Pretty much right. On average, no more than about 9,000 people are online at once, though this number is up significantly over just a couple of months ago. Only about 260,000 people have logged in in the last 60 days, so that's probably closer to the real number.
It's growing fairly fast, though. When I first signed on, they had 400,000 registered users, so they're gaining about 50,000 registrations a month on average. Using the above proportions, that comes out to about 20K or so actual new users a month on average, if it's even that high. And many of those are alternate accounts. Most people I know have one or two, so a guess would be that perhaps 10% to 15% of the registered userbase is actually just the same people with extra accounts.
Oh, but it is cheaper - for them. When I was working for Technicolor about 12 years ago, the cost of mass producing a CD was about 12 cents per unit. The packaging was about another dollar and a half. The rest of the cost is all in the content, and the music publishers pretty much charge whatever they think we'll pay for.
But they were right, the CD's are cheaper than cassettes and vinyl ever were, and they're lining their pockets with the difference.
It's very simple, really - they shouldn't be allowed to charge for content delivery because they're already being paid to do that.
The ISP's (and the telecoms that provide the backbones) are already charging their customers based on bandwidth at both ends of the connection.
It's like saying that a trucking service, who has been being paid to deliver pies for twenty years, suddenly wakes up one morning and decides that they not only want money for delivering the pies, they want some of the profit from the sale of the pies as well - even though they had no part in making the pies, and even though none of the materials used to make the pies originally belonged to them.
Very simple, really. There's no legal, ethical or moral basis for what they're trying to do.
Two things:
1) This is not the venue for this sort of political commentary.
2) While I generally agree with the sentiment, there are many decaffeinated brands that taste just as good as whatever it is you've been drinking.
I was standing in line to see a movie years ago - I forget which one - when I was approached by petitioners from PETA who were upset about the treatment of the horses in the latest Conan movie.
They showed me a letter from the Spanish Department of the Interior which said, basically, "Gosh, if you say they were abused, then we believe you." Then they waved this letter around claiming the Spanish Government corroborated their claims.
People who run up and start protesting before they know a damned thing about what they're protesting just make me laugh. I hope at least that the people who took off their clothes had nice butts, because apart from some tittilation, that's all they accomplished.
A few years ago William Shatner published a book in which he examined the influence Star Trek has had on the pace, direction and inspiration of modern invention as based on all that cool stuff we saw on Star Trek. For example, quantum teleportation is now a reality (though only for one particle at a time, we have flip-open communicators, Vocera has voiced activated comm-badges for sale, et cetera).
To what degree to you feel Star Trek is shaping our technological future, and is this necessarily a good thing?
Has anybody noticed yet that SCO is trying the "if I say it ten times, it's so" ploy? Beyond sanity by any measure, SCO presses on. I imagine that when the dust settles and the FTC has taken a look at this, that most of the above-the-line officers of SCO will wind up in jail for their outrageous attempt to (successfully) manipulate SCOX stock.
What baffles me is not how they can peddle this lunacy with a straight face, but why they believe that the fabric of society has broken down so much that this kind of thing is something you can do without shame.
Even twenty years ago, nobody would have had the giant brass clangers it would take to do something like this. Have our values eroded so badly? Has society really become so decadent that literally anything goes? And if it has, how do we go about the process of healing civilization itself?
Frankly I don't care if it's Microsoft's fault for writing buggy insecure code, or the user's fault for not keeping up on patches Microsoft released months ago. It's all stupid, and we shouldn't have to deal with it. Over here in California, Ventura County burned about $70G over this stupid worm.
One way or the other, Linux isn't affected. Neither are Macs (which are Unix now anyway). Isn't anybody on the Windows side of the fence getting tired of this by now?
First, yeah, I know about the 80 lines of code with the comments. I'll stipulate to that.
My point was that they're saying "we didn't do it and besides nobody saw us doing it". It sounds a little too much like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
My second point is, "They're trying to sue the entire planet over 80 lines of source code??" Am I the only one who's outraged about this?
My direct experience has been that with every service pack comes a host of new problems. Some have devestating effects on networking, the behavior of applications, or security. It's true, many of the things are benign or simply patch things that nobody uses. However, it is also true that the network administrators and IT managers at the companies I have worked for (and I've worked for some major players) are reluctant to roll out patches released by Microsoft until they've been fully tested and their effects known.
Nope, I wouldn't take a clean Win2K install over Win2K SP3. But I'd definately take it over SP1 and SP2. Each of those services packs screwed up networking, added new security vulnerabilities or broke system DLL's that applications I had been using at the time depended upon. It took Microsoft two tries to get it right.
As for NT 4.0, at least two of the service packs left NT networking horribly broken, and the IT managers wisely chose to skip them and wait for the next ones up before rolling out those upgrades.
.. I sincerely doubt that their reputation for releasing patches that break as much as they fix will be affected very much by this move. I think most business users will see it as an attempt to appear as though they're trying to address the issues instead of actually doing anything.
It's kind of like a balding man with a really bad comb-over. It looks okay from a distance, but it doesn't really fool anyone.
.. they said that though they've taken it out, they might put it back in in the future if they felt they needed to.
Obviously they WANTED to keep the DRM, but the market pressure forced them to do otherwise. They said that there was no financial incentive to keep the DRM in the product. We have to assume that their interest in DRM was driven by other concerns, since as they've taken it out and said that they might put it back in in the same breath. Evidently some of the people at that company are still strongly in favor of DRM, or this somewhat ambiguous statement wouldn't have been made in the first place.
To those people, the consumers of the world have an announcement of our own to make: "DRM is poisonous to future sales. Don't put it in your products, don't use it, don't even hint at it, because we're not buying it!"
Sorry to say, but if you're looking for a way to boost your comp-sci degree, philosophy isn't it. You need to boost it with a skill that you can sell. Philosophy isn't it.
Instead, try artificial intelligence, statistics, physics, real-time computer graphics, one of the medical sciences, mechanical or electrical engineering, astronomy, business law, ANYTHING that could be conceivably combined with what you already know that people might actually pay for.
You have a really good point here - historically one of the biggest problems in robotics is that robots usually would benefit greatly from having bigger brains than they could actually carry. Making use of a wireless connection would certainly solve that problem. It would also create the possibility of "robot hives", where one master brain of very high computing capacity could control a small fleet of robot body surrogates.
This concept has been explored in great detail in science fiction; those of us who actually read the stuff are already aware of the potential. Hurray for Intel! Real, practical humanoid robots can't be far off now (by which comment I most definitely imply that I don't think they're there yet).
In particular, I think the recent incident with the enterprise version of Office demanding registration every time it's started up, ending up with a complete lockout after the 50th try, is getting IT managers at least thinking about alternatives. It certainly isn't improving Microsoft's reputation, but whether this will push shops over into Open Office or Hancom Office is hard to determine. Newton's Third Law may prevail, despite the problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately yes, it does - that's about three years. As long as the period of effect of the contract is defined.
You bet it's not enforceable. By definition, a contract:
* is between two or more participating parties
* defines the behavior of one or more of those parties
* has a sharply defined period of effect
If the document does not meet these three basic standards, it is by any legal definition not a contract.
(IANAL, you'll probably want to do your own research, but I've gotten out of several bad agreements by pointing this out to the various involved)
Pretty much right. On average, no more than about 9,000 people are online at once, though this number is up significantly over just a couple of months ago. Only about 260,000 people have logged in in the last 60 days, so that's probably closer to the real number. It's growing fairly fast, though. When I first signed on, they had 400,000 registered users, so they're gaining about 50,000 registrations a month on average. Using the above proportions, that comes out to about 20K or so actual new users a month on average, if it's even that high. And many of those are alternate accounts. Most people I know have one or two, so a guess would be that perhaps 10% to 15% of the registered userbase is actually just the same people with extra accounts.
Oh, but it is cheaper - for them. When I was working for Technicolor about 12 years ago, the cost of mass producing a CD was about 12 cents per unit. The packaging was about another dollar and a half. The rest of the cost is all in the content, and the music publishers pretty much charge whatever they think we'll pay for.
But they were right, the CD's are cheaper than cassettes and vinyl ever were, and they're lining their pockets with the difference.
It's very simple, really - they shouldn't be allowed to charge for content delivery because they're already being paid to do that.
The ISP's (and the telecoms that provide the backbones) are already charging their customers based on bandwidth at both ends of the connection.
It's like saying that a trucking service, who has been being paid to deliver pies for twenty years, suddenly wakes up one morning and decides that they not only want money for delivering the pies, they want some of the profit from the sale of the pies as well - even though they had no part in making the pies, and even though none of the materials used to make the pies originally belonged to them.
Very simple, really. There's no legal, ethical or moral basis for what they're trying to do.
By a broad stretch of the definition, then yes.
But I won't be impressed until I see video of a robot which, not having been programmed to do so beforehand, is curiously examining its own hands.
Note that #1 is usually related to #2....
Two things: 1) This is not the venue for this sort of political commentary. 2) While I generally agree with the sentiment, there are many decaffeinated brands that taste just as good as whatever it is you've been drinking.
I was standing in line to see a movie years ago - I forget which one - when I was approached by petitioners from PETA who were upset about the treatment of the horses in the latest Conan movie.
They showed me a letter from the Spanish Department of the Interior which said, basically, "Gosh, if you say they were abused, then we believe you." Then they waved this letter around claiming the Spanish Government corroborated their claims.
People who run up and start protesting before they know a damned thing about what they're protesting just make me laugh. I hope at least that the people who took off their clothes had nice butts, because apart from some tittilation, that's all they accomplished.
A few years ago William Shatner published a book in which he examined the influence Star Trek has had on the pace, direction and inspiration of modern invention as based on all that cool stuff we saw on Star Trek. For example, quantum teleportation is now a reality (though only for one particle at a time, we have flip-open communicators, Vocera has voiced activated comm-badges for sale, et cetera).
To what degree to you feel Star Trek is shaping our technological future, and is this necessarily a good thing?
What baffles me is not how they can peddle this lunacy with a straight face, but why they believe that the fabric of society has broken down so much that this kind of thing is something you can do without shame.
Even twenty years ago, nobody would have had the giant brass clangers it would take to do something like this. Have our values eroded so badly? Has society really become so decadent that literally anything goes? And if it has, how do we go about the process of healing civilization itself?
Frankly I don't care if it's Microsoft's fault for writing buggy insecure code, or the user's fault for not keeping up on patches Microsoft released months ago. It's all stupid, and we shouldn't have to deal with it. Over here in California, Ventura County burned about $70G over this stupid worm.
One way or the other, Linux isn't affected. Neither are Macs (which are Unix now anyway). Isn't anybody on the Windows side of the fence getting tired of this by now?
Time to switch to an OS that doesn't do this.
*nix, anyone?
Hopefully.
"This law professor from the University of California points out weakness in SCO's legal bluster, "..
Talk about shooting fish in a barrel..
First, yeah, I know about the 80 lines of code with the comments. I'll stipulate to that.
My point was that they're saying "we didn't do it and besides nobody saw us doing it". It sounds a little too much like a kid caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
My second point is, "They're trying to sue the entire planet over 80 lines of source code??" Am I the only one who's outraged about this?
"I didn't do it, and besides nobody saw me and you can't prove a thing."
Most zip files, sorry to say, are made with WinZip now, so all that PKWare's reticence has accomplished is the balkanization of their own product.
My direct experience has been that with every service pack comes a host of new problems. Some have devestating effects on networking, the behavior of applications, or security. It's true, many of the things are benign or simply patch things that nobody uses. However, it is also true that the network administrators and IT managers at the companies I have worked for (and I've worked for some major players) are reluctant to roll out patches released by Microsoft until they've been fully tested and their effects known.
Nope, I wouldn't take a clean Win2K install over Win2K SP3. But I'd definately take it over SP1 and SP2. Each of those services packs screwed up networking, added new security vulnerabilities or broke system DLL's that applications I had been using at the time depended upon. It took Microsoft two tries to get it right.
As for NT 4.0, at least two of the service packs left NT networking horribly broken, and the IT managers wisely chose to skip them and wait for the next ones up before rolling out those upgrades.
.. I sincerely doubt that their reputation for releasing patches that break as much as they fix will be affected very much by this move. I think most business users will see it as an attempt to appear as though they're trying to address the issues instead of actually doing anything.
It's kind of like a balding man with a really bad comb-over. It looks okay from a distance, but it doesn't really fool anyone.
.. they said that though they've taken it out, they might put it back in in the future if they felt they needed to.
Obviously they WANTED to keep the DRM, but the market pressure forced them to do otherwise. They said that there was no financial incentive to keep the DRM in the product. We have to assume that their interest in DRM was driven by other concerns, since as they've taken it out and said that they might put it back in in the same breath. Evidently some of the people at that company are still strongly in favor of DRM, or this somewhat ambiguous statement wouldn't have been made in the first place.
To those people, the consumers of the world have an announcement of our own to make: "DRM is poisonous to future sales. Don't put it in your products, don't use it, don't even hint at it, because we're not buying it!"
Sorry to say, but if you're looking for a way to boost your comp-sci degree, philosophy isn't it. You need to boost it with a skill that you can sell. Philosophy isn't it.
Instead, try artificial intelligence, statistics, physics, real-time computer graphics, one of the medical sciences, mechanical or electrical engineering, astronomy, business law, ANYTHING that could be conceivably combined with what you already know that people might actually pay for.
You have a really good point here - historically one of the biggest problems in robotics is that robots usually would benefit greatly from having bigger brains than they could actually carry. Making use of a wireless connection would certainly solve that problem. It would also create the possibility of "robot hives", where one master brain of very high computing capacity could control a small fleet of robot body surrogates.
This concept has been explored in great detail in science fiction; those of us who actually read the stuff are already aware of the potential. Hurray for Intel! Real, practical humanoid robots can't be far off now (by which comment I most definitely imply that I don't think they're there yet).
The Vocera product is a Star Trek communicator! They even call their custom wireless TCP/IP protocol "Turbo Treck".
This proves my thesis that the kids who grew up watching Star Trek twenty years ago are out there by the thousands trying to build it today.
(Whadya know, a relevant post for once..)
In particular, I think the recent incident with the enterprise version of Office demanding registration every time it's started up, ending up with a complete lockout after the 50th try, is getting IT managers at least thinking about alternatives. It certainly isn't improving Microsoft's reputation, but whether this will push shops over into Open Office or Hancom Office is hard to determine. Newton's Third Law may prevail, despite the problems.
Support costs for Linux are lower per machine, and each machine does more. There have been abundant and numerous studies that show this. Try again.