Really, in the end, all that is needed to save Enterprise is to make it worthwhile for someone to pick up the production and broadcasting of season 5 and on. It's basic economics.
How would the rights and revenues of a totally fan supported series work out? As far as I can remember from when I first saw the $32M number, it was supposed to cover production, but it isn't offset by whatever revenues would come from the advertiments aired during the shows, syndication, DVD revenues, sponsorships, etc. (Tangent: Why doesn't the series work in a few sponsorships? Movies do it all the time. Some of the corps today WILL exist in the ST:E timeline, it's only what, 150 years?)
Let's say Enterprise was close to breaking even on Fox. Maybe fans chipping in a few million dollars will make it worthwhile to carry on? Maybe in the form of precommitments to the season on DVD? If not, maybe someone else will crunch the numbers and decide to pick up the show.
IMHO, I doubt that fan donations will ever raise $32M; however, I wouldn't be surprised if there was enough there to catch the eye of someone who can provide the funds.
I've grown to like Enterprise, particularly the latest season. I really wish that Fox would host a BT link that included the advertisements. Come one if you're going to give it a shoddy timeslot, throw us a bone! Besides, you know the show will end up on the 'net anyways - there's no technology on the near-term horizon to prevent that!
In CPU sizes, 200mm is pretty big. IIRC, newer Athlons bump around 100mm depending on the cache size. P4's are somewhat larger than the Athlons. Bigger chips use more material and fab space, plus, the defect rate rises (it only takes a single error in a critical part of the chip to ruin it).
I hate talk about bloat, slowness, and lazy programmers. For the same tasks, computers are far easier to use today than even 5 years ago. Never mind the fact that we can also do about 10 times as many different tasks now, than we did when I first started using PCs 10-15 years ago.
Yes, if I could find a floppy drive, and get a dos boot disk to boot, I could theoretically run a wickedly fast instance of WordPerfect 5.1. I wouldn't be able to surf the web, send email, listen to MP3's, work wirelessly, or work with graphics though -- and yes, graphics (e.g. diagrams) do have a proper place in day to day work!
Do people even remember the non-PNP days? IRQ's, IO Ports and the rest? Non-multitasking? Non-Memory protected (i.e. complete OS crashes from app errors?). These issues didn't seeem so bad back then since "that's the way it was", but now, I dread ever having to deal with those limitations again. Futzing with IRQ's for an hour just to make a modem stop locking up a PC is not my idea of productivity.
Hardware is cheap. Time isn't. I just hope we keep finding more ways to make my use of computers even easier.
Wiki's are pretty flexible. I wish I could find a basic Wiki that didn't need a webserver, yet had a good feature set (there probably is one, I haven't really looked too hard).
I use a big text file for "logs" of work done for clients. It's getting unwieldly now that it's rather big because it's one dimensional. Sure there is text search, but can you really remember the exact spelling of a company name or a task? At least a Wiki implies that some meta data is recorded - related pages and the time the page was created/edited. (And revision control, but that's not too relevant to job searches)
Ditto for Excel, how many columns do you create? Do you record the cover letter text of every application? The "essay" answers to online job applications? Too inflexible.
Plus, I've often desired to add images to my text/excel type logs - a simple chart is worth a thousand words sometimes. A good Wiki will support that.
I've used google adwords for a couple small campaigns. I suspect that I've been a victim of "click fraud" on the content network -- that's where your ads appear on third party websites. However, on the Google search network, the only entity who directly benefits from clicks is Google themselves. I'm pretty comfortable with the traffic I get from the search clicks.
I don't suppose they expect people to paint over their windows! So... this tin-foil coating (almost literally) isn't going to be perfect.
Bah! Encryption is the only way to go anyway. What happens when you have people, say, come inside your house? Never mind the inconvenience of no cell-phones.
I guess there are some niches for this product...somewhere.
Why bother with a T-1? Most folks don't upload and DSL/Cable download speeds are _higher_ than 1.4Mbps (at least in Canada). The extra cost for reliability and upstream bandwith are irrelevant for most home use.
the company I work for recently had a discussion around moving to alarm monitoring over the Internet this with the alarm co. I suspect that alarm companies will start with business customers where the margins are better. It won't be too long until home users get this option too. It's cheaper for everyone, plus, they can monitor for "cut" lines easily (i.e. you can ping a router every 5 minutes for free, but you can't have your alarm system take over the phone line to check-in every 5 minutes!).
I suspect that you're more likely to get an RMA for a Sony than some generic brand LCD. You do get something for the price premium, and a "perfect" LCD is probably one of them. Remember, in the end, NewEgg has to send the defective LCD upstream, if one manufacturer/distributor won't give NewEgg a refund for a LCD with a few dead pixels, there's not much NewEgg can do -- I wouldn't expect them to take the hit themselves, especially with PC retail margins so low.
The Passport concept was, and still is good. I never gave MS's attempt a real chance, because I was annoyed of programs like MSN Messenger and XP Remote Assistance bugging/requiring me to get an account.
Anyway, the idea of a simple username+passport system for the 99% of websites where we care about security "a little" does exist. I think Passport was overengineered. I suspect that a most people will NEVER trust their bank passwords to the same system that holds their Slashdot passwords. Without that level of security, a lot of the engineering and compliance testing and associated costs aren't necessary.
I would imagine that "all" that's needed is a big database, some public key system, and a client-side tool to fill in the login forms. It's not THAT tricky.
I'm imagining someone like Google being able to offer this with relative ease. The GoogleToolbar can handle the client-side for automatic logins, or each site can provide an alternate manual login form. Google can easily handle the distributed database and web services stuff. And the free publicity would be excellent - a lot of smaller sites already have Google Logos for their site search, adding one on the login forms is probably reasonable.
I don't think there's any particular reason to require all the cameras to send their data to the same hard drive (or drive array). They could each send data to their own drive, then pull it all back together later using the file serial numbers.
If a phisher grabs the login and races in, you will end up with two sessions open to the same account. If the bank sees this happens, just lock out the account as a precaution. Under most "normal" circumstances two sessions for the same account should not occur - except for possibly automated software like Quicken. For the sake of security, however, I'm sure people won't mind making sure Quicken isn't logging into your bank account when you want to manually login.
I think this is LONG overdue. I hope Canadian banks don't lag behind on some sort of hardware token. I know I cross my fingers whenever I visit friends or relatives and find their computers spyware and virus infested.
It's a surprisingly short jump from spyware to keylogging trojan... it's scares me actually.
I've been playing around with remastering Knoppix on and off for the last week or so... I've had the best luck with the instructions in this forum post. It's a lot easier than the wiki instructions, and it's current. YMMV.
Three down football is great! It makes for less running game and more air game --- which I, being a sucker for the big play, like. Or, maybe I'm biased, being Canadian and all...
Here's a free one that I bookmarked a couple years ago. Once you figure out the interface, you can put in a a word and have the translation from one, or several languages at once.
http://magic-dic.homeunix.net/
There's definitely the potential for problems for advertisers, particularly on what Google refers to as the "Content" network. I.e. the ads placed on 3rd party websites. Since those website owners directly benefit from clicks on any and all ads on their site, it's quite tempting to get people to make fraudulent clicks. Wasn't there an article on Wired.com a couple months ago about clicking-sweatshops in India who specialize in doing just this?
Realizing this, on my Adwords campaigns, I put a very tight limit on the price and the daily limit for the "Content" network. The "Search" ads are a lot safer, the only potential problem with those ads is with competitors clicking on your ads to run-up your marketing costs.
FWIW: I suspect that some site(s) made a bunch of fraudulent clicks for one of my adwords campaigns today - way more clicks than ever before, and a marginal net gain in traffic to the site. Fortunately, I don't play with big bucks, so doesn't really hurt.
Complex URL's don't look that great to the end web user. They just look "fishy". At least to me. Besides that, other things get unnecessarily messy like bookmarking, forwarding to friends, etc.
I should probably have been a little clearer. Imagine the UPS is between the PSU and the rest of the PC components. I.e., the UPS is charged from the PSU DC output.
When power goes out, there are "no" power conversions:
UPS output (already DC) -> DC connections to PC. (there are multiple DC voltages used in a PC, I suppose it couldn't be 100% efficient)
This compares to the power out of a normal UPS:
DC in battery -> Invert to AC for PSU
In PSU -> rectify to DC for PC components.
Plus, you save on various UPS components like cables, cases, power switches, some of the circuits, etc.
I've thought about this in the past too. It should be cheaper than an external UPS (as far as parts go, anyway) since you save two power conversions (1 from UPS to AC, and 1 from AC to DC inside the PSU). So you get away with a smaller battery. Plus, if you're smart about it, you could probably throttle down CPU and GPU speed to make a smaller battery last a little bit longer for a proper shutdown (or hibernate).
OTOH, without UPS for the monitor, you're relying on the shutdown code to do the right thing with your unsaved files and open network sessions!
How is this any different than caching the text of a website? For that matter, who gives Google the right to crawl my websites? Well, ME of course. The web is a public place. Most websites want traffic, those that don't can use a robots.txt file. It's the de facto standard, and every legitimate web crawler will obey it. Plus, every web designer either knows about it, or can Google it to find out about it.
In other words, I call PR stunt. A well executed one, I might add.
I agree. The writers are excellent. Of course, it's nice to have world class CGI, too.
Anyway, since it's pretty clear that Disney and Pixar will soon be parting ways. I've been thinking that Pixar should consider putting out a 2D animated movie. I think they could pull it off well. It would be a great way to put Disney behind them. Plus, they would gain the recognition they deserve for their capabilities outside of 3D graphics.
I highly doubt that Dell will start using any AMD chips for a while yet. Why? Because Dell is by far the largest Intel customer, and they get (and deserve) the best pricing for Intel chips. Plus, they receive large subsidies for advertising Intel only product lines.
Selling any AMD chips would threaten their pricing arrangements with Intel. Since Dell sells billions of dollars of CPUs per quarter, even a half a percent rise in Intel chip prices amounts to 10's of millions of dollars in CPU costs per year. Nevermind product development costs, inventory, and training costs.
Dell has to sell many thousands of ADDITIONAL units just to break even on adding AMD to it's roster.
That said, it's too late for me to try and run the math... maybe the numbers do make sense.
QOS at the router level (for a home/small biz) will do most of what you need. Cheap routers have quality of service settings now... or at least a Linksys WRT54G - with the stock firmware too.
Prioritize the voice traffic, and it should get whatever upstream bandwidth it needs. This won't do much with the downstream traffic, but for most folks it isn't a problem.
There's nothing in the privacy laws that prohibits collecting information. You probably can't require the information, and you certainly can not collect the information for one reason (e.g. extended warranties) and use it for another, like selling it to someone or otherwise mishandling it so that other firms get a hold of it.
I think Radioshack stopped asking because too many people got annoyed by it. I don't think they did anything useful with the information anyway. E.g. some co's send special deals to good customers. They were so pushy with it, they probably couldn't use the data anyways - garbage in, garbage out!
Re GP:
The salesman still gets his commission. They don't need to get your name, they just need the salesman's ID on the transaction.
OT: I recently went to buy an all-in-one printer at Futureshop. I pointed at a specific multifunction printer and told the salesman that "I'll take one". The salesman THEN begins a salesmans pitch, "this is an excellent model, it's like three devices in one..." Sometimes, I wonder what having an average IQ really means.
Slashdot Mirror
Really, in the end, all that is needed to save Enterprise is to make it worthwhile for someone to pick up the production and broadcasting of season 5 and on. It's basic economics.
How would the rights and revenues of a totally fan supported series work out? As far as I can remember from when I first saw the $32M number, it was supposed to cover production, but it isn't offset by whatever revenues would come from the advertiments aired during the shows, syndication, DVD revenues, sponsorships, etc. (Tangent: Why doesn't the series work in a few sponsorships? Movies do it all the time. Some of the corps today WILL exist in the ST:E timeline, it's only what, 150 years?)
Let's say Enterprise was close to breaking even on Fox. Maybe fans chipping in a few million dollars will make it worthwhile to carry on? Maybe in the form of precommitments to the season on DVD? If not, maybe someone else will crunch the numbers and decide to pick up the show.
IMHO, I doubt that fan donations will ever raise $32M; however, I wouldn't be surprised if there was enough there to catch the eye of someone who can provide the funds.
I've grown to like Enterprise, particularly the latest season. I really wish that Fox would host a BT link that included the advertisements. Come one if you're going to give it a shoddy timeslot, throw us a bone! Besides, you know the show will end up on the 'net anyways - there's no technology on the near-term horizon to prevent that!
In CPU sizes, 200mm is pretty big. IIRC, newer Athlons bump around 100mm depending on the cache size. P4's are somewhat larger than the Athlons. Bigger chips use more material and fab space, plus, the defect rate rises (it only takes a single error in a critical part of the chip to ruin it).
I hate talk about bloat, slowness, and lazy programmers. For the same tasks, computers are far easier to use today than even 5 years ago. Never mind the fact that we can also do about 10 times as many different tasks now, than we did when I first started using PCs 10-15 years ago.
Yes, if I could find a floppy drive, and get a dos boot disk to boot, I could theoretically run a wickedly fast instance of WordPerfect 5.1. I wouldn't be able to surf the web, send email, listen to MP3's, work wirelessly, or work with graphics though -- and yes, graphics (e.g. diagrams) do have a proper place in day to day work!
Do people even remember the non-PNP days? IRQ's, IO Ports and the rest? Non-multitasking? Non-Memory protected (i.e. complete OS crashes from app errors?). These issues didn't seeem so bad back then since "that's the way it was", but now, I dread ever having to deal with those limitations again. Futzing with IRQ's for an hour just to make a modem stop locking up a PC is not my idea of productivity.
Hardware is cheap. Time isn't. I just hope we keep finding more ways to make my use of computers even easier.
Wiki's are pretty flexible. I wish I could find a basic Wiki that didn't need a webserver, yet had a good feature set (there probably is one, I haven't really looked too hard). I use a big text file for "logs" of work done for clients. It's getting unwieldly now that it's rather big because it's one dimensional. Sure there is text search, but can you really remember the exact spelling of a company name or a task? At least a Wiki implies that some meta data is recorded - related pages and the time the page was created/edited. (And revision control, but that's not too relevant to job searches) Ditto for Excel, how many columns do you create? Do you record the cover letter text of every application? The "essay" answers to online job applications? Too inflexible. Plus, I've often desired to add images to my text/excel type logs - a simple chart is worth a thousand words sometimes. A good Wiki will support that.
I've used google adwords for a couple small campaigns. I suspect that I've been a victim of "click fraud" on the content network -- that's where your ads appear on third party websites. However, on the Google search network, the only entity who directly benefits from clicks is Google themselves. I'm pretty comfortable with the traffic I get from the search clicks.
I don't suppose they expect people to paint over their windows! So... this tin-foil coating (almost literally) isn't going to be perfect.
Bah! Encryption is the only way to go anyway. What happens when you have people, say, come inside your house? Never mind the inconvenience of no cell-phones.
I guess there are some niches for this product...somewhere.
Why bother with a T-1? Most folks don't upload and DSL/Cable download speeds are _higher_ than 1.4Mbps (at least in Canada). The extra cost for reliability and upstream bandwith are irrelevant for most home use.
the company I work for recently had a discussion around moving to alarm monitoring over the Internet this with the alarm co. I suspect that alarm companies will start with business customers where the margins are better. It won't be too long until home users get this option too. It's cheaper for everyone, plus, they can monitor for "cut" lines easily (i.e. you can ping a router every 5 minutes for free, but you can't have your alarm system take over the phone line to check-in every 5 minutes!).
I suspect that you're more likely to get an RMA for a Sony than some generic brand LCD. You do get something for the price premium, and a "perfect" LCD is probably one of them. Remember, in the end, NewEgg has to send the defective LCD upstream, if one manufacturer/distributor won't give NewEgg a refund for a LCD with a few dead pixels, there's not much NewEgg can do -- I wouldn't expect them to take the hit themselves, especially with PC retail margins so low.
The Passport concept was, and still is good. I never gave MS's attempt a real chance, because I was annoyed of programs like MSN Messenger and XP Remote Assistance bugging/requiring me to get an account.
Anyway, the idea of a simple username+passport system for the 99% of websites where we care about security "a little" does exist. I think Passport was overengineered. I suspect that a most people will NEVER trust their bank passwords to the same system that holds their Slashdot passwords. Without that level of security, a lot of the engineering and compliance testing and associated costs aren't necessary.
I would imagine that "all" that's needed is a big database, some public key system, and a client-side tool to fill in the login forms. It's not THAT tricky.
I'm imagining someone like Google being able to offer this with relative ease. The GoogleToolbar can handle the client-side for automatic logins, or each site can provide an alternate manual login form. Google can easily handle the distributed database and web services stuff. And the free publicity would be excellent - a lot of smaller sites already have Google Logos for their site search, adding one on the login forms is probably reasonable.
I don't think there's any particular reason to require all the cameras to send their data to the same hard drive (or drive array). They could each send data to their own drive, then pull it all back together later using the file serial numbers.
If a phisher grabs the login and races in, you will end up with two sessions open to the same account. If the bank sees this happens, just lock out the account as a precaution. Under most "normal" circumstances two sessions for the same account should not occur - except for possibly automated software like Quicken. For the sake of security, however, I'm sure people won't mind making sure Quicken isn't logging into your bank account when you want to manually login.
I think this is LONG overdue. I hope Canadian banks don't lag behind on some sort of hardware token. I know I cross my fingers whenever I visit friends or relatives and find their computers spyware and virus infested.
It's a surprisingly short jump from spyware to keylogging trojan... it's scares me actually.
Here I am, clicking on an external story at news.com, and low and behold, Slashdot's banner appears.
Is this a first? (Probably not) Anyway, watch what you type folks, Slashdot's almost mainstream!
I've been playing around with remastering Knoppix on and off for the last week or so... I've had the best luck with the instructions in this forum post. It's a lot easier than the wiki instructions, and it's current. YMMV.
Three down football is great! It makes for less running game and more air game --- which I, being a sucker for the big play, like. Or, maybe I'm biased, being Canadian and all...
Here's a free one that I bookmarked a couple years ago. Once you figure out the interface, you can put in a a word and have the translation from one, or several languages at once.
http://magic-dic.homeunix.net/
There's definitely the potential for problems for advertisers, particularly on what Google refers to as the "Content" network. I.e. the ads placed on 3rd party websites. Since those website owners directly benefit from clicks on any and all ads on their site, it's quite tempting to get people to make fraudulent clicks. Wasn't there an article on Wired.com a couple months ago about clicking-sweatshops in India who specialize in doing just this?
Realizing this, on my Adwords campaigns, I put a very tight limit on the price and the daily limit for the "Content" network. The "Search" ads are a lot safer, the only potential problem with those ads is with competitors clicking on your ads to run-up your marketing costs.
FWIW: I suspect that some site(s) made a bunch of fraudulent clicks for one of my adwords campaigns today - way more clicks than ever before, and a marginal net gain in traffic to the site. Fortunately, I don't play with big bucks, so doesn't really hurt.
Complex URL's don't look that great to the end web user. They just look "fishy". At least to me. Besides that, other things get unnecessarily messy like bookmarking, forwarding to friends, etc.
I should probably have been a little clearer. Imagine the UPS is between the PSU and the rest of the PC components. I.e., the UPS is charged from the PSU DC output.
When power goes out, there are "no" power conversions:
UPS output (already DC) -> DC connections to PC. (there are multiple DC voltages used in a PC, I suppose it couldn't be 100% efficient)
This compares to the power out of a normal UPS:
DC in battery -> Invert to AC for PSU
In PSU -> rectify to DC for PC components.
Plus, you save on various UPS components like cables, cases, power switches, some of the circuits, etc.
I've thought about this in the past too. It should be cheaper than an external UPS (as far as parts go, anyway) since you save two power conversions (1 from UPS to AC, and 1 from AC to DC inside the PSU). So you get away with a smaller battery. Plus, if you're smart about it, you could probably throttle down CPU and GPU speed to make a smaller battery last a little bit longer for a proper shutdown (or hibernate).
OTOH, without UPS for the monitor, you're relying on the shutdown code to do the right thing with your unsaved files and open network sessions!
How is this any different than caching the text of a website? For that matter, who gives Google the right to crawl my websites? Well, ME of course. The web is a public place. Most websites want traffic, those that don't can use a robots.txt file. It's the de facto standard, and every legitimate web crawler will obey it. Plus, every web designer either knows about it, or can Google it to find out about it.
In other words, I call PR stunt. A well executed one, I might add.
I agree. The writers are excellent. Of course, it's nice to have world class CGI, too.
Anyway, since it's pretty clear that Disney and Pixar will soon be parting ways. I've been thinking that Pixar should consider putting out a 2D animated movie. I think they could pull it off well. It would be a great way to put Disney behind them. Plus, they would gain the recognition they deserve for their capabilities outside of 3D graphics.
I highly doubt that Dell will start using any AMD chips for a while yet. Why? Because Dell is by far the largest Intel customer, and they get (and deserve) the best pricing for Intel chips. Plus, they receive large subsidies for advertising Intel only product lines.
Selling any AMD chips would threaten their pricing arrangements with Intel. Since Dell sells billions of dollars of CPUs per quarter, even a half a percent rise in Intel chip prices amounts to 10's of millions of dollars in CPU costs per year. Nevermind product development costs, inventory, and training costs.
Dell has to sell many thousands of ADDITIONAL units just to break even on adding AMD to it's roster.
That said, it's too late for me to try and run the math... maybe the numbers do make sense.
QOS at the router level (for a home/small biz) will do most of what you need. Cheap routers have quality of service settings now... or at least a Linksys WRT54G - with the stock firmware too.
Prioritize the voice traffic, and it should get whatever upstream bandwidth it needs. This won't do much with the downstream traffic, but for most folks it isn't a problem.
There's nothing in the privacy laws that prohibits collecting information. You probably can't require the information, and you certainly can not collect the information for one reason (e.g. extended warranties) and use it for another, like selling it to someone or otherwise mishandling it so that other firms get a hold of it.
I think Radioshack stopped asking because too many people got annoyed by it. I don't think they did anything useful with the information anyway. E.g. some co's send special deals to good customers. They were so pushy with it, they probably couldn't use the data anyways - garbage in, garbage out!
Re GP:
The salesman still gets his commission. They don't need to get your name, they just need the salesman's ID on the transaction.
OT: I recently went to buy an all-in-one printer at Futureshop. I pointed at a specific multifunction printer and told the salesman that "I'll take one". The salesman THEN begins a salesmans pitch, "this is an excellent model, it's like three devices in one..." Sometimes, I wonder what having an average IQ really means.