Just in case anyone runs across this... there are lots of people that sell things like AOL CDs on eBay for $1. They get lots of buyers. Basically, people are buying feedback. You will see someone selling 10 or so plasma TVs for $5k a pop. Look thru their history, and they bought $30 in $1 items. $30 to walk away with $15k or so in stolen profits. Just a heads up.
A long time eBay user, I've definitly come out way ahead... but there are risks. Nothing is as bad as Yahoo auctions. I caught a fraudulent seller red handed, notified Yahoo as there was 6 other bidders on the same item... and Yahoo wouldn't / didn't seem to do a thing about it. They (Yahoo) should be held accountable if money was lost -- they knew. I contacted the police in LA but since I didn't fall for it, there was no case to be opened.
Anyone seen the recent 3rd party company "SquareTrade?" I bought an item from a seller, he never responded to any emails from me, he left negative feedback and a squaretrade case, I responded with my side, and squaretrade still spams me every day telling me I have to pay $20 to get this dorks negative feedbacks removed. I needed the MPEG2 encoder unit for the 5th hope conference in NYC. Time was critical.
The funny thing is, the guy never responded to squaretrade either. It eggs you on like it will take care of you and help you out, but then it always asks for 20 dollars. It's like the loch ness monster, only instead of $3.50 the fucker wants $20! This all happened months ago, and this Squaretrade piece of shit still emails me every other day about paying $20 to resolve some negative feedback that I honestly could care less about. It was false, I'm not giving the squaretrade assholes $20 to remove it from eBay's database.
Ebay and Paypal are a love/hate relationship. They have grown too big for their own good without proper competition to keep them in check.
I sold a Cray supercomputer on eBay. Ebay quickly took the $100 in commision, but the bidder was slow to pay. I went thru eBays 6 step process of reporting the non-paying bidder, and the bidder said he would pay. So eBay still charged me $100 in comission. Here I am 6 months later calling daily trying to get these people at VRSim to pay. I contacted eBay asking why they never did anything / refunded / assisted, and they said "Please go to this page" which took me back to step 2. The deal is, everything has to be done in 30 days.... so once time runs out, eBay is home free. It takes like 2 weeks minimum to complete the non-paying bidder process.
Oh well, what can you do? The deals are good. The fees keep going up on a site with basically no customer service. Gotta love it.
As far as the laserjet office printers, I believe they are still fairly strong. Granted the physical unit might not be quite as heavy as a 4SI was, they still live up to the HP duty cycle.
As far as home printers and inkjets, yea you gotta sell shit to compete in that market because all your competitors are doing it. Ink jet printers are a rip off. Simple solution is to avoid them.
Just bring home a 600dpi or 1200dpi (RET) HP from eBay or the local thrift store, it will last another 30 years or so. If the fuser blows up, they are like $20 for a replacement. Same with the pick up rollers.
You can get a good deal, with one of the huge mailbox sorters. Every member of the family gets their own output tray!
Haven't read the article yet... can't wait to see what he has to say about his company's shoddy products and horrific support thanks to utilizing global workforce.
HPaq DL380 G3 > Dell.
To the OpenVMS fan - you guys sure are a die hard bunch! As a member of the hobbyist program from Montagar, I gotta say VMS is a odd cookie. Friends and myself have been playing with it as time permits on an older alphaserver 2100RM hooked to a Portmaster for remote serial access. Steep learning curve for us Unix people.
HP assimilation of Compaq NOT GOOD. HP needs to stick to printers, their desktops are poop. Compaq had good servers (but ugly, what is with the gaps around the drives!), but pretty much killed DIGITAL off.
I'm not a HP fan outside of printers and test gear, but they did the right thing by pimping the Compaq gear and fading out their ProCurve or whatever that crufty crap was they used to sell.
Dell though? Eat me with your flimsy 2u boxes.
The one box I have no experience with is IBM Netfinity. Good? Bad?
A while ago I purchased some Cray J932se's from a gov't contractor. They made me sign an end use certificate and a bunch of other documentation that basically states I admit that I know the laws regarding the exportation of supercomputers.
Even though it isn't very super any more, it's still under all of those regulations. I've had people interested in buying one or two in Germany, Canada and other countries but I could never get a legit answer about selling it outside the US. The worst part is all of the systems that have already been exported (Cray has a department that assists) can be sold to whomever, wherever.
I have the main letter framed and hanging in my living room.
In my research I found stories about SGI selling a Power Challenge XL to China (ooops) and IBM selling some SP action to the no-supercomputer-zones. Pretty crazy when you think about it.
I was under the impression that AMD chips are made outside of the US, and Intel has alot of R&D going up in India. This will leed to intellectual property bleed and foreign competitors, so we shouldn't have to worry about this too long.
There have been stinks in the past regarding clusters (I believe the original Beowulf linux mods were pulled down for a while due to the foreign threat).
Oh yea, and if anyone wants a Cray J932se, $4500 USD (can't export!). 3 cabinet, dual IOS, 32 proc.
Need the room, need the cash. It's technically sold buy the buyer is being slow and I have the right to sell it from under them. No Unicos.
You know what would be really funny? If someone could get a video of the projectionist.
Get one person with a camcorder with NO TAPE IN IT to go into the theater and get "busted"... then as the ruckus goes down, have friend videotape it using the nightshot mode. Be aware tho, nightshot has an IR illuminator. Would be funny.
I think I'm going to have to make a hat with blinking IR leds on it for fun. You can test it with the nightshot mode on consumer camcorders.
I can understand if your unimpressed with the 25 images one by one chained together, but the actual 5th hope website is short and to the point. The Wiki is useful. Everything doesn't need flash animations. Sometimes a text only useful site is more useful than a flashy clipart cluttered slow flushing turd.
Biafria spoke at h2k2 about large corporation marketing. It was good, he had albums of corporate anthems for various popular companies. People programming!
Good stuff, it was entertaining. Charismatic speaker, and it was later in the night. He spoke for about 2 hours.
ITEC shot themselves in the foot. Our local unix users group in Southeastern Virginia participated a year or two ago. We gave out about 400 sets of free linux CDs, had a good attendance and were welcomed by both the visitors and show staff.
Then the next year, cold sholder. "We want to act more like a training event" was the message. ITEC thought they could charge $400 admission and run some educational material to try to clue-i-fy IT managers or something.
Whatever. Garbage in, Garbage out. It was fun the one year.
Microsoft bought GeCAD in 2003. GeCAD made the RAV antivirus that was used with Linux and more importantly FreeBSD in mail anti-virus setups. This was a blow, as it was a good program and the announcement was made that the future Unix support would be discontinued.
Back in 2003 it was apparent that this was going to happen. I was hoping it would be integreated with Windows.
Symantec is a turd, I noticed it picked up a tar file that had some unix exploit code. Flash.c, this old program that dorked up unix terminal sessions. Symantec's scanner searches for unix utility source for various malicious utilities on windows systems. That is 100% wasted resources being used just to up the number of "viruses" their utility can find.
7-11 stores used it (Southland corporation). Easy to guess login/passwords.
TacoBell uses it (rgm/rollout was an account, could never get the F key emulation down). MANY of the automobile parts dealers (Pep Boys ran it). Some car parts stores, but dealerships seem to be more OS/400 or AIX based.
ALOT of Point of sale systems were driven on SCO. Lucent Audix systems ride on Unixware boxes for the Intuity systems, the Voice Power hosts were SCO I believe.
Many of these apps are moving to Linux. Why? Becuase the vendors can take Linux which is free, throw their app on it and charge the same $30,000 without having the overhead of paying the OS developers anything. I did some work for Pearl Vision and they were running a Linux solution, went from multiport serial board and dumb terminals to thin clients netbooting. Pretty interesting.
I don't think many of the SCO apps are using your big baller databases like Informix, Sybase, Oracle and such. They run scores of legacy database apps, and it is my understanding that many of these apps have been ported to Linux to aid the solutions providers in ditching the costs of paying for the OS. I know people who have taken apps written in wierdo scripting langauges and moved them to linux once the scripting language developer have recompiled the interperter for Linux.
Call it what you want, but this is probably why SCO is pissed and litigating with linux peeps. A pizza shop can easily spend $45,000 on 5 PCs running a text app to handle counter sales. Now SCO is cut out of the loop, but the same apps are being used coded in FoxPro or whatever, just running on linux. It will 100% bury SCO, they realize that there is no one that will buy their products because their customers will opt for the free Linux distros so they can make more profit since they don't have to feed the developers of the OS.
It costs quite a bit to launch a satellite into space, let alone 4 or 5 like DirecTV have. DirecTV knows that if it becomes too easy and widespread to pirate the signal their legitimite user base will shrivel up into nothing, yet their service will be used by all. Don't blame them for trying to protect their company, unless they outsource to India or something.
After the whole Steam fiasco and the lost time troubleshooting their crap, I have no sympathy for valve software. It would suck if it happened to ID software though.
Nothing like buying software to join in on games with friends, then being forced thru 8 months of beta test to be able to run a stupid game that was working originally. But at last, they fixed the advertisement delivery engine.
I had a friend (BART!) that was big into BeOS. It really was a neat OS, and to this day I think it would be better suited towards the desktop over linux in many ways. A bunch of media companies appeared to be commited to BeOS. I believe companies like Ensoniq, Yamaha and the likes were looking at it as a platform for multitrack audio recording and editing. It is a shame it died.
On that note, over at www.openbeos.org there is some pretty impressive development on an open source BeOS clone that is actually binarily compatible with the original BeOS (I believe). I haven't tried it myself, but stop by every month or so to check on the progress. It still appears to progress sometimes.
Lastly, I have a BeBox dual 66mhz that my friend Bart gave me. It needs a IO card and the plastic front with the LED bar graphs. If anyone has these parts without a complete box and is willing to part with them, please contact me.
Man, if music CD's were $5 each, I might actually buy some.
I bought the Dialated Peoples CD to help out a local music store. 1 good track, that I already had in MP3. Thats what I get for buying music.
First off, the minute you go from a VOIP endpoint to the POTS phone system (you know, to route calls to legacy landline equipment) you are then classified as a phone company. This is where the tarrifs come in. This might not be the case if you just went from VOIP to Cellular, not 100% positive.
Next up, while the Vonage/Packet8 endpoints work well, it can be a pain deploying a reliable VOIP network. Qualtiy of service is a must, because a large email with an attachment can totally take out audio in one direction for a few seconds.
VOIP is neat, I think it will seriously cut into the long distance profits, but *I* firmly believe wireless phones are more of a threat to landline POTS service. I think the phone companies need to replace the legacy ESS5a switches with something newer, capable of dropping 50mbps to each copper customer.
Personally I plan to move my phone lines to a message rate service, it's incoming only landline. I believe it is about $10 a month. This supports the excuse to have a PBX at home:-)
Here in Southeastern Virginia / Hampton Roads Cox run's a portal that competes with the local paper's portal. Cox has a captive audience, setting the homepage of all the cable modem customers to their local portal.
It has always been a fight for the homepage. The local paper used to have an ISP tied to it (infi.net) that ran dialup and hosting services for 100+ newspapers across the country (infi.net was owned by Landmark, Gannet and Knight-Ridder). Supposidly the big push from the papers wasn't that the ISP functions were really profitable, they just wanted their content on the homepage.
It is a bit monopolistic in a way, but I think everyone understands. More viewers, the more you can charge for banner ads.
The downside is none of the community sites are really innovative. In the case of Cox's, it is identical to every market they are in. Cookie cutter crap.
AOL probably has the biggest advantage, as normal netziens cannot access the content on their network. This is a major selling point for some of the AOL subscribers, even.
I heard a rumor that Wal*Mart is a huge IBM shop. The rumor I heard was they have some sorta crazy statistical setup that orders various stores to mvoe products around, then analyzes the sales before and after the moves. In the end, it's like the cost conscious sheeple are battling DeepBlue2 in terms of split second buying decisions. The WallyWOPR will win against your will to resist in buying that die cast NASCAR 1:18th scale model. You need it, it's located right near the bargain DVD bin because it sold.000142 more units per day in that location according to WallyWOPR. If only WallyWOPR could push good DVDs into the bargain bin.
Haven't read the article but I don't personally consider HP an innovator anymore. When someone says HP, I think "sore sight for a once great American Company." Morale is supposidly in the toilet in the American shops. Maybe morale is better over in India.
HP's test equipment is nice, and HP printers are great. I actually liked Compaq's x86 servers, and hated Compaq's non-business desktops. Never liked HP desktops, never seen much in the way of HP servers outside of the HP-UX systems. Hockey-PUX is wacked, I'd prefer Solaris or IRIX.
Toss the Dell servers in the trash where they belong, give me a used Compaq server over a new Dell rackmount turd any day. I guess Dell desktops are okay, but you really get what you pay for.
I'm not quite sure why Dell is so popular. Poor Gateway, why are they failing when Dell manages to ship such low grade product and run such poor customer service. And where did Austin, Northgate and Swan go.
Hello. I had a LPFM station, and was visited by the FCC. A few notes...
With the modern equipment and some caution, it is easy to avoid harmonics, and I never experienced adjacent channel interference. Supposidly down in Flordia (Miami?) there are lots of problems with intereference as immigrants run poorly constructed equipment. However, in most cases (like my visit) the FCC could cite ZERO interference. Either the FCC heard about it on the internet (they look), or a commercial station turned you in because they don't like the thought of competition in the market. I don't think LPFM stations would show up in the ratings.
The FCC responded to the LPFM (Low Power FM (Pirate radio)) craze with the LPFM rulings that appeared to setup a legal chance for people to have 10 and 100 watt stations. The thing is, most of the tickets went to churches. ***YAWWWWNNN*** Congrats, the radio band is now filled and there is no room for evil pirates playing non-top 40 format. Church groups are already allowed to have translators, so it was kind of a disappointment. I think Kennard was big on the church tip, so this might explain it.
If you WERE to drop your station over a commercial station, multipath signal antics would cause neither to sound good a short distance from your arial.
The NAB is really out to protect it's members. Monopolistic. No one wants competition. So that is just the way it is....
An *INTERESTING* thing is the new Icom D-Star ham radio equipment. It does 128kbps TCP/IP data via repeaters for Ham radio. I'm not 100% positive, but maybe if someone designed a cheap 1.2ghz digital receiver that could decode mp3 data from the DCOM ham radio system it would be possible to run a metro radio service using streaming mp3 data, along with the callsign of the station owner. There are projects to interface to various car decks, but widespread audience wouldn't be obtainable with the hardware requirements and some HAM people might get pissed if tons of the transmitters started showing up spewing 24x7 data.
I gotta admit, it was run running a station. But the requirements for operating legal are a bore, and it seems to take the fun out of it. LDBrewer was the big source for the equipment, and FCC owned him in a major way. The lack of gear has slowed the spread of LPFM. It is pretty much died AFAIK.
And yet another thing, does anyone know if something like a HP 22ghz spectrum analyzer can be set to watch the broadcast FM spectrum (88mhz to 108mhz)... then if anything new shows up, throw an alert via RS232? I've always wanted to monitor for FM pirates in my area...
Okay, I've been around a while. I've seen piracy in the form of ZIP disks of Police Quest 1 on the local warez BBSes. I've met the biggest warez pirates out there, the type that have 4 drawer file cabinets FILLED with photocopied manuals, and disk boxes stuffed with 3.5" disks that complety filled closets.
A few observations. In my youth, my parents could have never afforded to buy me the programs I pirated. They did buy me some software, thousands of dollars worth over the years. Boredom and curiosity led me to download other games, but I never spent much time playing them. Heck, there were Sierra games I never spent much time playing (Space Quest III was the BOMB though!).
In terms of applications, when I got older it helped me out in terms of being familiar with business applications. 14 year olds don't normally need Autocad, 16 year old's can't afford 3d Studio. Once you hit the business world though, things change. Lets not forget though, some prices are artificially high (Abobe bought and killed Aldus Photostyler which was awesome, eliminating competitive products, etc).
Another thing, the warez people like to collect programs. Many of them don't use them, it is just some sort of wierd obsession with collecting programs in mass. Given the amount of time it takes to play or complete a game, can someone with 2900 games in their pirate library really utilize them?
Given the costs of software, if every person bought all of their software at retail prices and there was no piracy, do you think many people would possess skills with apps like Photoshop? I can't think of many cases at all where I've not purchased a program (having the money to do so) and opted to warez the software.
I think the console games are priced as they are because the market will bear it, and there are many young adults that have jobs, living with parents, who can afford to pay the $70 or whatever it costs now for a single medicore playstation title.
Look at ID software, they made good titles and profited well. I know their stuff was pirated, but people with the money purchased the games.
A friend pirates every new game. He buys the good ones. I've seen the stacks of boxes, I'm sure he spends well over $2k a year in new releases. He was one of the evil pirates that had Dreamcast and other console hacks. What if pirates are your biggest customers?
Slashdot Mirror
Sawblade, Speak & Spell and a fork in the woods.
Alf was fake. The pickup never happened.
Phone Home!
Say it.
Just in case anyone runs across this... there are lots of people that sell things like AOL CDs on eBay for $1. They get lots of buyers. Basically, people are buying feedback. You will see someone selling 10 or so plasma TVs for $5k a pop. Look thru their history, and they bought $30 in $1 items. $30 to walk away with $15k or so in stolen profits. Just a heads up.
A long time eBay user, I've definitly come out way ahead... but there are risks. Nothing is as bad as Yahoo auctions. I caught a fraudulent seller red handed, notified Yahoo as there was 6 other bidders on the same item... and Yahoo wouldn't / didn't seem to do a thing about it. They (Yahoo) should be held accountable if money was lost -- they knew. I contacted the police in LA but since I didn't fall for it, there was no case to be opened.
Anyone seen the recent 3rd party company "SquareTrade?" I bought an item from a seller, he never responded to any emails from me, he left negative feedback and a squaretrade case, I responded with my side, and squaretrade still spams me every day telling me I have to pay $20 to get this dorks negative feedbacks removed. I needed the MPEG2 encoder unit for the 5th hope conference in NYC. Time was critical.
.... so once time runs out, eBay is home free. It takes like 2 weeks minimum to complete the non-paying bidder process.
The funny thing is, the guy never responded to squaretrade either. It eggs you on like it will take care of you and help you out, but then it always asks for 20 dollars. It's like the loch ness monster, only instead of $3.50 the fucker wants $20! This all happened months ago, and this Squaretrade piece of shit still emails me every other day about paying $20 to resolve some negative feedback that I honestly could care less about. It was false, I'm not giving the squaretrade assholes $20 to remove it from eBay's database.
Ebay and Paypal are a love/hate relationship. They have grown too big for their own good without proper competition to keep them in check.
I sold a Cray supercomputer on eBay. Ebay quickly took the $100 in commision, but the bidder was slow to pay. I went thru eBays 6 step process of reporting the non-paying bidder, and the bidder said he would pay. So eBay still charged me $100 in comission. Here I am 6 months later calling daily trying to get these people at VRSim to pay. I contacted eBay asking why they never did anything / refunded / assisted, and they said "Please go to this page" which took me back to step 2. The deal is, everything has to be done in 30 days
Oh well, what can you do? The deals are good. The fees keep going up on a site with basically no customer service. Gotta love it.
As far as the laserjet office printers, I believe they are still fairly strong. Granted the physical unit might not be quite as heavy as a 4SI was, they still live up to the HP duty cycle.
As far as home printers and inkjets, yea you gotta sell shit to compete in that market because all your competitors are doing it. Ink jet printers are a rip off. Simple solution is to avoid them.
Just bring home a 600dpi or 1200dpi (RET) HP from eBay or the local thrift store, it will last another 30 years or so. If the fuser blows up, they are like $20 for a replacement. Same with the pick up rollers.
You can get a good deal, with one of the huge mailbox sorters. Every member of the family gets their own output tray!
Haven't read the article yet... can't wait to see what he has to say about his company's shoddy products and horrific support thanks to utilizing global workforce.
HPaq DL380 G3 > Dell.
To the OpenVMS fan - you guys sure are a die hard bunch! As a member of the hobbyist program from Montagar, I gotta say VMS is a odd cookie. Friends and myself have been playing with it as time permits on an older alphaserver 2100RM hooked to a Portmaster for remote serial access. Steep learning curve for us Unix people.
HP assimilation of Compaq NOT GOOD. HP needs to stick to printers, their desktops are poop. Compaq had good servers (but ugly, what is with the gaps around the drives!), but pretty much killed DIGITAL off.
I'm not a HP fan outside of printers and test gear, but they did the right thing by pimping the Compaq gear and fading out their ProCurve or whatever that crufty crap was they used to sell.
Dell though? Eat me with your flimsy 2u boxes.
The one box I have no experience with is IBM Netfinity. Good? Bad?
A while ago I purchased some Cray J932se's from a gov't contractor. They made me sign an end use certificate and a bunch of other documentation that basically states I admit that I know the laws regarding the exportation of supercomputers.
Even though it isn't very super any more, it's still under all of those regulations. I've had people interested in buying one or two in Germany, Canada and other countries but I could never get a legit answer about selling it outside the US. The worst part is all of the systems that have already been exported (Cray has a department that assists) can be sold to whomever, wherever. I have the main letter framed and hanging in my living room.
In my research I found stories about SGI selling a Power Challenge XL to China (ooops) and IBM selling some SP action to the no-supercomputer-zones. Pretty crazy when you think about it.
I was under the impression that AMD chips are made outside of the US, and Intel has alot of R&D going up in India. This will leed to intellectual property bleed and foreign competitors, so we shouldn't have to worry about this too long.
There have been stinks in the past regarding clusters (I believe the original Beowulf linux mods were pulled down for a while due to the foreign threat).
Oh yea, and if anyone wants a Cray J932se, $4500 USD (can't export!). 3 cabinet, dual IOS, 32 proc. Need the room, need the cash. It's technically sold buy the buyer is being slow and I have the right to sell it from under them. No Unicos.
You know what would be really funny? If someone could get a video of the projectionist. Get one person with a camcorder with NO TAPE IN IT to go into the theater and get "busted" ... then as the ruckus goes down, have friend videotape it using the nightshot mode. Be aware tho, nightshot has an IR illuminator. Would be funny.
I think I'm going to have to make a hat with blinking IR leds on it for fun. You can test it with the nightshot mode on consumer camcorders.
How did you know it was his son? Was he wearing a hat that said "S.Wozniak's son" ?
Or common knowledge around your school?
I can understand if your unimpressed with the 25 images one by one chained together, but the actual 5th hope website is short and to the point. The Wiki is useful. Everything doesn't need flash animations. Sometimes a text only useful site is more useful than a flashy clipart cluttered slow flushing turd.
Biafria spoke at h2k2 about large corporation marketing. It was good, he had albums of corporate anthems for various popular companies. People programming!
Good stuff, it was entertaining. Charismatic speaker, and it was later in the night. He spoke for about 2 hours.
Don't knock it until you see it.
See you all there!
I heard it's in Bangladesh.
ITEC shot themselves in the foot. Our local unix users group in Southeastern Virginia participated a year or two ago. We gave out about 400 sets of free linux CDs, had a good attendance and were welcomed by both the visitors and show staff.
Then the next year, cold sholder. "We want to act more like a training event" was the message. ITEC thought they could charge $400 admission and run some educational material to try to clue-i-fy IT managers or something.
Whatever. Garbage in, Garbage out. It was fun the one year.
I vote they put GW Basic back into the BIOS ROM.
Or maybe useful utilities like Sun and other workstation vendors have.
Or maybe more than 15 FUCKING IRQS! Like Macs have.
Is it me, or is everyone else just better all around? The only thing going for PC's is the junk is so cheap.
Microsoft bought GeCAD in 2003. GeCAD made the RAV antivirus that was used with Linux and more importantly FreeBSD in mail anti-virus setups. This was a blow, as it was a good program and the announcement was made that the future Unix support would be discontinued.
Back in 2003 it was apparent that this was going to happen. I was hoping it would be integreated with Windows.
Symantec is a turd, I noticed it picked up a tar file that had some unix exploit code. Flash.c, this old program that dorked up unix terminal sessions. Symantec's scanner searches for unix utility source for various malicious utilities on windows systems. That is 100% wasted resources being used just to up the number of "viruses" their utility can find.
7-11 stores used it (Southland corporation). Easy to guess login/passwords.
TacoBell uses it (rgm/rollout was an account, could never get the F key emulation down). MANY of the automobile parts dealers (Pep Boys ran it). Some car parts stores, but dealerships seem to be more OS/400 or AIX based.
ALOT of Point of sale systems were driven on SCO. Lucent Audix systems ride on Unixware boxes for the Intuity systems, the Voice Power hosts were SCO I believe.
Many of these apps are moving to Linux. Why? Becuase the vendors can take Linux which is free, throw their app on it and charge the same $30,000 without having the overhead of paying the OS developers anything. I did some work for Pearl Vision and they were running a Linux solution, went from multiport serial board and dumb terminals to thin clients netbooting. Pretty interesting.
I don't think many of the SCO apps are using your big baller databases like Informix, Sybase, Oracle and such. They run scores of legacy database apps, and it is my understanding that many of these apps have been ported to Linux to aid the solutions providers in ditching the costs of paying for the OS. I know people who have taken apps written in wierdo scripting langauges and moved them to linux once the scripting language developer have recompiled the interperter for Linux.
Call it what you want, but this is probably why SCO is pissed and litigating with linux peeps. A pizza shop can easily spend $45,000 on 5 PCs running a text app to handle counter sales. Now SCO is cut out of the loop, but the same apps are being used coded in FoxPro or whatever, just running on linux. It will 100% bury SCO, they realize that there is no one that will buy their products because their customers will opt for the free Linux distros so they can make more profit since they don't have to feed the developers of the OS.
It costs quite a bit to launch a satellite into space, let alone 4 or 5 like DirecTV have. DirecTV knows that if it becomes too easy and widespread to pirate the signal their legitimite user base will shrivel up into nothing, yet their service will be used by all. Don't blame them for trying to protect their company, unless they outsource to India or something.
After the whole Steam fiasco and the lost time troubleshooting their crap, I have no sympathy for valve software. It would suck if it happened to ID software though. Nothing like buying software to join in on games with friends, then being forced thru 8 months of beta test to be able to run a stupid game that was working originally. But at last, they fixed the advertisement delivery engine.
I had a friend (BART!) that was big into BeOS. It really was a neat OS, and to this day I think it would be better suited towards the desktop over linux in many ways. A bunch of media companies appeared to be commited to BeOS. I believe companies like Ensoniq, Yamaha and the likes were looking at it as a platform for multitrack audio recording and editing. It is a shame it died.
On that note, over at www.openbeos.org there is some pretty impressive development on an open source BeOS clone that is actually binarily compatible with the original BeOS (I believe). I haven't tried it myself, but stop by every month or so to check on the progress. It still appears to progress sometimes.
Lastly, I have a BeBox dual 66mhz that my friend Bart gave me. It needs a IO card and the plastic front with the LED bar graphs. If anyone has these parts without a complete box and is willing to part with them, please contact me.
Man, if music CD's were $5 each, I might actually buy some. I bought the Dialated Peoples CD to help out a local music store. 1 good track, that I already had in MP3. Thats what I get for buying music.
*sigh*
:-)
First off, the minute you go from a VOIP endpoint to the POTS phone system (you know, to route calls to legacy landline equipment) you are then classified as a phone company. This is where the tarrifs come in. This might not be the case if you just went from VOIP to Cellular, not 100% positive.
Next up, while the Vonage/Packet8 endpoints work well, it can be a pain deploying a reliable VOIP network. Qualtiy of service is a must, because a large email with an attachment can totally take out audio in one direction for a few seconds.
VOIP is neat, I think it will seriously cut into the long distance profits, but *I* firmly believe wireless phones are more of a threat to landline POTS service. I think the phone companies need to replace the legacy ESS5a switches with something newer, capable of dropping 50mbps to each copper customer.
Personally I plan to move my phone lines to a message rate service, it's incoming only landline. I believe it is about $10 a month. This supports the excuse to have a PBX at home
Here in Southeastern Virginia / Hampton Roads Cox run's a portal that competes with the local paper's portal. Cox has a captive audience, setting the homepage of all the cable modem customers to their local portal.
It has always been a fight for the homepage. The local paper used to have an ISP tied to it (infi.net) that ran dialup and hosting services for 100+ newspapers across the country (infi.net was owned by Landmark, Gannet and Knight-Ridder). Supposidly the big push from the papers wasn't that the ISP functions were really profitable, they just wanted their content on the homepage.
It is a bit monopolistic in a way, but I think everyone understands. More viewers, the more you can charge for banner ads.
The downside is none of the community sites are really innovative. In the case of Cox's, it is identical to every market they are in. Cookie cutter crap.
AOL probably has the biggest advantage, as normal netziens cannot access the content on their network. This is a major selling point for some of the AOL subscribers, even.
I heard a rumor that Wal*Mart is a huge IBM shop. The rumor I heard was they have some sorta crazy statistical setup that orders various stores to mvoe products around, then analyzes the sales before and after the moves. In the end, it's like the cost conscious sheeple are battling DeepBlue2 in terms of split second buying decisions. The WallyWOPR will win against your will to resist in buying that die cast NASCAR 1:18th scale model. You need it, it's located right near the bargain DVD bin because it sold .000142 more units per day in that location according to WallyWOPR. If only WallyWOPR could push good DVDs into the bargain bin.
Haven't read the article but I don't personally consider HP an innovator anymore. When someone says HP, I think "sore sight for a once great American Company." Morale is supposidly in the toilet in the American shops. Maybe morale is better over in India.
HP's test equipment is nice, and HP printers are great. I actually liked Compaq's x86 servers, and hated Compaq's non-business desktops. Never liked HP desktops, never seen much in the way of HP servers outside of the HP-UX systems. Hockey-PUX is wacked, I'd prefer Solaris or IRIX.
Toss the Dell servers in the trash where they belong, give me a used Compaq server over a new Dell rackmount turd any day. I guess Dell desktops are okay, but you really get what you pay for.
I'm not quite sure why Dell is so popular. Poor Gateway, why are they failing when Dell manages to ship such low grade product and run such poor customer service. And where did Austin, Northgate and Swan go.
Hello. I had a LPFM station, and was visited by the FCC. A few notes...
With the modern equipment and some caution, it is easy to avoid harmonics, and I never experienced adjacent channel interference. Supposidly down in Flordia (Miami?) there are lots of problems with intereference as immigrants run poorly constructed equipment. However, in most cases (like my visit) the FCC could cite ZERO interference. Either the FCC heard about it on the internet (they look), or a commercial station turned you in because they don't like the thought of competition in the market. I don't think LPFM stations would show up in the ratings.
The FCC responded to the LPFM (Low Power FM (Pirate radio)) craze with the LPFM rulings that appeared to setup a legal chance for people to have 10 and 100 watt stations. The thing is, most of the tickets went to churches. ***YAWWWWNNN*** Congrats, the radio band is now filled and there is no room for evil pirates playing non-top 40 format. Church groups are already allowed to have translators, so it was kind of a disappointment. I think Kennard was big on the church tip, so this might explain it.
If you WERE to drop your station over a commercial station, multipath signal antics would cause neither to sound good a short distance from your arial.
The NAB is really out to protect it's members. Monopolistic. No one wants competition. So that is just the way it is....
An *INTERESTING* thing is the new Icom D-Star ham radio equipment. It does 128kbps TCP/IP data via repeaters for Ham radio. I'm not 100% positive, but maybe if someone designed a cheap 1.2ghz digital receiver that could decode mp3 data from the DCOM ham radio system it would be possible to run a metro radio service using streaming mp3 data, along with the callsign of the station owner. There are projects to interface to various car decks, but widespread audience wouldn't be obtainable with the hardware requirements and some HAM people might get pissed if tons of the transmitters started showing up spewing 24x7 data.
I gotta admit, it was run running a station. But the requirements for operating legal are a bore, and it seems to take the fun out of it. LDBrewer was the big source for the equipment, and FCC owned him in a major way. The lack of gear has slowed the spread of LPFM. It is pretty much died AFAIK.
And yet another thing, does anyone know if something like a HP 22ghz spectrum analyzer can be set to watch the broadcast FM spectrum (88mhz to 108mhz)... then if anything new shows up, throw an alert via RS232? I've always wanted to monitor for FM pirates in my area...
You never know what might show up on the dial...
Okay, I've been around a while. I've seen piracy in the form of ZIP disks of Police Quest 1 on the local warez BBSes. I've met the biggest warez pirates out there, the type that have 4 drawer file cabinets FILLED with photocopied manuals, and disk boxes stuffed with 3.5" disks that complety filled closets.
A few observations. In my youth, my parents could have never afforded to buy me the programs I pirated. They did buy me some software, thousands of dollars worth over the years. Boredom and curiosity led me to download other games, but I never spent much time playing them. Heck, there were Sierra games I never spent much time playing (Space Quest III was the BOMB though!).
In terms of applications, when I got older it helped me out in terms of being familiar with business applications. 14 year olds don't normally need Autocad, 16 year old's can't afford 3d Studio. Once you hit the business world though, things change. Lets not forget though, some prices are artificially high (Abobe bought and killed Aldus Photostyler which was awesome, eliminating competitive products, etc).
Another thing, the warez people like to collect programs. Many of them don't use them, it is just some sort of wierd obsession with collecting programs in mass. Given the amount of time it takes to play or complete a game, can someone with 2900 games in their pirate library really utilize them?
Given the costs of software, if every person bought all of their software at retail prices and there was no piracy, do you think many people would possess skills with apps like Photoshop? I can't think of many cases at all where I've not purchased a program (having the money to do so) and opted to warez the software.
I think the console games are priced as they are because the market will bear it, and there are many young adults that have jobs, living with parents, who can afford to pay the $70 or whatever it costs now for a single medicore playstation title.
Look at ID software, they made good titles and profited well. I know their stuff was pirated, but people with the money purchased the games.
A friend pirates every new game. He buys the good ones. I've seen the stacks of boxes, I'm sure he spends well over $2k a year in new releases. He was one of the evil pirates that had Dreamcast and other console hacks. What if pirates are your biggest customers?