It's the analysts who are (probably) underestimating Linux. You can be absolutely certain that both MSFT and AAPL are very aware of their competition. They'll both have labs full of Linux installs (plus OSX and Windows respectively) where they examine what new things are added, old things removed, what's fixed and what's left broken. These are companies with billion dollar budgets. Spending maybe a million (20 staff plus a big office) to research your competition is obvious.
You're ignoring the opportunity cost. Sure, it'll end up returning 3 times the amount it cost to make, which is a decent profit, but could the studio have spent that money making another (or two, or three other) films that would have done better? If so then Watchmen was the wrong choice. In this case would they have been better off making a couple of PG-13 films?
I don't think anyone has really argued that. The main argument "in favour" is that piracy doesn't affect sales - most of those who download the game wouldn't have bought it in the first place. This example is interesting for me in two ways:
Firstly, and somewhat negatively, it demonstrates that people pirating your game can increase the cost of running the servers for it considerably. That is a strong argument in favour of anti-piracy techniques such as DRM (assuming the DRM costs less than the cost of additional servers).
Secondly, and rather more positively, in the case of a online multiplayer game, having 6 times the number of players from the off is a bonus. A community of 18,000 would amount to empty servers a lot of the time especially if the game is available globally. A community of 118,000 would still be quiet in comparison to games like Counterstrike, but it might well be large enough to attract more players, at which point perhaps the game 'snowballs' into a huge community.
As with everything regarding piracy there are two sides to the coin. Only a very detailed statistical analysis of the numbers could tell you if it was a good or a bad thing, and even then people would still argue with the result.
With Google you can block it by switching off cookies if you don't trust Google's opt out option. With DPI at the ISP level you can't. You have no control over what they're monitoring (save for doing something like using an encrypted tunnel to a proxy outside of the ISPs view). That's a pretty significant difference.
We have computer controlled windmills, why not computer controlled sailing cargo vessels?
INAM (I'm Not A Miller) and I'm not up-to-date with the tech, but as far as I'm aware windmills can't plough into harbours destroying themselves and their cargo, potentially killing lots of people at the same time.
The notion that you can "gift" (or "buy") your way to being rich without doing any hard work, or having a creative idea, is so completely stupid that anyone who believes it, assuming they're in full control of their mental faculties, deserves what they get.
Comparing a 90 day period to a 365 day period isn't a like for like comparison (obviously). Statistically it's meaningless. Why not pick a 1 day period when there wasn't a spot in 2008 and there wasn't a spot in 2009 and say "Sun spot activity is unchanged!". It's silly.
Actually going fast is pretty easy so long as your aerodynamics are sound. All you need is enough energy input to counter air resistance and friction from the wheels and you can maintain whatever speed you like. The difficult bit is accelerating to a high speed quickly. It'd be easier to wait until people get over wanting to go fast than design a solar vehicle that can accelerate from a standstill anything like a petrol car.
Fortunately I can see that happening. As the price of driving goes up people's priorities will change.
There are flaws that have been in Windows for four years and Microsoft haven't patched them? I can't really say I'm surprised, but to come out with warnings like this shows an incredible contempt for their customers.
"Yeah, we know, we made rubbish software, you'd better take care now."
Storing your data in "the cloud" isn't really for home users, the advantages are minimal. It's for businesses who would normally incur massive bandwidth costs but instead are able to take advantage of the huge economies of scale a cloud vendor can provide.
A typical example is Twitter - all the user assets like avatars are hosted on Amazon's S3 service. That means Twitter doesn't have to pay for all that bandwidth, storage server space, redundant capacity, etc. They just pay a monthly fee that's far less per gigabyte than if they did it in-house. The disadvantage is that it ties them to Amazon.
I suspect that there'll be a few cloud vendors that sink in the next couple of years because they're not good enough to compete. Personally, I'd be wary of using one with only $11m in fund capital. It sounds a lot, but it's not. They could burn through that in months trying to market their service (against competition like Amazon and Google no less), and be left with no money having shut up shop, at which point all their existing clients would have a hell of a time migrating to another provider. They clearly have the technical ability to build a working service, but whether they have the ability to turn that into a service that will last in the market place is a whole different ball game.
That said, if I was researching a vendor to go with, I'd obviously read up on who else is with them on the non-technical side. They've got this far. That's more than a fair few others.
On a more serious note. They should include proper buttons for skipping tracks and and changing albums. Whilst the touch screen might look all fancy, it's not very useful when you're walking down a crowded street and just want to stick your hand in your pocket and skip to the next track.
I think you might be overestimating what's possible with a software update.;)
Yes it's worth developing games for the web. You can make a big pile of money and have loads of fun at the same time. Loads of people have.
But Facebook is not the web. It's Facebook. They're different. Maybe Facebook isn't such a good platform for rolling out premium 'pay for' games. But even that I'm not convinced about. People do pay for stuff in FB. I think it's more likely to be the case that people just don't like having things taken away. The lesson here is that Facebook users are motivated by a carrot rather than a stick.
The places the government publicise that they want to keep secret aren't actually secret at all. They're a façade. Then there's the somewhat secret stuff that the government denies exists. The real secret stuff is the stuff the government never mentions.
Never heard the government mention their lunar base with telescopes that can see through the roofs of buildings and spy on you on the toilet? That's pretty much proof they've got one, but it's a secret!
To that end, using a darknet is actually reducing how free you are because you're not standing up to the authority or laws you're circumventing. Freedom is being able to do what you want to do without having to hide it.
Facebook [...] says it could make a billion dollars a year from advertising
Go on then.
I could say I can make eleventy dollars a furlong from my blog; that doesn't make it true. Only a dribbling moron would base a business decision (such as exchanging their website for stock) on such a claim.
1000+ unique visitors is nothing. Even if they all hit the site at lunchtime (1 hour window), and look at 30 pages each (very high estimate for a normal site) that's only 8 requests a second. That isn't a lot. A single server could cope easily, especially if it's mostly static content. As an example, a forum I run gets a sustained 1000+ users an hour and runs fine on one server.
As for "high availability", that depends on your definition of "high". If the site being down for a morning is a big problem then you'll need a redundant failover server. If it being down for 15 minutes is a problem then you'll need a couple of them. You won't need a load balancer for that because the redundant servers will be sitting there doing nothing most of the time (hopefully). You'll need something that detects the primary server is offline and switches to the backup automatically. You might also want to have a separate database server that mirrors the primary DB if you're storing a lot of user content, plus a backup for it (though the backup DB server could always be the same physical machine as one of the backup webservers).
Whoever told you that you'll need as many as 6 servers is just plain wrong. That would be a waste of money. Either that or you're just seeing this as an opportunity to buy lots of servers to play with, in which case buy whatever your budget will allow!:)
If you're a bit too busy to go out of the basement to look, bear in mind that it won't be coming around again for another 50 million years (give or take 500,000 or so), so you might want to brave going outside after all.
Slashdot Mirror
It's the analysts who are (probably) underestimating Linux. You can be absolutely certain that both MSFT and AAPL are very aware of their competition. They'll both have labs full of Linux installs (plus OSX and Windows respectively) where they examine what new things are added, old things removed, what's fixed and what's left broken. These are companies with billion dollar budgets. Spending maybe a million (20 staff plus a big office) to research your competition is obvious.
Not having played with your penis I can't really state this as a fact, but I don't think I'd enjoy it very much.
You're ignoring the opportunity cost. Sure, it'll end up returning 3 times the amount it cost to make, which is a decent profit, but could the studio have spent that money making another (or two, or three other) films that would have done better? If so then Watchmen was the wrong choice. In this case would they have been better off making a couple of PG-13 films?
I don't think anyone has really argued that. The main argument "in favour" is that piracy doesn't affect sales - most of those who download the game wouldn't have bought it in the first place. This example is interesting for me in two ways:
Firstly, and somewhat negatively, it demonstrates that people pirating your game can increase the cost of running the servers for it considerably. That is a strong argument in favour of anti-piracy techniques such as DRM (assuming the DRM costs less than the cost of additional servers).
Secondly, and rather more positively, in the case of a online multiplayer game, having 6 times the number of players from the off is a bonus. A community of 18,000 would amount to empty servers a lot of the time especially if the game is available globally. A community of 118,000 would still be quiet in comparison to games like Counterstrike, but it might well be large enough to attract more players, at which point perhaps the game 'snowballs' into a huge community.
As with everything regarding piracy there are two sides to the coin. Only a very detailed statistical analysis of the numbers could tell you if it was a good or a bad thing, and even then people would still argue with the result.
That's because using Linux gives you dandruff.
I'm just kidding.
Living in a basement is what gives you dandruff. :)
With Google you can block it by switching off cookies if you don't trust Google's opt out option. With DPI at the ISP level you can't. You have no control over what they're monitoring (save for doing something like using an encrypted tunnel to a proxy outside of the ISPs view). That's a pretty significant difference.
Rude names. :)
People without social lives don't use social networks.
INAM (I'm Not A Miller) and I'm not up-to-date with the tech, but as far as I'm aware windmills can't plough into harbours destroying themselves and their cargo, potentially killing lots of people at the same time.
The notion that you can "gift" (or "buy") your way to being rich without doing any hard work, or having a creative idea, is so completely stupid that anyone who believes it, assuming they're in full control of their mental faculties, deserves what they get.
Comparing a 90 day period to a 365 day period isn't a like for like comparison (obviously). Statistically it's meaningless. Why not pick a 1 day period when there wasn't a spot in 2008 and there wasn't a spot in 2009 and say "Sun spot activity is unchanged!". It's silly.
Aren't these people just admitting that they were incompetent? That's refreshingly honest of them.
Actually going fast is pretty easy so long as your aerodynamics are sound. All you need is enough energy input to counter air resistance and friction from the wheels and you can maintain whatever speed you like. The difficult bit is accelerating to a high speed quickly. It'd be easier to wait until people get over wanting to go fast than design a solar vehicle that can accelerate from a standstill anything like a petrol car.
Fortunately I can see that happening. As the price of driving goes up people's priorities will change.
There are flaws that have been in Windows for four years and Microsoft haven't patched them? I can't really say I'm surprised, but to come out with warnings like this shows an incredible contempt for their customers.
"Yeah, we know, we made rubbish software, you'd better take care now."
Jeez.
Storing your data in "the cloud" isn't really for home users, the advantages are minimal. It's for businesses who would normally incur massive bandwidth costs but instead are able to take advantage of the huge economies of scale a cloud vendor can provide.
A typical example is Twitter - all the user assets like avatars are hosted on Amazon's S3 service. That means Twitter doesn't have to pay for all that bandwidth, storage server space, redundant capacity, etc. They just pay a monthly fee that's far less per gigabyte than if they did it in-house. The disadvantage is that it ties them to Amazon.
I suspect that there'll be a few cloud vendors that sink in the next couple of years because they're not good enough to compete. Personally, I'd be wary of using one with only $11m in fund capital. It sounds a lot, but it's not. They could burn through that in months trying to market their service (against competition like Amazon and Google no less), and be left with no money having shut up shop, at which point all their existing clients would have a hell of a time migrating to another provider. They clearly have the technical ability to build a working service, but whether they have the ability to turn that into a service that will last in the market place is a whole different ball game.
That said, if I was researching a vendor to go with, I'd obviously read up on who else is with them on the non-technical side. They've got this far. That's more than a fair few others.
I think you might be overestimating what's possible with a software update. ;)
Yes it's worth developing games for the web. You can make a big pile of money and have loads of fun at the same time. Loads of people have.
But Facebook is not the web. It's Facebook. They're different. Maybe Facebook isn't such a good platform for rolling out premium 'pay for' games. But even that I'm not convinced about. People do pay for stuff in FB. I think it's more likely to be the case that people just don't like having things taken away. The lesson here is that Facebook users are motivated by a carrot rather than a stick.
The places the government publicise that they want to keep secret aren't actually secret at all. They're a façade. Then there's the somewhat secret stuff that the government denies exists. The real secret stuff is the stuff the government never mentions.
Never heard the government mention their lunar base with telescopes that can see through the roofs of buildings and spy on you on the toilet? That's pretty much proof they've got one, but it's a secret!
Being anonymous is not the same as being free.
To that end, using a darknet is actually reducing how free you are because you're not standing up to the authority or laws you're circumventing. Freedom is being able to do what you want to do without having to hide it.
I did.
--: This post has been monitored by HM Prison Service Parkhurst IT Services :--
You have? Why don't you post them here too then? ;)
Facebook? Or my blog? ;)
Go on then.
I could say I can make eleventy dollars a furlong from my blog; that doesn't make it true. Only a dribbling moron would base a business decision (such as exchanging their website for stock) on such a claim.
1000+ unique visitors is nothing. Even if they all hit the site at lunchtime (1 hour window), and look at 30 pages each (very high estimate for a normal site) that's only 8 requests a second. That isn't a lot. A single server could cope easily, especially if it's mostly static content. As an example, a forum I run gets a sustained 1000+ users an hour and runs fine on one server.
As for "high availability", that depends on your definition of "high". If the site being down for a morning is a big problem then you'll need a redundant failover server. If it being down for 15 minutes is a problem then you'll need a couple of them. You won't need a load balancer for that because the redundant servers will be sitting there doing nothing most of the time (hopefully). You'll need something that detects the primary server is offline and switches to the backup automatically. You might also want to have a separate database server that mirrors the primary DB if you're storing a lot of user content, plus a backup for it (though the backup DB server could always be the same physical machine as one of the backup webservers).
Whoever told you that you'll need as many as 6 servers is just plain wrong. That would be a waste of money. Either that or you're just seeing this as an opportunity to buy lots of servers to play with, in which case buy whatever your budget will allow! :)
If you're a bit too busy to go out of the basement to look, bear in mind that it won't be coming around again for another 50 million years (give or take 500,000 or so), so you might want to brave going outside after all.