Nobody cares about FLAC, stop flogging a dead horse.
SHN's established and has already proven to be the "standard" of bootleg trading. You've got people with 400gb worth of SHN's, they're not interested in changing formats.
It's the same old "OGG is moar bettar, plz use it, open sores!" argument. If they were better, they would have come along first, not trailing on the heels of something inferior.
If so, shut up you make enough money as it is, and your high salaries are probably WHY you don't get bonuses.
I make way less than anything like that, but I work for a non-IT corporation, it's (gasp) profitable, has been experiencing growth, has great benefits, and it's a job I can go to every day and say "I love my job"
Even if I didn't get any monetary bonus, that's pretty good to me.
I think a lot of you people just like to complain and pine for what you don't have, rather than realize that you're probably in a better situation than 80-90 percent of the rest of the country.
and for what it's worth, everyone where I work got 500 bucks, a nice thanksgiving dinner (on work hours!) and a couple of other things, along with the satisfaction of knowing that we work for a pretty decent place to work at.
I'm a directv dsl subscriber, haven't even recieved a bill for it yet (odd) but I'm out the door.
Now that my year contract is seemingly bunk I figured I'd check out a recommendation or two from some of the other posts, and found speakeasy.net and check it out:
Dear DirectTV Subscriber, Sorry to hear your current provider will no longer be offering DSL service. Not to worry -- there's hope! We know you'll be very happy when you switch to Speakeasy Broadband. Call one of our top-notch sales representatives today at 1-800-556-5829 or simply fill out the form below. .. the thing goes on to say that they'll only have a 2 HOUR downtime between swapping ISP's, static IP's and a no fee installation.
This sounds a touch too good to be true, anyone have any recommendations or know if what they're offering is good as its word? I've read lots of nice things about speakeasy, and i'm willing to pay 10 bucks more a month for their stuff I think.
Is because the Wizards have the intention to charge full retail price for virtual cards. That's right, the same money you could spend in a store, and get real physical cards and at least have something to look at (or take elsewhere) when you're done playing. For this idea alone, I don't see how it can work very well beyond a very dedicated core of people.
Unlike most MMORPG games, MTG: Online isn't going to charge a monthly fee. The draw for EverCrack, Ultima Online, etc is that you pay your 10 bucks same as everyone else, and it's what you do in the game that makes you better or worse than everyone else. MTGO, it's all about the size of your wallet and how much you can afford to spend on getting better. Sure, some of you can say "but you still have to know how to play the game or 10,000 dollars worth of cards don't help". Yeah, true. But during the beta, I estimated that it would cost well over $500 to become "competitive" at the game, with little or no way to change that. Things would be pretty even for about a month, and then the "Mr. Suitcase" players would overwhelmingly dominate the game, much like that one guy who figured out Magic just a little too early at your local comic/card store and whipped the crap out of almost everyone on a regular basis.
My major attraction though, was Tournaments. This is where MTGO really lacks IMO. A typical tourney with 128 players (or so) can and will take up to 8 hours to finish. 8 hours! And you can't leave and go anywhere else either, cause the round might finish early and you'd default by not showing up! I tried a few of these tournaments and they don't have the appeal of a physical tournament where you can go and mess around doing other things (like side tournaments) since you have to sit at the game for a solid 8 hours (or until you lose).
Yeah, it'll suck if hackers do their thing, and if people rip other people off.. but it has to get people to play first if that's going to happen, and I don't think it will.
Scenario: Artist makes a fantastically creative (in mainstream music sense) album that sells a boatload of copies, sells out to the absolute maximum with every track being licensed for an advertisement somewhere along the way, thus turning the artist in question into a very very rich man with more popularity than he's ever seen in his life. Then in an effort to extend his 15 miuntes of fame, he records a follow-up album to the last one, that happens to be as close to an exact duplicate of the previous album. The fans are bored, the general public is apathetic, sales aren't lively and drop off the table when everyone buying the album the first week (henceforth known as "suckers") tell their friends "stick with the last album, this one's the same, but not fresh". The artist then goes on to blame everyone but himself for putting out a mediocre follow-up effort to what could be his finest work ever.
actually the windows users have far more choice and selection than even Linux, even in the freeware department. I can think of a half dozen quality freeware CD recording programs, all of which do audio very well.
The MAC people are boned, since I'm not sure there even IS a program besides Toast that works worth anything. And sinc Roxio makes Toast, the Mac people better find something else to burn with, and quick. PC people are fine, linux people are fine, and anyone who never upgrades software is fine, except I do think that they'll make some killer feature in the software to make it worthwhile to upgrade, not to mention support of new burners and bundling it in new burners and all that. (some people honestly never use anything besides what comes with their burner, and that's scary for the people using that HP CD Recorder software)
amazingly enough, atheletes are probably the most technologically equipped people out there from what I've read. When you have essentially 4 or 5 months with relatively litlle (read: not a damn thing, sir.) to do, and a lot of money, computer gear isn't so bad. If you made 280k a year (that's poor for an athelete!) and were in your early 20's (most professional atheletes tend to be that old) you'd probably have grown up with a nintendo, sega, gameboy, etc. Chances are you'd love nothing better than to sit around and play games for a few hours a day (and be able to afford amazing amounts of cool gear).
I sure know that if I played baseball, which essentially means the entire winter all i'd have to do is lift some weights (maybe 2 hrs a day) I'd sure get myself a pimped out rig of computers, a PS2, a Dreamcast and huge TV and invite all my rich friends over to play games (who also happen to be atheletes with nothing to do).
I remember reading an article once btw, from the 3DO people who said that Vladimir Gurrero (baseball player for the Montreal Expos) and his also-ballplaying brother used High Heat Baseball 2001 to 'scout' the pitchers they were going to face in upcoming games. Amazing eh? (and not entirely a bad idea, since the makers of the game do the same thing to get the proper AI for the game, I'm sure you've seen the commercials with Marshall Faulk and they try to get him to drop the football so they can get a fumble for the motion captures and stuff).
So it's probably a lot more widespread these days, and using a computer doesn't necessarily mean you're pasty white and sit in a chair all day and work in the tech industry. It's not just for uber-geeks anymore.
I see this happening first, and probably most successfully, in sports games. I can't quote actual sales figures, but I would imagine that EA's top selling titles happen to all be sports games. (Madden NFL, NBA Live, Triple Play, and their game for each and every sport including golf and soccer) The games are updated every year without fail (mostly due to the nature of the games changing, as well as engine improvements and other advances beyond roster updates) and so could the advertisements. People who enjoy these games tend to buy the new years version of the game every year (I'm personally guilty, I've bought the last 3 madden games, and the last 2 High heat games from 3D0) and as such the advertisement contracts could be changed, and re-paid every year.
On one hand, I almost don't understand why this hasn't happened already with the overwhelming corporate sponsorship in sports as it is. The stadiums are named for corporations, they're all adorned with logos, billboards, banners and other such advertisements, and honestly the games don't end up being as realistic with a "Joe's Tire" billboard in place of the amazingly large Budweiser billboard in certain baseball parks. If you know a stadium, even the advertisements add to the flavor and the 'feel' of the stadium, and I see the game companies joining up with the venues to 'migrate' the advertisements from their corporate sponsors to the video games. Except for the fact that they'd be soaked with beer advertisements and kids do play the games, it reaches their target audiences fairly well, and to me only seems like a logical extension of the advertisement world.
I wouldn't be surprised to see authentic replicas of hockey arenas in the next EA hockey game, which I think should be the next major sports game that EA brings out, sometime near September or October. They appear to be willing to be the first to jump into massive amounts of advertising, and I wish them well, as long as their reduced development cost is reflected in a price drop for games. Wishful thinking, but what other 'advertising medium' do you pay for AND have to view ads? Except for movies these days (what the hell is up with the TV commercials before the previews these days? I paid 8 bucks to see a movie, not a pepsi commercial, especially when the pepsi costs 3 dollars).
as cool as PA is, you have a new strip, what 4 times a week? Typical work week for people is 40 hours/week, so this assumes you actually spend 10 hours making a single 3-panel strip, based usually on an occurence in a daily happening, a new game, news from the gaming world, entertainment world, etc. Not exactly thought-provoking original content. Just a re-hash in a funny and interesting form. I mean honestly, a long discussion about "mags" from Phantasy Star Online, declaring it news and then making an accompanying comic strip to follow it honestly can't take you both a combined total of 20 hours to finish of actual work. If it does, then I'll stand corrected.
Don't get me wrong here, I love the strips. But you guys brag an awful lot about playing a crap-ton of games to be spending all your time making 4 strips a week. And then the strips tend to be ABOUT you playing games most of the time or something seemingly related.
Honestly, I wish I could find a way to get paid for playing video games all the time, and claim it to be a full-time job. I'm not sure of how much time exactly you guys truly spend on a given strip, but 10 hours per strip sounds a bit excessive IMO. Personally I have no art talent, my specialty involves making television (no, I'm not the Devil). But I have a full-time job, full-time college, AND spend my free-time (hah!) helping to make a television show which I love, for no money at all. I have the "real Job" to pay my bills, the college to get a better "real job" in the future, and the tv show on the side as a hobby, and any small amount of benefit I get from doing it as a bonus for doing something I love. I don't EXPECT money for doing it, since I'd be doing it anyway as I really like what I do.
Slightly related, a Baseball player can play baseball for a living because he spends roughly 90 hours a week "just playing a game", contributes in part to a large economic gain for a city, provides thousands, (just 1 player for 1 team in 1 city) with direct entertainment, and in the case of a telecast game, potentially several million people with entertainment. There's an existing market for sports, as there has been since the ancient times of roman gladiators and such, and the athletes are merely "taking what is their" so to speak when they get paid several millions of dollars to "just play baseball". Regardless of your personal feeling on the value of sports in the daily lives of humans, countless millions do draw great enjoyment from it, and since corporate people are currently getting very very rich of sports, the atheletes are more-or-less deserving of whatever they can get. The economics becomes a little messy if you get in-depth with it, but it's not quite the simple little trivia you'd like it to be I think.
Why can't people who make an online comic strip, run a website devoted to "mostly nothing", or other such things claim such autonomy, and be entitled to vast tracts of land and extreme wealth? Because there's no market. Regardless of how many hits a website gets every day (just ask yahoo) banner ads don't work worth a crap for advertising since they're not very intuitive, entirely too passive (and when they become active, people find ways to eliminate them or otherwise ignore them altogether) and people on the whole just don't seem to want to click on banners.
and for what it's worth, I'm a frequent visitor of the strip, it's on my link-bar, and along with a couple other online strips it's one of 3 that I actually make a habit in viewing. I really like it, and I think it'd be really cool if you guys COULD make a living doing such a project. But in the same vein as I have a "real job" and a "fun project", it might not hurt you guys to consider the strip a hobby, and not a career unless you've found a new and interesting way to create income from the internet.
I think the "sell" concept is a foreign idea to most linux users, when most software for linux is free in the first place, and even open source to boot. If one of the most popular games in a while (Quake3 was pretty popular on Win/Mac right?) couldn't sell copies in a Linux form, I'm not so sure that any software that complies to the "expensive, boxed, heavily advertised in national magazines" form of Windows, and even Mac to an extent games, rather than the typical "free/open software, word of mouth/board/bbs" approach that most Linux software follows.
It's really two different worlds of software, and gaming companies have found a large amount of success with their current model of things, and I don't see them all Open Sourcing their games (even though it might help) and I surely don't see game companies spending tons of money developing games to give them away for free.
But since that's exactly what a great deal of applications programmers for linux do on a daily basis, it's pretty much expected that someone who dares to charge large amounts for software isn't going to get a lot of business right?
Besides, anyone who is a true hardcore gamer already has a windows partition for the games, if not a whole separate machine since the good games don't come out for Mac or Linux except on rare occasions where they promptly tank and are found on ebay selling for 1/2 price a month later. It's almost canibalizing your own market to spend time, resources, money and programers to port a game to linux, or even develop one exclusively for Linux (or Mac for that matter, what's the last Mac-only game?).
heh, get used to it even more, because Tech Support people with a Clue (tm) don't stick around in Tech Support making crappy money, working crappy hours, dealing with people for very long, if ever.
If you knew how to configure a router, set up a netowrk and get things moving, would you take less than 10 bucks an hour to sit and here people complain about their inability to use their own computer? Hah.
not that they need a superbowl curse or anything, but I'm willing to bet "accenture" will be the first.com from this years bowl to be on f---edcompany.com's nice little dirt sheet.
Isn't it a Bad Thing when you have to remind people in large bold letters at the bottom of an add "formerly a company you don't know anything about either!" ?
actually, shouldn't bandwidth theoretically go UP? If multiple ISP's are using the same fiber to connect to their backbone connections, it won't all be on the same backbone connection right? ISP B will have their own servers, machines and bandwidth, as will AOL, and possible ISP C and ISP D. Therefore bandwidth will be MORE available to the other people using the cable lines to get to the actual servers and outgoing internet bandwidth. Am I correct at all on this? Cable fiber can handle a LOT of bandwidth, and that's NOT the reason why cable goes slower, it's the size of the pipe at the ISP -> rest of the net that gets full and slows everyone down. Shouldn't the fact that instead of 1 link to the "net", the cable prodiver will now have 2 or more links to the "net" run by separate sources, and theoreticaly could double (or better) bandwidth?
I don't know about ALL colleges, but I'm PAYING MONEY for my internet connection, therefore they're MY ISP. If it were free, sure, they could stick me with a super firewall and only let me have web access. But since i'm paying money out of my pocket to be provided with internet (actually, I'm getting jacked, cause it's not like I can say "oh, I don't want to pay the technology fee, and the athletic fee, and the towel fee") I think they ARE an ISP, and are obligated to service the students as such.
As for the cost, well just with 3000 dorm students being charged 100 dollars (probably small estimate) for "technology fee", gosh that's 300,000 dollars, well over the cost of a T3 for a YEAR, and this is in ONE semester. So much for it being "expensive", the school seems to have made a hell of a profit. Not to mention the subsidies the government provieds, and the fact that everyone on campus and in the labs is able to access this internet that the dorm residents are paying for. Now the way I see it, the school isn't just an ISP, but they're making a good profit of doing so, and then whining when people try and treat is as such.
Now, here we're faced with a different situation. The school "privatized" the res-net with cable modems supplied by the local cable company, and maintained (and bandwidth provided by) the school, and eventually the cable company has taken over more of the operation, but the bandwidth is still coming from the University. And I pay 20 bucks a month for it (cheap for cable, expensive I'd say for ethernet) Now in this case my school IS my ISP, quite litterally. I had an "incident" a long time ago where someone accused me of "hacking" (in reality all it was, was portscanning for BO in an IRC channel just to see if anyone had it) and I was almost even suspended from college for something I'm paying monthly charges on. Where exactly can I draw a line between ISP and not an ISP?
Personally, my thoughts are, if I'm paying money for it, it's mine, I can use it how I like. If they don't like it, well tough.
it might be the first, but I'd assume that Grand Royal has a corp license (maybe a free one since they kick so much ass) but at any rate they're a big deal record label, shoutcasting 24/7 stuff from their albums.
http://www.grandroyal.com/grRadio/index.html
Coldcut/NinjaTune may have one as well although I think they're using RealServer right now for their live streams.
I think a LOT of major players in the music industry are realizing the power of Mp3/Winamp/Shoutcast right now, and this is going to spark a LOT of legal battles concerning who REALLY owns the music, the record companies or the artists.
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Nobody cares about FLAC, stop flogging a dead horse.
SHN's established and has already proven to be the "standard" of bootleg trading. You've got people with 400gb worth of SHN's, they're not interested in changing formats.
It's the same old "OGG is moar bettar, plz use it, open sores!" argument. If they were better, they would have come along first, not trailing on the heels of something inferior.
Working IT jobs that pay you 45-50K/year or more?
If so, shut up you make enough money as it is, and your high salaries are probably WHY you don't get bonuses.
I make way less than anything like that, but I work for a non-IT corporation, it's (gasp) profitable, has been experiencing growth, has great benefits, and it's a job I can go to every day and say "I love my job"
Even if I didn't get any monetary bonus, that's pretty good to me.
I think a lot of you people just like to complain and pine for what you don't have, rather than realize that you're probably in a better situation than 80-90 percent of the rest of the country.
and for what it's worth, everyone where I work got 500 bucks, a nice thanksgiving dinner (on work hours!) and a couple of other things, along with the satisfaction of knowing that we work for a pretty decent place to work at.
I'm a directv dsl subscriber, haven't even recieved a bill for it yet (odd) but I'm out the door.
.. the thing goes on to say that they'll only have a 2 HOUR downtime between swapping ISP's, static IP's and a no fee installation.
Now that my year contract is seemingly bunk I figured I'd check out a recommendation or two from some of the other posts, and found speakeasy.net and check it out:
Dear DirectTV Subscriber,
Sorry to hear your current provider will no longer be offering DSL service. Not to worry -- there's hope! We know you'll be very happy when you switch to Speakeasy Broadband. Call one of our top-notch sales representatives today at 1-800-556-5829 or simply fill out the form below.
This sounds a touch too good to be true, anyone have any recommendations or know if what they're offering is good as its word? I've read lots of nice things about speakeasy, and i'm willing to pay 10 bucks more a month for their stuff I think.
Is because the Wizards have the intention to charge full retail price for virtual cards. That's right, the same money you could spend in a store, and get real physical cards and at least have something to look at (or take elsewhere) when you're done playing. For this idea alone, I don't see how it can work very well beyond a very dedicated core of people.
Unlike most MMORPG games, MTG: Online isn't going to charge a monthly fee. The draw for EverCrack, Ultima Online, etc is that you pay your 10 bucks same as everyone else, and it's what you do in the game that makes you better or worse than everyone else. MTGO, it's all about the size of your wallet and how much you can afford to spend on getting better. Sure, some of you can say "but you still have to know how to play the game or 10,000 dollars worth of cards don't help". Yeah, true. But during the beta, I estimated that it would cost well over $500 to become "competitive" at the game, with little or no way to change that. Things would be pretty even for about a month, and then the "Mr. Suitcase" players would overwhelmingly dominate the game, much like that one guy who figured out Magic just a little too early at your local comic/card store and whipped the crap out of almost everyone on a regular basis.
My major attraction though, was Tournaments. This is where MTGO really lacks IMO. A typical tourney with 128 players (or so) can and will take up to 8 hours to finish. 8 hours! And you can't leave and go anywhere else either, cause the round might finish early and you'd default by not showing up! I tried a few of these tournaments and they don't have the appeal of a physical tournament where you can go and mess around doing other things (like side tournaments) since you have to sit at the game for a solid 8 hours (or until you lose).
Yeah, it'll suck if hackers do their thing, and if people rip other people off.. but it has to get people to play first if that's going to happen, and I don't think it will.
cause we all know that quicktime sucks, only seconded by the crap that is Real Player and it's craptastic video formats.
Scenario: Artist makes a fantastically creative (in mainstream music sense) album that sells a boatload of copies, sells out to the absolute maximum with every track being licensed for an advertisement somewhere along the way, thus turning the artist in question into a very very rich man with more popularity than he's ever seen in his life. Then in an effort to extend his 15 miuntes of fame, he records a follow-up album to the last one, that happens to be as close to an exact duplicate of the previous album. The fans are bored, the general public is apathetic, sales aren't lively and drop off the table when everyone buying the album the first week (henceforth known as "suckers") tell their friends "stick with the last album, this one's the same, but not fresh". The artist then goes on to blame everyone but himself for putting out a mediocre follow-up effort to what could be his finest work ever.
Move over Pearl Jam, we now have The Moby Effect.
actually the windows users have far more choice and selection than even Linux, even in the freeware department. I can think of a half dozen quality freeware CD recording programs, all of which do audio very well.
The MAC people are boned, since I'm not sure there even IS a program besides Toast that works worth anything. And sinc Roxio makes Toast, the Mac people better find something else to burn with, and quick. PC people are fine, linux people are fine, and anyone who never upgrades software is fine, except I do think that they'll make some killer feature in the software to make it worthwhile to upgrade, not to mention support of new burners and bundling it in new burners and all that. (some people honestly never use anything besides what comes with their burner, and that's scary for the people using that HP CD Recorder software)
amazingly enough, atheletes are probably the most technologically equipped people out there from what I've read. When you have essentially 4 or 5 months with relatively litlle (read: not a damn thing, sir.) to do, and a lot of money, computer gear isn't so bad. If you made 280k a year (that's poor for an athelete!) and were in your early 20's (most professional atheletes tend to be that old) you'd probably have grown up with a nintendo, sega, gameboy, etc. Chances are you'd love nothing better than to sit around and play games for a few hours a day (and be able to afford amazing amounts of cool gear). I sure know that if I played baseball, which essentially means the entire winter all i'd have to do is lift some weights (maybe 2 hrs a day) I'd sure get myself a pimped out rig of computers, a PS2, a Dreamcast and huge TV and invite all my rich friends over to play games (who also happen to be atheletes with nothing to do). I remember reading an article once btw, from the 3DO people who said that Vladimir Gurrero (baseball player for the Montreal Expos) and his also-ballplaying brother used High Heat Baseball 2001 to 'scout' the pitchers they were going to face in upcoming games. Amazing eh? (and not entirely a bad idea, since the makers of the game do the same thing to get the proper AI for the game, I'm sure you've seen the commercials with Marshall Faulk and they try to get him to drop the football so they can get a fumble for the motion captures and stuff). So it's probably a lot more widespread these days, and using a computer doesn't necessarily mean you're pasty white and sit in a chair all day and work in the tech industry. It's not just for uber-geeks anymore.
I see this happening first, and probably most successfully, in sports games. I can't quote actual sales figures, but I would imagine that EA's top selling titles happen to all be sports games. (Madden NFL, NBA Live, Triple Play, and their game for each and every sport including golf and soccer) The games are updated every year without fail (mostly due to the nature of the games changing, as well as engine improvements and other advances beyond roster updates) and so could the advertisements. People who enjoy these games tend to buy the new years version of the game every year (I'm personally guilty, I've bought the last 3 madden games, and the last 2 High heat games from 3D0) and as such the advertisement contracts could be changed, and re-paid every year. On one hand, I almost don't understand why this hasn't happened already with the overwhelming corporate sponsorship in sports as it is. The stadiums are named for corporations, they're all adorned with logos, billboards, banners and other such advertisements, and honestly the games don't end up being as realistic with a "Joe's Tire" billboard in place of the amazingly large Budweiser billboard in certain baseball parks. If you know a stadium, even the advertisements add to the flavor and the 'feel' of the stadium, and I see the game companies joining up with the venues to 'migrate' the advertisements from their corporate sponsors to the video games. Except for the fact that they'd be soaked with beer advertisements and kids do play the games, it reaches their target audiences fairly well, and to me only seems like a logical extension of the advertisement world. I wouldn't be surprised to see authentic replicas of hockey arenas in the next EA hockey game, which I think should be the next major sports game that EA brings out, sometime near September or October. They appear to be willing to be the first to jump into massive amounts of advertising, and I wish them well, as long as their reduced development cost is reflected in a price drop for games. Wishful thinking, but what other 'advertising medium' do you pay for AND have to view ads? Except for movies these days (what the hell is up with the TV commercials before the previews these days? I paid 8 bucks to see a movie, not a pepsi commercial, especially when the pepsi costs 3 dollars).
as cool as PA is, you have a new strip, what 4 times a week? Typical work week for people is 40 hours/week, so this assumes you actually spend 10 hours making a single 3-panel strip, based usually on an occurence in a daily happening, a new game, news from the gaming world, entertainment world, etc. Not exactly thought-provoking original content. Just a re-hash in a funny and interesting form. I mean honestly, a long discussion about "mags" from Phantasy Star Online, declaring it news and then making an accompanying comic strip to follow it honestly can't take you both a combined total of 20 hours to finish of actual work. If it does, then I'll stand corrected.
Don't get me wrong here, I love the strips. But you guys brag an awful lot about playing a crap-ton of games to be spending all your time making 4 strips a week. And then the strips tend to be ABOUT you playing games most of the time or something seemingly related.
Honestly, I wish I could find a way to get paid for playing video games all the time, and claim it to be a full-time job. I'm not sure of how much time exactly you guys truly spend on a given strip, but 10 hours per strip sounds a bit excessive IMO. Personally I have no art talent, my specialty involves making television (no, I'm not the Devil). But I have a full-time job, full-time college, AND spend my free-time (hah!) helping to make a television show which I love, for no money at all. I have the "real Job" to pay my bills, the college to get a better "real job" in the future, and the tv show on the side as a hobby, and any small amount of benefit I get from doing it as a bonus for doing something I love. I don't EXPECT money for doing it, since I'd be doing it anyway as I really like what I do.
Slightly related, a Baseball player can play baseball for a living because he spends roughly 90 hours a week "just playing a game", contributes in part to a large economic gain for a city, provides thousands, (just 1 player for 1 team in 1 city) with direct entertainment, and in the case of a telecast game, potentially several million people with entertainment. There's an existing market for sports, as there has been since the ancient times of roman gladiators and such, and the athletes are merely "taking what is their" so to speak when they get paid several millions of dollars to "just play baseball". Regardless of your personal feeling on the value of sports in the daily lives of humans, countless millions do draw great enjoyment from it, and since corporate people are currently getting very very rich of sports, the atheletes are more-or-less deserving of whatever they can get. The economics becomes a little messy if you get in-depth with it, but it's not quite the simple little trivia you'd like it to be I think.
Why can't people who make an online comic strip, run a website devoted to "mostly nothing", or other such things claim such autonomy, and be entitled to vast tracts of land and extreme wealth? Because there's no market. Regardless of how many hits a website gets every day (just ask yahoo) banner ads don't work worth a crap for advertising since they're not very intuitive, entirely too passive (and when they become active, people find ways to eliminate them or otherwise ignore them altogether) and people on the whole just don't seem to want to click on banners.
and for what it's worth, I'm a frequent visitor of the strip, it's on my link-bar, and along with a couple other online strips it's one of 3 that I actually make a habit in viewing. I really like it, and I think it'd be really cool if you guys COULD make a living doing such a project. But in the same vein as I have a "real job" and a "fun project", it might not hurt you guys to consider the strip a hobby, and not a career unless you've found a new and interesting way to create income from the internet.
I think the "sell" concept is a foreign idea to most linux users, when most software for linux is free in the first place, and even open source to boot. If one of the most popular games in a while (Quake3 was pretty popular on Win/Mac right?) couldn't sell copies in a Linux form, I'm not so sure that any software that complies to the "expensive, boxed, heavily advertised in national magazines" form of Windows, and even Mac to an extent games, rather than the typical "free/open software, word of mouth/board/bbs" approach that most Linux software follows. It's really two different worlds of software, and gaming companies have found a large amount of success with their current model of things, and I don't see them all Open Sourcing their games (even though it might help) and I surely don't see game companies spending tons of money developing games to give them away for free. But since that's exactly what a great deal of applications programmers for linux do on a daily basis, it's pretty much expected that someone who dares to charge large amounts for software isn't going to get a lot of business right? Besides, anyone who is a true hardcore gamer already has a windows partition for the games, if not a whole separate machine since the good games don't come out for Mac or Linux except on rare occasions where they promptly tank and are found on ebay selling for 1/2 price a month later. It's almost canibalizing your own market to spend time, resources, money and programers to port a game to linux, or even develop one exclusively for Linux (or Mac for that matter, what's the last Mac-only game?).
heh, get used to it even more, because Tech Support people with a Clue (tm) don't stick around in Tech Support making crappy money, working crappy hours, dealing with people for very long, if ever. If you knew how to configure a router, set up a netowrk and get things moving, would you take less than 10 bucks an hour to sit and here people complain about their inability to use their own computer? Hah.
not that they need a superbowl curse or anything, but I'm willing to bet "accenture" will be the first .com from this years bowl to be on f---edcompany.com's nice little dirt sheet.
Isn't it a Bad Thing when you have to remind people in large bold letters at the bottom of an add "formerly a company you don't know anything about either!" ?
actually, shouldn't bandwidth theoretically go UP? If multiple ISP's are using the same fiber to connect to their backbone connections, it won't all be on the same backbone connection right? ISP B will have their own servers, machines and bandwidth, as will AOL, and possible ISP C and ISP D. Therefore bandwidth will be MORE available to the other people using the cable lines to get to the actual servers and outgoing internet bandwidth. Am I correct at all on this? Cable fiber can handle a LOT of bandwidth, and that's NOT the reason why cable goes slower, it's the size of the pipe at the ISP -> rest of the net that gets full and slows everyone down. Shouldn't the fact that instead of 1 link to the "net", the cable prodiver will now have 2 or more links to the "net" run by separate sources, and theoreticaly could double (or better) bandwidth?
I don't know about ALL colleges, but I'm PAYING MONEY for my internet connection, therefore they're MY ISP. If it were free, sure, they could stick me with a super firewall and only let me have web access. But since i'm paying money out of my pocket to be provided with internet (actually, I'm getting jacked, cause it's not like I can say "oh, I don't want to pay the technology fee, and the athletic fee, and the towel fee") I think they ARE an ISP, and are obligated to service the students as such.
As for the cost, well just with 3000 dorm students being charged 100 dollars (probably small estimate) for "technology fee", gosh that's 300,000 dollars, well over the cost of a T3 for a YEAR, and this is in ONE semester. So much for it being "expensive", the school seems to have made a hell of a profit. Not to mention the subsidies the government provieds, and the fact that everyone on campus and in the labs is able to access this internet that the dorm residents are paying for. Now the way I see it, the school isn't just an ISP, but they're making a good profit of doing so, and then whining when people try and treat is as such.
Now, here we're faced with a different situation. The school "privatized" the res-net with cable modems supplied by the local cable company, and maintained (and bandwidth provided by) the school, and eventually the cable company has taken over more of the operation, but the bandwidth is still coming from the University. And I pay 20 bucks a month for it (cheap for cable, expensive I'd say for ethernet) Now in this case my school IS my ISP, quite litterally. I had an "incident" a long time ago where someone accused me of "hacking" (in reality all it was, was portscanning for BO in an IRC channel just to see if anyone had it) and I was almost even suspended from college for something I'm paying monthly charges on. Where exactly can I draw a line between ISP and not an ISP?
Personally, my thoughts are, if I'm paying money for it, it's mine, I can use it how I like. If they don't like it, well tough.
it might be the first, but I'd assume that Grand Royal has a corp license (maybe a free one since they kick so much ass) but at any rate they're a big deal record label, shoutcasting 24/7 stuff from their albums.
http://www.grandroyal.com/grRadio/index.html
Coldcut/NinjaTune may have one as well although I think they're using RealServer right now for their live streams.
I think a LOT of major players in the music industry are realizing the power of Mp3/Winamp/Shoutcast right now, and this is going to spark a LOT of legal battles concerning who REALLY owns the music, the record companies or the artists.