Instead of blasting out 20K messages to all of the recipients at once, he blasts out a bunch of 1K messages, cutting down on his 95th percentile bandwidth. People will come back to read the articles, and when they do, web caching servers/software between users and his server will cache anything static. Eg: 5000 AOL users will get the article from the AOL caches instead of his site, but a bug in the HTML will get a 1x1 gif from his site directly.
Everyone sees exactly the same newsletter as Bruce intended to publish it (he probably doesn't make exceptions of Opera 7;^) instead of worrying about hoiw to accommodate HTML into everyone's broken mail reader.
It keeps from filling up countless mailboxes for something we'd probably go to his website for anyway.
If he has advertisers that want to post on his website, they get more eyeballs, and it's less annoying than being sent an ad as part of your mailbox. Conversely, like Slashdot, subscribers can pay Bruce not to put ads into the newsletter by giving him the annual subscription fee.
Bruce can tell exactly how many people read his article (web logs).
I learned this from the electronic greeting industry. Similar to Usenet 2 and Internet Mail 2000, messages semaphores will become the future of e-mail. People will create web content as easy as they create e-mail messages now and semaphore the recipients (using IM or email) to look at their content. Recipients who are interested will click on the URL in the semaphore. Recipients who want mail from Bruce, will open it. Bruce might even (G)PG(P)-sign the announcement notice so that spammers can't pretend to be him.
Then again, why should Bruce have to mail anyone at all? If his newsletter is so good, his readers will bookmark his page and read it every now and then, just like I do with DaemonNews or ArsTechnica.
The Internet is evolving, and Bruce is whining along the way. Mass-mailed newsletters are going the way of the dino-WAIS-server (just like FTP;^).
A user in a foreign country does not care if they violate the law and spam a user on a 'do not email' list. In fact, they are very likely to use that list as a source of addresses linked to real people. The proposal is misguided.
The net will eventually be a confederation of people sending mail to people on their whitelists and blocking everything else.
I took a look at some Nemesis reviews today on Yahoo to see if it was any good. One summed it up amusingly well that "while every even numbered movie is usually better than the odd ones, every fifth movie is a load of crap."
Alot of others felt that this movie is running out of plot lines, and it's getting old.
Instead, I found a great alternative. You can pass on Star Trek and go find Equilibrium. It doesn't look like it's in wide release, which is odd because it looks like it cost alot to produce. It has the best member ratings of any movies on Yahoo's current board (4.5 out of 5 - average is 3.1), and even better ratings than the sleeper hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding (3.8). The plot (it has one!) goes into a "what if" futuristic scenario about a world without feeling (reminds me of Gattaca), but has great action shots reminiscent of the Matrix that rivals John Wu's bullet-flying glass-breaking work. The critics don't like it much, perhaps too much action for them, but it's definately not a run-of-the-mill shoot-em-up.
Back in the day, ogg had a meaning as a verb in Netrek - "Let's go ogg a base". If you look at the NWfusion article, scroll down and read all of the "I won't buy it because it doesn't support Ogg" comments. Take that feedback and smoke it! They were Ogged!
It reminds me of the Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf campaign to People's Most Beautiful Person poll.
Quote: Ballmer and his salespeople will have a hard time convincing business clients that their networks should be moved from the 40-year-old Unix operating system to rival Windows if customers have a cheaper option, investors said.
I'm as old as Unix and I'm only 32. I'm not 40, dammit. These investors can't count!
At 8U you get to use standard (cheap!) ATX Xeon motherboards and put them in your cases. Xeon motherboards give you very fast CPUs with lots of memory (8GB-12GB) and usually one or two GigE built-in. This is what the high-end-computing customers want - concentrated computing power. VOIP is much less demanding. If you want to use Xeon with CompactPCI, you currently need to make your own motherboard ($$$$ in initial engineering costs) and figure out how to cool it (small fans don't work well).
Does anyone know any good CompactPCI Xeon manufacturers? Doubt it.
Why does anyone think Apple would want to implement on Intel? They should say "x86", not Intel. AMD and/or Transmeta might be more closely aligned with Apple's needs. On the consumer end, one could have a low-power Transmeta processor that code-morphs x86 and/or PowerPC. On the high-end, the AMD x86-64 architecture looks like it's getting much better OS support than Itanium.
"Switching gears to Apple will the rumored support of Hammer become a reality. Will Apple finally stop making the same mistakes and port over their OS to Hammer? How will Steve Jobs react to a market full of 64 bit CPUs when all Motorola has is bad yields? Surely this has crossed sweaterman's mind as the race to 64 bit computing accelerates. Will the rumors turn to reality? Again, like Dell, Jobs seems to be the stubborn type, so the likelihood of booting OS X on AMD silicon is far fetched at this time."
UPDATE 9/5/01: Our U.S. utility patent case for an "Ultra-Narrow Automobile Stabilized With Ballast" has just been allowed. International patent applications are in progress
Reminds me of Weeble Wobbles. "They weeble and they wobble but they don't fall down!"
So if it gets hit by a truck and goes flying for fifty feet, will it land right-side up?
Back when I worked fora game company in 1996, we were considering using a 3D engine and having branded objects in our games. We'd then go to sponsors to have them bid on items. I'm sure that anyone who read "Neuromancer" would have had similar thoughts of advertising in Cyberspace. So is this a patentable use of the business model? Who did it first? Is EA first?
This is ICANN doing something to help justify their existance when they normally do a whole lot of nothing. Politically, Verisign can make the appropriate changes to calm the waters, but I doubt ICANN would have the ability to enforce anything on Verisign. In a legal pissing match, Verisign has more money and probably more influence than ICANN.
In the meantime, I get "renew your licences or else" spam from the BSA and Microsoft using the information from my outdated and expired Verisign WHOIS record. Knowing this, I really wish I could unpublish my WHOIS data for my domain. Perhaps there's an appropriate need for privacy which the people behind these improperly-registered domains are fighting.
Oracle claims here to have solved this problem. They are internally replacing dozens of Exchange servers with a three-server cluster using their software for e-mail, voicemail, fax, and calendar.
It ain't open source, but it is an alternative and covers many of the bases discussed in this forum.
The best way to express your disapproval towards any business or group of businesses is to not buy their stuff.
... which they use as an argument in their defense. "Less people have been buying from us, so they must be pirating it all." Companies don't learn from the customers they don't have. They learn from the customers who complain.
Write a letter to your favorite record label. Tell them how much money you used to spend on their product in the past. Tell them how much you spend now (hopefully much less). Tell them why. Tell them what you would support (for example, $X/song or album for Internet downloads and fair use or $X/month for subscriptions to Internet radio statons or content servers).
I used to spend $50 per month on CDs. I haven't bought one in at least three years (and I don't pirate). Instead, I just listen to the radio. I still rent movies a couple times a month, though.
When I have some disposable income again, I'm going to donate an equal part to my local NPR station and an organization fighting the industry's over-reaching efforts. People have to fund the people speaking out for us.
Be creative. Make some effort. Don't just "not buy stuff". They won't get the message that way.
The US Secretary of Defense (Rumsfeld) was asked about the impact of WorldCom's demise on communications its contracts with the military. His response was something like: "Where there is a viable need for a service, there will be a provider. Whether it's the corporate shell the the contract was given to or the corporate shell that bought the service from the original corporate shell, the service will continue." His use of the term corporate shell was quite interesting, making corporations seem to be fictional entities surrounding a service. Many times, viable profitable contracts are bought out between defense contractors and the same people who served them just get their paychecks from a different company (eg: Andersen accountants who get hired by the replacing auditors).
Through Global Crossing's bankruptcy, they've been able to keep service up and running for many of their customers. Now, it's not likely that they're getting new business, but the business that they have still manages to continue to run using a minimal staff. Even though MFN has gone bankrupt, you don't see the power going out at PAIX. Adelphia is defaulting on loans, but my cable modem with them still more or less works. The investors lose; the banks and lenders lose; non-core people get laid off; and eventually, a long time later, the customer loses if they obliviously stick around after the company can't sustain operations anymore.
Worldcom is not bankrupt yet. Many believe it's likely though. CNBC reports they have $2B in the bank (one analyst estimates $1.6B after accelerated repayments), $30B in loans, and $54B in sellable assets (worth $8B at $0.20 on the dollar during a fire sale). It's up to the banks as to whether to kill their goose now that it's not laying gold eggs. Even if WorldCom goes bankrupt, the service will continue for quite a while. Some might buy the assets for pennies on the dollar and operate the same business with a better chance at making a profit. All of the direct investors and the lenders and the investors of the lenders will be left holding the bag, but service will continue.
As other replies have stated, DVD isn't a mature technology yet. If you're into bleeding edge technology, feel free to experiment.
Tape is still the cheapest media and most widely used and will continue to get more dense and less expensive over the next 4-5 years. You can currently buy LTO1 and AIT3 tapes for less than $100 per 100GB tape in large quantities. Sony has a 500GB half-inch format (S-AIT) coming out within a year. The jukeboxes and libraries are still expensive compared to CD changers, but if you have alot of data to backup, their up-front cost is not as significant. If you have lots of small data sets (600MB) to archive, it might make sense to use something random-access like CDs or near-line disk. If you have large databases or filesystems to archive, it's alot easier to manage one 100GB tape rather than 153 CDs or 20 DVDs for the same data. How are you going to manage and inventory all of those CDs? If you need to store more than 1TB, consider disk or tape solutions instead.
ATA disk-based technology might seem inexpensive at first. I've seen FCAL/SCSI solutions lower that $20/GB. I've seen commercial ATA RAID5 subsystems as low as $10/GB. One can build-it-yourself using off-the-shelf cheap parts ($3/GB white box system?), but would you trust your data on the cheapest disk technology? What happens when a disk dies or when the filesystem becomes corrupted? Consider, also, how you might scale a disk-based solution beyond 1TB (if that's what you need to do). Think about power, cooling, managing failed drives, etc. Also, do you really need to keep disk drives actively spinning for data you might not access again for at least 6 months?
In short, if you have less than 2TB of data to backup and small data sets, CD is inexpensive, but building an ATA-based archive system could work better, especially for managing the data. If you need to archive more than 10TB, tape is still the best proven way to go. In between, it may be possible to mix and match technologies to be cost-effective and still provide good performance. For example, you might keep 3-6 months of data on disk and archive the rest to a tape library.
I thought it was pretty neat when a football program would do replays of a scene using multiple cameras and "swing" you around a stadium to a better viewing angle. I think it was Fox Sports that did this, but I'm not sure.
Another thought: One can estimate that there are three or four phone numbers for every man woman and child (home/work/cell/fax/modem/etc.). How many cameras per person will we have within 10 years as we move to a surveillance-oriented society?
Slashdot Mirror
It has some other advantages too:
I learned this from the electronic greeting industry. Similar to Usenet 2 and Internet Mail 2000, messages semaphores will become the future of e-mail. People will create web content as easy as they create e-mail messages now and semaphore the recipients (using IM or email) to look at their content. Recipients who are interested will click on the URL in the semaphore. Recipients who want mail from Bruce, will open it. Bruce might even (G)PG(P)-sign the announcement notice so that spammers can't pretend to be him.
Then again, why should Bruce have to mail anyone at all? If his newsletter is so good, his readers will bookmark his page and read it every now and then, just like I do with DaemonNews or ArsTechnica.
The Internet is evolving, and Bruce is whining along the way. Mass-mailed newsletters are going the way of the dino-WAIS-server (just like FTP
-ez
A user in a foreign country does not care if they violate the law and spam a user on a 'do not email' list. In fact, they are very likely to use that list as a source of addresses linked to real people. The proposal is misguided.
The net will eventually be a confederation of people sending mail to people on their whitelists and blocking everything else.
-ez
To infinity and beyooooooooooooooooond!
For those who can't get to the site and are too lazy to lookup Google...
Images
Article
-ez
Karma: Whore (mostly through your posting article begging for positive modding)
I took a look at some Nemesis reviews today on Yahoo to see if it was any good. One summed it up amusingly well that "while every even numbered movie is usually better than the odd ones, every fifth movie is a load of crap."
Alot of others felt that this movie is running out of plot lines, and it's getting old.
Instead, I found a great alternative. You can pass on Star Trek and go find Equilibrium. It doesn't look like it's in wide release, which is odd because it looks like it cost alot to produce. It has the best member ratings of any movies on Yahoo's current board (4.5 out of 5 - average is 3.1), and even better ratings than the sleeper hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding (3.8). The plot (it has one!) goes into a "what if" futuristic scenario about a world without feeling (reminds me of Gattaca), but has great action shots reminiscent of the Matrix that rivals John Wu's bullet-flying glass-breaking work. The critics don't like it much, perhaps too much action for them, but it's definately not a run-of-the-mill shoot-em-up.
-ez
Back in the day, ogg had a meaning as a verb in Netrek - "Let's go ogg a base". If you look at the NWfusion article, scroll down and read all of the "I won't buy it because it doesn't support Ogg" comments. Take that feedback and smoke it! They were Ogged!
It reminds me of the Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf campaign to People's Most Beautiful Person poll.
Quote: Ballmer and his salespeople will have a hard time convincing business clients that their networks should be moved from the 40-year-old Unix operating system to rival Windows if customers have a cheaper option, investors said.
I'm as old as Unix and I'm only 32. I'm not 40, dammit. These investors can't count!
At 8U you get to use standard (cheap!) ATX Xeon motherboards and put them in your cases. Xeon motherboards give you very fast CPUs with lots of memory (8GB-12GB) and usually one or two GigE built-in. This is what the high-end-computing customers want - concentrated computing power. VOIP is much less demanding. If you want to use Xeon with CompactPCI, you currently need to make your own motherboard ($$$$ in initial engineering costs) and figure out how to cool it (small fans don't work well).
Does anyone know any good CompactPCI Xeon manufacturers? Doubt it.
Here's a comment from an AMDzone article (page 7)...
"Switching gears to Apple will the rumored support of Hammer become a reality. Will Apple finally stop making the same mistakes and port over their OS to Hammer? How will Steve Jobs react to a market full of 64 bit CPUs when all Motorola has is bad yields? Surely this has crossed sweaterman's mind as the race to 64 bit computing accelerates. Will the rumors turn to reality? Again, like Dell, Jobs seems to be the stubborn type, so the likelihood of booting OS X on AMD silicon is far fetched at this time."
From the Tango article:
UPDATE 9/5/01: Our U.S. utility patent case for an "Ultra-Narrow Automobile Stabilized With Ballast" has just been allowed. International patent applications are in progress
Reminds me of Weeble Wobbles. "They weeble and they wobble but they don't fall down!"
So if it gets hit by a truck and goes flying for fifty feet, will it land right-side up?
-ez
Back when I worked fora game company in 1996, we were considering using a 3D engine and having branded objects in our games. We'd then go to sponsors to have them bid on items. I'm sure that anyone who read "Neuromancer" would have had similar thoughts of advertising in Cyberspace. So is this a patentable use of the business model? Who did it first? Is EA first?
This is ICANN doing something to help justify their existance when they normally do a whole lot of nothing. Politically, Verisign can make the appropriate changes to calm the waters, but I doubt ICANN would have the ability to enforce anything on Verisign. In a legal pissing match, Verisign has more money and probably more influence than ICANN.
In the meantime, I get "renew your licences or else" spam from the BSA and Microsoft using the information from my outdated and expired Verisign WHOIS record. Knowing this, I really wish I could unpublish my WHOIS data for my domain. Perhaps there's an appropriate need for privacy which the people behind these improperly-registered domains are fighting.
-ez
Place your banner here, just $1000.
Oracle claims here to have solved this problem. They are internally replacing dozens of Exchange servers with a three-server cluster using their software for e-mail, voicemail, fax, and calendar.
It ain't open source, but it is an alternative and covers many of the bases discussed in this forum.
-ez
... which they use as an argument in their defense. "Less people have been buying from us, so they must be pirating it all." Companies don't learn from the customers they don't have. They learn from the customers who complain.
Write a letter to your favorite record label. Tell them how much money you used to spend on their product in the past. Tell them how much you spend now (hopefully much less). Tell them why. Tell them what you would support (for example, $X/song or album for Internet downloads and fair use or $X/month for subscriptions to Internet radio statons or content servers).
I used to spend $50 per month on CDs. I haven't bought one in at least three years (and I don't pirate). Instead, I just listen to the radio. I still rent movies a couple times a month, though.
When I have some disposable income again, I'm going to donate an equal part to my local NPR station and an organization fighting the industry's over-reaching efforts. People have to fund the people speaking out for us.
Be creative. Make some effort. Don't just "not buy stuff". They won't get the message that way.
-ez
...diamonds have no resale value. Naddah. Zilch
If that's the case, quit whining and click here to stick it to the sellers.
-ez
VCDs and DVDs are so low tech. I get my training via implants.
I don't think you can get 6 people to mars and back in a 30 ton ship; somebody prove me wrong - and then tell me how we build it for free!
No one said they had to be live people.
Ok, ok, $20b might be too low a number. Is there a company with $40b in the bank that could send six of their lawyer^H^H^H^H^H^H astronauts to Mars?
-ez
The US Secretary of Defense (Rumsfeld) was asked about the impact of WorldCom's demise on communications its contracts with the military. His response was something like: "Where there is a viable need for a service, there will be a provider. Whether it's the corporate shell the the contract was given to or the corporate shell that bought the service from the original corporate shell, the service will continue." His use of the term corporate shell was quite interesting, making corporations seem to be fictional entities surrounding a service. Many times, viable profitable contracts are bought out between defense contractors and the same people who served them just get their paychecks from a different company (eg: Andersen accountants who get hired by the replacing auditors).
Through Global Crossing's bankruptcy, they've been able to keep service up and running for many of their customers. Now, it's not likely that they're getting new business, but the business that they have still manages to continue to run using a minimal staff. Even though MFN has gone bankrupt, you don't see the power going out at PAIX. Adelphia is defaulting on loans, but my cable modem with them still more or less works. The investors lose; the banks and lenders lose; non-core people get laid off; and eventually, a long time later, the customer loses if they obliviously stick around after the company can't sustain operations anymore.
Worldcom is not bankrupt yet. Many believe it's likely though. CNBC reports they have $2B in the bank (one analyst estimates $1.6B after accelerated repayments), $30B in loans, and $54B in sellable assets (worth $8B at $0.20 on the dollar during a fire sale). It's up to the banks as to whether to kill their goose now that it's not laying gold eggs. Even if WorldCom goes bankrupt, the service will continue for quite a while. Some might buy the assets for pennies on the dollar and operate the same business with a better chance at making a profit. All of the direct investors and the lenders and the investors of the lenders will be left holding the bag, but service will continue.
- ez
(proudly ex-uunet, pre-WorldDom)
Rent this classic... Used Cars (1980, Kurt Russell, et.al.).
Recommended reading: Ender's Game by Orson Scott Card
The photo in the article talking about Green Destiny shows RLX shelves in the background.
-ez
Perhaps one day our cars won't start until we break the shrink wrap that says we must agree to the End User License Agreement before using the car.
It brings new meaning to the term "24-month lease".
-ez
As other replies have stated, DVD isn't a mature technology yet. If you're into bleeding edge technology, feel free to experiment.
Tape is still the cheapest media and most widely used and will continue to get more dense and less expensive over the next 4-5 years. You can currently buy LTO1 and AIT3 tapes for less than $100 per 100GB tape in large quantities. Sony has a 500GB half-inch format (S-AIT) coming out within a year. The jukeboxes and libraries are still expensive compared to CD changers, but if you have alot of data to backup, their up-front cost is not as significant. If you have lots of small data sets (600MB) to archive, it might make sense to use something random-access like CDs or near-line disk. If you have large databases or filesystems to archive, it's alot easier to manage one 100GB tape rather than 153 CDs or 20 DVDs for the same data. How are you going to manage and inventory all of those CDs? If you need to store more than 1TB, consider disk or tape solutions instead.
ATA disk-based technology might seem inexpensive at first. I've seen FCAL/SCSI solutions lower that $20/GB. I've seen commercial ATA RAID5 subsystems as low as $10/GB. One can build-it-yourself using off-the-shelf cheap parts ($3/GB white box system?), but would you trust your data on the cheapest disk technology? What happens when a disk dies or when the filesystem becomes corrupted? Consider, also, how you might scale a disk-based solution beyond 1TB (if that's what you need to do). Think about power, cooling, managing failed drives, etc. Also, do you really need to keep disk drives actively spinning for data you might not access again for at least 6 months?
In short, if you have less than 2TB of data to backup and small data sets, CD is inexpensive, but building an ATA-based archive system could work better, especially for managing the data. If you need to archive more than 10TB, tape is still the best proven way to go. In between, it may be possible to mix and match technologies to be cost-effective and still provide good performance. For example, you might keep 3-6 months of data on disk and archive the rest to a tape library.
-ez
I thought it was pretty neat when a football program would do replays of a scene using multiple cameras and "swing" you around a stadium to a better viewing angle. I think it was Fox Sports that did this, but I'm not sure.
Another thought: One can estimate that there are three or four phone numbers for every man woman and child (home/work/cell/fax/modem/etc.). How many cameras per person will we have within 10 years as we move to a surveillance-oriented society?
-ez
Transmitted music is just a lossy compression algorithm for reproducing the audio. You can't reproduce the actual performance of the human.
How many people go to a Tori Amos concert because she's a good piano player?
Is Andre Rieu (my mom's favorite) a great piano player? or a really good piano player that is attractive too?
Ben Folds is a good piano player, but an excellent performer.