Sniping works when people don't actually know what something is worth. Every time you make a bid, you literally raise the price of the item: you declare that it's worth at least this much to you.
Exactly - when people don't know what the item is worth, the current bid is what people think it's worth. I recently sold a car on ebay, and I hoped and prayed for people to bid early and often. This raises the perceived value, and lets the snipers come in at the last 5 minutes and move up from there. This is why shill bidding is outlawed -- it really works. If I could have (legally) run up the auction with 30 bids, I would have. Bump up the price some, still keep it somewhat reasonable, and make it look like there's all kinds of interest. Instead, I inserted lots of pictures, responded to every (not-stupid) question publically, and kept adding content throughout the auction. Keep people interested. I even added a video.
From a seller's perspective, I would really like the "new bid, auction extends for another 1 or 5 minutes idea. That puts the snipers in place, and lets my auction drag on & on while people are bidding. Love it. Oh well.
I'm in the same boat. I read reviews which say "it's short, only 12 hours". I think "3 hours is a lot, i'll never get 12 hours".
I still remember the teenager coming to work and starting up Doom. He immediately turned on god mode and the walk-through walls cheat. With all of the challenge gone, two minutes later he declared: This is Boring. Yes, thanks, but you killed the fun yourself. Challenge is an important part of the fun, but
What I want in a game is a super-hero mode. Hold in the super-hero button, and suddenly your character is controlled (maybe with a little "pushing" influence from me) and can move, dodge, find secret areas, hit the bad guys with headshots and makes the impossible jump. Zoom zoom -- go through the game as fast as you want.
I for one am tired of the Sony bashing
I score 4 for the "First the rootkit, now a $600 console" crowd
Just ahead "Sony wants everything to be proprietary"
In last place, "who has money for a $3000 TV and a $600 PS3?"
I don't usually defend Sony, but here goes: Why isn't anyone talking about the games? Sony has a bunch of developers working furiously on some great games. And lots of developers are supporting Sony because they beat the pants off XBox and Gamecube last round. The games will be there. Yes, they will be "first generation" PS3 games (by definition), but those developers have had plenty of time to groom their creations. I expect some great games, and people that will just have to sell what it takes to buy it. (not me - I have plenty of XBox games to finish)
My company now forbids using Google Desktop because of this feature.
Yes, it's off by default.
Yes, you have to go out of your way to turn it on.
Yes, they keep track of what's installed on everyone's machine.
Yes, there are ways around that -- but for safety's sake, I now use MSN's local search.
Google's product is forbidden.
So google (you listening?) -- how about local-only version for us corporate folks, with the upload option completely removed? We get a version that can be blessed by IT, you keep your user base.
Seems like a winner to me.
This "review" seems to have been written by a marketing firm, not a reviewer.
I helped a friend get his AIW X-600 going. What a pain.
After several tries, the driver checker never did like the video driver that was installed -- it was always out of date.
The software for viewing DVDs, watching TV, capturing video -- all different interfaces. For a casual guy to want to control it -- very hard to use. Tiny little buttons with cryptic symbols. I tried lots of keyboard shortcuts to get the menus to disappear (I think F2 worked for one).
You can time-shift, yes -- if you tell it that's what you want to do. And you don't mind fighting the interface to try to move around in time (he didn't have a remote). And you can't move around in time while a normal recording is working.
Everything on his machine was lightning fast -- except for launching ATI's apps and waiting for video to come along.
Video capture didn't work in other virtualdub nor Windows Movie Maker.
There were flickering problems in the resulting video. Sound/video synchronization became a problem over time.
But, he could copy his video tapes to the hard drive, and then onto a DVD (way more complicated than it needed to be). He could watch TV, set up the programming guide (which didn't install by default -- we had to go look for it through the install DVDs).
It has the checkmarks of a TIVO, but not the ease of use and clean interface of a TIVO.
Wouldn't it just be easier to have multiple CPUs?
Why, yes it would. GPUs fill a
For one thing, about 90% of the transistors on a GPU are used for processing. About 60% on a CPU are used for processing (the rest is used for caching).
There are also many more transistors in GPUs these days than CPUs.
Graphics processing is inherently parallel and streamed. That's what a GPU does very well, very fast. Grab 8 texture samples simultaneously each clock cycle, the next stage linearly blends these floating point values together in one clock. A CPU would have to work on each of those 8 one at a time.
For parallel, streamed operations - a GPU can speed up a process by 5 or 10 times, like this example. At SIGGRAPH this summer, they had a session on running a ray tracer on a GPU. After 15 minutes of explaining all of the optimizations they performed, they were happy to report that they were only 5x slower than a CPU implementation. Ray tracing is not a very parallel, streamed operation. Rays can bounce 10 times or maybe not a all.
So, let's review: GPUs are significantly faster than a CPU for graphics and some streamable parallelizable processes. CPUs are great for branchable, more random processing.
I attended the OpenGL Birds of a Feather session at Siggraph last week. This issue was brought up, and were were encouraged to complain to Microsoft. The speaker asked who thought this was a good idea. There was one lone hand up in the audience.
The speaker then explained: "He works at Apple".
My ISP (Charter) offers a $40/mo phone connection. Why is it worth more than Vonage's $25/mo service? According to the phone rep , because it includes a UPS so it works when the power goes out.
Must be a heck of a UPS for $15/mo.
This reminds me of a display at SIGGRAPH last year.
It used 1000Hz DLP projector.
The projector shined on 20 slices (parallel to the "screen", at increasing distance from the viewer), one at a time, so each slice was updated at 50Hz. Each slice was translucent, so the result was a convincing 3D image. Of course, you need a real 3D datasource, and the range of motion that it looks convincing is limited, but very cool. More info at Lightspacetech
From their FAQ:
How does the DepthCube z1024 3D Display work?
The DepthCube z1024 3D Display is a rear-projection volumetric display in which a high-speed DLP(TM)
video projector sends a series of 3D image slices into a 3D projection volume. The projection volume is
composed of a physically deep stack of 20 electrically-switchable liquid crystal scattering shutters. At any
instant in time 19 of scattering shutters are transparent and only one is in a white scattering state. We
switch a single shutter into the scattering state and project onto it the appropriate image slice
corresponding to its physical depth. Since each image slice is stopped in the projection volume at the
correct depth, the DepthCube produces a 3D image that is truly deep.
A patented 3D anti-aliasing hardware algorithm virtually eliminates the visual discontinuities between
layers so that the 3D image appears to be completely smooth and continuous.
With the high speed projector sending out 1000 image slices per second, the whole volume is refreshed
50 times a second. This is comparable to field refresh rate of NTSC video in the US and PAL video in
Europe (although the actual frame refresh rate of these is 30 Hz and 25 Hz respectively). Due to the high
speed digital interface between the computer and DepthCube Z1024 3D Display, a completely new 3D
image can be written to the display nearly 20 times each second.
Although not quite fast enough for Virtual Reality, this update rate is fast enough for real-time user
interaction with the 3D image. We've even played video games on it.
My apologies -- my global imagery dataset which I thought was well geo-referenced, was wrong. Way wrong. Dataset courtesy of http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/BlueMarb le/, geo-referencing courtesy of me. So you're right, Hawaii is not in the range of 140-145W -- it is at longitude W154, and must have been the launch location.
Sorry for the confusion -- I should have double-checked my numbers.
Actually, the article says 154W: the equatorial launch site at 154 degrees West longitude
My map of the world shows precious little at W154. Not Hawaii: Hawaii is roughly 140W to 145W. Some sprinking of islands from Alaska are (at 47N latitude). Good place for an international date line. I wonder if they really meant this number.
Note that the final position is 103W: DIRECTV expects to begin offering services from Spaceway F1 from the 102.8 degree West longitude orbital slot in the fall
Assuming they are placing the satellite over the center of the US, that's over the Rocky Mountains -- far from Australia -- so I wouldn't expect service there.
Re:Where does one get the info?
on
My Life as a Quant
·
· Score: 4, Informative
HSQuote is a front-end to Yahoo's historic data. Free full-featured demo for 15 days or so. Basically it lets you download years of each-day-end information (open value, close, high, low, volume). In a few miniutes I was able to get years (I set begin year to 1900) of results from the fortune 500 companies (had to find that list separately - then process in groups smaller than 125 tickers). I was all ready to code up some predictive functions to figure out what the market was probably going to do next, if it was a good time to sell or buy or hold, similar to Timing Cube. Oh well, maybe one day.
This is completely the wrong direction.
Let's turn the iPod devices into cassette tapes of the 21st century.
Hey, they're the same size as a cassette tape, right? Plug in your iPod-sized music player into your car deck (with an industry standard common interface), the deck charges the iPod (or similar)'s battery and can access music and play lists. The iPod remembers where you were in your book-on-tape or the song you were last playing.
Then just pop out the iPod when you're done. Having a completely separate hard drive and media library seems redundant to me.
Radioctive batteries used for Pluto mission
on
Nuclear Batteries
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
My brother tells me about radioactive batteries used in space, specifically the Pluto probe due to go up in 2006 and arrive 2015.
More battery details
here
and here and here.
There's less and less solar power available as you move away from the Sun (which was abundant on the Mercury trip). Plus, you need power for 10+ years. Where do I get that battery? From nuclear material, of course. The battery is the last thing to go into the spaceship, and you do lots of testing without it. And you make sure all the materials in the spacecraft can function with a reasonably radioactive source (near the top, as I recall).
He told me all this because I didn't know that the pilot light in a gas heater heats a piece of metal which provides enough voltage to drive the thermostat (hey bro, why doesn't the water heater have an electric plug?) Radioactive materials are mixed with ceramics to keep a reasonably constant amount of heat. The voltage comes from the heat. Wow, appliance technology moved into the space program.
If it's coming out this month, they must be using a 12x DVD burner. A DVD stream is about 1MB/sec, so 12x is 12MB/sec. 56sec at 12MB/sec is 672MB per hour of video. I'm sure they have MPEG-2 streams where an hour takes up 672MB.
But, since 400GB can store 709 hours, they must have a quality setting of about 400000MB/709hr=565MB/hr. Maybe they're allowing some overhead in their write-to-DVD time.
So they're not recording "normal" DVD video, a typical movie is about 1MB/sec. They're saving off MPEG streams to DVD-R which save video at about 160KB/sec. Much less than DVD-quality and doesn't play back in your DVD player -- but should play in their fancy player.
15 million in 5 quarters? At least someone is making money off of SCO.
From the conference call:
And SCO is now allocating $31M for the future of their lawsuit. That means they're investing $31M + the $15M already spent. The attorneys have agreed to accept this $31M amount, plus 33% of any settlement (up from 25%), and that's the max that SCO will have to play for their legal counsel. Supposedly the law firms will then by motivated by the final settlement. That leaves $12 for operations.
SCO also say that the lawsuits are progressing as expected, and they look forward to a jury trial in ~14 months.
They were happy to talk about their better Unix revenue, but people only want to ask questions about the lawsuit.
Does anyone have a good place to recycle old used-up batteries, (AA-size, not car batteries)? Instead of the obvious: tape them to the inside of a '486 case and lug it to Office Depot.
I visited the Sony trailer at Fair St. Louis this weekend. Their camera didn't work right (but after the staff crawled in the wires for 5 minutes, it started working again). The camcorder didn't work. Laptops were small & sexy, but pricey.
That being said, we all know Sony is far behind Apply here. But, all it takes is a PSP (Playstation Portable) which includes some memory for songs, and we may have the iPod killer. If they can sell 10s of millions of Gameboys, and if Sony can win the handheld game market like they won the home console market, the PSP can take over the iPod and the gameboy. (lots of ifs, the NGage didn't quite win the phone and gameboy market)
I think a lot of pirating is directly related to price.
And I think a lot of pirating is directly related to impatience.
I'm not pure of this particular "tonic", but awhile ago I noticed that if you could wait 1 year -- 12 months for the latest to become "so last year", content really is affordable.
PS2 and XBox games are $20 or less if they're popular and a year old. Less if you find them used at Blockbuster or eBay.
You can buy a year-old movie on DVD for the same cost as two full-price admissions at the theater.
My library has year-old DVD movies waiting on the shelf (while new releases have a waiting list stretching for months).
I found a year-old copy of Neverwinter Nights for less than $20. Money well spent.
Oh, and you know the game-of-the-year winners before you go shopping.
And somehow I want to teach my kids to respect copyrights, even while their friends have thousands of free songs on their iPods.
I'm not always that patient. But don't blame the price - we have lots of choices.
Modding game consoles is still hard enough, that the problem can be ignored.
Just like Napster was ignored by the authorities until Joe MiddleAmerica said "Hey, I have broadband and Napster -- I don't have to spend a few hundred dollars per year on CDs any more". That's when the RIAA got involved.
And that's when the gaming industry will start to make a bigger stink. Hopefully they won't be only fighting dads who just want to preserve their game investments.
btw, let's be real here. By the time a game is terminally scratched by Jr., you can find it on eBay or your local used reseller for $20 or less. It's not another $50 purchase.
You can always take the line-level output, and record your songs that way. Record a 60 min CD in 60 minutes to a 600MB WAV file, then split it up by hand to individual WAVs, then encode each to MP3 and label them yourselves.
Yes, it's a pain but it is a legal copy of your music in a format you can use.
It seems that the real problem here is the all-important calls-handled number. This is the only statistic that the parent company (the unnamed one that contracted with the tech-support company) cares about.
Obviously, what's also important is how well real problems are solved. So, I would suggest the parent company occasionally have a shill call in with a bogus problem. The caller knows what the problem is, but goes through the motions to determine how well tech supports handles customers and how problems are solved. The results of a few tests like this would be more important than some bogus "Take 2 minutes to tell us how our customer service department did" survey.
Similar techniques should be used in airport security so the workers know that sometimes people will come through with a some item that should be flagged.
Good testing is hard but worthwhile.
The upcoming
Playstation Portable (PSP) 1.8GB HD
hasn't been mentioned as a contender.
It's rewritable, decent size and surely they've reduced power consuption to a minimum, and with lots of production this winter, they should becoming cheap.
this author has demonstrated the ability to send a patch-virus out with new updated instructions.
Excellent point.
I'm worried about a virus that spreads normally, but also formats hard drives in maybe 10% of infected hosts (after trying to spread its payload, of course). Formatting all HDs would kill off the infection rate. Perhaps only the hosts that fail to spread to other hosts have HDs erased. ouch!
Well, it's because technically it's a FREE service. We pay for the
access to the cable, the programming is FREE.
But they aren't actually free.
ESPN wants $2.40 per user per month.
Obviously ESPN would be one of the most expensive channels. Lower tier channels want less. Pure advertising channels probably pay for the exposure (or there are kickbacks).
Even the new NFL channel wants $0.10 per household. Who's going to watch NFL-TV Feb - Aug? But that's why cable is so expensive -- all those extra channels each cost the channel company money per household. Every station wants a cut of your cable bill.
Slashdot Mirror
Sniping works when people don't actually know what something is worth. Every time you make a bid, you literally raise the price of the item: you declare that it's worth at least this much to you.
Exactly - when people don't know what the item is worth, the current bid is what people think it's worth. I recently sold a car on ebay, and I hoped and prayed for people to bid early and often. This raises the perceived value, and lets the snipers come in at the last 5 minutes and move up from there. This is why shill bidding is outlawed -- it really works. If I could have (legally) run up the auction with 30 bids, I would have. Bump up the price some, still keep it somewhat reasonable, and make it look like there's all kinds of interest. Instead, I inserted lots of pictures, responded to every (not-stupid) question publically, and kept adding content throughout the auction. Keep people interested. I even added a video.
From a seller's perspective, I would really like the "new bid, auction extends for another 1 or 5 minutes idea. That puts the snipers in place, and lets my auction drag on & on while people are bidding. Love it. Oh well.
I'm in the same boat. I read reviews which say "it's short, only 12 hours". I think "3 hours is a lot, i'll never get 12 hours".
I still remember the teenager coming to work and starting up Doom. He immediately turned on god mode and the walk-through walls cheat. With all of the challenge gone, two minutes later he declared: This is Boring. Yes, thanks, but you killed the fun yourself. Challenge is an important part of the fun, but
What I want in a game is a super-hero mode. Hold in the super-hero button, and suddenly your character is controlled (maybe with a little "pushing" influence from me) and can move, dodge, find secret areas, hit the bad guys with headshots and makes the impossible jump. Zoom zoom -- go through the game as fast as you want.
I for one am tired of the Sony bashing
I score 4 for the "First the rootkit, now a $600 console" crowd
Just ahead "Sony wants everything to be proprietary"
In last place, "who has money for a $3000 TV and a $600 PS3?"
I don't usually defend Sony, but here goes: Why isn't anyone talking about the games? Sony has a bunch of developers working furiously on some great games. And lots of developers are supporting Sony because they beat the pants off XBox and Gamecube last round. The games will be there. Yes, they will be "first generation" PS3 games (by definition), but those developers have had plenty of time to groom their creations. I expect some great games, and people that will just have to sell what it takes to buy it. (not me - I have plenty of XBox games to finish)
My company now forbids using Google Desktop because of this feature.
Yes, it's off by default.
Yes, you have to go out of your way to turn it on.
Yes, they keep track of what's installed on everyone's machine.
Yes, there are ways around that -- but for safety's sake, I now use MSN's local search.
Google's product is forbidden.
So google (you listening?) -- how about local-only version for us corporate folks, with the upload option completely removed?
We get a version that can be blessed by IT, you keep your user base.
Seems like a winner to me.
This "review" seems to have been written by a marketing firm, not a reviewer.
I helped a friend get his AIW X-600 going. What a pain.
After several tries, the driver checker never did like the video driver that was installed -- it was always out of date.
The software for viewing DVDs, watching TV, capturing video -- all different interfaces. For a casual guy to want to control it -- very hard to use. Tiny little buttons with cryptic symbols. I tried lots of keyboard shortcuts to get the menus to disappear (I think F2 worked for one).
You can time-shift, yes -- if you tell it that's what you want to do. And you don't mind fighting the interface to try to move around in time (he didn't have a remote). And you can't move around in time while a normal recording is working.
Everything on his machine was lightning fast -- except for launching ATI's apps and waiting for video to come along.
Video capture didn't work in other virtualdub nor Windows Movie Maker.
There were flickering problems in the resulting video. Sound/video synchronization became a problem over time.
But, he could copy his video tapes to the hard drive, and then onto a DVD (way more complicated than it needed to be). He could watch TV, set up the programming guide (which didn't install by default -- we had to go look for it through the install DVDs).
It has the checkmarks of a TIVO, but not the ease of use and clean interface of a TIVO.
Wouldn't it just be easier to have multiple CPUs?
Why, yes it would. GPUs fill a For one thing, about 90% of the transistors on a GPU are used for processing. About 60% on a CPU are used for processing (the rest is used for caching).
There are also many more transistors in GPUs these days than CPUs. Graphics processing is inherently parallel and streamed. That's what a GPU does very well, very fast. Grab 8 texture samples simultaneously each clock cycle, the next stage linearly blends these floating point values together in one clock. A CPU would have to work on each of those 8 one at a time.
For parallel, streamed operations - a GPU can speed up a process by 5 or 10 times, like this example. At SIGGRAPH this summer, they had a session on running a ray tracer on a GPU. After 15 minutes of explaining all of the optimizations they performed, they were happy to report that they were only 5x slower than a CPU implementation. Ray tracing is not a very parallel, streamed operation. Rays can bounce 10 times or maybe not a all.
So, let's review: GPUs are significantly faster than a CPU for graphics and some streamable parallelizable processes. CPUs are great for branchable, more random processing.
I attended the OpenGL Birds of a Feather session at Siggraph last week. This issue was brought up, and were were encouraged to complain to Microsoft. The speaker asked who thought this was a good idea. There was one lone hand up in the audience. The speaker then explained: "He works at Apple".
My ISP (Charter) offers a $40/mo phone connection. Why is it worth more than Vonage's $25/mo service? According to the phone rep , because it includes a UPS so it works when the power goes out. Must be a heck of a UPS for $15/mo.
This reminds me of a display at SIGGRAPH last year. It used 1000Hz DLP projector. The projector shined on 20 slices (parallel to the "screen", at increasing distance from the viewer), one at a time, so each slice was updated at 50Hz. Each slice was translucent, so the result was a convincing 3D image. Of course, you need a real 3D datasource, and the range of motion that it looks convincing is limited, but very cool. More info at Lightspacetech
From their FAQ:
How does the DepthCube z1024 3D Display work?
The DepthCube z1024 3D Display is a rear-projection volumetric display in which a high-speed DLP(TM) video projector sends a series of 3D image slices into a 3D projection volume. The projection volume is composed of a physically deep stack of 20 electrically-switchable liquid crystal scattering shutters. At any instant in time 19 of scattering shutters are transparent and only one is in a white scattering state. We switch a single shutter into the scattering state and project onto it the appropriate image slice corresponding to its physical depth. Since each image slice is stopped in the projection volume at the correct depth, the DepthCube produces a 3D image that is truly deep.
A patented 3D anti-aliasing hardware algorithm virtually eliminates the visual discontinuities between layers so that the 3D image appears to be completely smooth and continuous.
With the high speed projector sending out 1000 image slices per second, the whole volume is refreshed 50 times a second. This is comparable to field refresh rate of NTSC video in the US and PAL video in Europe (although the actual frame refresh rate of these is 30 Hz and 25 Hz respectively). Due to the high speed digital interface between the computer and DepthCube Z1024 3D Display, a completely new 3D image can be written to the display nearly 20 times each second.
Although not quite fast enough for Virtual Reality, this update rate is fast enough for real-time user interaction with the 3D image. We've even played video games on it.
My apologies -- my global imagery dataset which I thought was well geo-referenced, was wrong. Way wrong. Dataset courtesy of http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Newsroom/BlueMarb le/, geo-referencing courtesy of me. So you're right, Hawaii is not in the range of 140-145W -- it is at longitude W154, and must have been the launch location.
Sorry for the confusion -- I should have double-checked my numbers.
Actually, the article says 154W:
the equatorial launch site at 154 degrees West longitude
My map of the world shows precious little at W154. Not Hawaii: Hawaii is roughly 140W to 145W. Some sprinking of islands from Alaska are (at 47N latitude). Good place for an international date line. I wonder if they really meant this number. Note that the final position is 103W:
DIRECTV expects to begin offering services from Spaceway F1 from the 102.8 degree West longitude orbital slot in the fall
Assuming they are placing the satellite over the center of the US, that's over the Rocky Mountains -- far from Australia -- so I wouldn't expect service there.
HSQuote is a front-end to Yahoo's historic data. Free full-featured demo for 15 days or so. Basically it lets you download years of each-day-end information (open value, close, high, low, volume). In a few miniutes I was able to get years (I set begin year to 1900) of results from the fortune 500 companies (had to find that list separately - then process in groups smaller than 125 tickers). I was all ready to code up some predictive functions to figure out what the market was probably going to do next, if it was a good time to sell or buy or hold, similar to Timing Cube. Oh well, maybe one day.
This is completely the wrong direction.
Let's turn the iPod devices into cassette tapes of the 21st century.
Hey, they're the same size as a cassette tape, right? Plug in your iPod-sized music player into your car deck (with an industry standard common interface), the deck charges the iPod (or similar)'s battery and can access music and play lists. The iPod remembers where you were in your book-on-tape or the song you were last playing.
Then just pop out the iPod when you're done. Having a completely separate hard drive and media library seems redundant to me.
My brother tells me about radioactive batteries used in space, specifically the Pluto probe due to go up in 2006 and arrive 2015.
More battery details here and here and here.
There's less and less solar power available as you move away from the Sun (which was abundant on the Mercury trip). Plus, you need power for 10+ years. Where do I get that battery? From nuclear material, of course. The battery is the last thing to go into the spaceship, and you do lots of testing without it. And you make sure all the materials in the spacecraft can function with a reasonably radioactive source (near the top, as I recall).
He told me all this because I didn't know that the pilot light in a gas heater heats a piece of metal which provides enough voltage to drive the thermostat (hey bro, why doesn't the water heater have an electric plug?) Radioactive materials are mixed with ceramics to keep a reasonably constant amount of heat. The voltage comes from the heat. Wow, appliance technology moved into the space program.
If it's coming out this month, they must be using a 12x DVD burner. A DVD stream is about 1MB/sec, so 12x is 12MB/sec. 56sec at 12MB/sec is 672MB per hour of video. I'm sure they have MPEG-2 streams where an hour takes up 672MB.
But, since 400GB can store 709 hours, they must have a quality setting of about 400000MB/709hr=565MB/hr. Maybe they're allowing some overhead in their write-to-DVD time.
So they're not recording "normal" DVD video, a typical movie is about 1MB/sec. They're saving off MPEG streams to DVD-R which save video at about 160KB/sec. Much less than DVD-quality and doesn't play back in your DVD player -- but should play in their fancy player.
15 million in 5 quarters? At least someone is making money off of SCO.
From the conference call: And SCO is now allocating $31M for the future of their lawsuit. That means they're investing $31M + the $15M already spent. The attorneys have agreed to accept this $31M amount, plus 33% of any settlement (up from 25%), and that's the max that SCO will have to play for their legal counsel. Supposedly the law firms will then by motivated by the final settlement. That leaves $12 for operations.
SCO also say that the lawsuits are progressing as expected, and they look forward to a jury trial in ~14 months.
They were happy to talk about their better Unix revenue, but people only want to ask questions about the lawsuit.
Does anyone have a good place to recycle old used-up batteries, (AA-size, not car batteries)? Instead of the obvious: tape them to the inside of a '486 case and lug it to Office Depot.
I visited the Sony trailer at Fair St. Louis this weekend. Their camera didn't work right (but after the staff crawled in the wires for 5 minutes, it started working again). The camcorder didn't work. Laptops were small & sexy, but pricey. That being said, we all know Sony is far behind Apply here. But, all it takes is a PSP (Playstation Portable) which includes some memory for songs, and we may have the iPod killer. If they can sell 10s of millions of Gameboys, and if Sony can win the handheld game market like they won the home console market, the PSP can take over the iPod and the gameboy. (lots of ifs, the NGage didn't quite win the phone and gameboy market)
I think a lot of pirating is directly related to price.
And I think a lot of pirating is directly related to impatience.
I'm not pure of this particular "tonic", but awhile ago I noticed that if you could wait 1 year -- 12 months for the latest to become "so last year", content really is affordable.
PS2 and XBox games are $20 or less if they're popular and a year old. Less if you find them used at Blockbuster or eBay.
You can buy a year-old movie on DVD for the same cost as two full-price admissions at the theater.
My library has year-old DVD movies waiting on the shelf (while new releases have a waiting list stretching for months).
I found a year-old copy of Neverwinter Nights for less than $20. Money well spent.
Oh, and you know the game-of-the-year winners before you go shopping.
And somehow I want to teach my kids to respect copyrights, even while their friends have thousands of free songs on their iPods.
I'm not always that patient. But don't blame the price - we have lots of choices.
Modding game consoles is still hard enough, that the problem can be ignored.
Just like Napster was ignored by the authorities until Joe MiddleAmerica said "Hey, I have broadband and Napster -- I don't have to spend a few hundred dollars per year on CDs any more". That's when the RIAA got involved.
And that's when the gaming industry will start to make a bigger stink. Hopefully they won't be only fighting dads who just want to preserve their game investments.
btw, let's be real here. By the time a game is terminally scratched by Jr., you can find it on eBay or your local used reseller for $20 or less. It's not another $50 purchase.
You can always take the line-level output, and record your songs that way. Record a 60 min CD in 60 minutes to a 600MB WAV file, then split it up by hand to individual WAVs, then encode each to MP3 and label them yourselves.
Yes, it's a pain but it is a legal copy of your music in a format you can use.
It seems that the real problem here is the all-important calls-handled number. This is the only statistic that the parent company (the unnamed one that contracted with the tech-support company) cares about.
Obviously, what's also important is how well real problems are solved. So, I would suggest the parent company occasionally have a shill call in with a bogus problem. The caller knows what the problem is, but goes through the motions to determine how well tech supports handles customers and how problems are solved. The results of a few tests like this would be more important than some bogus "Take 2 minutes to tell us how our customer service department did" survey.
Similar techniques should be used in airport security so the workers know that sometimes people will come through with a some item that should be flagged.
Good testing is hard but worthwhile.
The upcoming Playstation Portable (PSP) 1.8GB HD hasn't been mentioned as a contender. It's rewritable, decent size and surely they've reduced power consuption to a minimum, and with lots of production this winter, they should becoming cheap.
this author has demonstrated the ability to send a patch-virus out with new updated instructions.
Excellent point. I'm worried about a virus that spreads normally, but also formats hard drives in maybe 10% of infected hosts (after trying to spread its payload, of course). Formatting all HDs would kill off the infection rate. Perhaps only the hosts that fail to spread to other hosts have HDs erased. ouch!
Well, it's because technically it's a FREE service. We pay for the access to the cable, the programming is FREE.
But they aren't actually free. ESPN wants $2.40 per user per month. Obviously ESPN would be one of the most expensive channels. Lower tier channels want less. Pure advertising channels probably pay for the exposure (or there are kickbacks). Even the new NFL channel wants $0.10 per household. Who's going to watch NFL-TV Feb - Aug? But that's why cable is so expensive -- all those extra channels each cost the channel company money per household. Every station wants a cut of your cable bill.