of these sites, but if you filter that out so that only legitimate hits get through, how much is the load on a simple page (this one's probably ~2k) going to be? I wouldn't think you could handle/. on an iPaq, but what would it take, do you think? What kind of webserver would it take to handle this amount of traffic?
Streaming movies may not be legal. The MPAA would have you think that it is not. But in the end, it's just somebody interpreting fair use to mean that they can "rent" the movie by streaming it over the net--instead of physically sending the DVD, which in my opinion is 100% okay, they simply send you the data. It's cheaper for them to do it this way, and as such they can do it for $1/viewing. That's the important part. Let me restate it:
It's cheaper to stream video over the 'net than it is to have it available for rent via blockbuster. As such, the cost to rent the DVD in this manner is less.
The MPAA doesn't want efficient, they want profit. There's no money to be made by increasing efficiency if you have a monopoly. This is why they don't offer services like this. But if renting a DVD is legal, so should this be. It's easier to copy a DVD than it is to record a realvideo stream, so the piracy angle is a crock. This is a highly efficient distribution method, and the MPAA is cracking down because they're threatened that their profits are going to go away as a result of the increased efficiency.
Stealing implies that this method of rental is illegal, which it may be, but shoud not be. Why is this any different than renting the DVD? These own a DVD, and they allow you to watch it for a fee. Rent. Period.
I'm a little confused as to your stance on copyright. You admit that copyright, in it's ideal form, serves to create more creative works free to the public. I assume by this you mean that when the copyright expires, the work becomes public domain. You then state that it is not morally wrong to disseminate MP3s. So do you support copyright, if not in it's current form then in it's oringinal form, or the original intent of it, or do you just want free, free, free? Because copyright is no good if it is not enforced, and in foobar's example, your answers involve breaking the copyright.
He may be slightly trollish, and you may be well-spoken, but that doesn't make you right, and it doesn't make him wrong. As always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. foobar makes a good point with his essay. The way you feel about it, your morals--if I create something and want to sell it, and somebody else reproduces it and sells(or gives away, I don't think it matters) the reproduction without my consent, that's okay with you? No limits on their actions, no accountability or anything like that? If that's your line, then fine, but as a person who admittedly doesn't pay for music any more (I'm boycotting the RIAA, but that's kind've a BS reason; in reality, I don't like paying $17 for a CD I'm going to put in my drive once, rip, and then store in the closet), I still believe that copyright helps promote the arts, and while it requires that we have to pay for them and creates a whole industry whose survival is based on the protection of those copyrights, I think copyright as a concept is a Good Thing.
Mike Daisey did build a business - his book and touring show, based on his hilarious gripes.
It's not quite the same. A well-run business is a self-contained system of systems (ie HR, shipping, billing, etc) that, once complete, can operate independently of the builder.
Writing a book is pretty much like owning a business, if you can get others to distribute the book for you. Your only job is to deposit the checks. So with regards to that, you're right.
The travelling show is more of a self-employment thing than a business. Jeff Bezos could hire somebody to be CEO of amazon.com, and spend the rest of his days in Maui. If the business is run well, it'll be okay. The travelling show, well, without it's star, there's no show. Therefore, it's not a classical business.
Maybe lifetime there's a higher percentage in favor of IBM, but you hear stories about people going through three, maybe 4 drives under warranty. IBM didn't do what people felt they should to remedy the situation, and their reputation suffered. Tell me that today you would rather buy a 60GB GXP than a comparable Maxtor drive.
Re:IBM Made $2.05 billion in the deal.
on
IBM Spins Down
·
· Score: 3, Funny
I'm guessing Hitachi's going to find in a few months that they got 18,000 migrant workers and dummies propped up with sticks.
I agree. IBM doesn't make money by selling PCs on the corporate level, they make money by servicing them, keeping everything running. But they're not promoting Linux, they're supporting Linux. Germany wanted Linux. IBM wanted Germany's money. IBM offered to support Linux. MS offered to support Windows. MS lost.
What I'd like to know, is why Germany chose to go with Linux over Windows. The cost to support it? Licensing costs? Security? Greater efficiency? I believe that support costs would be more than licensing costs, so would Linux cost less to support? If not, it's where Linux needs work. If it is, marketing is where Linux needs work. For example, I have lots of very computer-literate friends, smart guys, that have never touched *nix. I myself have very limited experience with it. I've never run it at home. Why? We always used Windows, and while it sure pissed us off until Windows 2000 came around, now we don't worry about stability, security(we don't worry about it, I said), or compatibility. We don't know what Linux has to offer. Certainly it has a lot to offer besides being free and open-source, and the failure of Linux advocates to properly communicate that is why I'm typing this in IE right now. Marketing, I tell you. That's where you make your money. With $1,000,000,000+ marketing campaigns, or word-of-mouth. McDonalds didn't get so big by making the world's best hamburger, they got there by making you want to eat there. And you do, even though their hamburgers suck. Sure, you could get a big, juicy burger from the mom 'n' pop burger shop down the road, but you don't. Why? Marketing.
I fully plan on using Mozilla when it comes out(I've run a few betas but never stuck to them), because I like tabbed browsing and hate popups. Those are two major selling points - things Moz has that IE does not. Word-of-mouth was good enough to convince me that I should use Mozilla.
Name 2 things that I cannot live without that Linux has that Windows does not, and you may convince me to put Linux on a box at home. I don't care about freeness, I'm talking about genuinely cool stuff that I would want to do. Why use Linux? I'm sure all you Linux users can think of a thousand reasons, but I've never had a real, serious Linux fan try and convince me to switch.
PS: Sorry for rambling. I am honestly interested in what Linux has to offer me. Kind've sad that I've spent so much time on/. and never compiled a single kernel, but maybe it's time to get started.
I can tell you for myself (I run a mail server), that my costs are $0 dealing with spam, and would be much much more than $0 prosecuting it. And I get over 10,000 spams a day, and could prosecute if I wanted to.
Facts, good. So that's where you're coming from. You run a mail server, and it can handle the UCE that you get. You get 10,000 spams a day. How do you know how much of that is spam? Do you have to delete them? How much time do you think that it takes your users to delete those 10,000 e-mails? What is the cost to them? Multiply that by the number of people with e-mail worldwide, and you've got a decent cost. Time is money. It may only cost me 18 hours a year, but multiplied by the number of people that get spam, that's a big number. If you were a republican, I'd say that that adds up to a decent loss of productivity in the US, hurts the GNP or whatever.
The biggest problem for me is that it's only going to get worse. It's a control issue, really. I have an e-mail address. I pay $X/year for it. I want people to send me e-mail, but only if they reasonably believe that I would want it. Meanwhile, I get like 10 "make your dick bigger" spams a day, 2 or 3 "free legal advice" spams(it's an MLM scheme, the product is decent but there are no controls over the people trying to market it, and as a result it's reputation as a legit service is being hurt), lots of lose weight, clear credit, refinance, pr0n, blah blah blah. I don't want any of that crap, and yet there's no way to stop it. I'm not going to buy a list of a million e-mail addresses, but is there a way to stop getting e-mail about it? If MCI calls me and tries to get me to switch to their service, and I tell them not to call me anymore, they stop calling me. There are laws to insure that. Spam is not the same way. Furthermore, if you believe that there is no way to block spam without blocking legitimate e-mail, take telemarketing. Telemarketing laws seem to be working out okay for the states that have the no-call lists (such as mine). So what would be different about e-mail that would keep it from working? What do you have to lose if 10,000 e-mails a day didn't get to your server? Would your job be in jeapordy? Simply, this: why don't you support federal legislation whose goal would be to eliminate spam?
The cost to prosecute spammers(1) is not going to exceed the savings in time spent deleting spam(2), the cost of the bandwidth used to transmit spam, or the equipment upgrades needed to handle spam(3), because since they can't stop it, they have to handle it.
You're not very persuasive, btw. I like hard facts, not speculation.
1) In civil court, btw, aka court costs paid by losing party, public defenders not involved, criminal prosecutors not involved.
2) 2-3min/day for me, that's 18-24 hours a year YOU(4) cost ME
3) Mail servers and the like
4) Not you literally, although I'm starting to wonder...
I bought a GF2 MX, 64mb DDR... It's nice enough, I can play Q3A smoothly at 640x480 with 2x AA and high quality and what not. I didn't buy a faster card because I was waiting for a reason I needed a faster card, and because it was fifty bucks. Spending $400 so that I could run 1280x1024 with AA just wasn't worth it for me. But when Doom 3 comes out, and my card doesn't cut it anymore, you're damn strait I'll upgrade.
In the case of the costs of spam - ranging from miniscule to nothing
The only number I've heard regarding the cost of spam was 6 billion dollars a year. I don't know if this includes infrastructure and bandwidth costs, or just the time taken to delete these e-mails, but there you go.
we will eventually be able to just dump the waste into the sun or something
I say we dump it onto uranus. What has that stupid uranus ever done for us? And besides, it takes no skill to hit the sun with a canister of waste. Hitting uranus, or better yet catching the waste in it's gravitational pull and having it orbit uranus, now there's a goal worth reaching.
Did your computer download that post? You can set it to notify you, but no big deal turning that off. SPAM is messages sent TO you, whereas you go to slashdot to read messages. Therein lies the difference.
She's going to college. If she smokes, and has access to it, I'm sure she'll use some of that college-try and figure out a way to transform it from bud to smoke to lungs. Guarantee she can come up with something. When was the last time you and your friends wanted to smoke up but were unable to find/create a device with which to smoke?
They run the mail server and give me a simple web client that allows me to redirect an alias to a central address. I only have one actual e-mail address (they let you set up as many as you want, with a mailbox limit up to 10mb total), but unlimited aliases. By default, obfuscation@mydomain.com is simply forwarded to my real address along with all the other aliases I make up. I can change the default behavior of undefined aliases to not forward to my account, but it's a great way to find out who got your e-mail address.
They allow you to do DNS in as much as you can map www.mydomain.com to wherever you want it to go (I think it currently goes to www.slashdot.org, actually). www or any other prefix you can think of. pr0n.mydomain.com could go to my own personal web server if I wanted it to. Again, via web client. I don't know if you can update their DNS server automatically, you could ask them about that.
No web space included.
$15/year covers the service plus.cc domain registration.
E-mail seems reliable so far as I can tell, I've only tested the DNS feature but it seemed easy enough.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd just mumble something about the on-board cache becoming corrupted, and having to replace the board with one from an identical drive.
A gram of coke for $.94? .94) buys .05, then 20 bucks buys 1 ounce. Which also means that $320 buys 1 pound of cocaine. Which, if I can recall my days as a runner for the columbian mafia, is a really good deal.
94 cents(I assume, not
Or was that TV?
Agreed. Some of the tracks from The Lord of the Rings soundtrack, sound horrible at 128. There's one track on there that doesn't sound right no matter what bitrate it's encoded as. I think it's the bridge to Kazad Dhoum or something. It gets quite loud, very busy, and the encoder just can't handle it. Maybe it's a settings thing, but I will admit that for over, say, 75% of music, I can't tell the difference at 128kbps with LAME.
320x480, interlaced. My bad.
640x480, or if you go on the website it also says it takes 1162x864 (or some such resolution) shots, is just not enough. Actually, 1162x864 might squeak in, but if I'm taking pictures, I want the resolution of my picture to be at least as big as my monitor, which is going to be the primary means of viewing the picture. So while this is really cool, it doesn't fit my needs, which are desktops/screen saver pictures that take up the entire screen, without resizing and making it less precise.
But then again, TV is 240x480 or something, so you wouldn't really gain anyway.
I live in the mountains. My primary concern is being able to listen to music in the mountains. Your input has clinched the deal for Sirius for me, or at least the deal against XM... Thanks.
I'm curious: could a well-configured firewall and lots of bandwidth outside the firewall take care of most of the /. effect? I know ppl like to DOS a lot of these sites, but if you filter that out so that only legitimate hits get through, how much is the load on a simple page (this one's probably ~2k) going to be? I wouldn't think you could handle /. on an iPaq, but what would it take, do you think? What kind of webserver would it take to handle this amount of traffic?
Streaming movies may not be legal. The MPAA would have you think that it is not. But in the end, it's just somebody interpreting fair use to mean that they can "rent" the movie by streaming it over the net--instead of physically sending the DVD, which in my opinion is 100% okay, they simply send you the data. It's cheaper for them to do it this way, and as such they can do it for $1/viewing. That's the important part. Let me restate it:
It's cheaper to stream video over the 'net than it is to have it available for rent via blockbuster. As such, the cost to rent the DVD in this manner is less.
The MPAA doesn't want efficient, they want profit. There's no money to be made by increasing efficiency if you have a monopoly. This is why they don't offer services like this. But if renting a DVD is legal, so should this be. It's easier to copy a DVD than it is to record a realvideo stream, so the piracy angle is a crock. This is a highly efficient distribution method, and the MPAA is cracking down because they're threatened that their profits are going to go away as a result of the increased efficiency.
Stealing implies that this method of rental is illegal, which it may be, but shoud not be. Why is this any different than renting the DVD? These own a DVD, and they allow you to watch it for a fee. Rent. Period.
I'm a little confused as to your stance on copyright. You admit that copyright, in it's ideal form, serves to create more creative works free to the public. I assume by this you mean that when the copyright expires, the work becomes public domain. You then state that it is not morally wrong to disseminate MP3s. So do you support copyright, if not in it's current form then in it's oringinal form, or the original intent of it, or do you just want free, free, free? Because copyright is no good if it is not enforced, and in foobar's example, your answers involve breaking the copyright.
He may be slightly trollish, and you may be well-spoken, but that doesn't make you right, and it doesn't make him wrong. As always, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. foobar makes a good point with his essay. The way you feel about it, your morals--if I create something and want to sell it, and somebody else reproduces it and sells(or gives away, I don't think it matters) the reproduction without my consent, that's okay with you? No limits on their actions, no accountability or anything like that? If that's your line, then fine, but as a person who admittedly doesn't pay for music any more (I'm boycotting the RIAA, but that's kind've a BS reason; in reality, I don't like paying $17 for a CD I'm going to put in my drive once, rip, and then store in the closet), I still believe that copyright helps promote the arts, and while it requires that we have to pay for them and creates a whole industry whose survival is based on the protection of those copyrights, I think copyright as a concept is a Good Thing.
That only works if you clean the keyboard off first. You think all they use the keyboard for is to enter passwords?
Then America comes by and makes fun of whomever is left.
Mike Daisey did build a business - his book and touring show, based on his hilarious gripes.
It's not quite the same. A well-run business is a self-contained system of systems (ie HR, shipping, billing, etc) that, once complete, can operate independently of the builder.
Writing a book is pretty much like owning a business, if you can get others to distribute the book for you. Your only job is to deposit the checks. So with regards to that, you're right.
The travelling show is more of a self-employment thing than a business. Jeff Bezos could hire somebody to be CEO of amazon.com, and spend the rest of his days in Maui. If the business is run well, it'll be okay. The travelling show, well, without it's star, there's no show. Therefore, it's not a classical business.
Maybe lifetime there's a higher percentage in favor of IBM, but you hear stories about people going through three, maybe 4 drives under warranty. IBM didn't do what people felt they should to remedy the situation, and their reputation suffered. Tell me that today you would rather buy a 60GB GXP than a comparable Maxtor drive.
I'm guessing Hitachi's going to find in a few months that they got 18,000 migrant workers and dummies propped up with sticks.
I agree. IBM doesn't make money by selling PCs on the corporate level, they make money by servicing them, keeping everything running. But they're not promoting Linux, they're supporting Linux. Germany wanted Linux. IBM wanted Germany's money. IBM offered to support Linux. MS offered to support Windows. MS lost.
/. and never compiled a single kernel, but maybe it's time to get started.
What I'd like to know, is why Germany chose to go with Linux over Windows. The cost to support it? Licensing costs? Security? Greater efficiency? I believe that support costs would be more than licensing costs, so would Linux cost less to support? If not, it's where Linux needs work. If it is, marketing is where Linux needs work.
For example, I have lots of very computer-literate friends, smart guys, that have never touched *nix. I myself have very limited experience with it. I've never run it at home. Why? We always used Windows, and while it sure pissed us off until Windows 2000 came around, now we don't worry about stability, security(we don't worry about it, I said), or compatibility. We don't know what Linux has to offer. Certainly it has a lot to offer besides being free and open-source, and the failure of Linux advocates to properly communicate that is why I'm typing this in IE right now. Marketing, I tell you. That's where you make your money. With $1,000,000,000+ marketing campaigns, or word-of-mouth. McDonalds didn't get so big by making the world's best hamburger, they got there by making you want to eat there. And you do, even though their hamburgers suck. Sure, you could get a big, juicy burger from the mom 'n' pop burger shop down the road, but you don't. Why? Marketing.
I fully plan on using Mozilla when it comes out(I've run a few betas but never stuck to them), because I like tabbed browsing and hate popups. Those are two major selling points - things Moz has that IE does not. Word-of-mouth was good enough to convince me that I should use Mozilla.
Name 2 things that I cannot live without that Linux has that Windows does not, and you may convince me to put Linux on a box at home. I don't care about freeness, I'm talking about genuinely cool stuff that I would want to do. Why use Linux? I'm sure all you Linux users can think of a thousand reasons, but I've never had a real, serious Linux fan try and convince me to switch.
PS: Sorry for rambling. I am honestly interested in what Linux has to offer me. Kind've sad that I've spent so much time on
I can tell you for myself (I run a mail server), that my costs are $0 dealing with spam, and would be much much more than $0 prosecuting it. And I get over 10,000 spams a day, and could prosecute if I wanted to.
Facts, good. So that's where you're coming from. You run a mail server, and it can handle the UCE that you get. You get 10,000 spams a day. How do you know how much of that is spam? Do you have to delete them? How much time do you think that it takes your users to delete those 10,000 e-mails? What is the cost to them? Multiply that by the number of people with e-mail worldwide, and you've got a decent cost. Time is money. It may only cost me 18 hours a year, but multiplied by the number of people that get spam, that's a big number. If you were a republican, I'd say that that adds up to a decent loss of productivity in the US, hurts the GNP or whatever.
The biggest problem for me is that it's only going to get worse. It's a control issue, really. I have an e-mail address. I pay $X/year for it. I want people to send me e-mail, but only if they reasonably believe that I would want it. Meanwhile, I get like 10 "make your dick bigger" spams a day, 2 or 3 "free legal advice" spams(it's an MLM scheme, the product is decent but there are no controls over the people trying to market it, and as a result it's reputation as a legit service is being hurt), lots of lose weight, clear credit, refinance, pr0n, blah blah blah. I don't want any of that crap, and yet there's no way to stop it. I'm not going to buy a list of a million e-mail addresses, but is there a way to stop getting e-mail about it? If MCI calls me and tries to get me to switch to their service, and I tell them not to call me anymore, they stop calling me. There are laws to insure that. Spam is not the same way.
Furthermore, if you believe that there is no way to block spam without blocking legitimate e-mail, take telemarketing. Telemarketing laws seem to be working out okay for the states that have the no-call lists (such as mine). So what would be different about e-mail that would keep it from working? What do you have to lose if 10,000 e-mails a day didn't get to your server? Would your job be in jeapordy?
Simply, this: why don't you support federal legislation whose goal would be to eliminate spam?
Pure speculation.
The cost to prosecute spammers(1) is not going to exceed the savings in time spent deleting spam(2), the cost of the bandwidth used to transmit spam, or the equipment upgrades needed to handle spam(3), because since they can't stop it, they have to handle it.
You're not very persuasive, btw. I like hard facts, not speculation.
1) In civil court, btw, aka court costs paid by losing party, public defenders not involved, criminal prosecutors not involved.
2) 2-3min/day for me, that's 18-24 hours a year YOU(4) cost ME
3) Mail servers and the like
4) Not you literally, although I'm starting to wonder...
I bought a GF2 MX, 64mb DDR... It's nice enough, I can play Q3A smoothly at 640x480 with 2x AA and high quality and what not.
I didn't buy a faster card because I was waiting for a reason I needed a faster card, and because it was fifty bucks. Spending $400 so that I could run 1280x1024 with AA just wasn't worth it for me. But when Doom 3 comes out, and my card doesn't cut it anymore, you're damn strait I'll upgrade.
In the case of the costs of spam - ranging from miniscule to nothing
The only number I've heard regarding the cost of spam was 6 billion dollars a year. I don't know if this includes infrastructure and bandwidth costs, or just the time taken to delete these e-mails, but there you go.
we will eventually be able to just dump the waste into the sun or something
I say we dump it onto uranus. What has that stupid uranus ever done for us? And besides, it takes no skill to hit the sun with a canister of waste. Hitting uranus, or better yet catching the waste in it's gravitational pull and having it orbit uranus, now there's a goal worth reaching.
buy your own domain, set up e-mail aliases. www.namezero.com
I like these guys.
Did your computer download that post? You can set it to notify you, but no big deal turning that off.
SPAM is messages sent TO you, whereas you go to slashdot to read messages. Therein lies the difference.
She's going to college. If she smokes, and has access to it, I'm sure she'll use some of that college-try and figure out a way to transform it from bud to smoke to lungs. Guarantee she can come up with something.
When was the last time you and your friends wanted to smoke up but were unable to find/create a device with which to smoke?
They run the mail server and give me a simple web client that allows me to redirect an alias to a central address. I only have one actual e-mail address (they let you set up as many as you want, with a mailbox limit up to 10mb total), but unlimited aliases. By default, obfuscation@mydomain.com is simply forwarded to my real address along with all the other aliases I make up. I can change the default behavior of undefined aliases to not forward to my account, but it's a great way to find out who got your e-mail address.
.cc domain registration.
They allow you to do DNS in as much as you can map www.mydomain.com to wherever you want it to go (I think it currently goes to www.slashdot.org, actually). www or any other prefix you can think of. pr0n.mydomain.com could go to my own personal web server if I wanted it to. Again, via web client. I don't know if you can update their DNS server automatically, you could ask them about that.
No web space included.
$15/year covers the service plus
E-mail seems reliable so far as I can tell, I've only tested the DNS feature but it seemed easy enough.
A bargain at twice the price.