First, I'll agree with all the folks who recommended PC Power & Cooling PS's. The Silencer 230 & 275 models are especially quiet, and I put them on all my heavily-used systems.
Drives are another factor, as many folks have mentioned. I put mine in some of those plastic removeable enclosures, disconnect the auxilliary fans, and it helps muffle the noise. It does trap the heat from the drive, but I've been running some 7200 RPM drives in them for about a year now with no problems.
Regarding fans... a simple rule is that the bigger the fan is, the slower it can spin to move the same amount of air.
For CPU fans, I've found that nearly all are cheap, nearly all are quiet when new, and they always get noisy after 6 months or so of heavy use. So keep a spare around, and replace it when necessary. Or just go with the huge heatsink suggestion, and maybe use a large slow-spinning case fan to move some air over it.
Okay, I know the commies were against the Czars. But that doesn't mean czars are good. Why is it that in this democracy, we appoint a czar everythime we want to fix something? Geez, if they called him a king, exerybody would be against it. How about a dictator? Strongman? Capo di Tutti?
Why would anyone pay for an internet broadcast when radio is free?
Because my favorite team is on the other coast. Was great when it was free, but it's probably not going to be worth the hassle if it's a pay thing, even at a cheap price.
Why does the radio station know/care if I use a registered version of real-audio?
The radio stations are the losers here. Previously, they had paid for the broadcast rights, and had gotten a wider audience by sending the stuff out over the 'net. Now, MLB is saying, hey... that's not part of what you paid for.
From the looks of it, what happened here is that Real paid for broadcast rights that used to be part of the radio stations' deals. MLB said sure, we'll take your money. Real probably figures they'll recoup the costs by selling subscriptions and/or software.
A post on the NTBugTraq list calls this story a "hoax". Perhaps that's overstating it, but it's a good example of the danger of jumping to conclusions.
The poster says that the demonstration script uses document.write to display the contents of a cookie in the browser window. Nowhere is it explained how the information might be transmitted back to the server.
I haven't investigated the code myself, just passing along the comments of others.
Music is not property. Okay, it is property according to the law, and most of us have an intuitive moral recognition of the rights of its creators. But unlike physical property, you can't defend music or protect it yourself. If you have a book and somebody tries to take it from you, you smash the guy in the face. If you have a house, and somebody tries to come in, and you whack him over the head with a 2x4. Sure, it's more civilized and more efficient to call the police. But while there are ways you can defend physical property, the *only* way to protect intellectual property is to call upon the government.
More to the point, how do you stop technology? It's easy to bad-mouth Napster, maybe easy to put them out of business. So what? Does anybody really think this will stop people from trading MP3's online? Is anybody naive enough to think that if Napster disappeared then copying would stop? There is always another technology around the corner, ready to fill in where Napster falls short.
It's easy to sit around and lament that artists aren't paid what they're worth. Hell, they never have been. But what can be done about it? How do you stop people from sharing music with their friends? The only way to do it is to police the people or to police the technology. Policing the companies that sell the technology won't do it, because... well the companies aren't the important part of the equation, the technology is. And technology is increasingly in the hands of individuals. That's not something anybody planned, it's just part of evolution.
As you noted, I think that there is definitely some value in allowing the music publishers to profit from their promotional work. The question I raised was whether there is a more efficient way to do this than by the copyright laws.
I spent some time in and around the music business, and have several close friends who are professional musicians. And mostly what I observed was that the people who control the publishing seem to have influence and money far in excess of the value they provide. You only have to meet a few coked-out A&R people to figure this out. Or you see situations where one female singer gets ahead by sleeping with somebody, while another doesn't. When merit is replaced by personal whims, it suggests that the influence of those in control is excessive.
Well, the justification that is normally put forth is that copyright protection provides an incentive for people to be creative. And I guess it's hard to argue that's not true.
But the more relevant question is whether the benefits to society from increased creativity outweigh the losses from decreased availability and the possibility lawyers can go around banging on people's doors. It's not at all clear whether this is true.
Certainly in the age of the Internet and increased ease of copying, we are beginning to see the costs of the decreased availability and of legal intervention more clearly.
The one area that gives me pause is the notion of music and of promotion. Imagine a world in which everybody was free to copy music or sing everybody else's songs. Presumably, it would be difficult to be a record company in such a world. But would there be less music made? Would garage bands cease to exist? Would there be fewer of them? Of course not.
But the music industry takes some of those bands (more or less at random) and promotes them to the public. Once a song becomes popular, it certainly adds something to the social fabric. For example, you meet a member of the opposite gender and you can dance to the same song, because you've both heard it on the radio.
So there is definitely some value to the promotion that the music industry does. The real question is whether IP laws are the only way to promote this.
IP laws are a relatively new invention; while most of our laws have evolved from millenia-old religious principles (it is wrong to kill somebody, you shouldn't steal somebody's property), only in recent centuries has the idea surfaced that ideas constitute property. Would we be better off if some prehistoric person had been able to patent the wheel? The idea is preposterous. The public benefits from having wheels, not from a chance to get rich by reinventing the wheel.
Oddly, technology is leading us down the right path. You still can't press your own CD's and sell them to the public as if they were the real thing, and that's good; I think few here will argue for that freedom. At the same time, it has become virtually impossible to prevent people from sharing music with their friends, thus eliminating most of the artificial scarcity that copyright laws cause.
>> If Amazon could run a self-sustaining and profitable long-term business by dropping its marketing and infrastructure expenditures today, then it should
Ah, but you specify long-term. I just said they could turn a profit this year if they slashed their promotion budget. But they know that if they don't keep growing, somebody will grow bigger, and they'll cease to be profitable. There are a going to be a few big survivors in each category, the rest will be also-rans or mom-and-pop operations. Think of how much Coke and Pepsi sell, compared to how much all the other colas sell. The 'net will probably allow for more survivors in each category, but there will still be a big payoff for being one of them.
This is another example of non-news, of an old blue-blooded publication pooh-poohing the high-growth economy of the Internet.
Net firms are DESIGNED to run out of money. Here's the way it works. VC's give ten companies ten million dollars each. They companies spend it as fast as they can, provided they get some results for it, and it's off to the races. Of course, startups pace their spending, but if they give themselves a year's cushion of cash, development will suffer and they'll fall behind. Of the ten companies, maybe one will reach maturity before it runs out of money, will go public, and will pay off the investors way better than 10-1.
Amazon could be making a profit today if they wanted to, but they're still spending enourmous amounts on promotion. Folks keep sayting that some sort of bubble is going to burst, but that's not quite accurate. Growth WILL slow down one of these days, though, once we reach a certain point of saturation. When that day comes, many companies will see their stock drop through the floor, and they'll be acquired for pennies by the big fish. With fewer startups nipping at their heels, the leaders like Amazon will reduce spending on promotion, and they'll start to show profits.
Well, every Internet connection is a shared connection; the fact that cable modems share a local loop as well as an upstream connection is pretty irrelevant. The cable company can build a bottleneck in the local loop, or they can build it in their routers. It's just a case of where they decide to spend their money.
I used MediaOne when I lived in Massachusetts, and was pretty impressed the way they handled it. They used DHCP, which allowed them to limit the number of modems sharing a loop. But even during the fast growth, you only got renumbered two or three times a year. You could choose your own host name, you could run servers with 384K upstream bandwidth. People would get somebody to host DNS, and they'd run web servers, mail servers, ftp, private NNTP servers, just about everything, and with MediaOne's full blessing.
And when you think about it, why is upstream bandwidth any different than downstream? Everything that goes out of a server has to go into a computer somewhere else. Connections have two ends, the bandwidth is no more precious on one end than the other.
>> you can use W2K kerberos to access Unix/Linux kerberos
Hey, it's simple then. Use Unix/Linux servers, and whatever you want on the desktop.
Still, I find it odd to think MS would intentionally limit the usefulness of their servers and of their directory. Unlike the desktop, they have a lot of competition in the server and directory space. This can't be a monopolistic move because it implies that they're leveraging server dominance to sell more desktops.
It'll be interesting to see how this develops. It'll probably just be reverse-engineered, saving MS the trouble of making a decision.
If the states were really concerned with leveling the playing field for their retailers, they'd cut their own sales taxes.
State treasuries are awash in money, to the extent that even politicians are embarrassed to ask for more. The "fairness" issue is simply an excuse to raise more money, while pretending to help the retailers. Phooey.
One thing that will almost certainly happen is that this will force the RIAA and MPAA to tone down the rhetoric, which has been truly venomous the last few weeks. Maybe they've felt empowered by a few court wins, or by the bushels of money they sent toward Washington (and the Clinton administration in particular).
This happened to me once with a small business I owned. Things were tough, and I had some preliminary talks with a competitor about selling the business. We couldn't reach a deal, so he called my banker and told him I was trying to liquidate my inventory from under them. It was too small-time to get lawyers involved, but I'll never forget it. One of the sleaziest things I've ever seen. I still get chills when I replay the conversations in my mind.
This case isn't about copyright, it's about reigning in some politcally-connected bullies, and they're long overdue for a good spanking. Or an anti-trust investigation. But don't expect the Clinton folks to lift a finger.
>> I am comfortable that in science, as in the rest of life, there is always one more unanswered question.
Well, that pretty much fits my broad definition of faith; it's the realization that at any given time some things are unmalleable and absolute and unexplainable, but yet we accept them and say "so be it."
In the end, such analysis leads simply to a better scientific understanding. Just as our knowledge of the world has progressed since biblical times, it will continue to progress in the future. But there will always be things that science hasn't explained.
Newton discovered that f=ma, but something else made it true. Darwin may have discovered evolution, but something else made it happen. Search as we might, science will always fall short of answering the fundamental spiritual question of "why?"
Somewhere along the line, I was able to reconcile my scientific/anthropological training with my faith, and realized that the two are not in conflict. Nutshell version: Science is born of God-given talents, and therefore we should not ignore it or belittle it. Maybe the world wasn't created in seven days, but I'm still in awe of whatever made it happen, and I don't intend to mess with it.
Continue studying, continue advancing science, but don't expect it to explain that which it can't. In science, there is always one more unanswered question; only some sort of faith can make you comfortable with that.
"United Nations World Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination and Xenophobia"
Have you ever heard the word xenophobia used to criticize any country other than the US? Expect to see headlines such as "Study shows 80% of all hate sites are US-based."
This sounds like a money grab; make Americans feel guilty, and wallow in the spare change they throw off.
Well, our difference, then , is that I don't think that first-come-first-served is necessarily the fairest way to distribute things, but you seem to prefer it.
Our do understand, however, the sentiment against somebody apparently making something for nothing, and that probably accounts for why ticket scalping is widely outlawed. Even so, it's legal in many places, and it's not so profitable that it attracts a lot of attention.
Interestingly, the economics of the domain registration situation are slightly different, in that there is only one possible seller for a given domain name. You can buy playoff tickets from any one of a number of scalpers, but you can only buy a particular domain from the current holder. And the seller might have many prospective purchasers bidding for the name. That imbalance probably drives up domain prices considerably.
Linus is clearly doing the right thing by defending his trademark; as others have noted, failure to defend it can lead to losing it.
That said, what exactly is so bad about domain speculators? It seems to me that they provide a useful service, just like ticket scalpers. And just to be clear, I'm not talking about the scammers who used to register and re-register domains without ever paying for them.
Most domain names, at $35/year, are priced below their market value. That's why there are so few good ones available. People register them as if they were free, because they nearly are. But that low cost is also what creates the shortage. Domain speculators help alleviate the shortage, by making names available to people who are willing to pay the most for them. In other words, by reselling the names at a profit, domain speculators help insure that the names will go to somebody who intends to use them, or at the very least, to somebody who will pay dearly for the privelege of not using it.
To illustrate: I just missed out on being able to register bobk.com, having been beaten by a couple of months by Microsoft (remember MS Bob?). As of last month, it's registered to somebody else, and I don't know the story behind it. But consider the situation of Microsoft holding the name, one that many other wanted, and for which MS had no further use (nor did they ever use it, as far as I can tell; a great domain name just went unused from 1994-whenever). What should Microsft have done with it?
Obviously "give it to me" wasn't an option; for that matter, there a a zillion Bobs out here who would love the name, but only one could own it. Who should get it? Should they have everybody write an essay as to why the deserve it and then give it way? Giving it to the highest bidder is an imperfect solution, but it's better than all others. Even if MS donated it to charity to avoid looking greedy, there's no assurance that the charity would be able to put it to use unless they sold it.
The Microsoft example is an anomoly, but it illustrates why reselling domain names (or Super Bowl tickets) helps to efficiently distribute underpriced goods when demand outstrips supply.
Slashdot Mirror
First, I'll agree with all the folks who recommended PC Power & Cooling PS's. The Silencer 230 & 275 models are especially quiet, and I put them on all my heavily-used systems.
Drives are another factor, as many folks have mentioned. I put mine in some of those plastic removeable enclosures, disconnect the auxilliary fans, and it helps muffle the noise. It does trap the heat from the drive, but I've been running some 7200 RPM drives in them for about a year now with no problems.
Regarding fans... a simple rule is that the bigger the fan is, the slower it can spin to move the same amount of air.
For CPU fans, I've found that nearly all are cheap, nearly all are quiet when new, and they always get noisy after 6 months or so of heavy use. So keep a spare around, and replace it when necessary. Or just go with the huge heatsink suggestion, and maybe use a large slow-spinning case fan to move some air over it.
Okay, I know the commies were against the Czars. But that doesn't mean czars are good. Why is it that in this democracy, we appoint a czar everythime we want to fix something? Geez, if they called him a king, exerybody would be against it. How about a dictator? Strongman? Capo di Tutti?
What the hell is the difference?
Why would anyone pay for an internet broadcast when radio is free?
Because my favorite team is on the other coast. Was great when it was free, but it's probably not going to be worth the hassle if it's a pay thing, even at a cheap price.
Why does the radio station know/care if I use a registered version of real-audio?
The radio stations are the losers here. Previously, they had paid for the broadcast rights, and had gotten a wider audience by sending the stuff out over the 'net. Now, MLB is saying, hey... that's not part of what you paid for.
From the looks of it, what happened here is that Real paid for broadcast rights that used to be part of the radio stations' deals. MLB said sure, we'll take your money. Real probably figures they'll recoup the costs by selling subscriptions and/or software.
I expect the radio stations to complain.
Oracle says they saved a billion dollars by using their own software.
Of course, they got it for free.....
Personal observation bears this out. When I was in college, young people were really smart. Now that I'm my forties, they seem really, really stupid.
Funny, though, my parents said the same thing when I was young.
The coolest thing would be to build a replica of the Microsoft Campus, then blow it up.
(Actually, I don't think it would be all that cool, I'm just trolling for points.)
A post on the NTBugTraq list calls this story a "hoax". Perhaps that's overstating it, but it's a good example of the danger of jumping to conclusions.
The poster says that the demonstration script uses document.write to display the contents of a cookie in the browser window. Nowhere is it explained how the information might be transmitted back to the server.
I haven't investigated the code myself, just passing along the comments of others.
Music is not property. Okay, it is property according to the law, and most of us have an intuitive moral recognition of the rights of its creators. But unlike physical property, you can't defend music or protect it yourself. If you have a book and somebody tries to take it from you, you smash the guy in the face. If you have a house, and somebody tries to come in, and you whack him over the head with a 2x4. Sure, it's more civilized and more efficient to call the police. But while there are ways you can defend physical property, the *only* way to protect intellectual property is to call upon the government.
More to the point, how do you stop technology? It's easy to bad-mouth Napster, maybe easy to put them out of business. So what? Does anybody really think this will stop people from trading MP3's online? Is anybody naive enough to think that if Napster disappeared then copying would stop? There is always another technology around the corner, ready to fill in where Napster falls short.
It's easy to sit around and lament that artists aren't paid what they're worth. Hell, they never have been. But what can be done about it? How do you stop people from sharing music with their friends? The only way to do it is to police the people or to police the technology. Policing the companies that sell the technology won't do it, because... well the companies aren't the important part of the equation, the technology is. And technology is increasingly in the hands of individuals. That's not something anybody planned, it's just part of evolution.
As you noted, I think that there is definitely some value in allowing the music publishers to profit from their promotional work. The question I raised was whether there is a more efficient way to do this than by the copyright laws.
I spent some time in and around the music business, and have several close friends who are professional musicians. And mostly what I observed was that the people who control the publishing seem to have influence and money far in excess of the value they provide. You only have to meet a few coked-out A&R people to figure this out. Or you see situations where one female singer gets ahead by sleeping with somebody, while another doesn't. When merit is replaced by personal whims, it suggests that the influence of those in control is excessive.
Well, the justification that is normally put forth is that copyright protection provides an incentive for people to be creative. And I guess it's hard to argue that's not true.
But the more relevant question is whether the benefits to society from increased creativity outweigh the losses from decreased availability and the possibility lawyers can go around banging on people's doors. It's not at all clear whether this is true.
Certainly in the age of the Internet and increased ease of copying, we are beginning to see the costs of the decreased availability and of legal intervention more clearly.
The one area that gives me pause is the notion of music and of promotion. Imagine a world in which everybody was free to copy music or sing everybody else's songs. Presumably, it would be difficult to be a record company in such a world. But would there be less music made? Would garage bands cease to exist? Would there be fewer of them? Of course not.
But the music industry takes some of those bands (more or less at random) and promotes them to the public. Once a song becomes popular, it certainly adds something to the social fabric. For example, you meet a member of the opposite gender and you can dance to the same song, because you've both heard it on the radio.
So there is definitely some value to the promotion that the music industry does. The real question is whether IP laws are the only way to promote this.
IP laws are a relatively new invention; while most of our laws have evolved from millenia-old religious principles (it is wrong to kill somebody, you shouldn't steal somebody's property), only in recent centuries has the idea surfaced that ideas constitute property. Would we be better off if some prehistoric person had been able to patent the wheel? The idea is preposterous. The public benefits from having wheels, not from a chance to get rich by reinventing the wheel.
Oddly, technology is leading us down the right path. You still can't press your own CD's and sell them to the public as if they were the real thing, and that's good; I think few here will argue for that freedom. At the same time, it has become virtually impossible to prevent people from sharing music with their friends, thus eliminating most of the artificial scarcity that copyright laws cause.
>> If Amazon could run a self-sustaining and profitable long-term business by dropping its marketing and infrastructure expenditures today, then it should
Ah, but you specify long-term. I just said they could turn a profit this year if they slashed their promotion budget. But they know that if they don't keep growing, somebody will grow bigger, and they'll cease to be profitable. There are a going to be a few big survivors in each category, the rest will be also-rans or mom-and-pop operations. Think of how much Coke and Pepsi sell, compared to how much all the other colas sell. The 'net will probably allow for more survivors in each category, but there will still be a big payoff for being one of them.
This is another example of non-news, of an old blue-blooded publication pooh-poohing the high-growth economy of the Internet.
Net firms are DESIGNED to run out of money. Here's the way it works. VC's give ten companies ten million dollars each. They companies spend it as fast as they can, provided they get some results for it, and it's off to the races. Of course, startups pace their spending, but if they give themselves a year's cushion of cash, development will suffer and they'll fall behind. Of the ten companies, maybe one will reach maturity before it runs out of money, will go public, and will pay off the investors way better than 10-1.
Amazon could be making a profit today if they wanted to, but they're still spending enourmous amounts on promotion. Folks keep sayting that some sort of bubble is going to burst, but that's not quite accurate. Growth WILL slow down one of these days, though, once we reach a certain point of saturation. When that day comes, many companies will see their stock drop through the floor, and they'll be acquired for pennies by the big fish. With fewer startups nipping at their heels, the leaders like Amazon will reduce spending on promotion, and they'll start to show profits.
"These are hip in Japan, China..."
Well, apparently they work.
Well, every Internet connection is a shared connection; the fact that cable modems share a local loop as well as an upstream connection is pretty irrelevant. The cable company can build a bottleneck in the local loop, or they can build it in their routers. It's just a case of where they decide to spend their money.
I used MediaOne when I lived in Massachusetts, and was pretty impressed the way they handled it. They used DHCP, which allowed them to limit the number of modems sharing a loop. But even during the fast growth, you only got renumbered two or three times a year. You could choose your own host name, you could run servers with 384K upstream bandwidth. People would get somebody to host DNS, and they'd run web servers, mail servers, ftp, private NNTP servers, just about everything, and with MediaOne's full blessing.
And when you think about it, why is upstream bandwidth any different than downstream? Everything that goes out of a server has to go into a computer somewhere else. Connections have two ends, the bandwidth is no more precious on one end than the other.
>> you can use W2K kerberos to access Unix/Linux kerberos
Hey, it's simple then. Use Unix/Linux servers, and whatever you want on the desktop.
Still, I find it odd to think MS would intentionally limit the usefulness of their servers and of their directory. Unlike the desktop, they have a lot of competition in the server and directory space. This can't be a monopolistic move because it implies that they're leveraging server dominance to sell more desktops.
It'll be interesting to see how this develops. It'll probably just be reverse-engineered, saving MS the trouble of making a decision.
If the states were really concerned with leveling the playing field for their retailers, they'd cut their own sales taxes.
State treasuries are awash in money, to the extent that even politicians are embarrassed to ask for more. The "fairness" issue is simply an excuse to raise more money, while pretending to help the retailers. Phooey.
Okay, here's the plan... we'll file for a patent on the concept of being a patent office, and then sue to put the Patent Office out of business.
One thing that will almost certainly happen is that this will force the RIAA and MPAA to tone down the rhetoric, which has been truly venomous the last few weeks. Maybe they've felt empowered by a few court wins, or by the bushels of money they sent toward Washington (and the Clinton administration in particular).
This happened to me once with a small business I owned. Things were tough, and I had some preliminary talks with a competitor about selling the business. We couldn't reach a deal, so he called my banker and told him I was trying to liquidate my inventory from under them. It was too small-time to get lawyers involved, but I'll never forget it. One of the sleaziest things I've ever seen. I still get chills when I replay the conversations in my mind.
This case isn't about copyright, it's about reigning in some politcally-connected bullies, and they're long overdue for a good spanking. Or an anti-trust investigation. But don't expect the Clinton folks to lift a finger.
>> I am comfortable that in science, as in the rest of life, there is always one more unanswered question.
Well, that pretty much fits my broad definition of faith; it's the realization that at any given time some things are unmalleable and absolute and unexplainable, but yet we accept them and say "so be it."
In the end, such analysis leads simply to a better scientific understanding. Just as our knowledge of the world has progressed since biblical times, it will continue to progress in the future. But there will always be things that science hasn't explained.
Newton discovered that f=ma, but something else made it true. Darwin may have discovered evolution, but something else made it happen. Search as we might, science will always fall short of answering the fundamental spiritual question of "why?"
Somewhere along the line, I was able to reconcile my scientific/anthropological training with my faith, and realized that the two are not in conflict. Nutshell version: Science is born of God-given talents, and therefore we should not ignore it or belittle it. Maybe the world wasn't created in seven days, but I'm still in awe of whatever made it happen, and I don't intend to mess with it.
Continue studying, continue advancing science, but don't expect it to explain that which it can't. In science, there is always one more unanswered question; only some sort of faith can make you comfortable with that.
You've got... certified mail.
"United Nations World Conference on Racism, Racial Discrimination and Xenophobia"
Have you ever heard the word xenophobia used to criticize any country other than the US? Expect to see headlines such as "Study shows 80% of all hate sites are US-based."
This sounds like a money grab; make Americans feel guilty, and wallow in the spare change they throw off.
Well, our difference, then , is that I don't think that first-come-first-served is necessarily the fairest way to distribute things, but you seem to prefer it.
Our do understand, however, the sentiment against somebody apparently making something for nothing, and that probably accounts for why ticket scalping is widely outlawed. Even so, it's legal in many places, and it's not so profitable that it attracts a lot of attention.
Interestingly, the economics of the domain registration situation are slightly different, in that there is only one possible seller for a given domain name. You can buy playoff tickets from any one of a number of scalpers, but you can only buy a particular domain from the current holder. And the seller might have many prospective purchasers bidding for the name. That imbalance probably drives up domain prices considerably.
That's pretty cool, thanks for the link.
Linus is clearly doing the right thing by defending his trademark; as others have noted, failure to defend it can lead to losing it.
That said, what exactly is so bad about domain speculators? It seems to me that they provide a useful service, just like ticket scalpers. And just to be clear, I'm not talking about the scammers who used to register and re-register domains without ever paying for them.
Most domain names, at $35/year, are priced below their market value. That's why there are so few good ones available. People register them as if they were free, because they nearly are. But that low cost is also what creates the shortage. Domain speculators help alleviate the shortage, by making names available to people who are willing to pay the most for them. In other words, by reselling the names at a profit, domain speculators help insure that the names will go to somebody who intends to use them, or at the very least, to somebody who will pay dearly for the privelege of not using it.
To illustrate: I just missed out on being able to register bobk.com, having been beaten by a couple of months by Microsoft (remember MS Bob?). As of last month, it's registered to somebody else, and I don't know the story behind it. But consider the situation of Microsoft holding the name, one that many other wanted, and for which MS had no further use (nor did they ever use it, as far as I can tell; a great domain name just went unused from 1994-whenever). What should Microsft have done with it?
Obviously "give it to me" wasn't an option; for that matter, there a a zillion Bobs out here who would love the name, but only one could own it. Who should get it? Should they have everybody write an essay as to why the deserve it and then give it way? Giving it to the highest bidder is an imperfect solution, but it's better than all others. Even if MS donated it to charity to avoid looking greedy, there's no assurance that the charity would be able to put it to use unless they sold it.
The Microsoft example is an anomoly, but it illustrates why reselling domain names (or Super Bowl tickets) helps to efficiently distribute underpriced goods when demand outstrips supply.