According to this recent AP story he's "only" in debt for $100m, with the action for a claimed "phony investment scam" worth $35m. I guess that's what you're talking about...
There's a nice site here in the UK that kinda of lets you do this - computerprices.co.uk.
Say you wanted a 1Ghz T'bird - they show you the comparison shopping prices for a few retailers and (scroll down a bit) the price history for that product, based on the best price each week. For this particular product, you'll see the price has come way down since launch (as expect).
Looking at RAM prices, you'll see they fluctuate a bit more.
I thought they also had a feature that would email me when a particular product got below a price you had entered, but I can't find that now.
Tangent - two examples of ad agencies taking advantage of opportunities which I thought were funny:
One ad company placed crushed cars around London to promote Godzilla flick. Had police tape and signs saying "Warning: Godzilla was here" (or similar). Insurance company comes along and places sign next to it saying "We cover you against acts of Godzilla".
Another ad company was recently renovating their London office. Their hoarding's had a sign saying "Bill posters will not be prosecuted". Ad company X, a bitter rival from down the street, placed a huge banner across the hoardings saying "You'll get better service with Ad company X" with an arrow pointing to them.
There's lots of graphiti-esque adverts 'round my part of the world (i'm vaguely near Hoxton/Shoreditch in London). I'm completely cool with small clubs or artists putting up "illegal" posters or spray painting things (cool examples: Banksy, the New Media Arse Media series, or the space invader tiles that I can't find the link to), but last summer a sportswear firm came and started spray painting their logo all over the place.
That pisses me off - they can afford to buy billboards (and, infact, do), so don't put your coroprate logo on the sidewalks - that's not cool and people see right through it. It's not edgey, it's not down with the kids. It's neither big not clever, and it just plain don't work.
Don't know if they used chalk paint, but, if they did, it's still there...
News.com has some video in RealVideo or Windows Media Player up now. They seem to be cutting over to a reporter live on the floor of the show, so I expect they'll be putting more up as they find their stories.
I'm not from the US, so I don't know how the set top boxes are sold in the States, so ignore me if I have things wrong...
Where do these people get the STBs to watch DirecTV from? Generally cable/satellite/etc operators will sell their STBs as a loss leader, aiming to get their money back from subscribtion charges over a lengthy period of time.
Assuming this is how DirecTV is sold in the states, that sounds pretty close to theft to me...
The Register is reporting that the UK list price for the X1 is going to be £1200 - almost double the straight currency conversion of £679 (US$1000 == GBP£679 at the moment, according to this site.
WTF is that all about then?
I noted that Apple UK's pricing of the Titanium Powerbook is only marginally above the straight conversion, which sounds fair to me. But almost double?
Or finding out that you were unsuccessful for the internal promotion when you're introduced to the person who got the job you were going for - who also happens to be your new boss.
Distributing ad-supported software is entirely different from ad-supported hardware.
The cost in distributing (via the 'Net) an additional copy of a piece of software is so close to zero, it's not worth counting.
Distributing hardware is much different. Someone has to pay for each additional pieces of hardware in the first place. Moving atoms around costs big money compared to bits.
Doesn't Eudora now come in an ad-supported or pay-for-it-and-get-no-ads versions? Anyone have figures on how well that's going?
...j
(who last week paid £5 to get rid of the ads in the DigiGuide software)
tele2 has been around for around 2 years, if I remember correctly. Their roll-out to other areas of the UK is frustraitingly slow, unfortunately. It's an off-shoot of a http://www.tele2.dk/">Danish company, but my Danish is not good enough to determine if they're doing wireless there.
The UK is interesting because of the relationship between BT, the cable companies and all the other phone companies. BT is moving as slow as possible in rolling out ADSL (it's only just become available in the last couple of months), and the cable companies are largely ineffective in providing cable modem access (largely thanks to the rapid consolidation in the industry, and the problems in integrating the different networks, I suspect). In the past 24 hours, however, the telecoms regulator, OFTEL, has started to put pressure on BT to speed up the unbundling of the local loop, which could change things dramatically.
Anyway, the point being, the telecoms landscape in the UK makes it difficult to get high speed (and consumer level cost) internet access over fixed wire. Hence, options such as the service provided by tele2 are interesting. Or the grass roots consume.net, or others.
If BT was playing nicely, it wouldn't be necessary, but they may end up shooting themselves in the foot.
I do agree that this charged service will probably kill the company.
It'll limit the usefulness of the my.mp3.com, but I doubt it will kill mp3.com outright.
my.mp3.com is still a useful service as it was originally intended - as a means of "bookmarking" your favourite tracks from mp3.com artists. When the beam-it software was first released, I went through a bundle of my albums until it recognised one (the joys of obscure music!), thought "that's kinda cool", and went back to listening to even more obscure (but far more tasty) music from mp3.com artists.
...j
(who has an NMA and bits and pieces on mp3.com, available by clicking immediately below here)
For all you funky europeans with DECT cordless phones, make sure you change your security code on the base stations! It's the same deal as with the wireless LANs, except, DECT phones are far more common.
Most (all?) base stations ship with a default security code of "00", which makes it easy to reassign a random base station, if you just so happen to be walking down the street with a DECT handset.
Or something.
Anyone played with data over DECT? I see that there are standards for data and DECT, and DECT to ISDN gateways, etc., but haven't really seen any products. Data over DECT could be fun...
Slashdot Mirror
According to this recent AP story he's "only" in debt for $100m, with the action for a claimed "phony investment scam" worth $35m. I guess that's what you're talking about...
There's a nice site here in the UK that kinda of lets you do this - computerprices.co.uk.
Say you wanted a 1Ghz T'bird - they show you the comparison shopping prices for a few retailers and (scroll down a bit) the price history for that product, based on the best price each week. For this particular product, you'll see the price has come way down since launch (as expect).
Looking at RAM prices, you'll see they fluctuate a bit more.
I thought they also had a feature that would email me when a particular product got below a price you had entered, but I can't find that now.
...j
Like you say, _you_ didn't read the website.
He had a projection box to display the images in colour.
Go look at the website, the pictures are quite stunning.
...j
Yeah, who's ever heard of big Asian industrial conglomerates making cars and computer gear.
Ignoring the likes of Hyundai and Daewoo, ofcourse.
...j
free2air has a long article on this, with lots of links, technical information, source code, and other good stuff.
And the fact that they've found 150 open hosts in London's Docklands.
And for you 802.11b geeks, you may be vaguely interested to know that newsfilter.co.uk (below) is served wirelessly. Yehaw!
...j
What a whacky way to run a business. Thank god it'll never catch on!
...j
I think the 1U thing came out just as they were going bust. Anyone know if they actually shipped? They looked nice in a coblt-y RAQ kinda way.
...j
Tangent - two examples of ad agencies taking advantage of opportunities which I thought were funny:
One ad company placed crushed cars around London to promote Godzilla flick. Had police tape and signs saying "Warning: Godzilla was here" (or similar). Insurance company comes along and places sign next to it saying "We cover you against acts of Godzilla".
Another ad company was recently renovating their London office. Their hoarding's had a sign saying "Bill posters will not be prosecuted". Ad company X, a bitter rival from down the street, placed a huge banner across the hoardings saying "You'll get better service with Ad company X" with an arrow pointing to them.
Heh.
...j
I've counted my fingers and toes and i'm still not there.
Give me a minute while I take off my pants to see if that helps...
...j
There's lots of graphiti-esque adverts 'round my part of the world (i'm vaguely near Hoxton/Shoreditch in London). I'm completely cool with small clubs or artists putting up "illegal" posters or spray painting things (cool examples: Banksy, the New Media Arse Media series, or the space invader tiles that I can't find the link to), but last summer a sportswear firm came and started spray painting their logo all over the place.
That pisses me off - they can afford to buy billboards (and, infact, do), so don't put your coroprate logo on the sidewalks - that's not cool and people see right through it. It's not edgey, it's not down with the kids. It's neither big not clever, and it just plain don't work.
Don't know if they used chalk paint, but, if they did, it's still there...
...j
stormpkg is a nice gfxial installer for .debs - it can be found in unstable, if memory serves me correctly.
not as slick as red-carpet, but more flexible.
works for me, anyway.
...j
If it just worked, wouldn't it be in the stable branch of the distro?
Just like no one would ever want to send unsolicited email, right?
...j
Erm, but if no one was attempting to exploit any weaknesses, why bother with security at all?
...j
News.com has some video in RealVideo or Windows Media Player up now. They seem to be cutting over to a reporter live on the floor of the show, so I expect they'll be putting more up as they find their stories.
The slashdot stand looks kinda slick...
...j
I'm not from the US, so I don't know how the set top boxes are sold in the States, so ignore me if I have things wrong...
Where do these people get the STBs to watch DirecTV from? Generally cable/satellite/etc operators will sell their STBs as a loss leader, aiming to get their money back from subscribtion charges over a lengthy period of time.
Assuming this is how DirecTV is sold in the states, that sounds pretty close to theft to me...
...j
The Register is reporting that the UK list price for the X1 is going to be £1200 - almost double the straight currency conversion of £679 (US$1000 == GBP£679 at the moment, according to this site.
WTF is that all about then?
I noted that Apple UK's pricing of the Titanium Powerbook is only marginally above the straight conversion, which sounds fair to me. But almost double?
...j
Or finding out that you were unsuccessful for the internal promotion when you're introduced to the person who got the job you were going for - who also happens to be your new boss.
That's not nearly as much fun as it sounds.
...j
Distributing ad-supported software is entirely different from ad-supported hardware.
The cost in distributing (via the 'Net) an additional copy of a piece of software is so close to zero, it's not worth counting.
Distributing hardware is much different. Someone has to pay for each additional pieces of hardware in the first place. Moving atoms around costs big money compared to bits.
Doesn't Eudora now come in an ad-supported or pay-for-it-and-get-no-ads versions? Anyone have figures on how well that's going?
...j
(who last week paid £5 to get rid of the ads in the DigiGuide software)
tele2 has been around for around 2 years, if I remember correctly. Their roll-out to other areas of the UK is frustraitingly slow, unfortunately. It's an off-shoot of a http://www.tele2.dk/">Danish company, but my Danish is not good enough to determine if they're doing wireless there.
The UK is interesting because of the relationship between BT, the cable companies and all the other phone companies. BT is moving as slow as possible in rolling out ADSL (it's only just become available in the last couple of months), and the cable companies are largely ineffective in providing cable modem access (largely thanks to the rapid consolidation in the industry, and the problems in integrating the different networks, I suspect). In the past 24 hours, however, the telecoms regulator, OFTEL, has started to put pressure on BT to speed up the unbundling of the local loop, which could change things dramatically.
Anyway, the point being, the telecoms landscape in the UK makes it difficult to get high speed (and consumer level cost) internet access over fixed wire. Hence, options such as the service provided by tele2 are interesting. Or the grass roots consume.net, or others.
If BT was playing nicely, it wouldn't be necessary, but they may end up shooting themselves in the foot.
No complaints there.
...j
I do agree that this charged service will probably kill the company.
It'll limit the usefulness of the my.mp3.com, but I doubt it will kill mp3.com outright.
my.mp3.com is still a useful service as it was originally intended - as a means of "bookmarking" your favourite tracks from mp3.com artists. When the beam-it software was first released, I went through a bundle of my albums until it recognised one (the joys of obscure music!), thought "that's kinda cool", and went back to listening to even more obscure (but far more tasty) music from mp3.com artists.
...j
(who has an NMA and bits and pieces on mp3.com, available by clicking immediately below here)
Isn't that for a 100Mbps connection to an ISP? The ISP will then want to charge you for hauling your packets about, methinks...
...j
Is real data flowing over consume.net yet?
If there was a node about 500 meters closer to me, I would be in range, but, well, until them. D'oh!
...j
For all you funky europeans with DECT cordless phones, make sure you change your security code on the base stations! It's the same deal as with the wireless LANs, except, DECT phones are far more common.
Most (all?) base stations ship with a default security code of "00", which makes it easy to reassign a random base station, if you just so happen to be walking down the street with a DECT handset.
Or something.
Anyone played with data over DECT? I see that there are standards for data and DECT, and DECT to ISDN gateways, etc., but haven't really seen any products. Data over DECT could be fun...
...j