Month-old stories used to get posted, but no we are getting links to stories that aren't even available yet! Maybe Taco finally got his time machine that was backordered at ThinkGeek.
Has anyone done a cost-efficiency comparison of dual-cpu performance vs. a simple cpu when considering the costs involved (special SMP boards, etc.) In otherwords is it more economical to buy two web servers or one smp server with tons of ram? Do certain applications (cpu intensive obviously) save money with SMP systems verus others that depend on IO throughput, etc and what applications are those? I'm really interested in knowing with better evidence than "well, I think..."
All of the computer makers are currently facing declining sales. Some is to blame for dot coms folding and less businesses buying computers, but many feel that comsumer sales have slowed because that 500hz computer they bought last year is just fine. It's not like the days of 286s where each jump was a major improvement for end users. Most people aren't having a problem reading mail or browsing the web with an "obsolete" 500mhz computer. They just don't see the need for a 1.5ghz model. What does this have to do with hard drives?
Well, the average user just isn't filling up an 80 gig drive. They don't want 200gig drives. So even if we hit a brick wall in terms of storage per inch, I just don't think the commodity market will be harmed. Once 256gig drives and the like are avaliable to end users, I don't think much more will be needed until more people start using their computers for video recording and other high storage requirements. And if the embedded device manufacturers have their way, that will never happen. Remember the niche markets like video editing don't drive the commodity market.
Maybe an upper limit on drives will just decrease the number of models a retailer has to sale and thus increase profit. Plus maybe this will give researchers more time to focus on speeding up existing drives and improving reliability.
Napster has effectively lost what few remaining users it had now that they aren't running at all (and haven't been for over a week). The newly announced pay service is completely new software where certain approved songs from labels and artists bought off are available at low quality in some yet-unspecified format where users "can't make cd copies", or so they say. Basically it's a service where you can download low-quality versions of songs to listen to on your computer for a fee, except you have to supply your own bandwidth and put up with only getting what is offered by others. Mark my words - that will never be sucessful with AudioGalaxy, etc around now.
In other words, napster is history. The media is just writing stories about it because they don't have anything better to write about it or don't have any clue what they are saying (See the hilarious CNN stories about Microsoft letting manufactures alter desktop icons. Every time it was repeated on headline news last night, it changed slightly until it was so far from true it was hilarious. Poor anchors.). AudioGalaxy, etc are the stories these days, not napster.
Life can sustain in wildly different environments, not just temperate grasslands.
But HA! We got the grasslands! It's not all computers and slashdot out there... Go enjoy what we have before your cheap monitor makes your eyes fall out.
If Adobe doesn't defend their copyright now, if say MS decided to release IllustratorXP, MS could site KIllustrator as a case Adobe made no attempt to protect it's trademarks. Legally speaking, if you don't defend your trademarks, your ability to enforce them in court is weakened or nonexistant.
If Adobe doesn't take steps to protect their trademarks, in the future someone could claim that a past failure to defend them means they no longer control them. In other words, Adobe really had no choice.
Just because KIllustrator is free doesn't mean they can copy the Adobe program AND use it's name. Don't get mad at Adobe, they were between a rock and a hard place. I think this solution really works well for everyone. They COULD have sued KIllustrator out of existence. Lets be glad they responded so calmly the second time around and lets stop naming our free software by adding the letter of our desktop environment to the name of a trademarked program.
was the iPAQ from compaq. The iPAQ has just overtaken even palm in sales (yes, it costs more so it doesn't take as many, and yes it doesn't have palm's installed base). Businesses usually follow the proverbial "rule of threes". It's very unusual for more than 3 big companies in an industry to survive. With palm, handspring, and compaq, there just isn't any room left for the Psion.
No, actually it was one of the worst slashdot comments ever. It was neither clever nor insightful. I shall never do such a thing again, unless I get really bored.
...According to our trafficompu2000 3d system, gridlock is covering the metro area. In certain areas espec-
DJ: What's a trafficompu2000, Captain Bob? Guy in Traffic Copter: Well it uses Cell Phone signals to track traffic - DJ: Hey, aren't cell phones in moving vechicles illegal Captain? Guy in Traffic Copter: Well, it sends them a ticket at the same time! The mayor has got this city running like a machine. Back to you, Rob.
... Stay tuned for more team traffic coverage every six minutes on W-W-W-W-W-FUN AM1240!
All slashdot open-source bias aside, this is the perfect example of how the government can use our money to benefit as many people as possible. There is nothing wrong with selling your software, but open-source is a great way to make best use of public money since the public benefits as well as the goverment agency.
I've got no problem with Microsoft selling to Coke or Ford or whomever, but I think the government should take advantage of and improve public property whenever possible. This is the IP equivelent of public parks that everyone can enjoy and share. Instead of using our taxes to further the causes of private companies, we can use our taxes to improve software for everyone.
Yeah, you all say the meditation music thing is a marketing ploy to get the company's name out. How could you accuse them of such a thing? It's not like they are going out of their way to mention the product by name in every report and it's not like they charge almost $150 per cd. Oh wait, yes they are and yes they do.
I never said the machine was BAD. I think the design is very clever. Your article said exactly what I said. It requires a different sytle of programming and that involves a substantial learning curve. My original post claimed that spending so much time and money climbing this mountain might not be so economical when the XBOX and gamecube are simpler and, yes, much less revolutionary in design. If it costs X dollars to write an X-BOX game and x+50 for PS2 and the user base eqaulizes, why pick the PS2? The X-BOX is just a glorified PC with a fast bus. But that's its greatest strength for a developer.
PS: Trip Hawkins says "It's historic, a mass market appliance that fundamentally changes society in the same way the printing press did." about EVERY system he is involved with. (See 3d0 multiplayer). Get some better quotes next time.
Sony really shot itself in the foot by releasing a machine so impossible to program. Numerous companies have jumped ship because of that single fact. If you are running a game development company, you have to keep yourself afloat. The game industry is not an easy industry to survive in. Timing is everything. Taking a year a develop your game for the PS2 and learn all its intricacies isn't reasonable when you could just port your PC version to the X-BOX in three months.
Even if you aren't porting, it's much easier to find trained directx developers and teach them a few X-BOX tricks than it is to teach coders a whole different style of programming needed for the PS2 (steaming textures in mid frame, etc) because of it's low system memory and odd design. If you can take "commodity coders" and use them for 6-8 months compared to sony-gurus for 12 months, which is a better way to make a profit?
In a 3+ console world, a game company wants to hit as many platforms as possible while still being economical. Square is no longer producing games just for the PS2 because it wants to maximize profits. Next time around, Square probably won't do a PS version at all because it won't be worth the time/money investment compared to just doing X-BOX/gamecube versions.
Yes, the new version of the Napster software includes acoustic fingerprinting software that is actually pretty good at stopping you from sharing much of anything. A report I saw yesterday claimed the average user went from sharing 220 files in February to 1.5 songs this week. According to all reports, Napster is all but empty.
But that is just phase one of Napster's plan. Phase two is the pay service. Napster has licensed MusicNet's new software to allow paying users to share blessed files (those from labels Napster has bought off, like this week's deal with European labels). The catch is that files will be "limited in quality" and users will be "unable to burn downloads to CD". Basically, the new software which they are beta testing right now shares little to no resemblence to Napster's current software.
The plan is that as soon as the pay service is implemented, the free service (aka what you know as Napster) will dissapear completely. Napster is being reborn as yet another ill-concieved.dot com, right up there with pets.com selling 15 pound bags of dogfood over the internet. Napster's idea is that you will use a proprietary client to share only songs Napster has rights to, you will only be able to download poor quality copies, and you won't be able to burn these to CDs. For this priviledge, they want you to PAY them. Basically, it's no longer a file sharing system, but instead a pay music download site that tricks you into supplying the bandwidth.
Blocking other Napster clients is only the first step. Soon, even their free clients won't work. The "new" pay Napster has little relation to the current Napster. It's a completely different thing.
I was watching a show on TechTV last week (bleh) and a little kid called in and asked how he could get on the internet with his Apple II. They were nice enough to explain to him how to use a shell account with his modem, but you couldn't help from noticing a sense of shock in their voices. Remember that not everyone can afford the latest equiptment and some people are stuck with ancient computers, especially kids. One man's nostalgia resource is another man's download.com.
I agree with what you have said. The original winCE devices were beyond awful. They didn't even sync with windows half the time, especially if you were using NT. I was just wondering if what she said had any effect that resulted in the current situation. One of the interview questions raised the idea that inaccurate predictions could cause the market to change and make them accurate. I just said in this case, I think it was palm's problem, not the predictions.
I have a question on the area of predictions in general. For example, fellow IDC analyst Jill House has been severaly negative on Palm over the years, with regard to the Win CE operating system and devices. A sample quote from her in Feb. 2000 read, "If I was Palm, I would be beside myself with panic."
It was announced this week that iPAQ will overtake the Palm very shortly (assuming you could Palm, inc seperate from Handspring, etc). Maybe she was right all along? Or did her predictions have some influence? Personally, I think the problem is that palms were great in 1997 but they haven't really gotten significantly better since then. But it is interesting to think about.
Automatic Media (owned Suck and Feed) was a business. The bottom line is that they have to have money to pay employees or they can no longer exist. So what kind of options does an online magazine have for funding?
Banners - These suck. The cpm's are falling every day. For whatever reason people aren't convinced they are worth paying much for. Also, half the time the banner company or advertiser doesn't pay the bill. An thus you can't pay your bills. There was a GREAT article on this on kuro5hin a while back where some people actually ran the numbers. It might be possible to make a profit with banners (slashdot), but it is very very hard. Most sites are lucky if they can pay for hosting with banners.
Subscription - Could be a viable idea. Too bad no one is subscribing. If you are a small professional publication like Suck, you have to compete with the conglomerates on the news side and the bloggers on the community side. Unfortunately, that leaves you stuck in the middle charging money while those you are competing with are giving away the content for free. What do you have to offer? Even sites that have rabidly loyal readers probably can't make this work. Why? Look at which real magazines sell well. Maxim? Stuff for Men (same company)? Generic woman's magazine? All those magazines are super-formulaic dribble targeted at the general population. Suck and Feed just don't appeal to most readers. Certainly not enough to make any real money. Look at me, I'm a total web addict and I didn't read either.
Micropayments - Am I the only one who thinks this is stupid? What successful business plan supports itself with tiny margins. How do you collect payments without spending more on the collection process? Ask anyone who's appeared on a talk show. It's more work than it's worth to cash some 8 cent checks you get from reruns. The only way this could work would be if a close system like PayPal let people have accounts and slushed micropayments around internally. But I still don't think it will work.
The balanced financial plan - We've taken a different approach. Our business plan doesn't require us to make any money. What we pay for hosting each month is about what I would spend on a meal at Wendy's. Add to that a slashdot-like submission system and our desire to write good articles about music for the fun of it and you have a system that works. We can never go out of business because we have almost no real costs. The worst thing that could happen is that we get bored. On the plus side, we don't have to display annoying standard banners or anything like that. Any money we make from affiliate type deals or short-term advertising contracts with specific businesses goes right into our pockets (and back into the site). IF people enjoy our content and site enough to want to pay for it or we grow large enough to attract some other sort of deal, fine. But we are happy now. I'd do it just for the free concert tickets.
Ok, so maybe I'm being negative. But the bottom line is that the mainstream press does a nice job of catering to the mainstream. The blog community caters to those who want an online community. Business-wise, there just isn't much room left. I say start the site because you care about what you are writing about. If a couple years down the road it becomes profitable, great.
40KB download? 12KB upload? $150 a month? Yeah right... That is rediculous.
Service: 150x12=$1800/year
Dish: $850-2750, they recommend the "right one"
Yearly licensing free: $70
Activation: $50
Hrm.. so if you keep the service for a year, that runs you about $230 - $390 per month for a glorified modem speedwise. You could probably save money by getting about 4 phone lines and isp accounts and combining the bandwidth. I guess a government is the only organization that would consider something like this.
Anyone who ever gets on irc these days can see that pirated copies of TV shows are getting really popular. There are groups that exist only to release say Sopranos or Simpsons episodes. This hack will A. reduce their work-load tremendously. B. allow one person to basically capture/encode several shows instead of it taking several people to do one show. I'd be upset if I was HBO. At this rate I would not be surprized if we start seeing yesterday's baseball game,etc on the napster clones and IRC on a daily basis. But then again, isn't this what is supposed to happen? Video content on the net...
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the average user just isn't filling up an 80 gig drive. They don't want 200gig drives. So even if we hit a brick wall in terms of storage per inch, I just don't think the commodity market will be harmed. Once 256gig drives and the like are avaliable to end users, I don't think much more will be needed until more people start using their computers for video recording and other high storage requirements. And if the embedded device manufacturers have their way, that will never happen. Remember the niche markets like video editing don't drive the commodity market.
Maybe an upper limit on drives will just decrease the number of models a retailer has to sale and thus increase profit. Plus maybe this will give researchers more time to focus on speeding up existing drives and improving reliability.
In other words, napster is history. The media is just writing stories about it because they don't have anything better to write about it or don't have any clue what they are saying (See the hilarious CNN stories about Microsoft letting manufactures alter desktop icons. Every time it was repeated on headline news last night, it changed slightly until it was so far from true it was hilarious. Poor anchors.). AudioGalaxy, etc are the stories these days, not napster.
But HA! We got the grasslands! It's not all computers and slashdot out there... Go enjoy what we have before your cheap monitor makes your eyes fall out.
If Adobe doesn't defend their copyright now, if say MS decided to release IllustratorXP, MS could site KIllustrator as a case Adobe made no attempt to protect it's trademarks. Legally speaking, if you don't defend your trademarks, your ability to enforce them in court is weakened or nonexistant.
Just because KIllustrator is free doesn't mean they can copy the Adobe program AND use it's name. Don't get mad at Adobe, they were between a rock and a hard place. I think this solution really works well for everyone. They COULD have sued KIllustrator out of existence. Lets be glad they responded so calmly the second time around and lets stop naming our free software by adding the letter of our desktop environment to the name of a trademarked program.
I'm just glad everything turned out so well.
It's unfortunate, but thats reality.
DJ: What's a trafficompu2000, Captain Bob?
Guy in Traffic Copter: Well it uses Cell Phone signals to track traffic -
DJ: Hey, aren't cell phones in moving vechicles illegal Captain?
Guy in Traffic Copter: Well, it sends them a ticket at the same time! The mayor has got this city running like a machine. Back to you, Rob.
YOU (to friend on phone): Damn!
"Punch the moving slashdot editor and win $20*"
*There is no slashdot editor
I've got no problem with Microsoft selling to Coke or Ford or whomever, but I think the government should take advantage of and improve public property whenever possible. This is the IP equivelent of public parks that everyone can enjoy and share. Instead of using our taxes to further the causes of private companies, we can use our taxes to improve software for everyone.
PS: I posted the story first
PS: Trip Hawkins says "It's historic, a mass market appliance that fundamentally changes society in the same way the printing press did." about EVERY system he is involved with. (See 3d0 multiplayer). Get some better quotes next time.
Even if you aren't porting, it's much easier to find trained directx developers and teach them a few X-BOX tricks than it is to teach coders a whole different style of programming needed for the PS2 (steaming textures in mid frame, etc) because of it's low system memory and odd design. If you can take "commodity coders" and use them for 6-8 months compared to sony-gurus for 12 months, which is a better way to make a profit?
In a 3+ console world, a game company wants to hit as many platforms as possible while still being economical. Square is no longer producing games just for the PS2 because it wants to maximize profits. Next time around, Square probably won't do a PS version at all because it won't be worth the time/money investment compared to just doing X-BOX/gamecube versions.
But that is just phase one of Napster's plan. Phase two is the pay service. Napster has licensed MusicNet's new software to allow paying users to share blessed files (those from labels Napster has bought off, like this week's deal with European labels). The catch is that files will be "limited in quality" and users will be "unable to burn downloads to CD". Basically, the new software which they are beta testing right now shares little to no resemblence to Napster's current software.
The plan is that as soon as the pay service is implemented, the free service (aka what you know as Napster) will dissapear completely. Napster is being reborn as yet another ill-concieved .dot com, right up there with pets.com selling 15 pound bags of dogfood over the internet. Napster's idea is that you will use a proprietary client to share only songs Napster has rights to, you will only be able to download poor quality copies, and you won't be able to burn these to CDs. For this priviledge, they want you to PAY them. Basically, it's no longer a file sharing system, but instead a pay music download site that tricks you into supplying the bandwidth.
Blocking other Napster clients is only the first step. Soon, even their free clients won't work. The "new" pay Napster has little relation to the current Napster. It's a completely different thing.
It was announced this week that iPAQ will overtake the Palm very shortly (assuming you could Palm, inc seperate from Handspring, etc). Maybe she was right all along? Or did her predictions have some influence? Personally, I think the problem is that palms were great in 1997 but they haven't really gotten significantly better since then. But it is interesting to think about.
Banners - These suck. The cpm's are falling every day. For whatever reason people aren't convinced they are worth paying much for. Also, half the time the banner company or advertiser doesn't pay the bill. An thus you can't pay your bills. There was a GREAT article on this on kuro5hin a while back where some people actually ran the numbers. It might be possible to make a profit with banners (slashdot), but it is very very hard. Most sites are lucky if they can pay for hosting with banners.
Subscription - Could be a viable idea. Too bad no one is subscribing. If you are a small professional publication like Suck, you have to compete with the conglomerates on the news side and the bloggers on the community side. Unfortunately, that leaves you stuck in the middle charging money while those you are competing with are giving away the content for free. What do you have to offer? Even sites that have rabidly loyal readers probably can't make this work. Why? Look at which real magazines sell well. Maxim? Stuff for Men (same company)? Generic woman's magazine? All those magazines are super-formulaic dribble targeted at the general population. Suck and Feed just don't appeal to most readers. Certainly not enough to make any real money. Look at me, I'm a total web addict and I didn't read either.
Micropayments - Am I the only one who thinks this is stupid? What successful business plan supports itself with tiny margins. How do you collect payments without spending more on the collection process? Ask anyone who's appeared on a talk show. It's more work than it's worth to cash some 8 cent checks you get from reruns. The only way this could work would be if a close system like PayPal let people have accounts and slushed micropayments around internally. But I still don't think it will work.
The balanced financial plan - We've taken a different approach. Our business plan doesn't require us to make any money. What we pay for hosting each month is about what I would spend on a meal at Wendy's. Add to that a slashdot-like submission system and our desire to write good articles about music for the fun of it and you have a system that works. We can never go out of business because we have almost no real costs. The worst thing that could happen is that we get bored. On the plus side, we don't have to display annoying standard banners or anything like that. Any money we make from affiliate type deals or short-term advertising contracts with specific businesses goes right into our pockets (and back into the site). IF people enjoy our content and site enough to want to pay for it or we grow large enough to attract some other sort of deal, fine. But we are happy now. I'd do it just for the free concert tickets.
Ok, so maybe I'm being negative. But the bottom line is that the mainstream press does a nice job of catering to the mainstream. The blog community caters to those who want an online community. Business-wise, there just isn't much room left. I say start the site because you care about what you are writing about. If a couple years down the road it becomes profitable, great.
Service: 150x12=$1800/year
Dish: $850-2750, they recommend the "right one"
Yearly licensing free: $70
Activation: $50
Hrm.. so if you keep the service for a year, that runs you about $230 - $390 per month for a glorified modem speedwise. You could probably save money by getting about 4 phone lines and isp accounts and combining the bandwidth. I guess a government is the only organization that would consider something like this.