You forgot another reason why companies go public. To appease and put the "golden handcuffs" on the employees, not to mention trying to attract top-notch potential employees. Having worked for several dot-coms in the last few years I can say that there isn't that much company loyalty out there. Many employees stay at companies hoping to make a lot of money off of their stock options.
Now in the last year, a lot of this has changed and more people are sticking around at companies for fear of not getting another job, but there are still a lot of people out there hoping to "strike it rich" off of stock options and you never will without going public.
Also, at one company that I was at that was on the verge of an IPO increased head count by 30-40% two weeks prior to the IPO. This was a few years ago when finding good employees was quite a battle. Again, probably not as much of a concern for companies these days.
While I agree that a lot of Tivo owners don't really care for suggestions, there are other features of Tivo that I think everyone loves. Let me define the differences for non-Tivo people out there:
1) "Season Pass" - Tell Tivo to tape all episodes of Junkyard Wars on TLC. This kicks ass. For instance, Junkyard Wars is changing the day it is on next week, but that is no sweat for me. In fact I don't care what time anything is ever on because Tivo just tapes it for me all the time. It is also smart about not taping the same thing over again. This is good for shows like The Sopranos which HBO shows the same episode 5 times in the same week. You could get something similar to this with "hotword", but chances are that you would get duplicates and possibly tape too many things.
2) Wishlists. You can tape shows by keyword (sounds like your "hotword" capabilities), or by actor/actress or director or any combination of these. This can be very useful if you love a certain actor/director/etc.
3) Suggestions. Some people love them, some hate them. Tivo tapes shows for you that you didn't ask for based on other shows that you gave thumps up/thumbs down to. Sometimes it will catch shows you didn't know you wanted to watch and is really cool. A lot of the time it tapes total garbage. Either way, it won't tape them if you don't have the space and will delete them first if you are out of room of shows you specifically asked to record. You can also turn this feature off if you don't want it at all.
4) Search for a show by genre/name. Record one episode or get a season pass for it (See #1).
5) You can record a show by channel/date/time, weekly, etc. I haven't _ever_ used this feature because it is too easy to tape shows with the other ways of recording.
Anyway, if Guideplus works for you for less money, then great. Alternatives are always good. But there is a definite advantage to the PVRs out there.
Having never used this software, I am curious what the "guide" capabilities are of their software? Is it as sophisticated as what you can get with a Tivo? Does it have "Season Pass" capabilities (i.e. tape all episodes of Junkyard Wars on TLC) and Wishlists (i.e. tape all Movies that star Cary Grant and are directed by Hitchcock)? Does it auto-tape suggestions too?
I think most people agree that while PVR's hardware is nothing too special, the software, Tivo especially, is what makes them worth the money. The ease of use, nice UI and features are things that I would doubt some freebie software that came with a video card could really compare to. Then agian, like I said I haven't seen this software in action.
Even easier, go through the trouble of setting up a 28.8k PPP link to a computer across the room that is hosting the file. Verify that it is the only internet connection that the client machine has. Load up a web page on the server which just references a file: URL that points to a file that is already on the client machine. Click on it, and the video loads up from local disk. All the non-technical business muckity-mucks in the room wouldn't have a clue what a file: URL is and they would be picking their jaws up off the ground.
You could even use some simple javascript to obsure the file: part of the url and make it look like you were hitting an HTTP: URL.
I have a co-worker who took his laptop home and booted it up with his wireless card in it. Much to his surprise, he was connected to the Internet even though he didn't have a wireless network at his house. Turns out that there was an "Internet cafe" across the street who evidently had no encryption turned on on their network and would let anyone with a wireless card connect to it.
So if you are moving to a new place, before you order that DSL line or cable modem, first pop in a wireless card and see if you can get a free Internet connection.
Re:someone should make a code red three
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Code Redux
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· Score: 1
That is amusing, but the Code Red III I would like to see would take control of your IIS server and then install the damn Code Red patch. Then after a day or so we wouldn't have to hear about this damn thing anymore.
If I was, then I would be slightly outraged that I was forced to pay for broadband internet access for everyone in the country when I couldn't even afford a computer for myself. Or are paying for computers for people also included in this?
Where is the money coming from? Isn't the tax rate in Canada high enough already?
I got my major in "Computer Science and Engineering". It is a single major at the University of California, Davis, at least. Not sure how many other universities offer this major, but I couldn't decide on which I wanted to do, so I did both. I chose it mostly because it didn't require as much high-level math as the Computer Science degree and didn't require as much high level EE stuff as the Computer Engineering degree. It was more well rounded.
This article from inside.com has more details on how this "copy protection scheme" will work. Basically the peers share a secret key and then the mp3 is encrypted with the key on the fly. Then presumably the mp3 is kept encrypted and your Napster client is the only thing with the key to decrypt it, so you'd have to play the mp3's in the Napster client.
There was another article about this a while ago that I read. Don't remember the URL. Basically it said that their plan was to have the peer that is hosting the mp3 to come up with a secret key for each peer that requests the mp3 and then encrypts it on the fly as it is going over the wire after sharing the key with the peer. Then you can only play the mp3 inside Napster which has the key to decrypt the mp3.
Napster isn't forgetting why they were so successful; they painted themselves into a corner with their total disregard for copyright and the record labels' power. Now they are getting sued into oblivion and are being forced to re-implement their entire system. If Napster could continue what they are currently doing and keep all the viral marketing going, they certainly would. Unfortunately for them, the RIAA is holding a gun to their heads and it's a _really_ big gun.
Note: I'm not against Napster or rooting for the RIAA, just stating the facts.
Forget Wolfenstein 3D, I want to see an updated (FPS? Third person perspective ala Tomb raider?) version of Beyond Castle Wolfenstein. That game ruled. Running around with the alarm going off and soldiers yelling at you in German, dragging dead bodies across the room to help map the levels. That's the kind of fun, exciting stuff I want to see in modern games.
Hey I'd rather see the blatant Gateway computers on ER than all the damn toilet-seat-cover-looking Apple iBooks that have been ALL OVER TV shows the last couple years.
Then again, TV is still "free" as compared to paying $9 to see movies in downtown San Francisco complete with commercials before the previews and the product placements in the movie.
I am wondering if Sony doesn't want to allow selling of virtual items because they aren't getting a piece of the action. I mean, if Sony was clever and forward-thinking, they could have built the selling of items into the game. If they did, this they charge some extra fee for credit card processing and customer support and then a little more for profit and they have a really good business model. Getting paid everytime someone sells something that doesn't exist in real life. No warehouses, no shipping costs. Very much like Ebay's model, which is profitable. Hell you might even be able to sustain the game without subscription fees if enough people are willing to buy the items.
Is it really cheating if someone kills you because they paid a lot of money for good weapons versus someone killing you because they spent several hours/days working hard to obtain these weapons? Let me just say that I haven't ever played the game, so I don't know all the facts, this is just conjecture and speculation.
All I know is that if I had some money and free time I would definitely think about creating a nice MMP online game with built-in e-commerce engine for selling of whatever virtual items there are in the game. Sounds to me like a great business to be in, as long as you can create a game that is fairly popular.
This is just a supposition with no real facts to back it up, but think about who would want this type of thing. Obviously huge media corporations such as those in the RIAA, MPAA, etc. Well if this type of technology is the holy grail for them, as we all suppose that it is, what would stop them from sending a little cash in the way of the hardware manufacturers? If the large media corporations help subsidise the cost of these new CPRM devices, then the cheapest hard drives on the market are the ones with CPRM on them. And why are EIDE/ATA drives so much more popular than the technically superior SCSI drives? Which one is much cheaper?
I think Congress(wo)men could be volunteers and would still be corrupted and wealthy. I don't think any of them are getting rich on their salary, it's all the "favors" from lobbyists.
Doesn't sound any more worse than Alexa
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Google And Privacy
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· Score: 1
And Alexa is built into Netscape and I have never seen any specific warnings during Netscape installs. If you have the "Show me related websites" activated (which it is by default) it tracks sites you go to. You can also download Alexa plugins for IE. At least the google software is upfront and honest about what it does.
It's a scaling dream. An application that is so easily distributed that you can have thousands of computers all running the same code which don't need to communicate with each other, except in daily batch jobs. Scaling is infinite and redundancy comes along with the package. Websites that rely on one centralized database are a scaling nightmare. One word: Ebay.
The article states in just the second paragraph that they get 40 million queries a day. So the math really is:
40,000,000 * (10 / 10000) = $40,000 per day
assuming ~30 days in a month:
40,000 * 30 = $1,200,000 per month.
Now I don't know any startup that wouldn't mind getting an extra $1.2 million a month. Not to mention that google's banner ads could be very targeted based on the query the user submitted, so the CPM would most likely be much higer than $10. I could easily see them getting closer to $30 CPM for targeted ads with the kind of traffic they get.
But of course I along with every other user hope they don't go this route and add banner ads to their site, but if it comes down to banner ads or shutting google down forever, I would not think twice about what I would prefer.
I have to agree with most things you said, much to my chagrin. The one thing I don't agree with, however, is when people make reference to Windows being easier to install than Linux. Installing Windows 98 is not an easy task. The last 3 times I have tried to install it on my machines it has taken literally more than one day before I actually got it installed, and in one case I couldn't get it installed and had to put Win95 on that machine instead. The truth is that most computers come pre-installed with Windows and most people never touch the Windows install disk let alone subject themselves to its painful install process.
Linux on the other hand is hardly ever pre-installed and therefore I think RedHat's install process is much smoother and installs more easily than Win98 in my personal experience. Of course it still has some gotchas wrt large modern day disk drives, much like the Windows installers, but I quickly found documentation on how to overcome such problems and never could find such help with Windows installs.
But, yes, my family is fairly computer savvy and none of them run Linux and maybe only my dad could handle a computer with Linux installed and even that would require a hefty learning curve. I believe that Red Hat has for some time been concentrating on trying to make Linux easier for Joe Schmoe and have made inroads with the install process.
Maybe you think ultraportable systems are too underpowered, but I ran an entire website my company was developing on my IBM Thinkpad 570 (4 pounds, 1" thick) on many cross country flights. This included apache, php, a multithreaded middleware caching layer and an entire Oracle database. Not to mention the fact that I had to test development with X and Netscape on the client side -- all on the same little notebook. Got an extra 6 hours of development time (thanks to an extra battery that I had to swap in midflight) each flight.
Slashdot Mirror
You forgot another reason why companies go public. To appease and put the "golden handcuffs" on the employees, not to mention trying to attract top-notch potential employees. Having worked for several dot-coms in the last few years I can say that there isn't that much company loyalty out there. Many employees stay at companies hoping to make a lot of money off of their stock options.
Now in the last year, a lot of this has changed and more people are sticking around at companies for fear of not getting another job, but there are still a lot of people out there hoping to "strike it rich" off of stock options and you never will without going public.
Also, at one company that I was at that was on the verge of an IPO increased head count by 30-40% two weeks prior to the IPO. This was a few years ago when finding good employees was quite a battle. Again, probably not as much of a concern for companies these days.
While I agree that a lot of Tivo owners don't really care for suggestions, there are other features of Tivo that I think everyone loves. Let me define the differences for non-Tivo people out there:
1) "Season Pass" - Tell Tivo to tape all episodes of Junkyard Wars on TLC. This kicks ass. For instance, Junkyard Wars is changing the day it is on next week, but that is no sweat for me. In fact I don't care what time anything is ever on because Tivo just tapes it for me all the time. It is also smart about not taping the same thing over again. This is good for shows like The Sopranos which HBO shows the same episode 5 times in the same week. You could get something similar to this with "hotword", but chances are that you would get duplicates and possibly tape too many things.
2) Wishlists. You can tape shows by keyword (sounds like your "hotword" capabilities), or by actor/actress or director or any combination of these. This can be very useful if you love a certain actor/director/etc.
3) Suggestions. Some people love them, some hate them. Tivo tapes shows for you that you didn't ask for based on other shows that you gave thumps up/thumbs down to. Sometimes it will catch shows you didn't know you wanted to watch and is really cool. A lot of the time it tapes total garbage. Either way, it won't tape them if you don't have the space and will delete them first if you are out of room of shows you specifically asked to record. You can also turn this feature off if you don't want it at all.
4) Search for a show by genre/name. Record one episode or get a season pass for it (See #1).
5) You can record a show by channel/date/time, weekly, etc. I haven't _ever_ used this feature because it is too easy to tape shows with the other ways of recording.
Anyway, if Guideplus works for you for less money, then great. Alternatives are always good. But there is a definite advantage to the PVRs out there.
Having never used this software, I am curious what the "guide" capabilities are of their software? Is it as sophisticated as what you can get with a Tivo? Does it have "Season Pass" capabilities (i.e. tape all episodes of Junkyard Wars on TLC) and Wishlists (i.e. tape all Movies that star Cary Grant and are directed by Hitchcock)? Does it auto-tape suggestions too?
I think most people agree that while PVR's hardware is nothing too special, the software, Tivo especially, is what makes them worth the money. The ease of use, nice UI and features are things that I would doubt some freebie software that came with a video card could really compare to. Then agian, like I said I haven't seen this software in action.
Even easier, go through the trouble of setting up a 28.8k PPP link to a computer across the room that is hosting the file. Verify that it is the only internet connection that the client machine has. Load up a web page on the server which just references a file: URL that points to a file that is already on the client machine. Click on it, and the video loads up from local disk. All the non-technical business muckity-mucks in the room wouldn't have a clue what a file: URL is and they would be picking their jaws up off the ground.
You could even use some simple javascript to obsure the file: part of the url and make it look like you were hitting an HTTP: URL.
Too many easy ways to fake it.
And don't forget the infamous "I'm feeling lucky" button. All the fun and odds of a Vegas slot machine without the cost.
I have a co-worker who took his laptop home and booted it up with his wireless card in it. Much to his surprise, he was connected to the Internet even though he didn't have a wireless network at his house. Turns out that there was an "Internet cafe" across the street who evidently had no encryption turned on on their network and would let anyone with a wireless card connect to it.
So if you are moving to a new place, before you order that DSL line or cable modem, first pop in a wireless card and see if you can get a free Internet connection.
That is amusing, but the Code Red III I would like to see would take control of your IIS server and then install the damn Code Red patch. Then after a day or so we wouldn't have to hear about this damn thing anymore.
I don't know about sexiest (I find her rather annoying actually), but she certainly is a geek. She wears the same clothes in every single episode!
What is that outfit anyway? Is she an extra in a Mad Max movie or something?
If I was, then I would be slightly outraged that I was forced to pay for broadband internet access for everyone in the country when I couldn't even afford a computer for myself. Or are paying for computers for people also included in this?
Where is the money coming from? Isn't the tax rate in Canada high enough already?
And by Lars I am of course talking about one of music sharing most notable opponents, Lars Ulrich of Metallica, native of Denmark.
I got my major in "Computer Science and Engineering". It is a single major at the University of California, Davis, at least. Not sure how many other universities offer this major, but I couldn't decide on which I wanted to do, so I did both. I chose it mostly because it didn't require as much high-level math as the Computer Science degree and didn't require as much high level EE stuff as the Computer Engineering degree. It was more well rounded.
http://www.inside.com/jcs/Story?article_id=23794&p od_id=9
There was another article about this a while ago that I read. Don't remember the URL. Basically it said that their plan was to have the peer that is hosting the mp3 to come up with a secret key for each peer that requests the mp3 and then encrypts it on the fly as it is going over the wire after sharing the key with the peer. Then you can only play the mp3 inside Napster which has the key to decrypt the mp3.
Napster isn't forgetting why they were so successful; they painted themselves into a corner with their total disregard for copyright and the record labels' power. Now they are getting sued into oblivion and are being forced to re-implement their entire system. If Napster could continue what they are currently doing and keep all the viral marketing going, they certainly would. Unfortunately for them, the RIAA is holding a gun to their heads and it's a _really_ big gun.
Note: I'm not against Napster or rooting for the RIAA, just stating the facts.
Forget Wolfenstein 3D, I want to see an updated (FPS? Third person perspective ala Tomb raider?) version of Beyond Castle Wolfenstein. That game ruled. Running around with the alarm going off and soldiers yelling at you in German, dragging dead bodies across the room to help map the levels. That's the kind of fun, exciting stuff I want to see in modern games.
Hey I'd rather see the blatant Gateway computers on ER than all the damn toilet-seat-cover-looking Apple iBooks that have been ALL OVER TV shows the last couple years.
Then again, TV is still "free" as compared to paying $9 to see movies in downtown San Francisco complete with commercials before the previews and the product placements in the movie.
I am wondering if Sony doesn't want to allow selling of virtual items because they aren't getting a piece of the action. I mean, if Sony was clever and forward-thinking, they could have built the selling of items into the game. If they did, this they charge some extra fee for credit card processing and customer support and then a little more for profit and they have a really good business model. Getting paid everytime someone sells something that doesn't exist in real life. No warehouses, no shipping costs. Very much like Ebay's model, which is profitable. Hell you might even be able to sustain the game without subscription fees if enough people are willing to buy the items.
Is it really cheating if someone kills you because they paid a lot of money for good weapons versus someone killing you because they spent several hours/days working hard to obtain these weapons? Let me just say that I haven't ever played the game, so I don't know all the facts, this is just conjecture and speculation.
All I know is that if I had some money and free time I would definitely think about creating a nice MMP online game with built-in e-commerce engine for selling of whatever virtual items there are in the game. Sounds to me like a great business to be in, as long as you can create a game that is fairly popular.
This is just a supposition with no real facts to back it up, but think about who would want this type of thing. Obviously huge media corporations such as those in the RIAA, MPAA, etc. Well if this type of technology is the holy grail for them, as we all suppose that it is, what would stop them from sending a little cash in the way of the hardware manufacturers? If the large media corporations help subsidise the cost of these new CPRM devices, then the cheapest hard drives on the market are the ones with CPRM on them. And why are EIDE/ATA drives so much more popular than the technically superior SCSI drives? Which one is much cheaper?
I think Congress(wo)men could be volunteers and would still be corrupted and wealthy. I don't think any of them are getting rich on their salary, it's all the "favors" from lobbyists.
And Alexa is built into Netscape and I have never seen any specific warnings during Netscape installs. If you have the "Show me related websites" activated (which it is by default) it tracks sites you go to. You can also download Alexa plugins for IE. At least the google software is upfront and honest about what it does.
It's a scaling dream. An application that is so easily distributed that you can have thousands of computers all running the same code which don't need to communicate with each other, except in daily batch jobs. Scaling is infinite and redundancy comes along with the package. Websites that rely on one centralized database are a scaling nightmare. One word: Ebay.
The article states in just the second paragraph that they get 40 million queries a day. So the math really is:
40,000,000 * (10 / 10000) = $40,000 per day
assuming ~30 days in a month:
40,000 * 30 = $1,200,000 per month.
Now I don't know any startup that wouldn't mind getting an extra $1.2 million a month. Not to mention that google's banner ads could be very targeted based on the query the user submitted, so the CPM would most likely be much higer than $10. I could easily see them getting closer to $30 CPM for targeted ads with the kind of traffic they get.
But of course I along with every other user hope they don't go this route and add banner ads to their site, but if it comes down to banner ads or shutting google down forever, I would not think twice about what I would prefer.
http://www.lokigames.com/~yoda/random/
I have to agree with most things you said, much to my chagrin. The one thing I don't agree with, however, is when people make reference to Windows being easier to install than Linux. Installing Windows 98 is not an easy task. The last 3 times I have tried to install it on my machines it has taken literally more than one day before I actually got it installed, and in one case I couldn't get it installed and had to put Win95 on that machine instead. The truth is that most computers come pre-installed with Windows and most people never touch the Windows install disk let alone subject themselves to its painful install process.
Linux on the other hand is hardly ever pre-installed and therefore I think RedHat's install process is much smoother and installs more easily than Win98 in my personal experience. Of course it still has some gotchas wrt large modern day disk drives, much like the Windows installers, but I quickly found documentation on how to overcome such problems and never could find such help with Windows installs.
But, yes, my family is fairly computer savvy and none of them run Linux and maybe only my dad could handle a computer with Linux installed and even that would require a hefty learning curve. I believe that Red Hat has for some time been concentrating on trying to make Linux easier for Joe Schmoe and have made inroads with the install process.
Maybe you think ultraportable systems are too underpowered, but I ran an entire website my company was developing on my IBM Thinkpad 570 (4 pounds, 1" thick) on many cross country flights. This included apache, php, a multithreaded middleware caching layer and an entire Oracle database. Not to mention the fact that I had to test development with X and Netscape on the client side -- all on the same little notebook. Got an extra 6 hours of development time (thanks to an extra battery that I had to swap in midflight) each flight.