They never had a way to turn a profit. Sure, it got a lot of use while it was "free". But RIAA or not, when they moved to a pay service they would have had much fewer users. And those users, now paying for Napster, would have been much less inclined to put themselves at risk of the RIAA and less inclined to use their own hard disk space to support a service they had to pay for, so many magnitudes fewer of files would be "shared". Given that, the few paying smucks would eventually figure out that they wern't getting enough for their money and go away. The basic business model was flawed, even without the RIAA: You can't expect your users to provide storage and bandwidth for you and expect them to pay you too.
Nothing new here, just another case of Microsoft doing something wrong and the resolution to the problem is that nothing happens to them. And when they get caught doing it again, nothing will happen then either. Funny it doesn't work that way if I get caught.
It's already been established that a company can't own a set of op codes for a cpu. File formats should certainly have the same protection, the data they contain almost always does not belong to the company that created the format; such a company should not be able to hold the data prisoner because only they can access the format.
reminiscence about BBS's ?
Youngsters! Didn't even mention 110 baud like my trusty ASR-33, bought and used an appliance rather than building his own video terminal. And he thinks he's remembering the good old days!
This is hardly building a UPS, it's more of taking several expensive items (inverter, power supply and large battery) and hooking them together. Considering my $120 900 VA runs my power hog AMD system(including 3 hard drives and 3 CD/DVD drives), my 21 inch HP monitor and a hand full of other things (including the DSL modem and the d-link) at about 41% load, I'm a lot further ahead than trying this expensive hack. And if I need more power for additional hardware I can always add another (less expensive) UPS and still be way ahead, if I thought I needed longer backup times I could use the same large capacity battery the article uses, mount it outside my UPS, and I would still be way ahead.
I'm all for build it yourself when that will save you cash and/or get you something better, but this hack just seems an expensive way to kluge together a UPS when you can buy better stuff for less cash.
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They never had a way to turn a profit. Sure, it got a lot of use while it was "free". But RIAA or not, when they moved to a pay service they would have had much fewer users. And those users, now paying for Napster, would have been much less inclined to put themselves at risk of the RIAA and less inclined to use their own hard disk space to support a service they had to pay for, so many magnitudes fewer of files would be "shared". Given that, the few paying smucks would eventually figure out that they wern't getting enough for their money and go away. The basic business model was flawed, even without the RIAA: You can't expect your users to provide storage and bandwidth for you and expect them to pay you too.
Nothing new here, just another case of Microsoft doing something wrong and the resolution to the problem is that nothing happens to them. And when they get caught doing it again, nothing will happen then either. Funny it doesn't work that way if I get caught.
It's already been established that a company can't own a set of op codes for a cpu. File formats should certainly have the same protection, the data they contain almost always does not belong to the company that created the format; such a company should not be able to hold the data prisoner because only they can access the format.
reminiscence about BBS's ? Youngsters! Didn't even mention 110 baud like my trusty ASR-33, bought and used an appliance rather than building his own video terminal. And he thinks he's remembering the good old days!
This is hardly building a UPS, it's more of taking several expensive items (inverter, power supply and large battery) and hooking them together. Considering my $120 900 VA runs my power hog AMD system(including 3 hard drives and 3 CD/DVD drives), my 21 inch HP monitor and a hand full of other things (including the DSL modem and the d-link) at about 41% load, I'm a lot further ahead than trying this expensive hack. And if I need more power for additional hardware I can always add another (less expensive) UPS and still be way ahead, if I thought I needed longer backup times I could use the same large capacity battery the article uses, mount it outside my UPS, and I would still be way ahead. I'm all for build it yourself when that will save you cash and/or get you something better, but this hack just seems an expensive way to kluge together a UPS when you can buy better stuff for less cash.