It's all just marketing hype now. It's purely a matter of Intel and AMD trying to "one-up" each other.
"I'm the fastest!" " No, I am!!"
For the average user, once you get up to 1.5 ghz or so, it doesn't really matter. My Athlon XP 1700 has a clock speed almost 50% faster than my wife's 1 ghz AMD Thunderbird, but her computer doesn't seem noticably slower.
1. Web sites are becoming more and more offensive. I recently visited a site that wouldn't display properly in Opera so I used IE. Unfortunately, IE lacks Opera's ability to block pop-up windows, and I was so bombarded with pop-ups that it was impossible to find the information I was looking for.
2. Search engines are all but useless. Type in any word or phrase and you get pr0n sites.
3. Your e-mail in-box is constantly flooded with spam.
4. The most popular Internet activities are message boards, instant messaging, chat rooms and e-mail. In other words, a high tech equivalent of the CB radio. Like the CB radio, the fad is passing.
5. Other than plain text and simple HTML, the Internet is worthless as a vehicle for delivering content. Which actually doesn't matter since most web sites have no content worth seeing.
Lack of cooling is certainly an issue with 7200 rpm and faster drives. Since installing fans on all my hard drives, the number of failures has gone way down.
However, there is a more troubling issue: How is it that you can now buy a 40 gig hard drive for less than $100? Simple -- the manufacturer cuts corners on quality and cranks them out by the thousands in third world sweat-shops.
IBM is now putting disclaimers on some of their hard drives, not recommending operating them for more than 8 - 10 hours per day.
"...they can show world governments that a mission to Mars is viable."
Oh puh-leeze!!! Yeah right, that's exactly what we need... spend a gazillion dollars on a manned mission to Mars so they can send back more picures of rocks and red dirt.
Sorry, been there, done that and bought the T-Shirt. There's nothing more to see here, please move along.
"the whole idea behind yEnc is to maximize bandwidth - which would cut into his employer's profits - more encoded content at the same price. Spread that over thousands of users, the number becomes significant."
This is a bogus argument. As he says in his article:
"And the bandwidth savings? That's an illusion.... Do you really think people aren't going to post more, if they can do it faster? Of course they are. They're always going to post more, with or without yEnc. And, with yEnc, they are even more likely to post more, because posting the same amount of material will take a shorter time..."
And he's exactly right. yEnc will have no effect on the revenue of news-servers that charge by the gigabyte. Although he only mentions uploading, the same thing applies to downloading as well. People will still download their 10GB a month, they'll just get an extra porn video or two for the same money.
"Shopping sites in general, as well as many other public sites that depend on referral revenue to operate will lose money as a result of this,"
What utter nonsense. A business is supposed to make money by selling a legitimate product or service. If a significant portion of your revenue comes from "referrals" and not from the sale of a legitimate product or service, then you deserve to go out of business.
to debate the same tired crap? "Software Piracy" is a lie. Using copyrighted material in a way that the author does not like or approve of IS NOT piracy. You can call it piracy, and you can spend lots of time and money on various copy protection schemes, but the average person isn't buying it (no pun intended).
In 1986 people were saying "Shareware is in trouble. If people don't start paying for shareware, it will disappear. 16 years later, there's more shareware than ever.
In 1989, the Wall Street Journal ran a front page article about "software piracy", citing the example of being able to walk into a Hong Kong store and buy a bootleg copy of Lotus 123 for $20. Right next to that story, was an article naming Jim Manzi, then CEO of Lotus, as the highest paid corporate executive in America with total compensation of $27 million. Hmmmm..... let's see now.... Lotus is being destroyed by "piracy" but they made so much money that they can afford to pay their CEO $27 million. Something doesn't add up.
The RIAA claims that music sales were down 10 pecent in 2001 compared to 2000. And of course Napster/Kaaza/Morpheus,et.al., are to blame. Taking into consideration that the entire economy took a major nosedive in the second half of 2001, a 10% drop in sales is trivial. If the events of 9/11 hadn't occured and the economy had stayed strong, it would not be out of line to say that music sales would have been the same or higher in 2001 compared to 2000. Now, think about that..... millions of people downloading millions of songs for free and yet there was no significant decrease in music sales.
The movie industry has now jumped on the bandwagon, claiming that they too are the "victims of rampant piracy" as people use their broadband internet connections to download moveis. Guess what. The movie industry just reported that 2001 had the largest box office receipts since they starting tracking that info in 1959.
The casual copying of material is irrelevant and has zero impact on the profits of the people who create the material.
"Ambrosia programmers spend the time to remove the licensing stuff, they recompile and release a FreeWare version to the net. They release a key generating program/algorithm."
Please cite a specific example of a shareware programmer who actually did this. I have yet to see it.
I used AmiPro for a long time and loved it. The AmiPro story is just one example of how companies screw themselves without any need for Microsoft to do anything evil.
In the fall of '95, *AFTER* Windows 95 had already come out, Lotus releases a new version of AmiPro, re-named to WordPro. Holy Mother..... what a load of crap!! Slow, buggy, crashes constantly.... and it's not even a Win95 app... it's still designed for Windows 3.1
Oh yeah, and just for good measure, they completely re-designed all the menus so that all of your favorite AmiPro functions were now located somewhere different.... if you could find them at all. PC Magazine gave WordPro glowing reviews, raving about all sorts of wonderful new features. Unfortunately, figuring out how to use these wonderful new features was nearly impossible since WordPro came with an "instruction manual" that was nothing more than a small, thin pamphlet that contained only the most basic of information.
In 1995, IBM tried to one-up Microsoft by releasing a new version of OS/2 before Windows 95 came out. I was looking for an alternative to The Evil Empire and seriously considered OS/2. However, I didn't go with OS/2, even though it was superior to Windows in several areas, because it flunked the "Best Buy" test.
The Best Buy test: Walk into Best Buy (or Circuit City or any store that sells computer software) and count the number of native OS/2 programs sitting on the shelves. Number = 0. Stay away.
Linux also fails the Best Buy test, which is why it will never pose a serious challenge to Windows (for general consumer use) and will continue to only be used as an OS for servers and computer geeks.
OK. You buy a can of Coke and find a flexible CD wrapped around it. Between the Coke factory, warehouse and sitting on the grocery store shelf, that CD has proabably been wrapped around the can for at least a month.
So once you get it home, how do you get it flattened out so that it will work in a CD player?
People demonstrate that they just don't get it. Shades of 1999. Let's make money on the Internet by selling nothing.
1. Computer hardware is expensive and difficult to maintain 2. Bandwith is expensive 3. Therefore, people should pay for/. even though there is nothing here worth paying for.
Walmart makes a gazillion dollars a year because it sells things that people actually want and need.
/. is free because that's exactly what it's worth.
"At that point the man remembers he has some earplugs in his pocket. He puts them in his ears, and the woman's screaming dulls down to be almost unnoticeable. Smiling, he goes about looking for a book, with the librarian following, becoming increasingly frustrated. He notices suddenly that everyone else seems to be wearing earplugs as well... He laughs, thinking that the "tip jar" is going to remain pretty empty..."
Added images.slashdot.org to my Hosts file. No more ads.
Yes, it costs money to operate/. (bandwidth doesn't grow on trees...yada yada yada). But, if you're going to charge, you have to have something worth selling.
So, would you pay for a magazine with zero original content and that merely reprints stories that have already been printed elsewhere?
Slashdot Mirror
1. 10 meg of useful stuff, 600 meg of crap. (Gotta fill up that CD!!)
2. Blank CD = 30 cents
Book with CD = $20 (or more) extra
It's all just marketing hype now. It's purely a matter of Intel and AMD trying to "one-up" each other.
"I'm the fastest!"
" No, I am!!"
For the average user, once you get up to 1.5 ghz or so, it doesn't really matter. My Athlon XP 1700 has a clock speed almost 50% faster than my wife's 1 ghz AMD Thunderbird, but her computer doesn't seem noticably slower.
Wesley Crusher is one of the all time worst Star Trek characters. "Enterprise" sucks bad enough without him.
Nothing but stupid, lame attempts at fake news stories.
Enough already.
1. Web sites are becoming more and more offensive. I recently visited a site that wouldn't display properly in Opera so I used IE. Unfortunately, IE lacks Opera's ability to block pop-up windows, and I was so bombarded with pop-ups that it was impossible to find the information I was looking for.
2. Search engines are all but useless. Type in any word or phrase and you get pr0n sites.
3. Your e-mail in-box is constantly flooded with spam.
4. The most popular Internet activities are message boards, instant messaging, chat rooms and e-mail. In other words, a high tech equivalent of the CB radio. Like the CB radio, the fad is passing.
5. Other than plain text and simple HTML, the Internet is worthless as a vehicle for delivering content. Which actually doesn't matter since most web sites have no content worth seeing.
From the "Friday the 13th" movies?
Cool!!
Lack of cooling is certainly an issue with 7200 rpm and faster drives. Since installing fans on all my hard drives, the number of failures has gone way down.
However, there is a more troubling issue:
How is it that you can now buy a 40 gig hard drive for less than $100? Simple -- the manufacturer cuts corners on quality and cranks them out by the thousands in third world sweat-shops.
IBM is now putting disclaimers on some of their hard drives, not recommending operating them for more than 8 - 10 hours per day.
These guys have watched too much sci-fi.
... spend a gazillion dollars on a manned mission to Mars so they can send back more picures of rocks and red dirt.
"...they can show world governments that a mission to Mars is viable."
Oh puh-leeze!!! Yeah right, that's exactly what we need
Sorry, been there, done that and bought the T-Shirt. There's nothing more to see here, please move along.
"the whole idea behind yEnc is to maximize bandwidth - which would cut into his employer's profits - more encoded content at the same price. Spread that over thousands of users, the number becomes significant."
..."
This is a bogus argument. As he says in his article:
"And the bandwidth savings? That's an illusion.... Do you really think people aren't going to post more, if they can do it faster? Of course they are. They're always going to post more, with or without yEnc. And, with yEnc, they are even more likely to post more, because posting the same amount of material will take a shorter time
And he's exactly right. yEnc will have no effect on the revenue of news-servers that charge by the gigabyte. Although he only mentions uploading, the same thing applies to downloading as well. People will still download their 10GB a month, they'll just get an extra porn video or two for the same money.
"Shopping sites in general, as well as many other public sites that depend on referral revenue to operate will lose money as a result of this,"
What utter nonsense. A business is supposed to make money by selling a legitimate product or service. If a significant portion of your revenue comes from "referrals" and not from the sale of a legitimate product or service, then you deserve to go out of business.
to debate the same tired crap? "Software Piracy" is a lie. Using copyrighted material in a way that the author does not like or approve of IS NOT piracy. You can call it piracy, and you can spend lots of time and money on various copy protection schemes, but the average person isn't buying it (no pun intended).
.... Lotus is being destroyed by "piracy" but they made so much money that they can afford to pay their CEO $27 million. Something doesn't add up.
..... millions of people downloading millions of songs for free and yet there was no significant decrease in music sales.
In 1986 people were saying "Shareware is in trouble. If people don't start paying for shareware, it will disappear. 16 years later, there's more shareware than ever.
In 1989, the Wall Street Journal ran a front page article about "software piracy", citing the example of being able to walk into a Hong Kong store and buy a bootleg copy of Lotus 123 for $20. Right next to that story, was an article naming Jim Manzi, then CEO of Lotus, as the highest paid corporate executive in America with total compensation of $27 million. Hmmmm..... let's see now
The RIAA claims that music sales were down 10 pecent in 2001 compared to 2000. And of course Napster/Kaaza/Morpheus,et.al., are to blame. Taking into consideration that the entire economy took a major nosedive in the second half of 2001, a 10% drop in sales is trivial. If the events of 9/11 hadn't occured and the economy had stayed strong, it would not be out of line to say that music sales would have been the same or higher in 2001 compared to 2000. Now, think about that
The movie industry has now jumped on the bandwagon, claiming that they too are the "victims of rampant piracy" as people use their broadband internet connections to download moveis. Guess what. The movie industry just reported that 2001 had the largest box office receipts since they starting tracking that info in 1959.
The casual copying of material is irrelevant and has zero impact on the profits of the people who create the material.
"Ambrosia programmers spend the time to remove the licensing stuff, they recompile and release a FreeWare version to the net.
They release a key generating program/algorithm."
Please cite a specific example of a shareware programmer who actually did this. I have yet to see it.
I used AmiPro for a long time and loved it. The AmiPro story is just one example of how companies screw themselves without any need for Microsoft to do anything evil.
.... and it's not even a Win95 app ... it's still designed for Windows 3.1
.... if you could find them at all. PC Magazine gave WordPro glowing reviews, raving about all sorts of wonderful new features. Unfortunately, figuring out how to use these wonderful new features was nearly impossible since WordPro came with an "instruction manual" that was nothing more than a small, thin pamphlet that contained only the most basic of information.
In the fall of '95, *AFTER* Windows 95 had already come out, Lotus releases a new version of AmiPro, re-named to WordPro. Holy Mother..... what a load of crap!! Slow, buggy, crashes constantly
Oh yeah, and just for good measure, they completely re-designed all the menus so that all of your favorite AmiPro functions were now located somewhere different
Yeah right.
In 1995, IBM tried to one-up Microsoft by releasing a new version of OS/2 before Windows 95 came out. I was looking for an alternative to The Evil Empire and seriously considered OS/2. However, I didn't go with OS/2, even though it was superior to Windows in several areas, because it flunked the "Best Buy" test.
The Best Buy test:
Walk into Best Buy (or Circuit City or any store that sells computer software) and count the number of native OS/2 programs sitting on the shelves. Number = 0. Stay away.
Linux also fails the Best Buy test, which is why it will never pose a serious challenge to Windows (for general consumer use) and will continue to only be used as an OS for servers and computer geeks.
OK. You buy a can of Coke and find a flexible CD wrapped around it. Between the Coke factory, warehouse and sitting on the grocery store shelf, that CD has proabably been wrapped around the can for at least a month.
So once you get it home, how do you get it flattened out so that it will work in a CD player?
Mozilla is nothing more than a slightly-less-crappy version of Netscape Communicator.
Phantom Menace sucked.
"I don't mind giving Netscape/AOL some revenue so that they can develop a decent competitor to IE."
So when is Nutscrape going to start work on a "decent competitior to IE"??? Netscape 6 is bloated, bug-ridden crap.
Use Opera.
Here's why:
1. Slashdot is nothing but reposting of stories that originate elsewhere.
2. So why pay Slashdot. Go read the stories at their original source.
3. If thoses sources start charging, read the newspapers and magazines that carry all those same stories (and that I'm already paying for anyway).
People demonstrate that they just don't get it.
/. even though there is nothing here worth paying for.
Shades of 1999. Let's make money on the Internet by selling nothing.
1. Computer hardware is expensive and difficult to maintain
2. Bandwith is expensive
3. Therefore, people should pay for
Walmart makes a gazillion dollars a year because it sells things that people actually want and need.
/. is free because that's exactly what it's worth.
"At that point the man remembers he has some earplugs in his pocket. He puts them in his ears, and the woman's screaming dulls down to be almost unnoticeable. Smiling, he goes about looking for a book, with the librarian following, becoming increasingly frustrated. He notices suddenly that everyone else seems to be wearing earplugs as well... He laughs, thinking that the "tip jar" is going to remain pretty empty..."
Added images.slashdot.org to my Hosts file. No more ads.
Ahhhh earplugs.
expensive? nah. Got it for free.
1. In business for 10 years
2. Number of BeOS apps on store shelves = 0
3. The end.
Yes, it costs money to operate /. (bandwidth doesn't grow on trees...yada yada yada). But, if you're going to charge, you have to have something worth selling.
So, would you pay for a magazine with zero original content and that merely reprints stories that have already been printed elsewhere?
I didn't think so.
" How much more do you spend on things that provide less value each month? "
Ahhh.... therin lies the rub. I'm hard-pressed to think of something I pay for that provides LESS value than this place.