"Oh yeah, they're really gonna call Trident after all 2 dumb asses return their laptops because they won't run Linux. BOO HOO!!!"
They're more likely to call Trident when that happens than if they get a bunch of calls from people who probably won't by Trident notebooks in the first place.
There's an easier and far more effective way. Don't buy the laptops in the first place. When IBM, etc. get phone calls and returned computers from people who tried to install Linux and failed, they'll be the ones to tell Trident, "Sorry, we can't use your chips until you give us Linux drivers."
"Their chipsets have been quite popular in portable systems like notebooks and have been widely used as on-board chipsets in low cost desktop computers."
The problem with the phrase "quite popular" is that it can mean a lot of things. Unfortunately, in this case, it means "quite popular" behind Nvidia's new mobile chips, ATI's more than 50% market share, and NeoMagic.
The war between ATI and Nvidia in particular is likely going to squeeze out smaller companies like Trident, just like what happened in the desktop world.
I may be a Bear on Trident, but that doesn't make me a Troll.
You could do it by embedding the on-demand streams and merging them into a single stream that has several "channels," where people can only see one "channel" at a time. But that requires more bandwidth for the whole stream, and/or degrading the signal quality of the individual streams to conserve bandwidth.
There may be another solution that doesn't end up having the same problems as just streaming on demand from a server, but I can't think of it.
Of course, the problem you're talking about is the fact that if two people want the same video stream, the stream travels twice through the pipe. Same stream, same bits.
Yes, but the beauty of it is different pipes. Once someone has the content, they not only don't need to download it again, but they become a distributor as well! So the second person to download can get it from me, or from the first person. The third person can get it from me, the first person, or the second person, etc.
How do you get revenue? Advertising, embedded within the stream, so that it's not easy to remove. Just like a TV show that's been recorded off of the TV. Porn sites (always ahead of the curve with new media technologies) have been doing this for years with great success.
How would you do Video-on-Demand with Multicast? It sounds a lot more than "pretty complex" to me; the only solutions I can think of involve either adding new bandwidth (eliminating the benefits of multicast) or signal quality degradation (blech).
Seems easier to generate a different model of distribution, where files are passed about from Gnutella-like clients, with the advertising embedded within the files.
What am I missing? How would you do video-on-demand with Multicasting, without the loss of quality or requiring more bandwidth per user?
No, it's not linear. It gets cheaper per unit as you by more, so there is not point of diminishing returns (as far as delivering the same stream to more people goes. More bandwidth on one physical link, yes, there are diminishing returns).
That's the problem with VoD, because with VoD, each stream connection is a different program, started at a completely different time.
And to think, with that great business model, the RIAA and MPAA still have all the money and your[sic] posting it on slashdot.
Yeah, well, I'm a nice guy that way.:):):) Nobody ever accused the MPAA/RIAA of being good at exploiting new markets.
The problem isn't just the bandwidth. The problem with the idea of video-on-demand is that, unlike broadcast, your costs scale with your audience. The technological problem of fitting high-quality signal over a tiny pipeline is a great one to solve, but video-on-demand's real problem is that the cost scales.
It's like choosing an O(exp) algorithm when you know an O(1) algorithm is available.
See, if I start broadcasting a signal, the more people that tune in, the more I can charge for pay-per-view or advertising. But the neat thing is that my cost is fixed; no matter how many people tune into that signal, it costs me the same amount to spray EM waves all over the place.
But with VoD, every new viewer means new bandwidth. Meaning that my costs go up with each new customer. And since the cost of additional bandwidth is not a linear equation, at some point there's diminishing returns, regardless of how small the stream is. My profit margins wither and die if there's enough demand for my video stream.
The only real solution for this from a business perspective is...get this...distributed file sharing, such as Napster or Gnutella. With tools like these, I'm able to avoid the added demands on my server by making the folks who want the service into servers themselves.
So the real technical problem to solve with VoD is not to make the streams smaller, although that certainly doesn't hurt, but to make money off of folks' file transfers. Obviously a direct tax on each transfer is going to cause problems, but an advertising-based model, where each transferred file has an advertisement attached with it, could work wonderfully.
Too bad for the RIAA and MPAA that they're too busy suing file-sharing users and pushing unsuccessful VoD goose-chases to figure this out, eh?
This is a cool technology if it's real. I wouldn't be surprised if it is real. But it won't make the internet into the great media-delivery tool the media corporations want it to be.
Which is the marketing scheme? The faster MHz? Or the better chip????
The faster MHz. Even people who ought to know better are looking at AMD's move as a "dirty trick" (*ahem*). But faster MHz, even though it's pretty much a pure marketing move, makes news headlines, and even those who know better are tempted to say, "Gee, still, 2GHz is really fast" even though its speed is comparableto a1.4GHz Athlon4.
When people call your marketing strategy a marketing strategy, and even more when they call it a "dirty trick" (*ahem*), then you're not doing as good of a job at marketing as your competitor whose marketing strategy is difficult for people to recognize as such.
Lego was wonderful, and I personally spent tons of time in my childhood toying with them, but the really amazing geek-child toy was Fischertechnik.
I know some people are fans of Erector, some are fans of Tinkertoys, and others fans of Lego, but I've yet to meet someone who played with Fischertechnik that didn't end up loving it above all else.
A while back I asked my Dad, "You know, I wish my kids would have something like that to play with." He asked me if I remembered how he told me to put the pieces back in the box, each piece in its own little slot, when I was a child? I did. He asked me if I remembered why he told me to do that?
Because one day, when I had kids of my own, I'd want it for them.
Dad, while finding it increasingly hard to find Fischertechnik in America (you can still get it, but it's not available in major department stores like it once was), saw the direction the company was heading, didn't like it, and knowing what a great toy it was thought ahead, way behind where my brother and I were thinking.
He still has all of it. Every plastic and metal piece.
I'm going home this weekend, and I'm going to build myself a crane with it.:)
Actually, I agreed with you. I don't know who modded down your post. I'll repost what you said here, because frankly, it didn't deserve being modded down:
Here's my one word:
Karma whore.
Okay, it's two. But I can't believe you used your +1 posting bonus to post something that redundant, off-topic, trollish, and stupid. I hope the moderators exact their vengeance against you and moderate your post down into the fiery depths of hell where it -- and you -- belong for all eternity.
My post was pretty lame. But on the other hand, it's what I was thinking at the time, and I reckon a lot of folks pretty much thought the same thing when they read the news.
I don't think anyone expected Sklyarov to not be indicted, but there's always that little glimmer of hope we hold onto...
There's also no reason to assume that the Evil Corporations are going to turn the world into a police state if we don't rise up against them.
The truth is, there's a good reason for believing both points of view. We're talking future events here. The reason for believing the police state will happen is simple; that's where we've headed over the past few years. But the good reason for believing we won't is also obvious -- this has happened before in the past, and it was defeated then, too.
In the case of my company, we farm out a lot of engineering work to Cairo -- but it's not just because of money.
See, our CEO, and several key employees, are Egyptian immigrants. By making jobs in Cairo, he's giving something back to the community that raised him.
My company's doing a similar thing. We have a handful of engineers here in California (mostly senior or specialized/highly-educated juniors), but the bulk of our staff is in Egypt.
It's not just about the cost savings. The company was founded by an Egyptian immigrant, and is staffed with several of his family members here and in Cairo. It's a way for them to give something back to their home community by providing well-paying jobs to people who simply don't have the opportunities we have.
It also poses some interesting problems. Egypt's internet infrastructure is sorely lacking. Since that's our main means of communication, it makes life difficult; a true broadband connection doesn't even exist; the 128kbps ISDN line they do use is laughably expensive, and goes down frequently.
Now imagine running the above connection over a VPN with Windows Active Directory. A small CVS check-in over the VPN takes anywhere from five to fifteen minutes -- which wouldn't be so bad if we could trust the network to stay up during that time. So one night, I set up my home Linux box (on an old P-233) with OpenSSH and CVS and did the same experiment...and it only took 20-30 seconds. Better security, better performance. Hooray for OpenSSH! Bad news for Win2k.
The Linux box for our future version control use should be arriving today.:)
And about X-box. They're losing money on each X-box they sell, but the game people send Microsoft money every time they sell a game. The gross margin in licensing is about as close to 100% as you can get.
Margins don't mean diddly-squat if you can't cover your operating expenses and investment. If they sell ninety million games and get $20 a pop, but spend 2 billion on marketing and developing the machine, guess what? They lose money. To the tune of $200M. Now I'm just dragging these numbers out of my ass, but MSFT officials have stated publicly that they're not in the game industry because they think "Wow, this is a great new market for us to tackle!" No.
Sony mentioned something about using the PS2 to get into every home, to be a platform for all people to use. When Sony made that announcement, Microsoft went into full-on defense mode. In MS' eyes, Sony was invading their territory.
The whole plan behind the X-box is: Defend our turf. Defend the monopoly. Keep everyone else out. And it's worthwhile to them to lose money if they can steal mindshare away from Sony.
But they can't steal mindshare. Sony looks only as good as the PS2 does; nobody looks at the GameCube and thinks, "Gee, the N64 wasn't that great, I don't think this one will be as good, either." And people's hesitations about buying the X-box ("Let's see if there are any better games...") are no different from their hesitations about the Cube or any other new console.
I used to believe that the X-box was Microsoft's way of getting into a new market, but then someone slapped me upside the head with the facts, and quotes from Microsoft officials. They're not in the game industry to make money. And you know what? They won't. But the effect will be more far-reaching than the realize, because they won't really be getting anything for that cost.
Whether or not.NET will be the silver bullet that Microsoft is relying on is unknown right now, but it definitely sounds like the backup strategy which you say they need. I'm certainly willing to go to great lengths to avoid using.NET myself (no way do I want to give Microsoft access to my financial data with their past history of insecurity), but they have made a good business of getting people to pay for their shoddy stuff so far, so why can't they do it again?
You answered your own question: "No way do I want to give MS access to my financial data!" There's a lot of mistrust of Microsoft in the world, even from the people who are wiling to use Microsoft's products.
This isn't a case where they've hit the killer OEM deal that has them set for the next decade, like DOS. Microsoft, with that no exceptions, doesn't get things right on the first try in the few cases when they try to do something themselves (as opposed to buying someone else's idea). And, it's rare for lightning to strike twice in the same spot.
It's an attempt, and it might generate revenue. But even the most slobberingly optimistic forecasts about.NET don't predict that this will lead to Microsoft dominance of an industry.
An even simpler question that few have asked is: Why? Why do I want to use.NET when I get the same functionality doing things the way I do them now? This is a real problem; in order to sell something, you have to have something to sell that people can't get better and for free elsewhere.
And that's the same problem they have with Windows.
This guy starts to make a good statement, and then trips and makes a fool of himself in the comment you quoted.
Yes, it's a mistake to make a commercial OS, but not because people are complicit in accepting Windows. It's because Windows is the only OS that anyone will pay money for nowadays, and even that is beginning to change.
The OS has become a commodity. What OS you use is becoming largely irrelevant for the most popular tasks people use their computer for. It's not that no one can compete with MS; it's that there's simply no money in it any more, and only sheer momentum is what allows Microsoft to charge for Windows. But even then, most people don't pay directly for it anyhow; they get it with their computer, and never see the costs.
No, we're not complicit in supporting Microsoft; we're complicit in not going out and buying OSes of any kind.
Slashdot Mirror
"Oh yeah, they're really gonna call Trident after all 2 dumb asses return their laptops because they won't run Linux. BOO HOO!!!"
They're more likely to call Trident when that happens than if they get a bunch of calls from people who probably won't by Trident notebooks in the first place.
There's an easier and far more effective way. Don't buy the laptops in the first place. When IBM, etc. get phone calls and returned computers from people who tried to install Linux and failed, they'll be the ones to tell Trident, "Sorry, we can't use your chips until you give us Linux drivers."
"Their chipsets have been quite popular in portable systems like notebooks and have been widely used as on-board chipsets in low cost desktop computers."
The problem with the phrase "quite popular" is that it can mean a lot of things. Unfortunately, in this case, it means "quite popular" behind Nvidia's new mobile chips, ATI's more than 50% market share, and NeoMagic.
The war between ATI and Nvidia in particular is likely going to squeeze out smaller companies like Trident, just like what happened in the desktop world.
I may be a Bear on Trident, but that doesn't make me a Troll.
You could do it by embedding the on-demand streams and merging them into a single stream that has several "channels," where people can only see one "channel" at a time. But that requires more bandwidth for the whole stream, and/or degrading the signal quality of the individual streams to conserve bandwidth.
There may be another solution that doesn't end up having the same problems as just streaming on demand from a server, but I can't think of it.
Trident hasn't been a player in graphics technology for years.
Probably as a result of poor business decisions like this, too.
If they make something worth buying, I'll worry about it. Until then...
Of course, the problem you're talking about is the fact that if two people want the same video stream, the stream travels twice through the pipe. Same stream, same bits.
Yes, but the beauty of it is different pipes. Once someone has the content, they not only don't need to download it again, but they become a distributor as well! So the second person to download can get it from me, or from the first person. The third person can get it from me, the first person, or the second person, etc.
How do you get revenue? Advertising, embedded within the stream, so that it's not easy to remove. Just like a TV show that's been recorded off of the TV. Porn sites (always ahead of the curve with new media technologies) have been doing this for years with great success.
2000 is a pretty paltry amount.
You need to be able to serve not thousands, but tens of thousands of people.
There are ways, but it's all pretty complex.
How would you do Video-on-Demand with Multicast? It sounds a lot more than "pretty complex" to me; the only solutions I can think of involve either adding new bandwidth (eliminating the benefits of multicast) or signal quality degradation (blech).
Seems easier to generate a different model of distribution, where files are passed about from Gnutella-like clients, with the advertising embedded within the files.
What am I missing? How would you do video-on-demand with Multicasting, without the loss of quality or requiring more bandwidth per user?
What about multi-cast?
:) :) :) Nobody ever accused the MPAA/RIAA of being good at exploiting new markets.
Doesn't work for Video-on-Demand.
No, it's not linear. It gets cheaper per unit as you by more, so there is not point of diminishing returns (as far as delivering the same stream to more people goes. More bandwidth on one physical link, yes, there are diminishing returns).
That's the problem with VoD, because with VoD, each stream connection is a different program, started at a completely different time.
And to think, with that great business model, the RIAA and MPAA still have all the money and your[sic] posting it on slashdot.
Yeah, well, I'm a nice guy that way.
The problem isn't just the bandwidth. The problem with the idea of video-on-demand is that, unlike broadcast, your costs scale with your audience. The technological problem of fitting high-quality signal over a tiny pipeline is a great one to solve, but video-on-demand's real problem is that the cost scales.
It's like choosing an O(exp) algorithm when you know an O(1) algorithm is available.
See, if I start broadcasting a signal, the more people that tune in, the more I can charge for pay-per-view or advertising. But the neat thing is that my cost is fixed; no matter how many people tune into that signal, it costs me the same amount to spray EM waves all over the place.
But with VoD, every new viewer means new bandwidth. Meaning that my costs go up with each new customer. And since the cost of additional bandwidth is not a linear equation, at some point there's diminishing returns, regardless of how small the stream is. My profit margins wither and die if there's enough demand for my video stream.
The only real solution for this from a business perspective is...get this...distributed file sharing, such as Napster or Gnutella. With tools like these, I'm able to avoid the added demands on my server by making the folks who want the service into servers themselves.
So the real technical problem to solve with VoD is not to make the streams smaller, although that certainly doesn't hurt, but to make money off of folks' file transfers. Obviously a direct tax on each transfer is going to cause problems, but an advertising-based model, where each transferred file has an advertisement attached with it, could work wonderfully.
Too bad for the RIAA and MPAA that they're too busy suing file-sharing users and pushing unsuccessful VoD goose-chases to figure this out, eh?
This is a cool technology if it's real. I wouldn't be surprised if it is real. But it won't make the internet into the great media-delivery tool the media corporations want it to be.
Sure, and the author even explicitly mentions Tom's Hardware and Sharky's Extreme as exceptions in the article:
"Tom's and Sharky's does the kind of detailed, intensive reporting that most magazines avoid."
Which is the marketing scheme? The faster MHz? Or the better chip????
The faster MHz. Even people who ought to know better are looking at AMD's move as a "dirty trick" (*ahem*). But faster MHz, even though it's pretty much a pure marketing move, makes news headlines, and even those who know better are tempted to say, "Gee, still, 2GHz is really fast" even though its speed is comparable to a 1.4GHz Athlon4.
When people call your marketing strategy a marketing strategy, and even more when they call it a "dirty trick" (*ahem*), then you're not doing as good of a job at marketing as your competitor whose marketing strategy is difficult for people to recognize as such.
Lego was wonderful, and I personally spent tons of time in my childhood toying with them, but the really amazing geek-child toy was Fischertechnik.
:)
I know some people are fans of Erector, some are fans of Tinkertoys, and others fans of Lego, but I've yet to meet someone who played with Fischertechnik that didn't end up loving it above all else.
A while back I asked my Dad, "You know, I wish my kids would have something like that to play with." He asked me if I remembered how he told me to put the pieces back in the box, each piece in its own little slot, when I was a child? I did. He asked me if I remembered why he told me to do that?
Because one day, when I had kids of my own, I'd want it for them.
Dad, while finding it increasingly hard to find Fischertechnik in America (you can still get it, but it's not available in major department stores like it once was), saw the direction the company was heading, didn't like it, and knowing what a great toy it was thought ahead, way behind where my brother and I were thinking.
He still has all of it. Every plastic and metal piece.
I'm going home this weekend, and I'm going to build myself a crane with it.
Actually, I agreed with you. I don't know who modded down your post. I'll repost what you said here, because frankly, it didn't deserve being modded down:
Here's my one word:
Karma whore.
Okay, it's two. But I can't believe you used your +1 posting bonus to post something that redundant, off-topic, trollish, and stupid. I hope the moderators exact their vengeance against you and moderate your post down into the fiery depths of hell where it -- and you -- belong for all eternity.
My post was pretty lame. But on the other hand, it's what I was thinking at the time, and I reckon a lot of folks pretty much thought the same thing when they read the news.
I don't think anyone expected Sklyarov to not be indicted, but there's always that little glimmer of hope we hold onto...
Shit.
There's also no reason to assume that the Evil Corporations are going to turn the world into a police state if we don't rise up against them.
The truth is, there's a good reason for believing both points of view. We're talking future events here. The reason for believing the police state will happen is simple; that's where we've headed over the past few years. But the good reason for believing we won't is also obvious -- this has happened before in the past, and it was defeated then, too.
In the case of my company, we farm out a lot of engineering work to Cairo -- but it's not just because of money.
See, our CEO, and several key employees, are Egyptian immigrants. By making jobs in Cairo, he's giving something back to the community that raised him.
It's a charitable thing to do.
My company's doing a similar thing. We have a handful of engineers here in California (mostly senior or specialized/highly-educated juniors), but the bulk of our staff is in Egypt.
:)
It's not just about the cost savings. The company was founded by an Egyptian immigrant, and is staffed with several of his family members here and in Cairo. It's a way for them to give something back to their home community by providing well-paying jobs to people who simply don't have the opportunities we have.
It also poses some interesting problems. Egypt's internet infrastructure is sorely lacking. Since that's our main means of communication, it makes life difficult; a true broadband connection doesn't even exist; the 128kbps ISDN line they do use is laughably expensive, and goes down frequently.
Now imagine running the above connection over a VPN with Windows Active Directory. A small CVS check-in over the VPN takes anywhere from five to fifteen minutes -- which wouldn't be so bad if we could trust the network to stay up during that time. So one night, I set up my home Linux box (on an old P-233) with OpenSSH and CVS and did the same experiment...and it only took 20-30 seconds. Better security, better performance. Hooray for OpenSSH! Bad news for Win2k.
The Linux box for our future version control use should be arriving today.
I think this word [merriam-webster] means exactly what I think it is in definition 1c: "A mass-produced unspecialized product."
And about X-box. They're losing money on each X-box they sell, but the game people send Microsoft money every time they sell a game. The gross margin in licensing is about as close to 100% as you can get.
Margins don't mean diddly-squat if you can't cover your operating expenses and investment. If they sell ninety million games and get $20 a pop, but spend 2 billion on marketing and developing the machine, guess what? They lose money. To the tune of $200M. Now I'm just dragging these numbers out of my ass, but MSFT officials have stated publicly that they're not in the game industry because they think "Wow, this is a great new market for us to tackle!" No.
Sony mentioned something about using the PS2 to get into every home, to be a platform for all people to use. When Sony made that announcement, Microsoft went into full-on defense mode. In MS' eyes, Sony was invading their territory.
The whole plan behind the X-box is: Defend our turf. Defend the monopoly. Keep everyone else out. And it's worthwhile to them to lose money if they can steal mindshare away from Sony.
But they can't steal mindshare. Sony looks only as good as the PS2 does; nobody looks at the GameCube and thinks, "Gee, the N64 wasn't that great, I don't think this one will be as good, either." And people's hesitations about buying the X-box ("Let's see if there are any better games...") are no different from their hesitations about the Cube or any other new console.
I used to believe that the X-box was Microsoft's way of getting into a new market, but then someone slapped me upside the head with the facts, and quotes from Microsoft officials. They're not in the game industry to make money. And you know what? They won't. But the effect will be more far-reaching than the realize, because they won't really be getting anything for that cost.
Whether or not .NET will be the silver bullet that Microsoft is relying on is unknown right now, but it definitely sounds like the backup strategy which you say they need. I'm certainly willing to go to great lengths to avoid using .NET myself (no way do I want to give Microsoft access to my financial data with their past history of insecurity), but they have made a good business of getting people to pay for their shoddy stuff so far, so why can't they do it again?
.NET don't predict that this will lead to Microsoft dominance of an industry.
.NET when I get the same functionality doing things the way I do them now? This is a real problem; in order to sell something, you have to have something to sell that people can't get better and for free elsewhere.
You answered your own question: "No way do I want to give MS access to my financial data!" There's a lot of mistrust of Microsoft in the world, even from the people who are wiling to use Microsoft's products.
This isn't a case where they've hit the killer OEM deal that has them set for the next decade, like DOS. Microsoft, with that no exceptions, doesn't get things right on the first try in the few cases when they try to do something themselves (as opposed to buying someone else's idea). And, it's rare for lightning to strike twice in the same spot.
It's an attempt, and it might generate revenue. But even the most slobberingly optimistic forecasts about
An even simpler question that few have asked is: Why? Why do I want to use
And that's the same problem they have with Windows.
This guy starts to make a good statement, and then trips and makes a fool of himself in the comment you quoted.
Yes, it's a mistake to make a commercial OS, but not because people are complicit in accepting Windows. It's because Windows is the only OS that anyone will pay money for nowadays, and even that is beginning to change.
The OS has become a commodity. What OS you use is becoming largely irrelevant for the most popular tasks people use their computer for. It's not that no one can compete with MS; it's that there's simply no money in it any more, and only sheer momentum is what allows Microsoft to charge for Windows. But even then, most people don't pay directly for it anyhow; they get it with their computer, and never see the costs.
No, we're not complicit in supporting Microsoft; we're complicit in not going out and buying OSes of any kind.
FWIW, you have my congratulations.
It's worth a lot, to me. Thank you for the kind words.
Hey, 'vi' is free too but I don't call it a replacement for Office.
That's because it's not a replacement for Office. But StarOffice is.
StarOffice cost: $0
MS Office cost: $400 or so
If you look at how many features you get per dollar spent, you'll see that StarOffice is infinitely better.