Package it right and put it on every cpu heatsink and psu in a datacenter. As long as the parts are cheap enough, cutting power usage in a large datacenter by 2% could be huge.
The FBI or some agent of the DoD will issue a national security letter, take the software before it is destroyed, and force Apple to stay mum on the topic. It doesn't matter what the judge's order says.
I know Michael personally, have read his blog for a couple years, and am familiar with his meta-parking service.
He's definitely one of the parking industry's most stand up guys. He's not a domain scammer, nor anything close to that. Advertisers love his service because he cuts off anyone with bad traffic. Now he's exposing the seedy underbelly of the parking industry... which of course seems to have pissed off some people.
The scammers make money by pounding advertisers' PPC links on parked pages and getting paid, then moving on to different accounts before Google or Yahoo can charge back against the first set of accounts. The middleman (parking co or Michael's co) gets burned in the process.
I was in the same situation about 10 years ago (yeah, pre-1.0-burst) so I think I have some insight for you...
First, this is a business question you are asking in a techie forum, bad idea. You are running a business, possibly selling a business, go get yourself some business advisers, at a minimum that means an accountant and a lawyer who know (or at least "get") your industry, and preferably some people who have sold companies in your industry, extra points if they sold to the same megacorp and aren't involved with megacorp any more (they can tell you how it all went, but if they're still there, there's a conflict).
Second, and read carefully: TAKE THE MONEY. There's an old expression: No one ever went broke making a profit.
Caveat: after taxes it should be more money than you'd make in 10 years of working the same "job" at average pay. (e.g. if you're an engineer who could easily pull in $125k/yr, make sure you're landing at least $1.25mm cash after taxes, don't take an all-stock deal - bubbles burst) You need enough money to be able to screw around for a few years if megacorp really does turn you lazy.
BUT don't get sucked into a long term contract working for megacorp. A year or two is ok, and if you're stuck with an earnout, make sure you really can see your company meeting those numbers. After a year you could be itching to leave the megacorp lifestyle (no company is perfect) and its best to know you can part on good terms, pick up and travel for a few months, then start your next awesome company.
Third, can I repeat #1? Find a better place than slashdot to get this sort of advice. If you're really strapped, try your college's career center network, or SCORE (.org)
We had a similar problem... the computer room is in the middle of our 6-room 1200 sq ft office, no windows, one ac duct on with the rest of the office. That rooms 8.5' by 12' (about 100 sq ft) with 9.5' ceilings. We now have 15 servers (mostly mid-range pc's but a few 8-core xeon boxes) running full time in there.
The solution came in several parts... first was to move any critical/primary stuff to our offsite servers and use the in-house boxes for backup and local-only stuff. We already had a cab at internap with some spare room.
Next we got a couple ceiling panels (its a false ceiling like in most office bldgs) that have a plastic grid for airflow instead of the usual cardboard foamy stuff.
We got rid of the nice locked, enclosed cabinets and got breadracks to increase airflow, and put two cheapy ($15) home depot oscillating fans in there.
If things get warm in the summer (i.e. today) we leave the door open for a bit and it cools down quickly. We're considering adding an exhaust fan/vent in the wall or ceiling, but since there's no exterior wall it's a pain, plus we'd have to deal with the landlord.
We probably only spent $100 and a day of labor, and it's "good enough."
Most of the comments here are way off. You make no mention of what the domain is currently used for or what the current owner has planned or in the works. It may be that they already paid a designer/programmer $1500 (or more!) for development work.
Even assuming (like most of the responses) that the domain is not being used *at all*, the current owner got there first and as long as the domain didn't conflict with a trademark at the time of registration and wasn't registered for the purpose of exploiting someone else's existing trademark, there's no way to get it in UDRP. Even if you go register a trademark now, since their registration will predate your trademark's issue date, you can't win. IANAL, so ask a real one if you don't believe me.
My advice: drop the cash on it now because domain prices have only been and will only continue to go up. Try offering $1k and see what they say. If your site can't make the $1500 back in a relatively short period of time your business model is flawed and/or you should come up with a different name.
Name one movie where the pre-release reviews weren't positive. The film companies control what gets said about their movies and they're not about to let some critic slam their film before the public's paid millions to see it. And if a critic DID write a negative pre-release review, he'd never get to see another pre-release.
This is a golden opportunity to hit SCO in the pocketbook!
Sign up and pay for a license. Once the transaction goes through, call your credit card company and reverse the charge. This costs SCO money - they refund your original amount plus pay a fee to the bank. If enough ppl do it they will lose the right to accept credit cards.:-)
P.S. IANAL, so if this constitutes fraud, I wouldn't know.
For spam to be profitable, *recipients* must be responding to the offers and paying money.
How about instead of coming up some contorted "standard", Microsoft and the other biggies put out an anti-spam PSA campaign... I'm sure the Gates Foundation can find a few mil for this...
Convince all those newbies not to respond to the spam offers and the senders will dry up.
I have a variation on this which might interest you- I used to use my cell as my main biz line, but when I moved I found my new apt has plaster (as opposed to sheetrock) with metal in the walls, acting as a faraday cage - I barely get FM radio reception indoors, must have cable to get TV, and get 1 bar on my cell when I'm lucky, though outside I get 3.
I signed up for Vonage and forward it to my home line when working at home, take the box with me when I'm at a client with a T1+, or forward it to my cell if I'm going to be out and about for more than a few hours.
This way I can move, get a new office, change cells, change local phone providers - anything really - and still keep my number.
Be realistic... there probably aren't many (if ANY) coders (or anyone else low on the totempole) left at SCO... it's a litigous shell. And those who are left probably own enough stock that due to the recent runups they don't care whether or not some companies won't hire them.
Falling prices is always a nice thing for consumers, but look out - quality is suffering, and companies like Maxtor have been accused of "stuffing the channel" to move more product.
These low prices are a result of cut-throat competition akin to that in the "0% financing" car industry -- the manufacturers aren't profiting, so there won't be very good support down the line. Look at IBM - they sold their (previously crappy) hard drive line to Hitachi. Additionally, virtually all of the IDE/ATA drive manufacturers have cut their warranties to 1 year OR LESS!
I personally had an 80 GB IBM deskstar die in December (3 months after manufacture). It cost just over $3,000 to get the thing recovered by a data recovery shop (the thing wouldn't power up, so no, Norton Utilities was not an option).
HOWEVER - now that big drives are so cheap, look for (and implement if you can afford it) IDE RAID-1 configurations (mirroring) to save money and increase reliability.
You get what you pay for. When dealing with these companies where most things are FREE you can't expect to get top-notch customer service. It costs a lot of money to staff a support center (even if the center is in Canada/India/Jamaica).
The 29-year old guy and his like may not be making money, but they are supplying the people who ARE! You have to stop things like this at the source, and that's the suppliers and crackers.
I suppose by your argument we should put low level people like all the 16-year old drug dealers in prison, and not the South American drug lords who grow mega kilos of coke and mj to ship here?
No. You catch both. That's why in China they are hitting the distributors who are making the money and here they are hitting the suppliers.
You should read the article before you comment next time, and think out your position before you rant.
I agree with all the ppl saying JonKatz is way out of line here. But I won't whine about it.
Solution: 1. Stop being an AC, register on Slashdot 2. Go into your preferences and find the section labeled "Exclude Stories from Homepage" 3. Check off JonKatz under Authors 4. Save your preferences 5. Go to home page and reload...
from Connectix (I think) does this... of course, it's not a "whole system" solution (I run Win2k as host, then Virtual PC with RedHat 7.0) and it saves the state of the linux machine to disk whenever I shut it down. This works pretty well for me, but might not be so great for huge number crunching, as the Virtual PC is always a lot slower than the host OS. Still, it might be worth looking into for some people.
Most of the time, wiping data (with an overwrite) IS good enough to prevent "prying eyes" from finding it. If you have data which is sensitive enough and are truly concerned, then you should have a sufficient budget to use a hot-swappable drive bay and acid bath to eliminate all risk of left over magnetic signatures.
On the other hand, if you are commiting criminal acts, attempting to eliminate evidence, and do not have sufficient resources to do so, I (and the rest of the paranoid ppl here) should have no sympathy or technical advice.
Likewise, realize that no one will use the highly advanced and expensive steps to recover your data if there isn't sufficient financial incentive.
Slashdot Mirror
Package it right and put it on every cpu heatsink and psu in a datacenter. As long as the parts are cheap enough, cutting power usage in a large datacenter by 2% could be huge.
Now can we get the output of their system fed into Twitter's banning system? Please?
I mute most of those "free eth" tweets and it helps a bit, but it would be nice not to have to.
The site worked fine with Netscape 3, but if you were still using NCSA Mosaic forget it!
The FBI or some agent of the DoD will issue a national security letter, take the software before it is destroyed, and force Apple to stay mum on the topic. It doesn't matter what the judge's order says.
I know Michael personally, have read his blog for a couple years, and am familiar with his meta-parking service.
He's definitely one of the parking industry's most stand up guys. He's not a domain scammer, nor anything close to that. Advertisers love his service because he cuts off anyone with bad traffic. Now he's exposing the seedy underbelly of the parking industry... which of course seems to have pissed off some people.
The scammers make money by pounding advertisers' PPC links on parked pages and getting paid, then moving on to different accounts before Google or Yahoo can charge back against the first set of accounts. The middleman (parking co or Michael's co) gets burned in the process.
That activity is from systems that hunt for other peoples' stop orders.
TFA is in The Atlantic - of course they present it as a conspiracy.
I was in the same situation about 10 years ago (yeah, pre-1.0-burst) so I think I have some insight for you...
First, this is a business question you are asking in a techie forum, bad idea. You are running a business, possibly selling a business, go get yourself some business advisers, at a minimum that means an accountant and a lawyer who know (or at least "get") your industry, and preferably some people who have sold companies in your industry, extra points if they sold to the same megacorp and aren't involved with megacorp any more (they can tell you how it all went, but if they're still there, there's a conflict).
Second, and read carefully: TAKE THE MONEY. There's an old expression: No one ever went broke making a profit.
Caveat: after taxes it should be more money than you'd make in 10 years of working the same "job" at average pay. (e.g. if you're an engineer who could easily pull in $125k/yr, make sure you're landing at least $1.25mm cash after taxes, don't take an all-stock deal - bubbles burst) You need enough money to be able to screw around for a few years if megacorp really does turn you lazy.
BUT don't get sucked into a long term contract working for megacorp. A year or two is ok, and if you're stuck with an earnout, make sure you really can see your company meeting those numbers. After a year you could be itching to leave the megacorp lifestyle (no company is perfect) and its best to know you can part on good terms, pick up and travel for a few months, then start your next awesome company.
Third, can I repeat #1? Find a better place than slashdot to get this sort of advice. If you're really strapped, try your college's career center network, or SCORE (.org)
We had a similar problem... the computer room is in the middle of our 6-room 1200 sq ft office, no windows, one ac duct on with the rest of the office. That rooms 8.5' by 12' (about 100 sq ft) with 9.5' ceilings. We now have 15 servers (mostly mid-range pc's but a few 8-core xeon boxes) running full time in there.
The solution came in several parts... first was to move any critical/primary stuff to our offsite servers and use the in-house boxes for backup and local-only stuff. We already had a cab at internap with some spare room.
Next we got a couple ceiling panels (its a false ceiling like in most office bldgs) that have a plastic grid for airflow instead of the usual cardboard foamy stuff.
We got rid of the nice locked, enclosed cabinets and got breadracks to increase airflow, and put two cheapy ($15) home depot oscillating fans in there.
If things get warm in the summer (i.e. today) we leave the door open for a bit and it cools down quickly. We're considering adding an exhaust fan/vent in the wall or ceiling, but since there's no exterior wall it's a pain, plus we'd have to deal with the landlord.
We probably only spent $100 and a day of labor, and it's "good enough."
Most of the comments here are way off. You make no mention of what the domain is currently used for or what the current owner has planned or in the works. It may be that they already paid a designer/programmer $1500 (or more!) for development work.
Even assuming (like most of the responses) that the domain is not being used *at all*, the current owner got there first and as long as the domain didn't conflict with a trademark at the time of registration and wasn't registered for the purpose of exploiting someone else's existing trademark, there's no way to get it in UDRP. Even if you go register a trademark now, since their registration will predate your trademark's issue date, you can't win. IANAL, so ask a real one if you don't believe me.
My advice: drop the cash on it now because domain prices have only been and will only continue to go up. Try offering $1k and see what they say. If your site can't make the $1500 back in a relatively short period of time your business model is flawed and/or you should come up with a different name.
Name one movie where the pre-release reviews weren't positive. The film companies control what gets said about their movies and they're not about to let some critic slam their film before the public's paid millions to see it. And if a critic DID write a negative pre-release review, he'd never get to see another pre-release.
Chalk it up to Yet Another Netsol Cash Grab
Along with WLS and sitefinder.
Yup, looks like we're going back to punchcards. Now THAT's news!
This is a golden opportunity to hit SCO in the pocketbook!
:-)
Sign up and pay for a license. Once the transaction goes through, call your credit card company and reverse the charge. This costs SCO money - they refund your original amount plus pay a fee to the bank. If enough ppl do it they will lose the right to accept credit cards.
P.S. IANAL, so if this constitutes fraud, I wouldn't know.
For spam to be profitable, *recipients* must be responding to the offers and paying money.
How about instead of coming up some contorted "standard", Microsoft and the other biggies put out an anti-spam PSA campaign... I'm sure the Gates Foundation can find a few mil for this...
Convince all those newbies not to respond to the spam offers and the senders will dry up.
I have a variation on this which might interest you- I used to use my cell as my main biz line, but when I moved I found my new apt has plaster (as opposed to sheetrock) with metal in the walls, acting as a faraday cage - I barely get FM radio reception indoors, must have cable to get TV, and get 1 bar on my cell when I'm lucky, though outside I get 3.
I signed up for Vonage and forward it to my home line when working at home, take the box with me when I'm at a client with a T1+, or forward it to my cell if I'm going to be out and about for more than a few hours.
This way I can move, get a new office, change cells, change local phone providers - anything really - and still keep my number.
Be realistic... there probably aren't many (if ANY) coders (or anyone else low on the totempole) left at SCO... it's a litigous shell. And those who are left probably own enough stock that due to the recent runups they don't care whether or not some companies won't hire them.
SPIDERMAN!
Human-spider hybrids could produce your silk and not eat each other.
Falling prices is always a nice thing for consumers, but look out - quality is suffering, and companies like Maxtor have been accused of "stuffing the channel" to move more product.
These low prices are a result of cut-throat competition akin to that in the "0% financing" car industry -- the manufacturers aren't profiting, so there won't be very good support down the line. Look at IBM - they sold their (previously crappy) hard drive line to Hitachi. Additionally, virtually all of the IDE/ATA drive manufacturers have cut their warranties to 1 year OR LESS!
I personally had an 80 GB IBM deskstar die in December (3 months after manufacture). It cost just over $3,000 to get the thing recovered by a data recovery shop (the thing wouldn't power up, so no, Norton Utilities was not an option).
HOWEVER - now that big drives are so cheap, look for (and implement if you can afford it) IDE RAID-1 configurations (mirroring) to save money and increase reliability.
You get what you pay for. When dealing with these companies where most things are FREE you can't expect to get top-notch customer service. It costs a lot of money to staff a support center (even if the center is in Canada/India/Jamaica).
Get a real ISP and you'll get a real response.
WRONG.
I too work on shrink wrapped software.
The 29-year old guy and his like may not be making money, but they are supplying the people who ARE! You have to stop things like this at the source, and that's the suppliers and crackers.
I suppose by your argument we should put low level people like all the 16-year old drug dealers in prison, and not the South American drug lords who grow mega kilos of coke and mj to ship here?
No. You catch both. That's why in China they are hitting the distributors who are making the money and here they are hitting the suppliers.
You should read the article before you comment next time, and think out your position before you rant.
What are you doing with Christmas lights up in May?
I agree with all the ppl saying JonKatz is way out of line here. But I won't whine about it.
Solution:
1. Stop being an AC, register on Slashdot
2. Go into your preferences and find the section labeled "Exclude Stories from Homepage"
3. Check off JonKatz under Authors
4. Save your preferences
5. Go to home page and reload...
Ahhhh, back to "stuff that matters"
It's maintained by an OpenSRS reseller (the "little guys" in the domain reg. biz)
from Connectix (I think) does this... of course, it's not a "whole system" solution (I run Win2k as host, then Virtual PC with RedHat 7.0) and it saves the state of the linux machine to disk whenever I shut it down. This works pretty well for me, but might not be so great for huge number crunching, as the Virtual PC is always a lot slower than the host OS. Still, it might be worth looking into for some people.
Most of the time, wiping data (with an overwrite) IS good enough to prevent "prying eyes" from finding it. If you have data which is sensitive enough and are truly concerned, then you should have a sufficient budget to use a hot-swappable drive bay and acid bath to eliminate all risk of left over magnetic signatures.
On the other hand, if you are commiting criminal acts, attempting to eliminate evidence, and do not have sufficient resources to do so, I (and the rest of the paranoid ppl here) should have no sympathy or technical advice.
Likewise, realize that no one will use the highly advanced and expensive steps to recover your data if there isn't sufficient financial incentive.