Where did you see that the PS3 was going to cost $699? I've heard no confirmation on price though I have seen suggestions that they'll have two versions, one that is in that price range, with a lot of extra features like a DVD recorder, etc (similar to the PSX). And a pure game machine in the usual price range.
Keep in mind that Sony will have a lower cost for their hardware than Microsoft will in the long run. Why? Because Microsoft is getting a processor that is only for the XBox. Sony is getting a processor that's going to be part of a lot of different systems. So, they'll have a long run cost advantage. Furthermore, if the Cell's architecture works as advertised, then they should be able to release future Playstations that up performance simply by adding more cells, where as Microsoft will have to do a complete re-engineering. In theory, there might be the possibility of connecting up your PS3 to your PS4 to give you some extra performance.
I think it was the head of Nintendo that pointed this out, but when it comes to consoles, it's really about the games. If the next incarnation of GTA runs on a PS3, then a PS3 is what I will own. I don't particularly like Halo, because I find shooters work much better on PC's. So what's to draw me to their system?
Think of it this way: what can the XBox 2 possibly offer me that's new? Sure they can up the graphics performance, hard drive space, etc, but it's really just making it an evolutionary step better than the current system. Furthermore, if raw performance was a big deal, they'd already dominate the market because the XBox outperforms and has more features than the PS2. Hell, even for existing XBox owners the decision will require some thought seeing as old games won't play on the new system (as far as I know).
On the other hand, the PS3 will be backward compatible, add significant processing power, and quite likely add some new features like having a hard drive and output for HD. Those features, of course, already exist on an XBox, but this means people fixated on hardware performance should be turning to PS3 as the better system. So barring some major manufacturing glitches, delays, etc, I see no reason to think the PS3 will be losing market share to the XBox 2.
Something to keep in mind is that Microsoft has always thrived on the value of it's stock. They've paid their employees with a lot of stock incentives and because of their continuing growth, they managed to get some of the best and brightest.
As their growth has fallen off, they have less to lure the best and brightest to their offices. They are no longer scene as a source of innovation, so people aren't going to seek them out for that. They are no longer a source of tremendous financial reward, so nobody's going there for that either. Why would you work at Microsoft if you could go to Google or Apple, companies that are still growing and innovating?
Microsoft isn't going away anytime soon, but as the leader in the industry, their days are numbered. Their products are quickly becoming mere commodities, only sustained by their monopoly position. Nobody cares that their computer runs Windows, they only care that their software works.
Once somebody finds a good way for people to be able to get stuff done without Windows then Windows will cease to be a going concern. At that point, Microsoft will have to compete on the same level as everybody else. Filled with bureaucrats and lacking those sparks of life that fill places like Google, they will fade from importance.
Using that logic, Microsoft outlook is far more secure than Novell Evolution because patches are coming out all the time for Outlook.
What really matters in the end is:
1) The seriousness of exploits 2) The quantity of exploits 3) The imposition placed on IT people in applying patches to fix exploits
If you release a lot of patches but they are readily applied without causing downtime, etc, then that's not a big problem. If a few exploits are found but the exploits are huge gaping holes, that's bad for everybody. This is another one of those cases of trying to measure a qualitative problem using quantitative means. It means nothing but it looks good in a press release.
Is it truly more secure than Linux? The real measure is hacks per capita. How many boxes are out there, and how many are getting exploited?
Frankly, I think Linux is more secure for one simple reason: I can more readily control what's running. Linux is much easier to trim down to a minimal system, shutting down services, and making it very difficult for an exploit to do anything if it can even get on there. If I have a box that's a Linux webserver, I can trim it down to Apache and SSH, and that's it. If I just watch for exploits of those two things and the kernel itself, I'm golden. With Windows, I have these service packs and updates that change mysterious things without my knowledge. I'm at much greater risk of unexpected consequences of a security fix.
On a tangent: I'm not convinced that the "playstation-style games" are going to go over as well on a handheld-sized screen. Part of the reason handheld games so often look cartoony is that it is very, very hard to do the realistic, highly-detailed game environments we've come to expect from consoles on a small screen.
I've seen a PSP. It looks really good. The form factor makes the PSP less portable than a game boy, but the screen is really quite large and high quality. Ultimately I think games like GTA should translate onto the platform quite nicely.
I've not seriously considered buying a gameboy since the first generation one that I used to play tetris on all the time. The PSP is really tempting me though because it has the potential to play some more serious games. I probably won't buy one because for $250, I'd rather upgrade the video card on my PC, but it is tempting.
On average they might lose a little bit of money on the deal in pure shipping, but I'm sure they'll make up for it hugely in sales.
I mean, if you pay them the $79 why would you order something from someplace else? Let's say a book you'd buy is $5 cheaper at B&N. Well, when you add on shipping, it's really not any cheaper than it would be from Amazon. So then you buy it at Amazon.
Furthermore, let's say you do buy lots of stuff to get the most for your money. As long as the margin on each item is greater than what they are losing in shipping, they'll be ecstatic.
The other thing is that if they can guarantee a certain amount of second day shipping business, they can probably get some nice discounts from UPS/FedEx. So that'll end up reducing their overall costs.
As for your specific exploit of the heavy books, I would guarantee that the margins they make on those heavy text books are huge, regardless of shipping, so they can afford to take a hit. I'm fairly certain they charge a flat fee for shipping books anyhow, so I think they already accounted for the variances in weight. You'd actually do them more harm by purchasing a lot of cheap things where the margins are minimal.
So I decided to play with it for a moment and see how cool it was. I did a search for a couple restaurants and shops nearby. It didn't have a listing for any of them, with or without photo. So I decided to search for something obvious: Dave and Busters.
The entry came up with a photo and everything, but the photo was wrong. They had the right block but they were off by about half a block. Impressive technological feat to be within half a block, but it makes the technology totally useless.
In the case of D&B, if you scan up the street you can see the big orange and blue awning and find it. But then I knew the street and so knew which direction to scroll when I saw that they were off. So now they combine the sometimes humorous inaccuracy of on-line maps with a new level of inaccuracy using street level photos.
You may be better off asking for directions from a real person:)
It won't grow automatically. Note the ongoing lack of support for the Ogg Vorbis format. It's a good format, and yeah you can get plugins to deal with it on most media players. But you don't see it on portable players and it's rarely available by default.
Ultimately people use the formats that most people already have support for. Most people have windows, therfore people put video in WMV format. If most players supported Theora, then you'd have a motivation to use theora. Otherwise you're just creating hassles for the end user.
Sometimes I think that way. Sometimes I see an article, and think that it's an interesting perspective. Then I go read another site and find almost the exact same article. Eventually I realize that it's each site, excerpting the same AP wire article, with just different quotes.
Red. Blue. That's the problem. It becomes too easy for people stuck in their little cultural bubble to think that the rest of the world should be just like them. People lose their understanding that in fact there are different people in this world with different kinds of lives.
All I'm saying is that it isn't a utopia. Frankly we don't know the ramifications of all of this, and so I'm just suggesting that we should be taking this with a grain of salt. Sure there are good things, but shifts like this are always double-edged swords.
Who said it was a utopia? Most people getting their news from major news sites that are offshoots of the same media companies that run TV. The other news is made up of what people actively seek to find out about. So that means people going out and finding the stories that reinforce their existing opinions, further fragmenting society.
If you can get everybody interested in a suite of applications and API's that will work on something other than Windows, then it frees them to switch.
The problem you have right now is that companies will balk at the notion of going to Linux on the desktop because they don't have Outlook and Office. If you can convince them of the value of alternatives on Windows, it opens the door to move them to Linux down the road.
Yes, Dean hired bloggers. One of the bloggers they hired stopped writing his own blog during that time. The other blogger continually posted on his original blog saying that he was salaried by the Dean campaign.
So let's not blow this out of proportion folks. If they had concealed what they were doing, that would be an entirely different beast. They met the basics of journalistic integrity, revealing that they were in fact being paid for their work.
Personally I use the same sort of setup but use rdiff-backup to do the actual backup/restoration. It's really nice because I now have nightly differential backups of my system without consuming a large amount of disk space.
Also, rdiff-backup allows for remote operations. So you can have a central server back up many desktops, with relative ease. It doesn't have a nice GUI, but then again, I'm running it all through a cron job anyhow, so who cares.
Restoration is a breeze because the most recent snapshot is just a copy of the regular files, so you can go through and copy over the data. It's a little more work to get a differential snap shot, but it's nice to have if you need it.
If you do that, they can still go after the listeners.
Actually I'm not sure about that. Keep in mind that we're talking about a broadcast, and I'm fairly certain part of the DMCA clarified what was established as a broadcast on-line. If it's a broadcast, then the notion of suing the listener is equivalent to suing the citizens of a city because the local FM station didn't pay their license. That doesn't make sense.
The tricky part is, if you listen, and you're part of the P2P network, then I suppose you are also a broadcaster technically. In the end I imagine it doesn't matter too much because if they want to sue you, how many people have the cash to fight it.
Another thing to consider. If all of those middle players could be considered broadcasters, would ASCAP want to license all of the listeners as well? I mean they are broadcasting in a sense.
ASCAP will be knocking on your door. Shortly after I graduated from College I was running a little radio station on the Internet. It was a 28Kbps RealAudio stream and I had maybe 4 listeners at my peak. None the less, AASCAP sent me a letter demanding that I cease broadcasting, or license my broadcast through them.
For a non-profit station they had a flat rate of something like $250/year. I suppose that's not that terrible, but since I wasn't making any money at all on the venture ~$20/month seemed a little steep to me. If you have any sort of revenue, they will charge you more based on your revenue.
If you want to do audio casting, I'd recommend Live365 instead. Because they volume license, the rates that you ultimately pay to ASCAP are lower than you'd end up paying on your own. One argument for using them, bandwidth considerations, seems to be fading, but it's definitely worth it just to avoid the legal hassle if your a hobbyist.
They already are getting that competition in the form of the Internet. The average American spends 30 minutes less time watching TV on a daily basis because of the Internet.
Ultimately, TV and Movies are just another form of entertainment. If they make access to these things expensive and inconvenient, people will simply choose another way to be entertained. They'll go watch the latest e-mail from strong bad. They'll download some fan produced star wars movie. They won't have to pay a dime and ultimately they'll be as entertained, if not more so, than they were from TV and Movies.
So go ahead mega media empires. Go ahead and DRM and freak out about all of this, and watch it all crumble underneath your feet. We are your CUSTOMERS, and you are supposed to provide us a service. If you actually think that intentionally introducing confusing, complicated, and inflexible products will make us more willing to give you money, you need to get into rehab.
Because, how many more movies are you going to go to if they do that. If you could make 10 times as many films, and get 10 times as many people to go, that might make sense.
The market for movies already gets pretty saturated over christmas and summer. One big movie gets released and makes money on the first weekend, then the next big movie gets released and it cuts into the revenue of the first big movie.
The other issue, as pointed out by other posters, is that big name actors are effectively part of the marketing cost of a film. I can think of a few movies that Denzel Washington's been in that I've seen because he's in them. He's a brand, in essence, and represents a certain quality of film. I've never been dissapointed by a movie he's been in so paying him the big money is worth it.
Yeah some people complain about the grief system, but ultimately it's easy to avoid weapons lock if you pay attention to what you're shooting at. I've only ever had weapons lock (1000 grief) when I made a deliberate effort to get grief, just to see how far I could go. By the way, 5000 grief is a 3 day auto-ban and then you get 17 days of gettting a weapons lock if you even sneeze on a friendly. Pretty effective deterrent.
Exactly. I've done a lot of work with date manipulation, and it can be a huge pain, but the thing is, software can make up for the defficiencies in our system. For example, in Java, there's a Calendar class. It's a black box with many mysterious innards that magically calculate dates for me. I don't need to know what years are leap years, etc, because some other coder already sat down and worked that out. So for that coder, maybe it was a big hassle, but now, for me, it's not too bad. Problem sovled.
If you're going to review things for the enterprise, then you need to keep in mind the requirements of an enterprise. Very few large businesses are willing to trust a product that doesn't have some sort of obvious support structure behind it. If the reviewer could not find a solid support structure for it, then it isn't suitable as an enterprise spam solution.
The article says that the school upgraded to a new version of Exchange during that two day period. IS it possible that during the course of the upgrade they also added some anti-spam features that aren't visible to the end user?
I know that personally I've had my mail server go down for more than two days without a backup relay and had no notable drop in spam traffic.
Well right now I'm somebody who own's a DVD player and a POTV (Plain Old TV). Now, if it so happens that all of the movies I start buying are in both HD and regular formats, then some day I'll look at my collection and think, "I really should upgrade".
What ends up happening is that you feel like you could be getting more out of your system than you are. If you stereo is capable of 5.1 surround and you only have two speakers you'll keep wanting to get the other 3.1.
The big benefit of this is that you can reduce the plan that you're on. Why get the 1000 minute plan when you can get the 300 minute plan? Off peak might be free, but if you need to make lots of calls on peak, it would be quite useful.
Frankly though I can't imagine that this operation will be around for long. Phone companies are not going to tolerate somebody manipulating their market like this to make some money at their expense.
Slashdot Mirror
Where did you see that the PS3 was going to cost $699? I've heard no confirmation on price though I have seen suggestions that they'll have two versions, one that is in that price range, with a lot of extra features like a DVD recorder, etc (similar to the PSX). And a pure game machine in the usual price range.
Keep in mind that Sony will have a lower cost for their hardware than Microsoft will in the long run. Why? Because Microsoft is getting a processor that is only for the XBox. Sony is getting a processor that's going to be part of a lot of different systems. So, they'll have a long run cost advantage. Furthermore, if the Cell's architecture works as advertised, then they should be able to release future Playstations that up performance simply by adding more cells, where as Microsoft will have to do a complete re-engineering. In theory, there might be the possibility of connecting up your PS3 to your PS4 to give you some extra performance.
I think it was the head of Nintendo that pointed this out, but when it comes to consoles, it's really about the games. If the next incarnation of GTA runs on a PS3, then a PS3 is what I will own. I don't particularly like Halo, because I find shooters work much better on PC's. So what's to draw me to their system?
Think of it this way: what can the XBox 2 possibly offer me that's new? Sure they can up the graphics performance, hard drive space, etc, but it's really just making it an evolutionary step better than the current system. Furthermore, if raw performance was a big deal, they'd already dominate the market because the XBox outperforms and has more features than the PS2. Hell, even for existing XBox owners the decision will require some thought seeing as old games won't play on the new system (as far as I know).
On the other hand, the PS3 will be backward compatible, add significant processing power, and quite likely add some new features like having a hard drive and output for HD. Those features, of course, already exist on an XBox, but this means people fixated on hardware performance should be turning to PS3 as the better system. So barring some major manufacturing glitches, delays, etc, I see no reason to think the PS3 will be losing market share to the XBox 2.
Give 34.50 billion away to stockholders? :)
Something to keep in mind is that Microsoft has always thrived on the value of it's stock. They've paid their employees with a lot of stock incentives and because of their continuing growth, they managed to get some of the best and brightest.
As their growth has fallen off, they have less to lure the best and brightest to their offices. They are no longer scene as a source of innovation, so people aren't going to seek them out for that. They are no longer a source of tremendous financial reward, so nobody's going there for that either. Why would you work at Microsoft if you could go to Google or Apple, companies that are still growing and innovating?
Microsoft isn't going away anytime soon, but as the leader in the industry, their days are numbered. Their products are quickly becoming mere commodities, only sustained by their monopoly position. Nobody cares that their computer runs Windows, they only care that their software works.
Once somebody finds a good way for people to be able to get stuff done without Windows then Windows will cease to be a going concern. At that point, Microsoft will have to compete on the same level as everybody else. Filled with bureaucrats and lacking those sparks of life that fill places like Google, they will fade from importance.
Using that logic, Microsoft outlook is far more secure than Novell Evolution because patches are coming out all the time for Outlook.
What really matters in the end is:
1) The seriousness of exploits
2) The quantity of exploits
3) The imposition placed on IT people in applying patches to fix exploits
If you release a lot of patches but they are readily applied without causing downtime, etc, then that's not a big problem. If a few exploits are found but the exploits are huge gaping holes, that's bad for everybody. This is another one of those cases of trying to measure a qualitative problem using quantitative means. It means nothing but it looks good in a press release.
Is it truly more secure than Linux? The real measure is hacks per capita. How many boxes are out there, and how many are getting exploited?
Frankly, I think Linux is more secure for one simple reason: I can more readily control what's running. Linux is much easier to trim down to a minimal system, shutting down services, and making it very difficult for an exploit to do anything if it can even get on there. If I have a box that's a Linux webserver, I can trim it down to Apache and SSH, and that's it. If I just watch for exploits of those two things and the kernel itself, I'm golden. With Windows, I have these service packs and updates that change mysterious things without my knowledge. I'm at much greater risk of unexpected consequences of a security fix.
On a tangent: I'm not convinced that the "playstation-style games" are going to go over as well on a handheld-sized screen. Part of the reason handheld games so often look cartoony is that it is very, very hard to do the realistic, highly-detailed game environments we've come to expect from consoles on a small screen.
I've seen a PSP. It looks really good. The form factor makes the PSP less portable than a game boy, but the screen is really quite large and high quality. Ultimately I think games like GTA should translate onto the platform quite nicely.
I've not seriously considered buying a gameboy since the first generation one that I used to play tetris on all the time. The PSP is really tempting me though because it has the potential to play some more serious games. I probably won't buy one because for $250, I'd rather upgrade the video card on my PC, but it is tempting.
On average they might lose a little bit of money on the deal in pure shipping, but I'm sure they'll make up for it hugely in sales.
I mean, if you pay them the $79 why would you order something from someplace else? Let's say a book you'd buy is $5 cheaper at B&N. Well, when you add on shipping, it's really not any cheaper than it would be from Amazon. So then you buy it at Amazon.
Furthermore, let's say you do buy lots of stuff to get the most for your money. As long as the margin on each item is greater than what they are losing in shipping, they'll be ecstatic.
The other thing is that if they can guarantee a certain amount of second day shipping business, they can probably get some nice discounts from UPS/FedEx. So that'll end up reducing their overall costs.
As for your specific exploit of the heavy books, I would guarantee that the margins they make on those heavy text books are huge, regardless of shipping, so they can afford to take a hit. I'm fairly certain they charge a flat fee for shipping books anyhow, so I think they already accounted for the variances in weight. You'd actually do them more harm by purchasing a lot of cheap things where the margins are minimal.
So I decided to play with it for a moment and see how cool it was. I did a search for a couple restaurants and shops nearby. It didn't have a listing for any of them, with or without photo. So I decided to search for something obvious: Dave and Busters.
:)
The entry came up with a photo and everything, but the photo was wrong. They had the right block but they were off by about half a block. Impressive technological feat to be within half a block, but it makes the technology totally useless.
In the case of D&B, if you scan up the street you can see the big orange and blue awning and find it. But then I knew the street and so knew which direction to scroll when I saw that they were off. So now they combine the sometimes humorous inaccuracy of on-line maps with a new level of inaccuracy using street level photos.
You may be better off asking for directions from a real person
It won't grow automatically. Note the ongoing lack of support for the Ogg Vorbis format. It's a good format, and yeah you can get plugins to deal with it on most media players. But you don't see it on portable players and it's rarely available by default.
Ultimately people use the formats that most people already have support for. Most people have windows, therfore people put video in WMV format. If most players supported Theora, then you'd have a motivation to use theora. Otherwise you're just creating hassles for the end user.
Sometimes I think that way. Sometimes I see an article, and think that it's an interesting perspective. Then I go read another site and find almost the exact same article. Eventually I realize that it's each site, excerpting the same AP wire article, with just different quotes.
Red. Blue. That's the problem. It becomes too easy for people stuck in their little cultural bubble to think that the rest of the world should be just like them. People lose their understanding that in fact there are different people in this world with different kinds of lives.
All I'm saying is that it isn't a utopia. Frankly we don't know the ramifications of all of this, and so I'm just suggesting that we should be taking this with a grain of salt. Sure there are good things, but shifts like this are always double-edged swords.
Who said it was a utopia? Most people getting their news from major news sites that are offshoots of the same media companies that run TV. The other news is made up of what people actively seek to find out about. So that means people going out and finding the stories that reinforce their existing opinions, further fragmenting society.
Utopia? Not as such.
If you can get everybody interested in a suite of applications and API's that will work on something other than Windows, then it frees them to switch.
The problem you have right now is that companies will balk at the notion of going to Linux on the desktop because they don't have Outlook and Office. If you can convince them of the value of alternatives on Windows, it opens the door to move them to Linux down the road.
Yes, Dean hired bloggers. One of the bloggers they hired stopped writing his own blog during that time. The other blogger continually posted on his original blog saying that he was salaried by the Dean campaign.
So let's not blow this out of proportion folks. If they had concealed what they were doing, that would be an entirely different beast. They met the basics of journalistic integrity, revealing that they were in fact being paid for their work.
Read more about it here.
Personally I use the same sort of setup but use rdiff-backup to do the actual backup/restoration. It's really nice because I now have nightly differential backups of my system without consuming a large amount of disk space.
Also, rdiff-backup allows for remote operations. So you can have a central server back up many desktops, with relative ease. It doesn't have a nice GUI, but then again, I'm running it all through a cron job anyhow, so who cares.
Restoration is a breeze because the most recent snapshot is just a copy of the regular files, so you can go through and copy over the data. It's a little more work to get a differential snap shot, but it's nice to have if you need it.
If you do that, they can still go after the listeners.
Actually I'm not sure about that. Keep in mind that we're talking about a broadcast, and I'm fairly certain part of the DMCA clarified what was established as a broadcast on-line. If it's a broadcast, then the notion of suing the listener is equivalent to suing the citizens of a city because the local FM station didn't pay their license. That doesn't make sense.
The tricky part is, if you listen, and you're part of the P2P network, then I suppose you are also a broadcaster technically. In the end I imagine it doesn't matter too much because if they want to sue you, how many people have the cash to fight it.
Another thing to consider. If all of those middle players could be considered broadcasters, would ASCAP want to license all of the listeners as well? I mean they are broadcasting in a sense.
ASCAP will be knocking on your door. Shortly after I graduated from College I was running a little radio station on the Internet. It was a 28Kbps RealAudio stream and I had maybe 4 listeners at my peak. None the less, AASCAP sent me a letter demanding that I cease broadcasting, or license my broadcast through them.
For a non-profit station they had a flat rate of something like $250/year. I suppose that's not that terrible, but since I wasn't making any money at all on the venture ~$20/month seemed a little steep to me. If you have any sort of revenue, they will charge you more based on your revenue.
If you want to do audio casting, I'd recommend Live365 instead. Because they volume license, the rates that you ultimately pay to ASCAP are lower than you'd end up paying on your own. One argument for using them, bandwidth considerations, seems to be fading, but it's definitely worth it just to avoid the legal hassle if your a hobbyist.
They already are getting that competition in the form of the Internet. The average American spends 30 minutes less time watching TV on a daily basis because of the Internet.
Ultimately, TV and Movies are just another form of entertainment. If they make access to these things expensive and inconvenient, people will simply choose another way to be entertained. They'll go watch the latest e-mail from strong bad. They'll download some fan produced star wars movie. They won't have to pay a dime and ultimately they'll be as entertained, if not more so, than they were from TV and Movies.
So go ahead mega media empires. Go ahead and DRM and freak out about all of this, and watch it all crumble underneath your feet. We are your CUSTOMERS, and you are supposed to provide us a service. If you actually think that intentionally introducing confusing, complicated, and inflexible products will make us more willing to give you money, you need to get into rehab.
Because, how many more movies are you going to go to if they do that. If you could make 10 times as many films, and get 10 times as many people to go, that might make sense.
The market for movies already gets pretty saturated over christmas and summer. One big movie gets released and makes money on the first weekend, then the next big movie gets released and it cuts into the revenue of the first big movie.
The other issue, as pointed out by other posters, is that big name actors are effectively part of the marketing cost of a film. I can think of a few movies that Denzel Washington's been in that I've seen because he's in them. He's a brand, in essence, and represents a certain quality of film. I've never been dissapointed by a movie he's been in so paying him the big money is worth it.
Yeah some people complain about the grief system, but ultimately it's easy to avoid weapons lock if you pay attention to what you're shooting at. I've only ever had weapons lock (1000 grief) when I made a deliberate effort to get grief, just to see how far I could go. By the way, 5000 grief is a 3 day auto-ban and then you get 17 days of gettting a weapons lock if you even sneeze on a friendly. Pretty effective deterrent.
Exactly. I've done a lot of work with date manipulation, and it can be a huge pain, but the thing is, software can make up for the defficiencies in our system. For example, in Java, there's a Calendar class. It's a black box with many mysterious innards that magically calculate dates for me. I don't need to know what years are leap years, etc, because some other coder already sat down and worked that out. So for that coder, maybe it was a big hassle, but now, for me, it's not too bad. Problem sovled.
If you're going to review things for the enterprise, then you need to keep in mind the requirements of an enterprise. Very few large businesses are willing to trust a product that doesn't have some sort of obvious support structure behind it. If the reviewer could not find a solid support structure for it, then it isn't suitable as an enterprise spam solution.
The article says that the school upgraded to a new version of Exchange during that two day period. IS it possible that during the course of the upgrade they also added some anti-spam features that aren't visible to the end user?
I know that personally I've had my mail server go down for more than two days without a backup relay and had no notable drop in spam traffic.
Well right now I'm somebody who own's a DVD player and a POTV (Plain Old TV). Now, if it so happens that all of the movies I start buying are in both HD and regular formats, then some day I'll look at my collection and think, "I really should upgrade".
What ends up happening is that you feel like you could be getting more out of your system than you are. If you stereo is capable of 5.1 surround and you only have two speakers you'll keep wanting to get the other 3.1.
The big benefit of this is that you can reduce the plan that you're on. Why get the 1000 minute plan when you can get the 300 minute plan? Off peak might be free, but if you need to make lots of calls on peak, it would be quite useful.
Frankly though I can't imagine that this operation will be around for long. Phone companies are not going to tolerate somebody manipulating their market like this to make some money at their expense.