If only you could win lawsuits with distributed computing power. [/wishful] I'll bet there tons of people that would donate processing time to helping defend open source.
2) Botnets and profit. We all know of spammers using zombies to peddle goods, and of script kiddies using them to DDoS. What if some enterprising but immoral person decided to use the computing power of his zombies to profit off of the distributed computing payments? With enough zombies, he could easily make a good amount of money off of other people's computers.
So? I'd rather the spammers (or "clustered computer users" in this case) used their zombie machines for that. Then it would get the spam to stop. Wow, you could solve two problems at once. Make distributed computing pay better than spamming, and you would stop the spam problem, too.
I've got a couple of thoughts to weigh in with here. The first deals with the economics of the $10, $12, $15, etc. prices. It's generally called market forces or supply and demand or "what the market will bear". They are charging it because they can. They get thousands of subscribers at that price point. There have been several people say, "Well, the content isn't worth $15 to me. If it were more like 7 or 8, I'd do it." That is trying to say that they can get more subscribers and make more money if they would make the amount reasonable. But really, think of the math there. 7 or 8 bucks more or less doesn't seem like much because it's a single digit dollar amount, but think in a large economic sense. That would be cutting the price in HALF! They would have to generate a 100% increase in subscribers--double their customers--just to break even. So, yes, they are profit-mongering, as someone pointed out. That $15 a month gives them a very generous revenue stream above the costs of running the system. (Which is why I was amazed to hear that they actually charge extra for the expansion packs.)
OK, second point is this. Someone mentioned that they must be making huge profit because everyone is jumping on the MMORPG bandwagon. True, and that is from whence price salvation will come. Right now, the MMO genre is still fairly new, it is growing very rapidly, and there is basically more demand than supply. Give it some time, and there will be more MMO games available, there will be more competition between games for the audience, and companies will start to realize that they can compete better and get more subscribers by lowering their prices some, or creating a much better game. Either or both of those will be a plus for the consumer.
Think of it this way, you're paying the early-adopter fee, like the people who pay some huge amount for the latest processor or video card. Many people will be patient and pick it up in the next year or so and pay much less.
This seems like a good place to point this out. No one here has a problem with using the term "code theft" for when the people got hold of a copy of the Half Life 2 source code, but they will scream bloody murder if someone says "music theft" in reference to illegal music downloads. What an outrageous double standard!
I see. Since you don't produce music to sell, "The owners haven't been deprived of it. It should be enriching the public domain anyway. Actually, they're stealing from me by not releasing it to roam free across the creative landscape!" But since you do produce code to sell, "They're destroying the value of the code and taking my ability to sell it for profit now. They are taking money away from the hard work I put in to it."
If you've gotten this far, maybe you are a thoughtful moderator, rather than having marked me Troll or Flamebait already. Digital music / digital game code--they're both just bits in the bucket, so choose one label and stick to it. Don't try to separate them so you can defend one and hate the other.
The problem with setting up a voluntary information submitting system is that it immediately makes the false distinction for the TSA of "guilty" vs. "innocent".
[attendant taking papers]"Date of birth and current address, please." [traveler]"Forget it. I already bought my ticket for this flight." [attendant, whispered to security guard]"Grab that one for questioning."
...the man without fear. That basic idea is the premise of what happened to him. He lost his sight, and it extremely improved his other senses. To put a little comic book spin on it, though, they incorporated the angle that it was some kind of radioactive waste that splashed in his face so that it caused a more extreme heightening of his senses than a normal person.
I did read the article. He was exaggerating that aspect a little as an example. One shouldn't have to remember to turn your sound off any time you run a program. If you aren't trying to play music, it shouldn't blare music from the computer for a Scrabble game.
In defense of PC, let me point out that he trying to compare machines with a specific purpose to those with a general purpose and is upset that the level of complexity is higher.
This is wrong. You have an interesting argument, but it doesn't belong in this discussion because you misunderstood what he was talking about. He was not talking about "computers" or "operating systems". He was talking about individual programs. The purpose of a Scrabble game should be to select letters and spell words with them--not to play a symphony at you. The purpose of a chess game is display a board and let you move pieces on it--not make fancy sound effects.
All of you miss the point of what happened there. Your reply is, "If you don't like the sound from that Scrabble game, then disable the sound!"
Uh, yeah, then how are you supposed to hear the mp3 you wanted to listen to while playing? Music and noises have no place in scrabble. That was his legitimate complaint. I would like to leave the computer sound on, though, for playing the music I select.
This is EXACTLY one of those cases. Fedora is not willing to pay licensing fees for patent-encumbered stuff, but other distros that are generally for-pay currently have mp3 decoders in their distro because they knew practically took priority over philosophy for their users.
and I would hate that. How often your wipers swish is very much a personal preference thing. For me, that scraping sound on the windshield when there's not enough water drives me crazy, so I turn the intermitten down to let more water build up. For my wife, any drops of water on the windshield drives her crazy, but she doesn't mind the scraping sound, so she turns the intermittent up.
It's one of those cases where they could have it available if they want, but should make it fairly easy to disable and adjust manually too.
Huh? push-button transmission is prevalent today? I only heard of one when I read the description on the CarTalk website about Tommy's 1963 Dodge Dart, and I've never seen one.
I'm running into something like this issue right now. I want a zipping program that can span disks for a file I need to transfer. I think that's the second most common task for a zipping program (or at least in the top 5). Winzip would do it, but it's shareware that disables itself after 30 days. I want something I can continue to use. I go to Sourceforge, and there's a program called 7-zip. It's high up in the active projects list, it's rated "5-Production/stable" and runs on Windows, so it should do exactly what I need, right? No. It doesn't span disks--that's on the to-do list for the program, even though the feature requests section shows several people asking for it. How can this be rated Production/Stable when it's missing a basic function that all the shareware programs have?
They decided to put in a bunch of other obscure features instead of one that's really important (and easy to implement). It even has 41 language sets in it! Don't just say "No one uses floppies anymore." because it applies to any removable media. Many of the shareware programs will let you set the chunk size, so that you can span CD-Rs with big zip files.
Get two "diverse" connections. This might be a T-1 and a DSL, or a DSL and a cable modem. By using completely different architechures, you can get incredible diversity without spending a bunch of money.
There's a friend of mine who developed a database system for some schools to run through their website. He is also providing hosting for them at his house.(after pricing out several hosting services and finding them a waste) The school system bought the server, and he got redundancy by hooking up DSL as primary with cable modem as secondary. The server has both connections plugged in and if it detects the DSL goes out, it will failover to the cable one.
That's a pretty good solution for low cost. I don't know the details of how he set up the server to do the detection and failover, but he has confirmed that it works by disconnecting the DSL line from it and seeing it automatically switch the connection and keep serving on the cable line. It's a Windows Server 2003.
Here's another suggestion. Check out some garage sales. This is summer, so they'll be going on every weekend. Just check your local paper. Probably about half the garage sales I've been to have some computer parts there--mouse for a buck, keyboard for a buck, etc. I just ran a fundraising garage sale at our church this past weekend. There were several mice, computer speakers, monitors, joystick, Gravis gamepad. I sold a whole computer I was downgrading because of a better one I got. My cool story on that was that someone brought an 18.1 inch flat panel monitor with the suggestion, "Maybe someone can fix it." I wasn't going to put a known broken monitor out there for sale, so I took it home and checked it out. It would power on, but it looked like nothing going on, until I shined a flashlight on it--burned out backlight. So I'll be putting in some money to get that replaced and have cheap LCD display.
Yeah, it's informative, but geez! $39 for that thing. That's exactly what he's looking for, but is it in his price range? I think he'd rather do the cutting apart a keyboard project. I guess this does fall into the more money than time category.
I've found this to be the case with unusual items. If there's some obscure thing you want, odds are there is some place that sells exactly what you're looking for, but the price will be about 5 times what you feel it's worth.
I think I'm being trolled here. A. These people would not be browsing porn. B. Even if they would have checked out some porn stuff a few times, they wouldn't have bookmarked it for someone else to find.
I fixed up a computer for some friends of ours. It was so full of crap that they were scared to let their kids use the computer at all with all the porn popups and stuff. Their bookmark lists had been filled with porn links--divided into subdirectory categories even. I need to check back with them to see if they've been using Firefox or have gone back out of habit. I don't think I removed their icon for IE, which I should have done.
Now explain this? It's got boatloads more functionality (find as you type, tabbed browsing, popup blocker, livemarks [0.9+], etc etc.)... but it 'doesn't include many functions'.
It's due to a preconceived mindset. The phrase "doesn't include many functions" is comparative, even though it doesn't use the words "less" or "more". He is automatically making a comparison to the web browser he has used before, which is almost certainly IE. Here's what happens. IE has a set of features: A B C D and E. Now Firefox doesn't do C or E by default because they are security risks like activeX or something. People here are incredulous because they're shouting to the guy, "But Firefox also does F G H I J and K, which IE doesn't!" Well, the reviwer has never heard of or used any of those things so he doesn't have any appreciation or knowledge of them.
That seems to be the hardest aspect of convincing people to switch. When you try to tell them about the great features missing from IE, you just get a blank stare because they've never used them and don't understand how convenient they could be. If you switched them, they probably wouldn't use tabbed browsing, they wouldn't install any extensions, etc. They would just use it like they used to use IE and only see shortcomings. I think this is why we need to take advantage of the recent epidemic of IE security problems to convince people that their computers are going to become infested with spyware through IE.
Two versions actually; as, one was a clock tripler (33MHz x 3) and one was a clock quadrupler (25MHz x 4).
It's appropriate that your username is "confused one". The DX4 was never a clock quadrupler. They tripled the regular bus speeds of 25, 33, or 40. I do remember seeing DX-4 100's and 120's. DX-4 was another trademark naming issue. After the DX-2, they were told that DX-3 would just be describing exactly what it did, so it could not be trademarked. They just changed it to a 4 so that it basically Didn't Make Sense(TM) and could therefore be trademarked as a name, rather than a description. I recently heard that there was a 50MHz bus speed for a short while, but I don't know if they used any of the doublers or triplers on that one.
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If only you could win lawsuits with distributed computing power. [/wishful]
I'll bet there tons of people that would donate processing time to helping defend open source.
What a waste! I just use a VM to run each of my three other accounts.
I've got a couple of thoughts to weigh in with here. The first deals with the economics of the $10, $12, $15, etc. prices. It's generally called market forces or supply and demand or "what the market will bear". They are charging it because they can. They get thousands of subscribers at that price point. There have been several people say, "Well, the content isn't worth $15 to me. If it were more like 7 or 8, I'd do it." That is trying to say that they can get more subscribers and make more money if they would make the amount reasonable. But really, think of the math there. 7 or 8 bucks more or less doesn't seem like much because it's a single digit dollar amount, but think in a large economic sense. That would be cutting the price in HALF! They would have to generate a 100% increase in subscribers--double their customers--just to break even. So, yes, they are profit-mongering, as someone pointed out. That $15 a month gives them a very generous revenue stream above the costs of running the system. (Which is why I was amazed to hear that they actually charge extra for the expansion packs.)
OK, second point is this. Someone mentioned that they must be making huge profit because everyone is jumping on the MMORPG bandwagon. True, and that is from whence price salvation will come. Right now, the MMO genre is still fairly new, it is growing very rapidly, and there is basically more demand than supply. Give it some time, and there will be more MMO games available, there will be more competition between games for the audience, and companies will start to realize that they can compete better and get more subscribers by lowering their prices some, or creating a much better game. Either or both of those will be a plus for the consumer.
Think of it this way, you're paying the early-adopter fee, like the people who pay some huge amount for the latest processor or video card. Many people will be patient and pick it up in the next year or so and pay much less.
"...but hacking in to private systems to steal digital property is something much worse in my mind."
OK, reasonable point. The online online form of breaking and entering does throw a different aspect into it.
This seems like a good place to point this out. No one here has a problem with using the term "code theft" for when the people got hold of a copy of the Half Life 2 source code, but they will scream bloody murder if someone says "music theft" in reference to illegal music downloads. What an outrageous double standard!
I see. Since you don't produce music to sell, "The owners haven't been deprived of it. It should be enriching the public domain anyway. Actually, they're stealing from me by not releasing it to roam free across the creative landscape!" But since you do produce code to sell, "They're destroying the value of the code and taking my ability to sell it for profit now. They are taking money away from the hard work I put in to it."
If you've gotten this far, maybe you are a thoughtful moderator, rather than having marked me Troll or Flamebait already. Digital music / digital game code--they're both just bits in the bucket, so choose one label and stick to it. Don't try to separate them so you can defend one and hate the other.
The problem with setting up a voluntary information submitting system is that it immediately makes the false distinction for the TSA of "guilty" vs. "innocent".
[attendant taking papers]"Date of birth and current address, please."
[traveler]"Forget it. I already bought my ticket for this flight."
[attendant, whispered to security guard]"Grab that one for questioning."
...the man without fear.
That basic idea is the premise of what happened to him. He lost his sight, and it extremely improved his other senses. To put a little comic book spin on it, though, they incorporated the angle that it was some kind of radioactive waste that splashed in his face so that it caused a more extreme heightening of his senses than a normal person.
I did read the article. He was exaggerating that aspect a little as an example. One shouldn't have to remember to turn your sound off any time you run a program. If you aren't trying to play music, it shouldn't blare music from the computer for a Scrabble game.
All of you miss the point of what happened there. Your reply is, "If you don't like the sound from that Scrabble game, then disable the sound!"
Uh, yeah, then how are you supposed to hear the mp3 you wanted to listen to while playing? Music and noises have no place in scrabble. That was his legitimate complaint. I would like to leave the computer sound on, though, for playing the music I select.
This is EXACTLY one of those cases. Fedora is not willing to pay licensing fees for patent-encumbered stuff, but other distros that are generally for-pay currently have mp3 decoders in their distro because they knew practically took priority over philosophy for their users.
and I would hate that. How often your wipers swish is very much a personal preference thing. For me, that scraping sound on the windshield when there's not enough water drives me crazy, so I turn the intermitten down to let more water build up. For my wife, any drops of water on the windshield drives her crazy, but she doesn't mind the scraping sound, so she turns the intermittent up.
It's one of those cases where they could have it available if they want, but should make it fairly easy to disable and adjust manually too.
Huh? push-button transmission is prevalent today? I only heard of one when I read the description on the CarTalk website about Tommy's 1963 Dodge Dart, and I've never seen one.
I'm running into something like this issue right now. I want a zipping program that can span disks for a file I need to transfer. I think that's the second most common task for a zipping program (or at least in the top 5). Winzip would do it, but it's shareware that disables itself after 30 days. I want something I can continue to use. I go to Sourceforge, and there's a program called 7-zip. It's high up in the active projects list, it's rated "5-Production/stable" and runs on Windows, so it should do exactly what I need, right? No. It doesn't span disks--that's on the to-do list for the program, even though the feature requests section shows several people asking for it. How can this be rated Production/Stable when it's missing a basic function that all the shareware programs have?
They decided to put in a bunch of other obscure features instead of one that's really important (and easy to implement). It even has 41 language sets in it! Don't just say "No one uses floppies anymore." because it applies to any removable media. Many of the shareware programs will let you set the chunk size, so that you can span CD-Rs with big zip files.
Why has no one realized this is Soviet Germany?
So what does it take for an editor to pull a story?
That's a pretty good solution for low cost. I don't know the details of how he set up the server to do the detection and failover, but he has confirmed that it works by disconnecting the DSL line from it and seeing it automatically switch the connection and keep serving on the cable line. It's a Windows Server 2003.
Here's another suggestion. Check out some garage sales. This is summer, so they'll be going on every weekend. Just check your local paper. Probably about half the garage sales I've been to have some computer parts there--mouse for a buck, keyboard for a buck, etc. I just ran a fundraising garage sale at our church this past weekend. There were several mice, computer speakers, monitors, joystick, Gravis gamepad. I sold a whole computer I was downgrading because of a better one I got.
My cool story on that was that someone brought an 18.1 inch flat panel monitor with the suggestion, "Maybe someone can fix it." I wasn't going to put a known broken monitor out there for sale, so I took it home and checked it out. It would power on, but it looked like nothing going on, until I shined a flashlight on it--burned out backlight. So I'll be putting in some money to get that replaced and have cheap LCD display.
Yeah, it's informative, but geez! $39 for that thing. That's exactly what he's looking for, but is it in his price range? I think he'd rather do the cutting apart a keyboard project. I guess this does fall into the more money than time category.
I've found this to be the case with unusual items. If there's some obscure thing you want, odds are there is some place that sells exactly what you're looking for, but the price will be about 5 times what you feel it's worth.
I think I'm being trolled here. A. These people would not be browsing porn. B. Even if they would have checked out some porn stuff a few times, they wouldn't have bookmarked it for someone else to find.
I fixed up a computer for some friends of ours. It was so full of crap that they were scared to let their kids use the computer at all with all the porn popups and stuff. Their bookmark lists had been filled with porn links--divided into subdirectory categories even. I need to check back with them to see if they've been using Firefox or have gone back out of habit. I don't think I removed their icon for IE, which I should have done.
That seems to be the hardest aspect of convincing people to switch. When you try to tell them about the great features missing from IE, you just get a blank stare because they've never used them and don't understand how convenient they could be. If you switched them, they probably wouldn't use tabbed browsing, they wouldn't install any extensions, etc. They would just use it like they used to use IE and only see shortcomings. I think this is why we need to take advantage of the recent epidemic of IE security problems to convince people that their computers are going to become infested with spyware through IE.