I've bid on (and won) several things on ebay, and every single time, without fail, there is obvious shill bidding. I mean, do real people really bid $99.04 for an item?
I regularly place bids like $20.06 on a console game so that I can beat a $20 max bid cheaply. (Given the rest of your comment, I think you're right that you were seeing shills in this case.)
And just to cover all our slashdot bases, this would almost certainly run on your Beowulf cluster quite nicely.
BTW, this is a heck of a package for engineers that do this kind of work. Having written vaguely similar software (parallel finite element solving code also using the MPI library for communications in my case), I have some appreciation of this accomplishment.
>The second XBox wave promises...exclusives like Spiderman
Hmmm, the brand new issue of the Official Playstation Magazine has Spiderman on the cover and a long story of his history, and the movie. Its nice of them to help promote an Xbox exclusive!
No, wait, a quick look look at ebworld.com shows that Spiderman is actually available for Playstation 2, Xbox, GameCube, Game Boy Advanced, and PC.
As many others have said, this is Xbox's main problem - there is little or nothing of interest that is actually exclusive to it.
Moreover, I don't think there ever can be. If a company spends a lot of money and effort producing a mega-hit for the Xbox, why would it not spend a tiny additional effort to port it to the PC and reap a huge additional bonanza?
This and similar previous FTC efforts are not going after spammers per se, but rather going after the worst of the worst pyramid schemers and snake oil salesman. The FTC has no interest in going after "legitimate" spam. And frankly, that's probably not in their mandate as an organization.
If you want to have a government agency help with stopping the theft of service and DoS attacks that spam is, perhaps the FBI is a better place to look. Naw, they're too busy arresting Russian Ebook pirates. Maybe the real trick is to get Adobe complaining about spam. Then we'd see some action!
You see, those folks sending out junk mail are actually SUBSIDISING YOU! That Valentine's Day card you're about to send to your grandmother costs you less than it should because of all those coupons and solicitations you receive.
Can you, perhaps, document this claim somehow? We've all heard it, but is it true? And if it's true, why has Congress forbidden the Post Office to do an actual audit of the revenues and costs associated with each class of mail? Could it be that the DMA doesn't want us to know the truth?
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I regularly place bids like $20.06 on a console game so that I can beat a $20 max bid cheaply. (Given the rest of your comment, I think you're right that you were seeing shills in this case.)
And just to cover all our slashdot bases, this would almost certainly run on your Beowulf cluster quite nicely.
BTW, this is a heck of a package for engineers that do this kind of work. Having written vaguely similar software (parallel finite element solving code also using the MPI library for communications in my case), I have some appreciation of this accomplishment.
>The second XBox wave promises...exclusives like Spiderman
Hmmm, the brand new issue of the Official Playstation Magazine has Spiderman on the cover and a long story of his history, and the movie. Its nice of them to help promote an Xbox exclusive!
No, wait, a quick look look at ebworld.com shows that Spiderman is actually available for Playstation 2, Xbox, GameCube, Game Boy Advanced, and PC.
As many others have said, this is Xbox's main problem - there is little or nothing of interest that is actually exclusive to it.
Moreover, I don't think there ever can be. If a company spends a lot of money and effort producing a mega-hit for the Xbox, why would it not spend a tiny additional effort to port it to the PC and reap a huge additional bonanza?
This and similar previous FTC efforts are not going after spammers per se, but rather going after the worst of the worst pyramid schemers and snake oil salesman. The FTC has no interest in going after "legitimate" spam. And frankly, that's probably not in their mandate as an organization.
If you want to have a government agency help with stopping the theft of service and DoS attacks that spam is, perhaps the FBI is a better place to look.
Naw, they're too busy arresting Russian Ebook pirates. Maybe the real trick is to get Adobe complaining about spam. Then we'd see some action!
Can you, perhaps, document this claim somehow? We've all heard it, but is it true? And if it's true, why has Congress forbidden the Post Office to do an actual audit of the revenues and costs associated with each class of mail? Could it be that the DMA doesn't want us to know the truth?