Re:Diminishing sales equals diminishing use?
on
The Dying PC Market
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You are correct, but more to the point:
Warcraft Consoles End of the GHZ wars and software to utilize the speed Microsoft's Vista only DX10
World of warcraft has done something that no game in history has ever done. It's made it quite ok to run on antiquated hardware. I'm not saying that the latest expansion runs fantastically on a 1.8GHz proc, but but is quite playable with a reasonable video card. Blizzard is a significant thorn in the side of hardware manufacturers, how dare they not double the specs every year?
Consoles are making serious impovements these days. When the XBOX hit the market, it was little more than a middle upper end PC. The PS3 is an insane multi-processing platform. The WII has raised the bar on control and has a massive following.
The more cores war has failed to capture the publics eye. Would you like your new honda with 1,2 or 4 engines.... They're just lost. And really, who needs that power right now? So you can John some hashes faster, that doesn't help your grandmother do her taxes. The lions share of app developers aren't writing for more cores. Software is stagnating, pc sales will as well. Throw vista on a desktop with all the horsepower you want and you still have a sluggish buggy, driver alienated OS, MS threw DX10 on that and people aren't writing for it. If DX10 were on XP, there would be a host of new games sitting out there waiting for you to throttle up.
Things will kick back off again, it'll just take time.
Security through obscurity only lasts until someone figures it out.
Nothing like having the eyes of every coder on you to keep you honest.
This stuff isn't rocket science.
profit Take the users id number, display a list of questions, record the answer to the questions, transmit them home securely, (hardest part) profit
Honestly, there's no reason not to use a generic kernel, ncurses and a flatfile db. weld the case shut, seal off all ports save fine vents. pgp crypt the data with the local machines public key. pass the data out the screen via IR to a portable terminal. Don't give any indication on site of how many votes were taken or what the outcome was. send the data from the terminal through phone line to an otherwise offline central collection site. decrypt the data with the private keys, dump the localized tallies in to a hosted image for public consumption. concatenate the files, count the results, dump the total in to a hosted image for public consumption.
USB drivers choke on most webcams quickly, (yeah I know I can change usb arch and get it to work, be nice if both flavors didn't lock up). Generic webcam drivers miss the boat on individual camera features. (specifically quickcam pro's). HP multifunction gets sketchy. Better Power management, (suspend, low power)
All bases are covered somewhat, what's needed now is improvement on that existing coverage.
'The Pentagon issued a report indicating that space-based solar power 'has the potential to help the United States stave off climate change and avoid future conflicts over oil by harnessing the Sun's power to provide an essentially inexhaustible supply of clean energy.'
What the HELL are we gonna do with 5-10MW of power that's going to end oil conflict? We can do this on the groud, right now. If you do that in oil or gas, that's not even a turbine the size of a truck. We'd need to see a multi GW solution to do any good and even that would be limited
You know what's light and could use 5-10MW of power in orbit... one hell of a laser...
it's not unreasonable that they just googled "average size of an mp3" for fake press conference numbers.
3.5 * 30000 = 105000
I'd propose that 100GB per month is the limit.
I'm a FIOS user, I could exceed that in 15 hours (theoretically)
That said, If correct, I don't think it's an unreasonable number at all.
In terms of 700MB CD, that's 142 CD's of data a month. (avg divx movie fitting on a cd, maybe two) In terms of Joost streaming TV, that's 300 Hours. (roughly 10 hours a day)
Anyone that's not a 24x7 superleaf p2p node is likely to be ok.
The real problem is the invisible limit barrier with a notice then ban you immediately.
Comcast should be sending more than one notice, It sounds to me like these people might need a little more time to work it out. Perhaps they're harvesting the numbers before the people actually get (or read) the letters. Wouldn't hurt to wait another week and send out another notice. It would also do wonders for PR if they explained P2P flooding to the masses. a 30 second commercial explaining P2P traffic and why it can't always be accomidated would be a good gesture.
If you have a dorm's worth of people running 24x7 p2p unthrottled, it's a huge strain on the infrastructure. The more you throw at it, the more they'll take.
I see both sides, but Comcast isn't handling it very well.
Actually AD has one more thing going for it. A huge install base and companies full of people that don't mind populating it.
Interop of AD and existing LDAP projects will ease the progression of Linux in to the work place.
It was easy to sell them on CENT VM servers because there was almost no interoperability required. Samba out of the box with AD logins and better integration with evolution would go a long way to selling the bosses on OSS.
They updated the windows update engine, That's not going to affect your apps, homegrown or otherwise. If windows update was really going to stop working altogether if this didn't get applied, It would make sense to apply it before everything died. (making it impossible to apply it easily)
I seriously doubt they had to do it this way. Unless there was some y2k like bug that would cause it to die off, they could have launched it nominally. My guess is they made some big change to their backend and needed to do it this way to make thier lives easier.
Scarier yet, If this has something to do with windows genuine and they plan to route out all the non-genuine licenses.
Windows update in it's current state is in pretty bad shape. I work for a decent sized company. It can't seem to update machines without locking a decent percentage up for 15-20 mins with 100% processor util. WSUS3 improved that situation somewhat and updated the WU system. The best possible scenerio is that this a product of that fix and they rolled it out silently to improve user's perception of thier products. (unlikely)
I'm a systems engineer for a mid sized company. Yes, many people listen to streaming radio.
Though a lot of people these days have easy access to mp3's, many people don't feel that bringing their pirated music to work is a good idea.
Add that to the people who have mp3's but can't justify getting an mp3 player of a adequate size, add in the group that can afford it, justify it, but are simply too lazy to get one and those that are afraid of leaving their players around their desk and you have a booming number of desk workers that dearly love their streaming radio.
With streaming radio, they can pick a station that's non explicit and not have to worry about NIN:Closer blaring out of their speakers while they're headed off to the bathroom.
The price of bandwidth in a big city is ever decreasing so our management has decided that it's better to up the pipe than to cut off the users access.
Personally, I think streaming radio is the devil, it's a constant drain on your internet connection that can grow quickly out of control when you throw a few hundred users at it. People feel strongly about it so when you try to tell a user at a 768K site that they need to have people shut down some streams so they can work, they think you're just being an ass. My personal feelings aside, Something needs to be done to keep streaming radio as healthy as possible. Our legal system has us walking a very narrow path. Stray much from that path and it's a long long way back up to get back to where you were.
The oddity about the music industry, is that the period when the copy write would make the artist the most money, almost always coincides with the artist collecting the least capital from the signing label. It's not just that we're cheap, there's a great devide between the haves and the have nots, and they're screwing up a good thing so they can keep that divide as wide and unfair as possible.
According to a report released in March 2007, under the newly proposed rates, annual fees for all station owners are projected to reach $2.3 billion by 2008. This figure is more than four times that for terrestrial radio broadcasters who, due to terms set forth in the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, are exempt from the additional royalties imposed on digital broadcasting outlets, which compensate the performers of recorded works. .
Watts are far cheaper than Megabytes, radio stations currently run over 20 minutes of ads per hour to stay profitable. The RIAA is peeing in their own pool. sooner or later, everone's gonna get out, it's not going to be pretty.
What really needs to happen is for everone to recognise who is an RIAA member and chastise them for it. The RIAA does everthing without recourse under a percieved cloak of anonymity. If people realized that Garth Brooks Record label is suing 12 yr olds and 80 year olds without computers with no remorse, they might have a different perspective on it.
Exceedingly wealthy people in these kinds of positions are often detached from reality. The guy probably hasn't pumped his own gas in 10 years (if ever, no that's not a shot against you New Jersey-ians).
He probably sees bank robbery as a victimless crime, that's what insurance is for right? No people in the bank get traumatized, no one had to pay for that missing money, besides everyone out there has more money than they know what to do with, right? Why can't he afford that 12th Porches? Poor guy.
In all actuality, he's simply missing perspective. We all are. I can't tell you how hard it is to live in the projects, I don't live there. It's easy to look down on people who you aren't familiar with. Perhaps, it's easy for me to look down on a millionaire jackass making these comments because I just don't understand him.
If he got mugged and beat half senseless he'd probably have a different view of things.
Because very few legal downloads would make enough money to pay for the insane cost of commercial bandwidth these days. We just got a 5mb circuit for $1000 a month and that was a crazy steal of a deal.
People who are going to download without paying, are going to do it anyway. They had a pretty sweet deal for years. You could get hold of the new stuff by taping it off the radio or dubbing it from a friend, but the media degraded over time and the quality was sub par anyway. Every time the marketing execs at the record company worked out a new hit, ever other teenager would run out and buy the album with hopes that something else on it would be worth listening to. That's why there are so many "one hit wonders". Things have changed, it's the information age. You can know whatever your brain can absorb, for free.
They're going to have to reduce production costs. Stop spending millions trying to make the big bang instant star overnight productions, take the good stuff and distribute it to you for a nominal fee, once radio time reaches a peak, put the artist on tour.
They're not paying the artist anything as it is, that's all in the tours. If you stop spending money on promoting, natural talent will rise to the surface. (T-shirts, logos, cd covers don't sell music anyway, get real, make that stuff once the music is selling) Studio production costs money, but if the talent is good, you don't have to make a silk purse out of a sows ear. Setup burn on the fly kiosks at the stores with cd screeners. I don't believe for a moment you couldn't produce a CD for less that a dollar. You just can't do it the wasteful way they do it now. Just how much of that $10-$20 sticker price is going to bully people around?
If piracy was done today. Some would turn to ITunes, buy only what they really really want and walk away. Most would just turn back to listening to radio. If you're not buying 99 cent tracks today, you're probably not going to buy them in the absense of a way to get them for free.
I don't think ever in history has the death of a market model caused so much evil, pain and suffering.
I think the AppHoles should shut their mouths and be happy that someone digs their products enough to turn putting content on them in to urban dictionary verbs.
After years of insane overprice and self market strangling I really thought the AppHoles had started to get their act together with minis and OSX. Turns out they still suck loud and clear over the hardware/software improvements. That's it! Microsoft! Apple! Fight to the DEATH!!!!!!!11 (we can only win, and if we're really lucky they'll knock each other off!)
Yeah the reading format is positively awful. I get calls all the time from new users: them:"My Word is broken!" me:"How's that?" them:"it's only printing two pages" me:"how many should it have printed?" them:"four." me:"What's the last thing ir printed out?" them: BLAH BLAH BLAH me: "well that's the last thing on the document, is it in reading layout?" them: "no... well what's that mean"
It displayed on four pages so they want to see it print on 4 pages. Sad really.
Yeah, M$ is still proprietary, Eventally that will hopefully be their undoing.
The page rendering isn't going to be easy. Matter of fact I'm fairly certain it's going to suck profusely. I wouldn't even be suprised if M$ sabotaged the formats just so that is the case.
But OO needs to unseat them. (Or at least Google) And it's not going to happen until one business can use it's product to communicate documents and presentations without somone on the other side cleaning up the output.
Slashdot Mirror
You are correct, but more to the point:
Warcraft
Consoles
End of the GHZ wars and software to utilize the speed
Microsoft's Vista only DX10
World of warcraft has done something that no game in history has ever done. It's made it quite ok to run on antiquated hardware. I'm not saying that the latest expansion runs fantastically on a 1.8GHz proc, but but is quite playable with a reasonable video card. Blizzard is a significant thorn in the side of hardware manufacturers, how dare they not double the specs every year?
Consoles are making serious impovements these days. When the XBOX hit the market, it was little more than a middle upper end PC. The PS3 is an insane multi-processing platform. The WII has raised the bar on control and has a massive following.
The more cores war has failed to capture the publics eye. Would you like your new honda with 1,2 or 4 engines.... They're just lost. And really, who needs that power right now? So you can John some hashes faster, that doesn't help your grandmother do her taxes. The lions share of app developers aren't writing for more cores. Software is stagnating, pc sales will as well. Throw vista on a desktop with all the horsepower you want and you still have a sluggish buggy, driver alienated OS, MS threw DX10 on that and people aren't writing for it. If DX10 were on XP, there would be a host of new games sitting out there waiting for you to throttle up.
Things will kick back off again, it'll just take time.
Security through obscurity only lasts until someone figures it out.
Nothing like having the eyes of every coder on you to keep you honest.
This stuff isn't rocket science.
profit
Take the users id number,
display a list of questions,
record the answer to the questions,
transmit them home securely, (hardest part)
profit
Honestly, there's no reason not to use a generic kernel, ncurses and a flatfile db.
weld the case shut, seal off all ports save fine vents.
pgp crypt the data with the local machines public key.
pass the data out the screen via IR to a portable terminal.
Don't give any indication on site of how many votes were taken or what the outcome was.
send the data from the terminal through phone line to an otherwise offline central collection site.
decrypt the data with the private keys, dump the localized tallies in to a hosted image for public consumption.
concatenate the files, count the results, dump the total in to a hosted image for public consumption.
USB drivers choke on most webcams quickly, (yeah I know I can change usb arch and get it to work, be nice if both flavors didn't lock up). Generic webcam drivers miss the boat on individual camera features. (specifically quickcam pro's). HP multifunction gets sketchy. Better Power management, (suspend, low power)
All bases are covered somewhat, what's needed now is improvement on that existing coverage.
'The Pentagon issued a report indicating that space-based solar power 'has the potential to help the United States stave off climate change and avoid future conflicts over oil by harnessing the Sun's power to provide an essentially inexhaustible supply of clean energy.'
What the HELL are we gonna do with 5-10MW of power that's going to end oil conflict? We can do this on the groud, right now. If you do that in oil or gas, that's not even a turbine the size of a truck. We'd need to see a multi GW solution to do any good and even that would be limited
You know what's light and could use 5-10MW of power in orbit... one hell of a laser...
No NO, it's perfectly safe to buy a Seagate hard disk, just make sure you don't eat the whole thing... /having MASH flashbacks
The first GIS return for mp3 size is 3.5MB ala Cnet
http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rlz=1T4GGIH_enUS233US233&q=average+size+of+an+mp3
it's not unreasonable that they just googled "average size of an mp3" for fake press conference numbers.
3.5 * 30000 = 105000
I'd propose that 100GB per month is the limit.
I'm a FIOS user, I could exceed that in 15 hours (theoretically)
That said, If correct, I don't think it's an unreasonable number at all.
In terms of 700MB CD, that's 142 CD's of data a month. (avg divx movie fitting on a cd, maybe two)
In terms of Joost streaming TV, that's 300 Hours. (roughly 10 hours a day)
Anyone that's not a 24x7 superleaf p2p node is likely to be ok.
The real problem is the invisible limit barrier with a notice then ban you immediately.
Comcast should be sending more than one notice, It sounds to me like these people might need a little more time to work it out. Perhaps they're harvesting the numbers before the people actually get (or read) the letters. Wouldn't hurt to wait another week and send out another notice. It would also do wonders for PR if they explained P2P flooding to the masses. a 30 second commercial explaining P2P traffic and why it can't always be accomidated would be a good gesture.
If you have a dorm's worth of people running 24x7 p2p unthrottled, it's a huge strain on the infrastructure. The more you throw at it, the more they'll take.
I see both sides, but Comcast isn't handling it very well.
Actually AD has one more thing going for it. A huge install base and companies full of people that don't mind populating it.
Interop of AD and existing LDAP projects will ease the progression of Linux in to the work place.
It was easy to sell them on CENT VM servers because there was almost no interoperability required. Samba out of the box with AD logins and better integration with evolution would go a long way to selling the bosses on OSS.
*If they're not lying
They updated the windows update engine, That's not going to affect your apps, homegrown or otherwise.
If windows update was really going to stop working altogether if this didn't get applied, It would make sense to apply it before everything died. (making it impossible to apply it easily)
I seriously doubt they had to do it this way. Unless there was some y2k like bug that would cause it to die off, they could have launched it nominally. My guess is they made some big change to their backend and needed to do it this way to make thier lives easier.
Scarier yet, If this has something to do with windows genuine and they plan to route out all the non-genuine licenses.
Windows update in it's current state is in pretty bad shape. I work for a decent sized company. It can't seem to update machines without locking a decent percentage up for 15-20 mins with 100% processor util. WSUS3 improved that situation somewhat and updated the WU system. The best possible scenerio is that this a product of that fix and they rolled it out silently to improve user's perception of thier products. (unlikely)
I'm a systems engineer for a mid sized company. Yes, many people listen to streaming radio.
Though a lot of people these days have easy access to mp3's, many people don't feel that bringing their pirated music to work is a good idea.
Add that to the people who have mp3's but can't justify getting an mp3 player of a adequate size, add in the group that can afford it, justify it, but are simply too lazy to get one and those that are afraid of leaving their players around their desk and you have a booming number of desk workers that dearly love their streaming radio.
With streaming radio, they can pick a station that's non explicit and not have to worry about NIN:Closer blaring out of their speakers while they're headed off to the bathroom.
The price of bandwidth in a big city is ever decreasing so our management has decided that it's better to up the pipe than to cut off the users access.
Personally, I think streaming radio is the devil, it's a constant drain on your internet connection that can grow quickly out of control when you throw a few hundred users at it. People feel strongly about it so when you try to tell a user at a 768K site that they need to have people shut down some streams so they can work, they think you're just being an ass. My personal feelings aside, Something needs to be done to keep streaming radio as healthy as possible. Our legal system has us walking a very narrow path. Stray much from that path and it's a long long way back up to get back to where you were.
Nah, it's most likely dead. (-9) That's what you do to old technology when you replace it with another classified system.
I find it odd, the people who would most be interested in HD technology are also the people who get screwed over most by DRM.
I'm sorry, I can't sell you this bagel. You might eat it and enjoy it. Now if you were an Anorexic supermodel who could care less...
unless it utilized another already authorized application to connect (IE, Trillian, AV Asoftware Update, Windows Update)
The oddity about the music industry, is that the period when the copy write would make the artist the most money, almost always coincides with the artist collecting the least capital from the signing label. It's not just that we're cheap, there's a great devide between the haves and the have nots, and they're screwing up a good thing so they can keep that divide as wide and unfair as possible.
C opyright_Royalty_Changes
a boutus_members
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_radio#2007_
According to a report released in March 2007, under the newly proposed rates, annual fees for all station owners are projected to reach $2.3 billion by 2008. This figure is more than four times that for terrestrial radio broadcasters who, due to terms set forth in the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act, are exempt from the additional royalties imposed on digital broadcasting outlets, which compensate the performers of recorded works. .
Watts are far cheaper than Megabytes, radio stations currently run over 20 minutes of ads per hour to stay profitable. The RIAA is peeing in their own pool. sooner or later, everone's gonna get out, it's not going to be pretty.
http://www.riaa.com/aboutus.php?content_selector=
What really needs to happen is for everone to recognise who is an RIAA member and chastise them for it. The RIAA does everthing without recourse under a percieved cloak of anonymity. If people realized that Garth Brooks Record label is suing 12 yr olds and 80 year olds without computers with no remorse, they might have a different perspective on it.
But can we get it to moderate slashdot?
echo sudo apt-get install evolution > /etc/cron.daily/evolve /etc/cron.daily/evolve
chmod 555
Mr. Cotton's BIO
i os/cotton_rick.shtml
http://nbcuni.com/About_NBC_Universal/Executive_B
Exceedingly wealthy people in these kinds of positions are often detached from reality. The guy probably hasn't pumped his own gas in 10 years (if ever, no that's not a shot against you New Jersey-ians).
He probably sees bank robbery as a victimless crime, that's what insurance is for right? No people in the bank get traumatized, no one had to pay for that missing money, besides everyone out there has more money than they know what to do with, right? Why can't he afford that 12th Porches? Poor guy.
In all actuality, he's simply missing perspective. We all are. I can't tell you how hard it is to live in the projects, I don't live there. It's easy to look down on people who you aren't familiar with. Perhaps, it's easy for me to look down on a millionaire jackass making these comments because I just don't understand him.
If he got mugged and beat half senseless he'd probably have a different view of things.
Verizon offers voicewing, direct vonage replace, equivalent pricing, sameish features.
e .aspx
http://www22.verizon.com/ForYourHome/VOIP/VOIPHom
Because very few legal downloads would make enough money to pay for the insane cost of commercial bandwidth these days. We just got a 5mb circuit for $1000 a month and that was a crazy steal of a deal.
People who are going to download without paying, are going to do it anyway. They had a pretty sweet deal for years. You could get hold of the new stuff by taping it off the radio or dubbing it from a friend, but the media degraded over time and the quality was sub par anyway. Every time the marketing execs at the record company worked out a new hit, ever other teenager would run out and buy the album with hopes that something else on it would be worth listening to. That's why there are so many "one hit wonders". Things have changed, it's the information age. You can know whatever your brain can absorb, for free.
They're going to have to reduce production costs. Stop spending millions trying to make the big bang instant star overnight productions, take the good stuff and distribute it to you for a nominal fee, once radio time reaches a peak, put the artist on tour.
They're not paying the artist anything as it is, that's all in the tours. If you stop spending money on promoting, natural talent will rise to the surface. (T-shirts, logos, cd covers don't sell music anyway, get real, make that stuff once the music is selling) Studio production costs money, but if the talent is good, you don't have to make a silk purse out of a sows ear. Setup burn on the fly kiosks at the stores with cd screeners. I don't believe for a moment you couldn't produce a CD for less that a dollar. You just can't do it the wasteful way they do it now. Just how much of that $10-$20 sticker price is going to bully people around?
If piracy was done today. Some would turn to ITunes, buy only what they really really want and walk away. Most would just turn back to listening to radio. If you're not buying 99 cent tracks today, you're probably not going to buy them in the absense of a way to get them for free.
I don't think ever in history has the death of a market model caused so much evil, pain and suffering.
Bah, ethics! No worries, they just need to make sure they use the whole thing. No part should go to waste!
or wait was that hunting deer....
I think the AppHoles should shut their mouths and be happy that someone digs their products enough to turn putting content on them in to urban dictionary verbs.
After years of insane overprice and self market strangling I really thought the AppHoles had started to get their act together with minis and OSX. Turns out they still suck loud and clear over the hardware/software improvements. That's it! Microsoft! Apple! Fight to the DEATH!!!!!!!11 (we can only win, and if we're really lucky they'll knock each other off!)
Not a problem, you just throw a step down in the car and carge the car with 2.4MV at .5mA :P
"Please hook up the conductor and step away from the car."
They need to stop using ssn for primary identification. Take an md5 of the ssn and use it for verification perhaps but using it for id is just silly.
Yeah the reading format is positively awful. I get calls all the time from new users: ... well what's that mean"
them:"My Word is broken!"
me:"How's that?"
them:"it's only printing two pages"
me:"how many should it have printed?"
them:"four."
me:"What's the last thing ir printed out?"
them: BLAH BLAH BLAH
me: "well that's the last thing on the document, is it in reading layout?"
them: "no
It displayed on four pages so they want to see it print on 4 pages. Sad really.
Yeah, M$ is still proprietary, Eventally that will hopefully be their undoing.
The page rendering isn't going to be easy. Matter of fact I'm fairly certain it's going to suck profusely. I wouldn't even be suprised if M$ sabotaged the formats just so that is the case.
But OO needs to unseat them. (Or at least Google) And it's not going to happen until one business can use it's product to communicate documents and presentations without somone on the other side cleaning up the output.