It's another thing to ACTIVELY PROMOTE this type of company by putting them in your trade show booth.
These companies can do better.
Send a little note:
We don't care who you sell your product too, but don't actively promote scum like infinium. Who's side are you on? The nice guys, or the litigation prone?
Infinium is the company that is suing an enthusiest site and its operator personally for $20,000,000 for providing what appears to be basically accurate information about its products.[1]
The gaming / enthusiest market is a core market for Nvidia. Not only does Nvidia have to wake up in the morning knowing they are supporting a litigation prone (and otherwise apparently unsuccesful) company (infinium), but they also have to live with the business decision of actively supporting a company that is engaged in litigation with the very folks who buy and promote their product! And that the litigation appears to be pretty unjustified.
[1] PLEASE READ THE LINKS IN THE ARTICLE AND REACH YOUR OWN CONCLUSIONS. THESE ARE SIMPLY OPINIONS BASED ON A QUICK REVIEW OF THE LINKED MATERIAL.
I did this with my last system. I even had them test boot it in the store. It turns out though that that about 80% of the time the system has trouble with BIOS, a known issue with the motherboard being finnicky it turns out.
The small place doesn't have a great return policy. Basically, once you've purchased the CPU / Memory / MB etc you own them.
I've put together a TON of systems myself, and I'll be honest, until you've tested a combo of MB/CPU/Mem a significant number of times it is hard to guarantee reliability, there are a lot of little edge cases that you can spend a lot of time working on. And the focus on many review sites is speed.
I guess I havn't run into many shops that do a super easy return policy and reasonable prices.
I've gotten old enough that I no longer thrill at the idea of building my own system. I'm looking for something quiet, very reliable, and inexpensive. Performance comes behind these critiera.
Basically I'm looking for the Dell equivelant in the AMD world, someone who cranks them out in great quantities. I checked out HP etc, wasn't blown away. Also open to a smaller shop if they come with a good recommendation (and without the insanely gaudy cases, no rounded plastic please).
This is I think the perfect type of narrowly targeted investigative technique that I would support. The FBI KNOWS a crime has been committed, and is following and building an evidence trail.
The problem is, the FBI has squandered a lot of their social capital in the IT space by pulling all sorts of ugly students in trolling the net to harasss or intimidate folks or prosucte crimes that folks don't consider serious to merit such strong persuit.
Now, when they take an appropriate approach, folks are still skeptical.
There was a big push to get contributors for the NY Times ad. I contributed myself. The idea was to have something out connected to 1.0 release +/- 3 weeks.
I can't seem to even find a draft layout of the ad. Am I missing something? Worried that in their excitment at receiving lots of money, they've added a million features to the site, but have slowed up on the ad which attracted folks in the first place.
Probably I just need a clarifying pointer to the place where the mockups are.
Does NOT generate 100 watts of light with 22
on
Screw-in LED Floodlights
·
· Score: 5, Informative
THIS IS NOT TRUE!!
The specs for the light are I beleive 300 lumens. This is more like a 45-60 watt bulb.
A 100 watt bulb might generate 1500+ lumens.
It still is significantly more efficient, and with a SIGNIFICANTLY longer life span, but it is not equal to a 100 watt bulb.
When these first came out (won some awards) I checked them out for this very thing.
They also are not an all around type light a la a lightbulb, more of a spotlight (90 degree beam angle?), so better for flooding a wall or artwork with color / light.
The transition cost is significant with all the floating windows. Found it frustrating when moving back and forth.
Realize everyone who uses gimp loves this setup, but for those of us transitioning from almost any other graphics toolset it is a bit of a difficult transition.
They have created basically five potentially very solid franchises, the creative work they put into it etc etc. And then disney get's to take all the properties and do what they want with them.
Somone has got to be kicking themselves for agreeing to one of those contract terms. With their own creative properties pixar would be worth a fortune.
The danger with non-policy overrides is that they open up a store to bias claims, which can be far more costly then the actual benefit obtained.
i.e. The manager is more likely to over-ride for nicely dressed white women then for a minority.
Combined with the facts that bias does exist in the world, and I think you'd see at the larger chain corporate type places that human override of this type of system is harder then expected.
Was struck that the systems might be pretty simplistic in nature.
I could think of a few things to add:
Time since purchase (if only a day less likely to have been 'wardrobed'), returns relative to total purchases, quantity of total purchase made and not returned per customer etc.
Local variance on return policies is of course not possible, as this opens the store to charges of various types of bias.
I for example shop at Amazon a lot, even if their prices are higher. Why? Because I am happy and comfortable with their return policy among other things. Looking at my order history I notice I have been going their for seven years now, and my purchasing power has probably increased over that time.
A shame to lose long term / loyal customers.
That said, I had a friend who worked at a name brand clothing store, and people flat out do steal and return items. Or simply steal. That would drive me nuts.
The article and reporters may enjoy "fueling steam", they tend to enjoy stiring up controversy.
Linus saying it looks too invasive at the moment for him to roll-in without other testing? NO ONE is going to fault him for that. Linux has gotten where it is because people can actually use it, in contrast to plenty of other experimental efforts.
No one is going to think he is arrogant for doing his jobs. These patches can work their way into some feeder kernels first, and the usual cycle can work itself out.
Too many uninformed folks like to say, "Fork!" or "Arrrogant!" without ever having actually maintained any type of code base.
What the dear poster probably doesn't realize is that there are ALREADY real time Linux kernel varients in use out there, moving stuff mainline is hardly a fork, if anything montevista is trying to get out of the separate kernel maintenance business.
Who cares if there is prior art, if you, joe schmoe software developer doesn't have the $1 million or years of your life to give to the cause of walking your so called prior art through the court system. And even if you THINK you are right, don't think you have a certain chance of success.
At the end of this big fight, what have you got? Nothing much, perhaps not even court costs. All you have won is the right not to pay $1000 to some serial litigator.
The problem is that it is extremely easy to get software and other types of patents, and extremely expensive to effectively defend against them.
Companies realize this, and patents tons of stuff. If Microsoft were to sue IBM for patent violation (legal under US law and they likely have tons of patents IBM infringes because patents are always stretched every which way), IBM can pull the same stunt on them. It's basically MAD, and they all know it.
I'd agree with Bruce however, it's never a good idea to partner with people you can't stand. So ideally you'd get a good law firm instead of a bogus one. But the point of leveraging the market still stands in my mind.
What ends up happening is the big fish can play without being as concerned about patent issues as smaller fish, who are easier to hold up for money, have less money to defend themselves..
If the patent is legit (and I think open source efforts may generate a higher percentage of legit patents then the overall software patent pool) then you don't need to individually prosecute.
Write something licensing the patent royalty free to OSI Open Source software and if the patent is good you can always outsource prosecution to a shark firm.
Look at the Eloas patent, Kodak's patents, SCO and Boise (funding from baystar). These firms have patent prosecution down to assembly line extortion. Similar to personal injury, some of these would no doubt factor or buy the right to prosecute a certain number / specific set of companies and keep 90% of resultant awards or settlement as a fee.
Of course, this would have to be so carefully managed that I'm not sure if it would work. But with the right law firm / financial investor partnership the cost of litigation might not be such an issue. These are the exact tools the proprietary sector uses.
Software companies often generate and cross license patents in patent pools. This type of activity defends against other companies who actually build products and have many patents (though not against the IP firms with nothing to offer but litigation).
Novell's step is a different way of accomplishing this. Would be interesting if the open source movement itself started developing patents to play a role in patent pools.
What Jabber struggles with is a high quality open source reference server implementation that can serve as the center of gravity for server side jabber development.
Whether it is hgiher level C# / Java or lowerlevel C++ / C there isn't (yet) a body of software with a lot of developer momentum behind it.
Jive just released some of their stuff, will be interesting to see how that unwinds.
If Jabber could get to that gravity producing mass on an open source implementation, I think you'd start to see Jabber expand into reliable messaging, higher volume messaging, presense, communication, BPM and lots of others apps.
For $500 you avoid being on the hook, potentially for the rest of your LIFE, if something bad happened at your LAN party. You'd be insane not to get insurance!
Unless your business is to pay fortunes in medical/legal/pain and suffering bills, pass that risk to someone else who is used to taking the risk. Do you have the $50,000 to even defend yourself against a (possibly bogus) claim? If you are worried about $500, probably not! Does the insurance company? Probably so. You'd be insane not to take out insurance!
Do bad things ever happen? Yes they do!
Someone hurts themselves. Someone hurts someone else. Somone get's electrocuted by your wiring even though it is their own fault. Somone is on drugs and dies at your party. You'd be insane not to take out insurance.
Now if something bad did happen at your party, and someone needed expensive medical attention, don't you WANT to encourage them to get it? Don't you WANT to know that they will be taken care of by your insurance. This isn't just thinking about yourself, it is also thinking about them. You'd be insane to skip insurance!
Now, the per-event cost for a one event type thing every year is going to be high relative to what it would cost to add on event insurance to an existing type of policy. You might check if a local company would sponsor the event and add the liability coverage to their policy (it will be cheaper). If you have a friend who is an insurance broker you might try asking them as well, though at $500 we are not talking much here at all, so an insurage agent making $10 commission is not going to spend much time with you.
I don't play games online, and don't know insurance, but hope the 2 cents helps. Kudos for taking out insurance the first time around.
It would be great for folks to realize that writing apps cross-platform is one of the single best ways to get TONS of adoption, and ease any eventual transitions to Linux.
I'll bet that despite being more featurefull, Evolution will be trounced be Thunderbird in terms of usage in the foreseable future.
Can someone in the industry catch us up on the status / thinking on HD vs BlueRay?
We all realize that this battle will be deceided by marketing and content control. Would be interesting to understand a bit more about the relative strengths of the two techs under the hood.
With PS3 going Blu-Ray, perhaps XBox will go HD-DVD.
Are either of them simpler to use for storage etc for computers?
Technical bullet points pro and con between them.
Royalty hassles, which group will charge the most?
Slashdot Mirror
It's one thing to sell your product broadly.
It's another thing to ACTIVELY PROMOTE this type of company by putting them in your trade show booth.
These companies can do better.
Send a little note:
We don't care who you sell your product too, but don't actively promote scum like infinium.
Who's side are you on? The nice guys, or the litigation prone?
Mention the Nvidia CES booth.
I'm including some address below.
Carrie Cowan
Consumer/Games/Partner PR Manager
ccowan@nvidia.com
+1 (408) 486 7330
Brian Burke
Desktop PR Manager
bburke@nvidia.com
+1 (512) 401 4385
Bryan Del Rizzo
Platform Products PR Manager
bdelrizzo@nvidia.com
+1 (408) 486 2772
Infinium is the company that is suing an enthusiest site and its operator personally for $20,000,000 for providing what appears to be basically accurate information about its products.[1]
The gaming / enthusiest market is a core market for Nvidia. Not only does Nvidia have to wake up in the morning knowing they are supporting a litigation prone (and otherwise apparently unsuccesful) company (infinium), but they also have to live with the business decision of actively supporting a company that is engaged in litigation with the very folks who buy and promote their product! And that the litigation appears to be pretty unjustified.
[1]
PLEASE READ THE LINKS IN THE ARTICLE AND REACH YOUR OWN CONCLUSIONS. THESE ARE SIMPLY OPINIONS BASED ON A QUICK REVIEW OF THE LINKED MATERIAL.
I did this with my last system. I even had them test boot it in the store. It turns out though that that about 80% of the time the system has trouble with BIOS, a known issue with the motherboard being finnicky it turns out.
The small place doesn't have a great return policy. Basically, once you've purchased the CPU / Memory / MB etc you own them.
I've put together a TON of systems myself, and I'll be honest, until you've tested a combo of MB/CPU/Mem a significant number of times it is hard to guarantee reliability, there are a lot of little edge cases that you can spend a lot of time working on. And the focus on many review sites is speed.
I guess I havn't run into many shops that do a super easy return policy and reasonable prices.
I've gotten old enough that I no longer thrill at the idea of building my own system. I'm looking for something quiet, very reliable, and inexpensive. Performance comes behind these critiera.
Basically I'm looking for the Dell equivelant in the AMD world, someone who cranks them out in great quantities. I checked out HP etc, wasn't blown away. Also open to a smaller shop if they come with a good recommendation (and without the insanely gaudy cases, no rounded plastic please).
The amount of analysis Groklaw reviews SCO's claims with is like taking a jackhammer to a microbe.
3,000 words, 100 comments. Yes you destroy the microbe, but...
SCO is always good for a laugh, but I have to smile at groklaw too.
This is I think the perfect type of narrowly targeted investigative technique that I would support. The FBI KNOWS a crime has been committed, and is following and building an evidence trail.
The problem is, the FBI has squandered a lot of their social capital in the IT space by pulling all sorts of ugly students in trolling the net to harasss or intimidate folks or prosucte crimes that folks don't consider serious to merit such strong persuit.
Now, when they take an appropriate approach, folks are still skeptical.
There was a big push to get contributors for the NY Times ad. I contributed myself. The idea was to have something out connected to 1.0 release +/- 3 weeks.
I can't seem to even find a draft layout of the ad. Am I missing something? Worried that in their excitment at receiving lots of money, they've added a million features to the site, but have slowed up on the ad which attracted folks in the first place.
Probably I just need a clarifying pointer to the place where the mockups are.
THIS IS NOT TRUE!!
The specs for the light are I beleive 300 lumens. This is more like a 45-60 watt bulb.
A 100 watt bulb might generate 1500+ lumens.
It still is significantly more efficient, and with a SIGNIFICANTLY longer life span, but it is not equal to a 100 watt bulb.
When these first came out (won some awards) I checked them out for this very thing.
They also are not an all around type light a la a lightbulb, more of a spotlight (90 degree beam angle?), so better for flooding a wall or artwork with color / light.
Still super cool. Still a bit expensive.
Couldn't agree more.
The transition cost is significant with all the floating windows. Found it frustrating when moving back and forth.
Realize everyone who uses gimp loves this setup, but for those of us transitioning from almost any other graphics toolset it is a bit of a difficult transition.
Ouch. I just feel bad for pixar.
They have created basically five potentially very solid franchises, the creative work they put into it etc etc. And then disney get's to take all the properties and do what they want with them.
Somone has got to be kicking themselves for agreeing to one of those contract terms. With their own creative properties pixar would be worth a fortune.
What a shame.
The danger with non-policy overrides is that they open up a store to bias claims, which can be far more costly then the actual benefit obtained.
i.e. The manager is more likely to over-ride for nicely dressed white women then for a minority.
Combined with the facts that bias does exist in the world, and I think you'd see at the larger chain corporate type places that human override of this type of system is harder then expected.
Was struck that the systems might be pretty simplistic in nature.
I could think of a few things to add:
Time since purchase (if only a day less likely to have been 'wardrobed'), returns relative to total purchases, quantity of total purchase made and not returned per customer etc.
Local variance on return policies is of course not possible, as this opens the store to charges of various types of bias.
I for example shop at Amazon a lot, even if their prices are higher. Why? Because I am happy and comfortable with their return policy among other things. Looking at my order history I notice I have been going their for seven years now, and my purchasing power has probably increased over that time.
A shame to lose long term / loyal customers.
That said, I had a friend who worked at a name brand clothing store, and people flat out do steal and return items. Or simply steal. That would drive me nuts.
The article and reporters may enjoy "fueling steam", they tend to enjoy stiring up controversy.
Linus saying it looks too invasive at the moment for him to roll-in without other testing? NO ONE is going to fault him for that. Linux has gotten where it is because people can actually use it, in contrast to plenty of other experimental efforts.
No one is going to think he is arrogant for doing his jobs. These patches can work their way into some feeder kernels first, and the usual cycle can work itself out.
Too many uninformed folks like to say, "Fork!" or "Arrrogant!" without ever having actually maintained any type of code base.
What the dear poster probably doesn't realize is that there are ALREADY real time Linux kernel varients in use out there, moving stuff mainline is hardly a fork, if anything montevista is trying to get out of the separate kernel maintenance business.
Am I missing something obviou here?
Who cares if there is prior art, if you, joe schmoe software developer doesn't have the $1 million or years of your life to give to the cause of walking your so called prior art through the court system. And even if you THINK you are right, don't think you have a certain chance of success.
At the end of this big fight, what have you got? Nothing much, perhaps not even court costs. All you have won is the right not to pay $1000 to some serial litigator.
The problem is that it is extremely easy to get software and other types of patents, and extremely expensive to effectively defend against them.
Companies realize this, and patents tons of stuff. If Microsoft were to sue IBM for patent violation (legal under US law and they likely have tons of patents IBM infringes because patents are always stretched every which way), IBM can pull the same stunt on them. It's basically MAD, and they all know it.
I'd agree with Bruce however, it's never a good idea to partner with people you can't stand. So ideally you'd get a good law firm instead of a bogus one. But the point of leveraging the market still stands in my mind.
What ends up happening is the big fish can play without being as concerned about patent issues as smaller fish, who are easier to hold up for money, have less money to defend themselves..
If the patent is legit (and I think open source efforts may generate a higher percentage of legit patents then the overall software patent pool) then you don't need to individually prosecute.
Write something licensing the patent royalty free to OSI Open Source software and if the patent is good you can always outsource prosecution to a shark firm.
Look at the Eloas patent, Kodak's patents, SCO and Boise (funding from baystar). These firms have patent prosecution down to assembly line extortion. Similar to personal injury, some of these would no doubt factor or buy the right to prosecute a certain number / specific set of companies and keep 90% of resultant awards or settlement as a fee.
Of course, this would have to be so carefully managed that I'm not sure if it would work. But with the right law firm / financial investor partnership the cost of litigation might not be such an issue. These are the exact tools the proprietary sector uses.
Software companies often generate and cross license patents in patent pools. This type of activity defends against other companies who actually build products and have many patents (though not against the IP firms with nothing to offer but litigation).
Novell's step is a different way of accomplishing this. Would be interesting if the open source movement itself started developing patents to play a role in patent pools.
I noticed they've added a powered by sun graphic at the bottom of their page, which is loading INCREDIBLY slowly.
Coincidence, or did the sun manage to melt them, putting the bomb in dot com?
Compared to NASA manned shuttle launches, and the tens of other launches world wide these guys produce relatively little dangerous waste.
So perhaps the enviro tax can be paid to them.
Instead of $2 billion and tons of toxic waste, we save a few billion and the enviroment.
What Jabber struggles with is a high quality open source reference server implementation that can serve as the center of gravity for server side jabber development.
Whether it is hgiher level C# / Java or lowerlevel C++ / C there isn't (yet) a body of software with a lot of developer momentum behind it.
Jive just released some of their stuff, will be interesting to see how that unwinds.
If Jabber could get to that gravity producing mass on an open source implementation, I think you'd start to see Jabber expand into reliable messaging, higher volume messaging, presense, communication, BPM and lots of others apps.
DON'T SKIP INSURANCE.
Insurance is only expensive if you don't need it.
For $500 you avoid being on the hook, potentially for the rest of your LIFE, if something bad happened at your LAN party. You'd be insane not to get insurance!
Unless your business is to pay fortunes in medical/legal/pain and suffering bills, pass that risk to someone else who is used to taking the risk. Do you have the $50,000 to even defend yourself against a (possibly bogus) claim? If you are worried about $500, probably not! Does the insurance company? Probably so. You'd be insane not to take out insurance!
Do bad things ever happen? Yes they do!
Someone hurts themselves. Someone hurts someone else. Somone get's electrocuted by your wiring even though it is their own fault. Somone is on drugs and dies at your party. You'd be insane not to take out insurance.
Now if something bad did happen at your party, and someone needed expensive medical attention, don't you WANT to encourage them to get it? Don't you WANT to know that they will be taken care of by your insurance. This isn't just thinking about yourself, it is also thinking about them. You'd be insane to skip insurance!
Now, the per-event cost for a one event type thing every year is going to be high relative to what it would cost to add on event insurance to an existing type of policy. You might check if a local company would sponsor the event and add the liability coverage to their policy (it will be cheaper). If you have a friend who is an insurance broker you might try asking them as well, though at $500 we are not talking much here at all, so an insurage agent making $10 commission is not going to spend much time with you.
I don't play games online, and don't know insurance, but hope the 2 cents helps. Kudos for taking out insurance the first time around.
It would be great for folks to realize that writing apps cross-platform is one of the single best ways to get TONS of adoption, and ease any eventual transitions to Linux.
I'll bet that despite being more featurefull, Evolution will be trounced be Thunderbird in terms of usage in the foreseable future.
But cool to see a very swanky looking release.
Anyone have a torrent of the whole movie up. Happy to stick a few mbs behind it as well.
Can someone in the industry catch us up on the status / thinking on HD vs BlueRay?
We all realize that this battle will be deceided by marketing and content control. Would be interesting to understand a bit more about the relative strengths of the two techs under the hood.
With PS3 going Blu-Ray, perhaps XBox will go HD-DVD.
Are either of them simpler to use for storage etc for computers?
Technical bullet points pro and con between them.
Royalty hassles, which group will charge the most?
Which looks like it has the momentum so far.
Ouch, that is an ooop's ;).
Google develops the rich web app stack. Applications can be deployed through the web with richer interfaces then HTML provides.
Google has some of these apps (search, email etc).
Google get's richer.
EV1 Servers paid them a significant amount as well I beleive, which is being used to fund there litigation.