Right, but if that article was written for another paper, it would almost certainly also mention the ad early in the text, given that's the biggest recent "hard" news related to Firefox.
That doesn't mean that the NYT is writing this article because of the ad for non-editorial reasons.
It's entirely possible that the ad -- the notoriety and newsworthyness, not the financial gain -- is a factor in this article getting published. I'm just saying you can't accuse the NYT of bias from the ad just because it ran in the same publication. Are folks saying that once they accepted the Firefox ad, they should cease publishing stories about it?
There's a helpful response. I have no problem with a constructive criticism of that issue based on either personal experience or verifiable fact, but the AC reply is just the kind of unhelpful knee-jerk response that reduces the quality of discussions about these kind of issues.
Nice theory, but you've failed to check the most basic underlying fact -- is this really their first article about Firefox? No.
The NYT, and their lead technology writer, David Pogue, have mentioned Firefox any number of times before. Just a cursory search of the archives shows 6-7 articles published prior to the advertisement, and I know Pogue has been advocating it in his online weblog and emails as well.
So, while yes, the advertisement in the NYT helped raise Firefox's profile, it's difficult to draw any direct causality between its placement and the timing of this article. (Not to mention the traditional church and state separation the NYT enforces between its advertising and editorial regimes.)
The fact that a few people can't play HL2 because of the incidentals of their remote location doesn't make Steam an evil (or even poor) system. Companies do not have an obligation to make a software product usable for everyone out there, or make sure that the system satifies the paranoid fantasies of every/.er either.
There's a valid commercial decision every company makes regarding which customers are worth addressing, and when you weigh the potential long profit of broadband/56k users with Steam installed, vs a few more non-Steam users in the boonies somewhere, it's not hard to figure out which group is going to have a higher long-term commercial value.
For all your outrage over connecting each time you play, you haven't bothered to figure out the "offline" mode.
Your ATI coupons entitle you to whatever license on HL2 Valve is offering to the general public, not whatever your opinion is. They've fulfilled that promise.
Face it, delivering software on a physical medium is badly outdated and largely done for marketing reasons these days. Aside from user-installed operating systems (a relatively tiny market, let's admit) there is almost no reason why broadband users (the wide majority of active gamers) should be paying to support physical delivery.
I bought HL2 via steam, and I used my old HL1 key to open up those games via Steam. It's worked great across the board, and it was far more convinient that buying HL2 on DVD or installing from my aging HL1 CD and patching up 4 years of updates. When I head home tonight, HLDM will be downloaded and ready to go on my system. Bravo, Valve.
The modem point is valid for CS, perhaps, but I'd have to think the fraction of the market with both a sub-56k modem and a computer with sufficient graphics capabilities to play Half-Life is really, really small.
With all this publicity about the tiny group of people who may have had a problem with steam, we're often forgetting the hundreds of thousands (if not millions, by now) of people who have had success with this system and are off happily playing HL2 or CS:S.
When software companies don't sufficiently support or patch traditionally issued software, everyone whines about it. Now, when a company makes an real attempt to revise how the whole distribution channel works, everyone is whining it doesn't work the way they want it to, or that it doesn't run on their PC Junior with a 110 bps modem.
Tough nuts, I say. Steam, by almost any measure, has been a huge success commercially for both Valve and Vivendi, and the whining of a few uninvolved players is not something they're losing sleep over.
Money talks loudest to these guys, and you can bet that every other game developer is watching this process very closely, if not already trying to figure out how to shortcut the traditional retail channel.
Good for them. In the era of broadband there's no reason we should still be walking to EB to pick up a box that's 90% air and 10% outdated bits, and paying $10-$20 to them for the "honor".
At least it's a bunch of real game guys creating and running Steam. How would/. like it if it was (gasp!) MS running this instead?
Distributors are a necessary part of a market, and they're not inherently evil. A good distributor performs a valuable function of maintaining a supply chain, retail relationships and media relationships that it simply wouldn't be cost effective for a game software team to maintain. They also perform a valid filtering function in terms of the quality and professionalism of games, as well as the level of support you can expect after the release (yes, it's not as good as it could be -- but it could be worse.) Why? Because unlike game teams, which might only be around for one game, the publisher at least has an ongoing interest in their reputation and profitability -- their business objectives are more aligned with your interests as a customer than the game makers.
Yes, they make money off this function. No, it's not a creative function. But it's a valid business and I disagree with the/. knee jerk reaction that it must be bad just because it makes money.
"Really, making your money selling something someone else worked to produce... and making more money that that person or entity is just unethical."
That only describes probably a good 80% of our economy. How do you think those Cheerios in your breakfast bowl this morning got there? By moving through a series of distributors and marketing entities.
"I think we need a new distribution system... one that operates the same way perhaps that open source does. One that provides clear legal protection for property rights and profit margins while cutting out all the fat-catting and middleman bloat of the current system."
You're presuming that not having distributors would increase the money that gets to game makers. I'd argue it's the other way around -- if Valve had to build up a huge marketing and distribution network just to place HL2 in retail stores for Christmas, there would be almost no chance of a profit -- more likely, it would simply not be done. (Yes, online is an alternative -- but it's still only a small fraction of sales and will remain so for quite a long time in any industry driven greatly by gift buying.)
When you go from physical (retail shelf) distribution, to online, you may see some disintermediation like Steam, but more likely you're just going to see a new form of distributor. iTunes isn't RIAA, but it's just another distributor, and customers much prefer it to going to individual musician's web sites.
Unless you want to allow every game manufacturer to install their own version of "steam" (and we've already heard the bitching that just one caused) eventually Steam or something like it is just going to become another distributor.
(NB: I do not work, nor have I ever worked, for a publisher or distributor of any type of media.)
You're confusing the problem of raster icons with problems associated with higher screen resolutions.
Many operating systems are already using some form of vector icon or considering moving to it (KDE,Mac OSX)... it takes more compute time but not a lot (you only have to compute the raster equiv once given the screen size.)
Once that happens, you'll be happy using the high res screen and setting the icon size to say, 1 inch, while others might choose a 0.5 inch icon.
Yes, Apple can do what they want. Heck, if they wanted to, they could even stop talking to the press entirely.
These web sites are produced almost without exception by Mac enthusiasts who write daily as a labor of love, not for money. Their audience is mostly comprised similarly of Mac-lovers who are simply hungry for details far too arcane for the regular media.
When I used to come in and cover MacWorld Expo, I saw that many of the enthusiast writers like Jason O'Grady, etc. were extremely knowledgeable journalists who worked very hard to cover Mac news in a way that most mainstream reporters just couldn't (because we weren't assigned to it 100%)
Apple is only hurting itself by cutting them out. Yes, they're just taking away free press access to conferences. But conferences at MacWorld are expensive if your company isn't paying, not to mention that many of these site authors have to fly in and pay for hotels, incurring hundreds of dollars in cost even if they did get the free media pass. If they can't get into conferences, the Expo is not very useful -- the salespeople manning booths generally don't know anything more than the average Mac enthusiast about what's going on. I remember asking questions at the Apple booth and realizing even their floor people didn't know the internals of the new systems yet. The conferences and private events are where the action is, generally.
Apple's action is a slap in the face at these Mac sites, especially given the "community-oriented" nature of the Apple/Macintosh world. Many of these guys treat Mac ownership as a lifestyle choice and identity, more than an OS choice (laugh, but so do Linux users.) Now they're being told to go away, because they're not "professional" enough. It's an ugly mistake by Apple, and it's going to hurt them.
(I used to cover Apple for a top online news site. It's thankless work, even for a Mac fan like me. No matter what you write, you get flames from PC users and Mac users about the story being biased (often claiming exactly the opposite bias.))
Pop quiz: In what country does a cartoon mouse enjoy more legal protection than an individual's privacy?
Ironic that in a post about the strength of small companies, you have a sig that notes how dominant Disney (the biggest of the big) has been in bending US governement policy to protect its business against smaller competitors.
Even the greatest "startup" companies of late have been crowded out of their markets as their product becomes commoditized (see: Palm, Handspring)
When the big companies fail, another large company comes along, buys their infrastructure cheap, and uses it to relaunch a new service, with more marketing muscle (dollars) than the other players (see: telecom.)
The "smaller, solidly-built" companies are often far more exposed to competition and market shift because such a large percentage of their revenue comes from a single market or customer.
I don't think you understand the business issue, no.
The problem is that if you choose to "bootstrap" a business, you necessarily have to forgo taking outside investment of any real size. So you're going to grow so slowly that by the time you're of any size, the market you're targeting is completely dominated by players who chose the faster growth path, or who moved in (already big) from an adjacent market.
In a world where the biggest two or three players in a market enjoy 90% of the revenue, and also enjoy tremenous cost savings in marketing and buying thanks to scale, the game becomes to grow and dominate as quickly as possible.
It's great to play "lemonade stand" but that's simply not how it works. In particular, no venture investor will have any interest, because the returns you potentially will bring in terms of capital worth simply won't be compelling, considering the risk.
YES, the explosive growth path is much riskier. But the rewards are 10X more (VCs want returns like 1000% on early-stage investments.) In general, the bootstrap strategy simply doesn't have any hope of providing returns better than simply investing in a similar-beta selection of stocks (if you can find stocks that risky.)
Markets simply grow too fast and change too fast these days for 19th-century business models. No question, you're going to see more and more of these "implosions" of major investment startups. That's simply part of the game. If they hadn't taken that risk and attempted to become a big player, they simply would have been crowded out of the market quietly, without ever having had ANY hope of becoming a major player.
I thought that according to Anamaniacs, all cultural progress was intended to impress women.
* War * Politics * Business * The Arts (except Musicals)
Maybe we've turned a corner here...
And hey, some of us have broadband so we can download movies and MP3s all day. Haven't you been listening to the RIAA/MPAA?
Re:Fading photos (was: Too bad that...)
on
World's First Photo
·
· Score: 2, Funny
They're a lot more likely to be viewable than color photographs you took 15 years ago. Color prints, especially the first decade or two worth, fade incredibly fast compared to properly processed (i.e. washed until bleach and other chemicals are gone) black and white photos. From what I understand, there are more B&W civil war photos surviving than color photos from the first 5-10 years of those (and I read this a while back, so I assume it's only gotten worse.)
Yes, CDRs do degrade (albeit slowly.) But you can always transfer the information over to new CDRs with no degredation (yay digital tech!)
I'm more concerned about my DV tapes. Will they degrade before I can afford to transfer them to DVDs (at current prices transferring even my small collection would cost me nearly a grand.)
If you really want to preserve your photos for eternity, post them to USENET. Everyone knows the binaries there are just the same photos being posted over and over...
It was the Navaho, and they were used in the Pacific theater, not Europe. Their language is particular problematic to translate or learn.
"The Code Book" by Simon Singh has a good chapter about this.
I believe the Cherokee were considered but not used. The need in the Pacific theater was primarily for extremely rapid encryption of transmissions by forward air controllers for strikes, and for whatever reason this was not a tactical need in the European theater.
Having it be a single unit, rather than a seperate CPU, it a big plus for schools. With a CPU that's not under the monitor, you have one more thing you need to lock down, more cables to hook up, more difficulty transporting/moving the units.
Especially for educational institutations, having a seperate CPU increases chances of damage or theft... younger kids will knock it to the floor, and older ones will have an easier time stealing it... and knowing that it would run Linux really nicely, wouldn't you think some people would want to walk off with it?
These boards are far smaller than MicroATX boards, or even flexATX boards.
uATX pretty much an ATX board with 3 PCI slots instead of 5. It's only a few inches smaller. With the SS40 units you're talking about something about half that size in are.
If you want better gaming performance you can use one of the new GF4MX that have a PCI connection.. you'll probably get equivalent performance from a SS50/40 in a box half the size.
Linux works GREAT on the SV24 for me... I've got one with a Celeron 850 running Mandrake 8.2, serving as a web server, Squid proxy, etc. I also use it as my Linux desktop via VNC.
It also has a Crystalfontz LCD and LCDProc running, so it's a lot like those web "cubes" that Cobalt used (?) to make: http://karlo.org/archives/000247.php
Right now it's been up for 9 days, but it hasn't crashed once. Installed fine from the CDs on the first try, no weird settings or anything, no extra drivers.
There is a lot of traffic about the SV24/25 and SS50/40 on the Viahardware.com Small Form Factor Forum... so far, nobody's had problems using them with Linux.
And yes, they/are/ loud... even my SV24 is loud after switching the case fan and down-volting the PSU fan. The 1U CPU heatsink that comes with the SV24 is very whiny, and I need to replace it... of course if quiet is important, you can always put in a Via C3 CPU and not have a CPU fan at all!
Also, everyone wants AGP, bigger CPUs, etc but then complains about the noise... smaller boxes with the same heat-generating components are going to be LOUDER... if you want quiet and small, expect to use a smaller, cooler CPU and vidcard -- and think about a more efficent OS than Windows!
Pursuing copyright infringers doesn't always have much to do with the issue of how much profit they're taking. These organizations have a responsibility to protect the interests of the lyric's owners, and as such, they probably should go after anyone redistributing lyrics on a large-scale basis without their permission.
I liked lyrics.ch but the fact is they didn't have the rights to the material they were redistributing. If musicians in the future wanted to make money off the lyrics they wrote, their profit would be hurt by the existence of lyrics.ch.
IMHO, the copyright holder has the right to set whatever value they want upon their work. Others have the right not to buy that work. There is no "fair" issue w/regards to price - only whatever the creator feels they want to release the work. Whether or not the purchaser chooses to make money off the licensed work is irrelevant (nod to fair use, which Lyrics server was absolutely not.)
If you can't make enough money running a lyrics server to support whatever the lyric's copyright holders want to charge, that's your problem, not theirs. It would be nice if an agreement could be reached, but it's not anybody's fault if it doesn't happen. Maybe lyrics are just to valuable to be something you can give away for free to end users on the net. That may just be a economic issue, not an emotional one.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, but if that article was written for another paper, it would almost certainly also mention the ad early in the text, given that's the biggest recent "hard" news related to Firefox.
That doesn't mean that the NYT is writing this article because of the ad for non-editorial reasons.
It's entirely possible that the ad -- the notoriety and newsworthyness, not the financial gain -- is a factor in this article getting published. I'm just saying you can't accuse the NYT of bias from the ad just because it ran in the same publication. Are folks saying that once they accepted the Firefox ad, they should cease publishing stories about it?
There's a helpful response. I have no problem with a constructive criticism of that issue based on either personal experience or verifiable fact, but the AC reply is just the kind of unhelpful knee-jerk response that reduces the quality of discussions about these kind of issues.
Nice theory, but you've failed to check the most basic underlying fact -- is this really their first article about Firefox? No.
The NYT, and their lead technology writer, David Pogue, have mentioned Firefox any number of times before. Just a cursory search of the archives shows 6-7 articles published prior to the advertisement, and I know Pogue has been advocating it in his online weblog and emails as well.
So, while yes, the advertisement in the NYT helped raise Firefox's profile, it's difficult to draw any direct causality between its placement and the timing of this article. (Not to mention the traditional church and state separation the NYT enforces between its advertising and editorial regimes.)
The fact that a few people can't play HL2 because of the incidentals of their remote location doesn't make Steam an evil (or even poor) system. Companies do not have an obligation to make a software product usable for everyone out there, or make sure that the system satifies the paranoid fantasies of every /.er either.
There's a valid commercial decision every company makes regarding which customers are worth addressing, and when you weigh the potential long profit of broadband/56k users with Steam installed, vs a few more non-Steam users in the boonies somewhere, it's not hard to figure out which group is going to have a higher long-term commercial value.
For all your outrage over connecting each time you play, you haven't bothered to figure out the "offline" mode.
Your ATI coupons entitle you to whatever license on HL2 Valve is offering to the general public, not whatever your opinion is. They've fulfilled that promise.
Face it, delivering software on a physical medium is badly outdated and largely done for marketing reasons these days. Aside from user-installed operating systems (a relatively tiny market, let's admit) there is almost no reason why broadband users (the wide majority of active gamers) should be paying to support physical delivery.
I bought HL2 via steam, and I used my old HL1 key to open up those games via Steam. It's worked great across the board, and it was far more convinient that buying HL2 on DVD or installing from my aging HL1 CD and patching up 4 years of updates. When I head home tonight, HLDM will be downloaded and ready to go on my system. Bravo, Valve.
The modem point is valid for CS, perhaps, but I'd have to think the fraction of the market with both a sub-56k modem and a computer with sufficient graphics capabilities to play Half-Life is really, really small.
/. like it if it was (gasp!) MS running this instead?
With all this publicity about the tiny group of people who may have had a problem with steam, we're often forgetting the hundreds of thousands (if not millions, by now) of people who have had success with this system and are off happily playing HL2 or CS:S.
When software companies don't sufficiently support or patch traditionally issued software, everyone whines about it. Now, when a company makes an real attempt to revise how the whole distribution channel works, everyone is whining it doesn't work the way they want it to, or that it doesn't run on their PC Junior with a 110 bps modem.
Tough nuts, I say. Steam, by almost any measure, has been a huge success commercially for both Valve and Vivendi, and the whining of a few uninvolved players is not something they're losing sleep over.
Money talks loudest to these guys, and you can bet that every other game developer is watching this process very closely, if not already trying to figure out how to shortcut the traditional retail channel.
Good for them. In the era of broadband there's no reason we should still be walking to EB to pick up a box that's 90% air and 10% outdated bits, and paying $10-$20 to them for the "honor".
At least it's a bunch of real game guys creating and running Steam. How would
Distributors are a necessary part of a market, and they're not inherently evil. A good distributor performs a valuable function of maintaining a supply chain, retail relationships and media relationships that it simply wouldn't be cost effective for a game software team to maintain. They also perform a valid filtering function in terms of the quality and professionalism of games, as well as the level of support you can expect after the release (yes, it's not as good as it could be -- but it could be worse.) Why? Because unlike game teams, which might only be around for one game, the publisher at least has an ongoing interest in their reputation and profitability -- their business objectives are more aligned with your interests as a customer than the game makers.
/. knee jerk reaction that it must be bad just because it makes money.
Yes, they make money off this function. No, it's not a creative function. But it's a valid business and I disagree with the
"Really, making your money selling something someone else worked to produce... and making more money that that person or entity is just unethical."
That only describes probably a good 80% of our economy. How do you think those Cheerios in your breakfast bowl this morning got there? By moving through a series of distributors and marketing entities.
"I think we need a new distribution system... one that operates the same way perhaps that open source does. One that provides clear legal protection for property rights and profit margins while cutting out all the fat-catting and middleman bloat of the current system."
You're presuming that not having distributors would increase the money that gets to game makers. I'd argue it's the other way around -- if Valve had to build up a huge marketing and distribution network just to place HL2 in retail stores for Christmas, there would be almost no chance of a profit -- more likely, it would simply not be done. (Yes, online is an alternative -- but it's still only a small fraction of sales and will remain so for quite a long time in any industry driven greatly by gift buying.)
When you go from physical (retail shelf) distribution, to online, you may see some disintermediation like Steam, but more likely you're just going to see a new form of distributor. iTunes isn't RIAA, but it's just another distributor, and customers much prefer it to going to individual musician's web sites.
Unless you want to allow every game manufacturer to install their own version of "steam" (and we've already heard the bitching that just one caused) eventually Steam or something like it is just going to become another distributor.
(NB: I do not work, nor have I ever worked, for a publisher or distributor of any type of media.)
You're confusing the problem of raster icons with problems associated with higher screen resolutions.
Many operating systems are already using some form of vector icon or considering moving to it (KDE,Mac OSX)... it takes more compute time but not a lot (you only have to compute the raster equiv once given the screen size.)
Once that happens, you'll be happy using the high res screen and setting the icon size to say, 1 inch, while others might choose a 0.5 inch icon.
Yes, Apple can do what they want. Heck, if they wanted to, they could even stop talking to the press entirely.
These web sites are produced almost without exception by Mac enthusiasts who write daily as a labor of love, not for money. Their audience is mostly comprised similarly of Mac-lovers who are simply hungry for details far too arcane for the regular media.
When I used to come in and cover MacWorld Expo, I saw that many of the enthusiast writers like Jason O'Grady, etc. were extremely knowledgeable journalists who worked very hard to cover Mac news in a way that most mainstream reporters just couldn't (because we weren't assigned to it 100%)
Apple is only hurting itself by cutting them out. Yes, they're just taking away free press access to conferences. But conferences at MacWorld are expensive if your company isn't paying, not to mention that many of these site authors have to fly in and pay for hotels, incurring hundreds of dollars in cost even if they did get the free media pass. If they can't get into conferences, the Expo is not very useful -- the salespeople manning booths generally don't know anything more than the average Mac enthusiast about what's going on. I remember asking questions at the Apple booth and realizing even their floor people didn't know the internals of the new systems yet. The conferences and private events are where the action is, generally.
Apple's action is a slap in the face at these Mac sites, especially given the "community-oriented" nature of the Apple/Macintosh world. Many of these guys treat Mac ownership as a lifestyle choice and identity, more than an OS choice (laugh, but so do Linux users.) Now they're being told to go away, because they're not "professional" enough. It's an ugly mistake by Apple, and it's going to hurt them.
(I used to cover Apple for a top online news site. It's thankless work, even for a Mac fan like me. No matter what you write, you get flames from PC users and Mac users about the story being biased (often claiming exactly the opposite bias.))
Ironic that in a post about the strength of small companies, you have a sig that notes how dominant Disney (the biggest of the big) has been in bending US governement policy to protect its business against smaller competitors.
Wishful thinking. So far, it hasn't happened.
Even the greatest "startup" companies of late have been crowded out of their markets as their product becomes commoditized (see: Palm, Handspring)
When the big companies fail, another large company comes along, buys their infrastructure cheap, and uses it to relaunch a new service, with more marketing muscle (dollars) than the other players (see: telecom.)
The "smaller, solidly-built" companies are often far more exposed to competition and market shift because such a large percentage of their revenue comes from a single market or customer.
I don't think you understand the business issue, no.
The problem is that if you choose to "bootstrap" a business, you necessarily have to forgo taking outside investment of any real size. So you're going to grow so slowly that by the time you're of any size, the market you're targeting is completely dominated by players who chose the faster growth path, or who moved in (already big) from an adjacent market.
In a world where the biggest two or three players in a market enjoy 90% of the revenue, and also enjoy tremenous cost savings in marketing and buying thanks to scale, the game becomes to grow and dominate as quickly as possible.
It's great to play "lemonade stand" but that's simply not how it works. In particular, no venture investor will have any interest, because the returns you potentially will bring in terms of capital worth simply won't be compelling, considering the risk.
YES, the explosive growth path is much riskier. But the rewards are 10X more (VCs want returns like 1000% on early-stage investments.) In general, the bootstrap strategy simply doesn't have any hope of providing returns better than simply investing in a similar-beta selection of stocks (if you can find stocks that risky.)
Markets simply grow too fast and change too fast these days for 19th-century business models. No question, you're going to see more and more of these "implosions" of major investment startups. That's simply part of the game. If they hadn't taken that risk and attempted to become a big player, they simply would have been crowded out of the market quietly, without ever having had ANY hope of becoming a major player.
I thought that according to Anamaniacs, all cultural progress was intended to impress women.
* War
* Politics
* Business
* The Arts (except Musicals)
Maybe we've turned a corner here...
And hey, some of us have broadband so we can download movies and MP3s all day. Haven't you been listening to the RIAA/MPAA?
They're a lot more likely to be viewable than color photographs you took 15 years ago. Color prints, especially the first decade or two worth, fade incredibly fast compared to properly processed (i.e. washed until bleach and other chemicals are gone) black and white photos. From what I understand, there are more B&W civil war photos surviving than color photos from the first 5-10 years of those (and I read this a while back, so I assume it's only gotten worse.)
Yes, CDRs do degrade (albeit slowly.) But you can always transfer the information over to new CDRs with no degredation (yay digital tech!)
I'm more concerned about my DV tapes. Will they degrade before I can afford to transfer them to DVDs (at current prices transferring even my small collection would cost me nearly a grand.)
If you really want to preserve your photos for eternity, post them to USENET. Everyone knows the binaries there are just the same photos being posted over and over...
It was the Navaho, and they were used in the Pacific theater, not Europe. Their language is particular problematic to translate or learn.
"The Code Book" by Simon Singh has a good chapter about this.
I believe the Cherokee were considered but not used. The need in the Pacific theater was primarily for extremely rapid encryption of transmissions by forward air controllers for strikes, and for whatever reason this was not a tactical need in the European theater.
So how is the PowerBook for running Linux, say Mandrake 8.2??
I'd love to carry that laptop instead of my Dell... it has better resolutioin, better graphics, built-in 802.11, yada yada.
Are folks having success running Linux distros on the PowerBook G4s? Is this a good pick for a Linux laptop, or should I stick with my Dell?
Having it be a single unit, rather than a seperate CPU, it a big plus for schools. With a CPU that's not under the monitor, you have one more thing you need to lock down, more cables to hook up, more difficulty transporting/moving the units.
Especially for educational institutations, having a seperate CPU increases chances of damage or theft... younger kids will knock it to the floor, and older ones will have an easier time stealing it... and knowing that it would run Linux really nicely, wouldn't you think some people would want to walk off with it?
These boards are far smaller than MicroATX boards, or even flexATX boards.
uATX pretty much an ATX board with 3 PCI slots instead of 5. It's only a few inches smaller. With the SS40 units you're talking about something about half that size in are.
If you want better gaming performance you can use one of the new GF4MX that have a PCI connection.. you'll probably get equivalent performance from a SS50/40 in a box half the size.
Linux works GREAT on the SV24 for me... I've got one with a Celeron 850 running Mandrake 8.2, serving as a web server, Squid proxy, etc. I also use it as my Linux desktop via VNC.
/are/ loud... even my SV24 is loud after switching the case fan and down-volting the PSU fan. The 1U CPU heatsink that comes with the SV24 is very whiny, and I need to replace it... of course if quiet is important, you can always put in a Via C3 CPU and not have a CPU fan at all!
It also has a Crystalfontz LCD and LCDProc running, so it's a lot like those web "cubes" that Cobalt used (?) to make:
http://karlo.org/archives/000247.php
Right now it's been up for 9 days, but it hasn't crashed once. Installed fine from the CDs on the first try, no weird settings or anything, no extra drivers.
There is a lot of traffic about the SV24/25 and SS50/40 on the Viahardware.com Small Form Factor Forum... so far, nobody's had problems using them with Linux.
And yes, they
Also, everyone wants AGP, bigger CPUs, etc but then complains about the noise... smaller boxes with the same heat-generating components are going to be LOUDER... if you want quiet and small, expect to use a smaller, cooler CPU and vidcard -- and think about a more efficent OS than Windows!
Pursuing copyright infringers doesn't always have much to do with the issue of how much profit they're taking. These organizations have a responsibility to protect the interests of the lyric's owners, and as such, they probably should go after anyone redistributing lyrics on a large-scale basis without their permission.
I liked lyrics.ch but the fact is they didn't have the rights to the material they were redistributing. If musicians in the future wanted to make money off the lyrics they wrote, their profit would be hurt by the existence of lyrics.ch.
IMHO, the copyright holder has the right to set whatever value they want upon their work. Others have the right not to buy that work. There is no "fair" issue w/regards to price - only whatever the creator feels they want to release the work. Whether or not the purchaser chooses to make money off the licensed work is irrelevant (nod to fair use, which Lyrics server was absolutely not.)
If you can't make enough money running a lyrics server to support whatever the lyric's copyright holders want to charge, that's your problem, not theirs. It would be nice if an agreement could be reached, but it's not anybody's fault if it doesn't happen. Maybe lyrics are just to valuable to be something you can give away for free to end users on the net. That may just be a economic issue, not an emotional one.