HP sells ink, inkjet printers, laser printers, large scale printers and plotters, scanners, copiers, high end costs-more-than-a-porsche-copiers, servers, network equipment, big iron servers, SANs, and medical imaging devices. They're not in the same category as SGI or DEC as their product line is still broad.
Building a website based company is completely different from running a hardware company. Witness Carly Fiorina's tenure for an example of how that goes, and even she was kind of selling hardware at Lucent. Ebay had no supply chain to deal with, HP is nothing BUT supply chain. Also, let's not forget that the explosive growth of eBay was one of these right place right idea right time once in a lifetime things.
Quality of life is a thing too though that factors in. Think of it this way: If you're in blazing pain and can't move your limbs properly any more because of the pain, is living 15 years like that really better than living 10 years pain free and able to do tons of things you couldn't without the drug?
We already know the answer to this. Science has proven that a minimal caloric diet with the correct balance of nutrients will slow the aging process, but be boring as hell to live on, with the likelyhood of the end user feeling hungry more often than not. Nevertheless, despite the fact we know that you can live longer by doing this, there aren't many takers.
Permanent effects? I hope this system has permanent effects on the mosquitos, and that permanent effect is they fucking die. There are TRILLIONS of the goddamn things on this planet. Carving out a bunch of yard sized pockets where the little bloodsuckers can't go without meeting hot laser death is not going to make even the slightest dent in their overall population. Even if these systems blanketed every urban area on the planet, we'd probably still only nail 2% of them. Species wise, that's a rounding error on a census.
You know, the day Sputnik went up hardly anyone was thinking about a commercial use for space, and now look at us. Space has definitely become a "build it and they will come" scenario. If you make payload lifting even cheaper, there will be more customers because things that didn't make sense before suddenly start to.
Actually, I'm not a betting person myself, but in this case I would bet that he is anything BUT boned. Why? Because it just never looks good on the SEC's part to have a loose cannon send an email like this one to an intended suit target, especially BEFORE the suit is filed. Makes it look like the suit is retaliation, not an actual case.
That's great. So you're telling me that Shaw, Bell, AT&T or Comcast is planning on putting a CRS-1 in every neighborhood? Because if not, who gives a flying fuck how much capacity the central switch has if it's all choked off trying to get to the endpoints.
And while you're at it, please do show us where the terabit peering uplinks are. Hey, look everyone, I've got a 25,000 gallon per minute impeller pump hooked up to a garden hose drawing from a bathtub! Isn't that awesome?
You speak exactly like someone who's read all the cool material and committed all the (best case) specs to memory, but never had to design or even work with a real network with real constraints.
That BIG switch can only handle so much bloody traffic at once. You want a perfect analogy from yesterday's news? Pretend that your ISP's internet network is the road network, and you're fleeing Hurricane Gustav. From the pictures we've seen the last few days, can you guess what happens if everyone in the neighborhood wants to use all their bandwidth all at once?
No. My argument is stop being an asshole and trying to eat all the resources offered to you as peak usage. Let's apply your argument to another network, OK? My taxes pay for that street in front of my house. Should I not be allowed to park my RV right in the middle of it since it's paid for by me?
As others have said, all networks are built and funded based on the idea of oversubscription. What do you think would happen in one in 5 people in your neighborhood decided to use their landlines 24/7? Nobody else would get an outgoing line, that's what. Average neighborhood switch has 1 outgoing line for every 10 users. 1000 houses, only 100 can be on the phone at the same instant. Networks work the same way.
CentOS, which I pulled down last week is what, 3GB? So that would be 30GB of traffic for you. How many distros do you pull down in a month? Under the Comcast plan, you could still do that 7 times/month.. That's a new distro every 4.5 days for ya.
Yes. I'll bet one in 5 do. And I'd also be willing to be that activity has a lot to do with seeding/torrenting, and none of it is Linux distros.
Look, it's this kind of behavior that causes us to not be able to have nice things. Tragedy of the commons and all that. Because people want to eat up all the resources they can, now those resources are scarce and have to be regulated. This kind of crap reminds me of when one of the phone companies up here (Canada) started providing all you can eat long distance in the 90s. Suddenly their overnight usage shot up dramatically. After a little while they got curious to see what the hell was going on, and they started putting line monitors on a few of the long calls. The were not actually listening in, just measuring changes in the voltage indicating activity, and found on some of the calls there was a strangely uniform voltage for hours sometimes. Intrigued, they started phoning some of these people, suspecting there might be equipment problems. What they found instead was that this activity was caused by people who were couples, in different cities, calling each other before bed, saying good night, and then SETTING THE PHONE DOWN ON THE PILLOW all night so they could "sleep in the same bed". Just because they could. Do you consider that "reasonable" usage of long distance lines?
Here's something to try on a dare. just TRY backing up that 500GB drive in a month on a standard cable connection. My guess is with the average upstream it'll take you over 2.5 months to transmit that much data. I had to back up 100 GB of a client's data from their office in Edmonton to Vancouver, and they were on a standard cable connection. Their maximum upload settled in around 64 KB/s - 80 KB/s. The most efficient way to do it was to transmit the 3 GB or so of critical accounting data overnight the first day, and then courier a portable hard drive of the rest.
So IMHO, backing up 500GB to an online service at this point in time isn't really feasible. Maybe if we were in Japan and had 100Mbit fiber to the house that would be feasible.
Oh for fucks sake. Comcast is putting a 250GB cap on it. I, in Canada have a Shaw business account with the X-Treem or whatever it is option that gives me a grand total of 130GB a month transfer. I run a web server at home, I also run a backup server that backs up no less than 3 remote sites to my place twice a week just for geographical distribution (house is about 35 miles from downtown). I also download a bunch of things including audiovisual entertainments, and other things, surf the web, have people try and break in to my webserver, and a hundred other things. And I never exceed my cap. Ever. Once, with 5 days to go, and Shaw's customer service site reporting that my monthly usage was only 30GB that month, I thought to myself just for fun, I should see how much I can download in 5 days, after all that's 100GB going to waste, right:). Didn't put more than a moderate dent in it.
You, if you are doing what you describe above will NEVER "blow the bandwidth cap". Especially if it's twice what I can't use up.
The only way this will inconvenience anyone is if they are not a "moderate or heavy surfer" and are in fact running torrent downloads 24/7/365 pulling a constant load of 100kBps or more.
Think about this. Comcast's cap is 250GB, yes? There is 2,592,000 seconds in 30 days. 250,000 MB / 2,592,000 =.096451. That means to exceed your cap, you must have a constant network load of.096 megabytes PER SECOND all month. I SERIOUSLY doubt that's the case if you are using it as described.
Are you kidding me? You do know the "Article" is actually a press release from the plaintiff's lawyers, right? And some of those claims, like "a billion dollars in economic damage"? They think they could make a billion dollars in revenue for a mail migration tool? Fuck off. Let's put this in perspective. Grand Theft Auto IV *might* come close to making a billion dollars in revenue. Some mail migration tool from a company nobody's ever heard of, not so much.
Bullshit. They're losing customers because they treat everyone like thieves. Stardock doesn't and last I looked they're doing quite well.
The principle problem I have is the companies and how they want it both ways. When you purchase software you're not buying it, you're "licensing" it. But if something happens to the media your licensed software came on, like it was scratched or broken and rendered unusable, you have to purchase another media at full price, despite the fact you've already "licensed" it.
Use services like Steam and this problem goes away. Although Steam has a few issues if you don't have an active net connection as well, so that could be improved on. But I vastly prefer their idea that once you buy a game, you can reinstall it on as many of your machines as you want so long as you're only playing it on one at a time. And there's no media to lose or need to have in the CD tray.
ID had probably the perfect setup back in the Q3Arena days. Buy our game, then take the disk and install it on all the machines in the office, everyone can play a LAN game for free. But if you want to play online, you need your own key. It was perfect, and it was a wonderful promotional tool. I know at least a dozen people in the office who got so hooked on Q3 during our LAN parties that they went out and bought Q3 to play online. All of those purchasers would never have even thought about it unless they were able to try it for free like they did.
You're talking about doing a "smart shelf" type application. The problem with that is that each "gate" still costs hundreds of dollars if not thousands for a really useful one with multiple antennas positioned to read the tag in any orientation. You could get away with only one reader at each boundary as long as you set the item's location to begin with. But yes, very expensive.
Really. Most sub $100 readers have a range that can be measured in millimeters. To get something with about 3' or 4' of range for a single reader will cost four figures. I've done some fairly extensive testing with these readers, and it is possible to boost the range by adding external antennas (for more money). So I guess what I am saying is that what you are planning on doing is technically possible, but is not feasible for most peoples' "tinkering" budgets.
Which is exactly how Steve Jobs' brain works. I recall seeing a thing on when he was first shown the Segway prototypes back when nobody knew what "IT" was. Kamen showed him a few different potential models and the first thing Jobs said was "you want to only have one model. Don't confuse people with choice".
You're not the target market. You are running a "home server". I use Ubuntu at the office, and there are a few annoyances with it, but for the most part it works. And I use Windows XP for certain things and there are a few different annoyances with it but it works. I will agree that stuff like RAID support isn't as seamless as it could be yet, but by the same token holding it up as an example of why nobody should try using Linux on the desktop is stupid. 99.9% of "average" desktop users out there don't even know what RAID is, let alone want to use it.
Actually, the sub-issue here is that Creative's Vista drivers for said hardware don't work properly at all. So this guy's drivers are the only useful Vista drivers for that hardware. The fact that he re-enabled Dolby is an interesting sideshow and the one Creative's using as a club here to beat him, but the real spotlight should be on what the hell is wrong with Creative that they can't have their team of day-job programmers make drivers that work in a year, but a lone hobbyist tinkerer can.
As long as someone has a spare computer around, it's pretty easy to install off a CD once you download the iso. If they have the technical skill to throw a couple big hard drives in the spare box, even better.
Communism is utopian. It is built on 19th century pseudo-science, and it ought to be no more respectable to be a Communist than to be a Phrenologist.
Not necessarily. See, here's the rub. Communism is actually the ideal social structure, except that in populations about ~500 individuals, it doesn't work because human nature derails it. There are many communist communities in north America, just under different names. Hutterite colonies, Amish colonies, etc. All of them succeed because they are relatively insular, and stay small. When a communistic community grows beyond a certain size, it inevitably self-destructs. To avoid this, the colony starts a new "daughter" colony as the population increases.
Re:I've seen the trickle down effects of piracy
on
RIAA Sues Usenet.com
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· Score: 1
Oh, get the hell off your high horse. You say:
I made a choice to not pirate karaoke at our club. We have about 7000 songs in our collection. This in in contrast to the 10-15 venues that have popped up in our area with anywhere between 50,000-150,000 songs.
Karaoke is expensive. About $2 a track. So somebody please tell me, with a straight face how these new guys that just popped out of nowhere suddenly have a $300,000 karaoke collection. Fact is, they don't.
So if you're absolutely certain these new competitors of yours are using pirated tracks, why are you whining to the Slashdot crowd instead of say, phoning the RIAA's piracy hotline, or call ASCAP on them? It would seem to me that if ASCAP can get a restaurant to cough up $5500 over singing Happy Birthday then a pirate Karaoke place with 150,000 infringing songs, and hundreds, if not THOUSANDS of infringing "public performances" per week would be reduced to a smoking crater by them. So why haven't you? It would be a great way to eliminate your competition, and for only minutes of your time, no less.
Unless you have, in which case the fact that the competition's still there would mean that: a) They bribed whoever came to get them or b) They are on the up and up, and just have more financial backing than your place does. In which case, this has nothing to do with piracy, and everything to do with business competition.
Slashdot Mirror
HP sells ink, inkjet printers, laser printers, large scale printers and plotters, scanners, copiers, high end costs-more-than-a-porsche-copiers, servers, network equipment, big iron servers, SANs, and medical imaging devices. They're not in the same category as SGI or DEC as their product line is still broad.
Building a website based company is completely different from running a hardware company. Witness Carly Fiorina's tenure for an example of how that goes, and even she was kind of selling hardware at Lucent. Ebay had no supply chain to deal with, HP is nothing BUT supply chain. Also, let's not forget that the explosive growth of eBay was one of these right place right idea right time once in a lifetime things.
Quality of life is a thing too though that factors in. Think of it this way: If you're in blazing pain and can't move your limbs properly any more because of the pain, is living 15 years like that really better than living 10 years pain free and able to do tons of things you couldn't without the drug?
We already know the answer to this. Science has proven that a minimal caloric diet with the correct balance of nutrients will slow the aging process, but be boring as hell to live on, with the likelyhood of the end user feeling hungry more often than not. Nevertheless, despite the fact we know that you can live longer by doing this, there aren't many takers.
Permanent effects? I hope this system has permanent effects on the mosquitos, and that permanent effect is they fucking die. There are TRILLIONS of the goddamn things on this planet. Carving out a bunch of yard sized pockets where the little bloodsuckers can't go without meeting hot laser death is not going to make even the slightest dent in their overall population. Even if these systems blanketed every urban area on the planet, we'd probably still only nail 2% of them. Species wise, that's a rounding error on a census.
You know, the day Sputnik went up hardly anyone was thinking about a commercial use for space, and now look at us. Space has definitely become a "build it and they will come" scenario. If you make payload lifting even cheaper, there will be more customers because things that didn't make sense before suddenly start to.
Actually, I'm not a betting person myself, but in this case I would bet that he is anything BUT boned. Why? Because it just never looks good on the SEC's part to have a loose cannon send an email like this one to an intended suit target, especially BEFORE the suit is filed. Makes it look like the suit is retaliation, not an actual case.
That's great. So you're telling me that Shaw, Bell, AT&T or Comcast is planning on putting a CRS-1 in every neighborhood? Because if not, who gives a flying fuck how much capacity the central switch has if it's all choked off trying to get to the endpoints.
And while you're at it, please do show us where the terabit peering uplinks are. Hey, look everyone, I've got a 25,000 gallon per minute impeller pump hooked up to a garden hose drawing from a bathtub! Isn't that awesome?
You speak exactly like someone who's read all the cool material and committed all the (best case) specs to memory, but never had to design or even work with a real network with real constraints.
Wanker.
Just the one. And a lovely custom firewall with time limits that she hates ;)
*facepalm*
That BIG switch can only handle so much bloody traffic at once. You want a perfect analogy from yesterday's news? Pretend that your ISP's internet network is the road network, and you're fleeing Hurricane Gustav. From the pictures we've seen the last few days, can you guess what happens if everyone in the neighborhood wants to use all their bandwidth all at once?
No. My argument is stop being an asshole and trying to eat all the resources offered to you as peak usage. Let's apply your argument to another network, OK? My taxes pay for that street in front of my house. Should I not be allowed to park my RV right in the middle of it since it's paid for by me?
As others have said, all networks are built and funded based on the idea of oversubscription. What do you think would happen in one in 5 people in your neighborhood decided to use their landlines 24/7? Nobody else would get an outgoing line, that's what. Average neighborhood switch has 1 outgoing line for every 10 users. 1000 houses, only 100 can be on the phone at the same instant. Networks work the same way.
CentOS, which I pulled down last week is what, 3GB? So that would be 30GB of traffic for you. How many distros do you pull down in a month? Under the Comcast plan, you could still do that 7 times/month.. That's a new distro every 4.5 days for ya.
Yes. I'll bet one in 5 do. And I'd also be willing to be that activity has a lot to do with seeding/torrenting, and none of it is Linux distros.
Look, it's this kind of behavior that causes us to not be able to have nice things. Tragedy of the commons and all that. Because people want to eat up all the resources they can, now those resources are scarce and have to be regulated. This kind of crap reminds me of when one of the phone companies up here (Canada) started providing all you can eat long distance in the 90s. Suddenly their overnight usage shot up dramatically. After a little while they got curious to see what the hell was going on, and they started putting line monitors on a few of the long calls. The were not actually listening in, just measuring changes in the voltage indicating activity, and found on some of the calls there was a strangely uniform voltage for hours sometimes. Intrigued, they started phoning some of these people, suspecting there might be equipment problems. What they found instead was that this activity was caused by people who were couples, in different cities, calling each other before bed, saying good night, and then SETTING THE PHONE DOWN ON THE PILLOW all night so they could "sleep in the same bed". Just because they could. Do you consider that "reasonable" usage of long distance lines?
Here's something to try on a dare. just TRY backing up that 500GB drive in a month on a standard cable connection. My guess is with the average upstream it'll take you over 2.5 months to transmit that much data. I had to back up 100 GB of a client's data from their office in Edmonton to Vancouver, and they were on a standard cable connection. Their maximum upload settled in around 64 KB/s - 80 KB/s. The most efficient way to do it was to transmit the 3 GB or so of critical accounting data overnight the first day, and then courier a portable hard drive of the rest.
So IMHO, backing up 500GB to an online service at this point in time isn't really feasible. Maybe if we were in Japan and had 100Mbit fiber to the house that would be feasible.
Oh for fucks sake. Comcast is putting a 250GB cap on it. I, in Canada have a Shaw business account with the X-Treem or whatever it is option that gives me a grand total of 130GB a month transfer. I run a web server at home, I also run a backup server that backs up no less than 3 remote sites to my place twice a week just for geographical distribution (house is about 35 miles from downtown). I also download a bunch of things including audiovisual entertainments, and other things, surf the web, have people try and break in to my webserver, and a hundred other things. And I never exceed my cap. Ever. Once, with 5 days to go, and Shaw's customer service site reporting that my monthly usage was only 30GB that month, I thought to myself just for fun, I should see how much I can download in 5 days, after all that's 100GB going to waste, right :). Didn't put more than a moderate dent in it.
You, if you are doing what you describe above will NEVER "blow the bandwidth cap". Especially if it's twice what I can't use up.
The only way this will inconvenience anyone is if they are not a "moderate or heavy surfer" and are in fact running torrent downloads 24/7/365 pulling a constant load of 100kBps or more.
Think about this. Comcast's cap is 250GB, yes? There is 2,592,000 seconds in 30 days. 250,000 MB / 2,592,000 = .096451. That means to exceed your cap, you must have a constant network load of .096 megabytes PER SECOND all month. I SERIOUSLY doubt that's the case if you are using it as described.
Are you kidding me? You do know the "Article" is actually a press release from the plaintiff's lawyers, right? And some of those claims, like "a billion dollars in economic damage"? They think they could make a billion dollars in revenue for a mail migration tool? Fuck off. Let's put this in perspective. Grand Theft Auto IV *might* come close to making a billion dollars in revenue. Some mail migration tool from a company nobody's ever heard of, not so much.
Bullshit. They're losing customers because they treat everyone like thieves. Stardock doesn't and last I looked they're doing quite well.
The principle problem I have is the companies and how they want it both ways. When you purchase software you're not buying it, you're "licensing" it. But if something happens to the media your licensed software came on, like it was scratched or broken and rendered unusable, you have to purchase another media at full price, despite the fact you've already "licensed" it.
Use services like Steam and this problem goes away. Although Steam has a few issues if you don't have an active net connection as well, so that could be improved on. But I vastly prefer their idea that once you buy a game, you can reinstall it on as many of your machines as you want so long as you're only playing it on one at a time. And there's no media to lose or need to have in the CD tray.
ID had probably the perfect setup back in the Q3Arena days. Buy our game, then take the disk and install it on all the machines in the office, everyone can play a LAN game for free. But if you want to play online, you need your own key. It was perfect, and it was a wonderful promotional tool. I know at least a dozen people in the office who got so hooked on Q3 during our LAN parties that they went out and bought Q3 to play online. All of those purchasers would never have even thought about it unless they were able to try it for free like they did.
Including how much you missed my point by? ;)
You're talking about doing a "smart shelf" type application. The problem with that is that each "gate" still costs hundreds of dollars if not thousands for a really useful one with multiple antennas positioned to read the tag in any orientation. You could get away with only one reader at each boundary as long as you set the item's location to begin with. But yes, very expensive.
Really. Most sub $100 readers have a range that can be measured in millimeters. To get something with about 3' or 4' of range for a single reader will cost four figures. I've done some fairly extensive testing with these readers, and it is possible to boost the range by adding external antennas (for more money). So I guess what I am saying is that what you are planning on doing is technically possible, but is not feasible for most peoples' "tinkering" budgets.
Which is exactly how Steve Jobs' brain works. I recall seeing a thing on when he was first shown the Segway prototypes back when nobody knew what "IT" was. Kamen showed him a few different potential models and the first thing Jobs said was "you want to only have one model. Don't confuse people with choice".
You're not the target market. You are running a "home server". I use Ubuntu at the office, and there are a few annoyances with it, but for the most part it works. And I use Windows XP for certain things and there are a few different annoyances with it but it works.
I will agree that stuff like RAID support isn't as seamless as it could be yet, but by the same token holding it up as an example of why nobody should try using Linux on the desktop is stupid. 99.9% of "average" desktop users out there don't even know what RAID is, let alone want to use it.
Actually, the sub-issue here is that Creative's Vista drivers for said hardware don't work properly at all. So this guy's drivers are the only useful Vista drivers for that hardware. The fact that he re-enabled Dolby is an interesting sideshow and the one Creative's using as a club here to beat him, but the real spotlight should be on what the hell is wrong with Creative that they can't have their team of day-job programmers make drivers that work in a year, but a lone hobbyist tinkerer can.
What about FreeNAS?
As long as someone has a spare computer around, it's pretty easy to install off a CD once you download the iso. If they have the technical skill to throw a couple big hard drives in the spare box, even better.
Communism is utopian. It is built on 19th century pseudo-science, and it ought to be no more respectable to be a Communist than to be a Phrenologist.
Not necessarily. See, here's the rub. Communism is actually the ideal social structure, except that in populations about ~500 individuals, it doesn't work because human nature derails it. There are many communist communities in north America, just under different names. Hutterite colonies, Amish colonies, etc. All of them succeed because they are relatively insular, and stay small. When a communistic community grows beyond a certain size, it inevitably self-destructs. To avoid this, the colony starts a new "daughter" colony as the population increases.
Oh, get the hell off your high horse. You say:
I made a choice to not pirate karaoke at our club. We have about 7000 songs in our collection. This in in contrast to the 10-15 venues that have popped up in our area with anywhere between 50,000-150,000 songs.
Karaoke is expensive. About $2 a track. So somebody please tell me, with a straight face how these new guys that just popped out of nowhere suddenly have a $300,000 karaoke collection. Fact is, they don't.
So if you're absolutely certain these new competitors of yours are using pirated tracks, why are you whining to the Slashdot crowd instead of say, phoning the RIAA's piracy hotline, or call ASCAP on them? It would seem to me that if ASCAP can get a restaurant to cough up $5500 over singing Happy Birthday then a pirate Karaoke place with 150,000 infringing songs, and hundreds, if not THOUSANDS of infringing "public performances" per week would be reduced to a smoking crater by them. So why haven't you? It would be a great way to eliminate your competition, and for only minutes of your time, no less.
Unless you have, in which case the fact that the competition's still there would mean that:
a) They bribed whoever came to get them or
b) They are on the up and up, and just have more financial backing than your place does. In which case, this has nothing to do with piracy, and everything to do with business competition.