For the 3 months ended September 2002, the first number on each line below is revenue, the second number is operating income/(loss), in millions of dollars:
Client $ 2,892 $2,482 Server Platforms 1,523 519 Information Worker 2,385 1,879 Business Solutions 107 (68 ) MSN 531 (97 ) CE/Mobility 17 (33 ) Home and Entertainment 505 (177 ) Reconciling Amounts (214 ) (455 )
Overall $ 7,746 $4,050
Yes they are losing money on a lot of other things, but the amounts of those losses are pretty insignificant to Microsoft. Even the comparitively low-margin Server Platforms division could use its profit to cover the losses of Biz Solutions, MSN, CE, and XBOX combined. The overall profit margin (4050/7746) is still 52% -- an astoundingly high margin for any business. After income taxes, Microsoft's profit for the quarter (yes, for a quarter, not a year) is "only" $2726 million, which is a net margin of 35% (that's 2726/7746), still extremely high.
Well, Bill Gates has been selling shares in the millions, not thousands. He appears to have sold about 10 million shares in October.
But I'm not sure what that has to do with the companies profitability or monopoly status. Microsoft is a profitable company, regardless of stock-option loopholes. If the price of MSFT stock goes down, that would actually reduce MSFT's expense for exercized stock options, if it chose to expense stock options. I'm guessing that's what you are referring to when you talk about "tax-stock-option loopholes".
MSFT-stock is not sold by Microsoft, except at the IPO and any secondary offerings. When MSFT stock is bought and sold on the open market, Microsoft doesn't get any of that money. The shareholder who sells the shares gets the money.
If more people would take responsibility for their own lives, instead of blaming someone else when things go wrong, those people would probably enjoy much happier lives with less silly lawsuits like this one.
There are so many ways this woman could have taken more responsibility for the situation.
According to the article, the company "presented her with a $214 charge for 14 months of service that had gone unbilled because of an accounting error. Carter said she agreed to pay half..."
There's problem number one. She should have paid the whole bill. She got the service (with deferred payments even), she should pay for it. There is no reason why she should only pay half. Failure to receive a bill doesn't relieve you of your obligation to pay. Now, if they were tacking on late charges that would be a different story, but that doesn't seem to be the case here. She claims they intially accepted the offer of paying half but later rejected it. I suspect the truth is more that they agreed she could pay half now and half later, and when time came for her to pay the other half, she balked. But, I'm speculating.
According to the article "she terminated the account". They didn't cancel her service, she did. So why didn't she notify her contacts of her new email address? According to the article "Carter and her potential employer had exchanged telephone messages about the position". There's the next problem -- obviously she had been in phone contact with them, she should have notified them of her new email address, or at least notified them that her old email address was no longer valid. BTW, the email was "from a potential employer encouraging her to apply" -- it was NOT a job offer, nor does it even sound like it was a personalized email. It sounds to me like it was a job-posting spammail.
When you are trying to get a job, it is YOUR responsibility to keep in contact with the potential employer. For her to fail to get an email but not bother to follow up until "some three and a half weeks" later, well it sounds to me like she wasn't that interested in the job.
If *she* had taken responsibility and paid her bill in full when it was presented, this wouldn't have happened.
If *she* had taken responsibility and notified her potential employer contact of her new email address when it changed, this wouldn't have happened.
If *she* had taken responsibility and followed up with her potential employer when she didn't hear from them, this wouldn't have happened.
Whether or not her "potential employer" got notified that her mail was undeliverable is the least of her problems.
Does she think that if her former ISP had merely sent a bounce message back to her potential employer, they would have immediately offered her the $65,000? If I were the potential employer and I sent an email to a job candidate and it bounced, I would not even bother to try to contact the person anymore. If they follow-up with me, fine. There's lots of qualified people out there looking for jobs, I'll just go on to the next person.
Ummm... donate to Abiword by putting more money into an account that is apparently insecure? I don't think so.
From the Abiword page:
In order to donate money, you must have a PayPal account.
I tend to side with the folks in this thread who suspect a bad password or something like that -- there's been no evidence presented that I have seen which indicates any responsibility on PayPal's part.
Whether PayPal or Abiword is to blame, there needs to be some assurance that donations are secure before *anyone* donates more money, especially to the same Paypal account.
Tivo service, as of Nov 1, 2002, is $4.99/month on top of your DirecTV service, unless you have their high-end programming package, then it is free.
Tivo stores program guide data from sat too (10 days of data). Two tuners, but no mpeg encoder. Tivo also has a save-to-VCR feature.
The new DirecTV-tivo box (due out this month) will be $199, 40 GB drive (about 35 hours), USB 2.0.
I'm not familiar with the DishPVR but it does sound very similar to Tivo. Tivo's best feature in my opinion is the Season Pass, which records every episode of a particular show on a particular channel, so you never have to miss your favorite show even if they change the time on you.
Even with my Tivo, I sometimes watch the commercials. Why? Because I'm not really paying that much attention to the TV in the first place. How many people just have the TV on as 'background noise' while they are doing something else?
Even if it's a show I am truly paying attention to, I will occasionally watch a commercial if it looks interesting.
But even if you do get rid of commercials, that shouldn't matter, because I am still paying to watch the programming. Last time I checked my DirecTV bill was around $60/month. If the broadcast channels haven't figured out how to get a cut of that money from DirecTV, that's their problem, not mine. The shows I really like to watch tend to not have commercials anyway -- they are mostly on HBO (Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, etc.). And because they are quality programming, I don't mind paying for them.
No way am I going to pay extra for Jerry Springer or American Idol or any of that other crap. So maybe that means without commercials, that type of programming will go away, and we'll end up with better programming overall.
Did I read the same article??
on
Is Linux Dead?
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· Score: 1
"It appears MSNBC is reporting that Linux has failed as an operating system. By citing the large Linux hype as reason for Linux to be dominating the market, they draw the conclusion that the "open source" alternative has flopped as an operating system. They briefly mention the success of Linux in the server community, but really the article gives Linux as little credit as possible."
Hmm... Looking at the article in my browser, I can't find the words "hype", "dead", "failed", or "flopped" anywhere in the article. In fact, the article has some rather positive statements about Linux's success as a server platform, and rather accurately describes the challenges Linux is facing as a home PC platform.
The concept of a "home PC" is likely to go away in the next few years anyway, replaced by a variety of devices, some of which already have embedded Linux (Tivo, for example). So I doubt you will find many companies trying to sell Linux as a home PC platform. Even Microsoft has acknowledged that this market doesn't have much of a future.
A lot of people here are simply saying "Yes, he has to disclose it." It's not that easy. There are two big problems to this that I can see. First, the customers are NOT the victims here. Second, the sysadmin clearly has ethical obligations to his employer; whether he has ethical obligations to his employer's customers is less clear.
When a credit card number is used fraudulently, the credit card company is the victim. The holder of the credit card (the consumer) has no responsibility to pay for fraudulent charges; he only has a responsibility to notify the credit card company that the charges are not legitimate.
Some may say that the consumer is ultimately the victim because the credit card company will pass losses from fraud to their customers in the form of higher fees. If you believe this then you probably also believe that copying a CD actually takes money out of the music industry's bank accounts. The credit company has the power to change their system to stop fraud -- it is simply more profitable for them to absorb the losses instead.
This is one of the reasons I've never been afraid to use my credit card number online -- why there was ever fear over this is beyond my understanding. If someone steals my credit card number (it happened to me once), I just call up the credit card company and tell them. I don't have to pay for something I didn't buy. Period.
Anyway, my point is that there is not an ethical obligation to the customer because the customer is not a potential victim here. Some have said there is a legal obligation but I do not believe that (i am not a lawyer). If a restaurant discovers a waiter has been stealing credit card numbers they are not going to notify their customers. They will fire the waiter and notify the credit card company and possibly the police.
The second part of this -- who the sysadmin has an ethical obligation to -- goes like this: As a sysadmin you have an ethical obligation to your employer to not harm your employer. You also have an ethical obligation to not use your employer's customer data to contact the customers directly -- you would be stealing data just like the credit card thieves and could face prosecution from your (by this point, former) employer. You also have an ethical obligation to understand your position in the company and operate within those bounds -- you are a sysadmin, not a lawyer, not a PR person, not a manager. You also have an ethical obligation to your employer to notify an appropriate person *within the company* when someone else is behaving unethically. The company has an ethical and probably legal obligation to notify the credit card company -- since the credit card company stands to lose money of the stolen numbers are used.
Credit card companies have entire departments to deal with fraud -- they have the expertise the handle this situation. Joe sysadmin doesn't. Joe sysadmin's employer doesn't. And the customers certainly don't. The credit card company is really the one that should be notified here -- and since the credit card company is the potential victim, it should be up to them to decide whether or not to involve law enforcement.
If I were the sysadmin in this situation I would first try to convince my manager to involve the company's legal dept to find out what our legal obligations and risks are. I would encourage them to notify the credit card company and offer my time to work with the credit card company to investigate whether or not something actually happened. If the company decides to keep quiet, I would put my objections in writing and make sure they are known, and I would look for another employer. In this case, though, I wouldn't take it upon myself to notify anyone outside the company. If the crime involved human victims rather than corporate ones, I think I would feel obligated to notify law enforcement.
It's cool that he apparently found a way to improve signage and help motorists.
What's not cool is how he did it. He did not get approval from anybody. He did it covertly -- going so far as to disguise himself as a construction worker and create a fake work order in order to deceive the police if they showed up. His actions were unethical. It wasn't volunteer work, either. It might have been considered that if he volunteered his services to somebody, but that's not what he did. He took it upon himself to change the state-owned signage, whether the state liked it or not.
What if what he thought was "helpful" turned out to be detrimental? Fortunately in this case the guy was apparently pretty smart and made an intelligent modification. What if the next guy decides it would be better if all of the exit numbers were changed? Or the speed limit?
The summary is a little misleading because this really has *nothing* to do with Tivo. It's another company trying to compare themselves to Tivo (although it's kind of strange that neither Tivo nor UltimateTV are mentioned in the article).
But if you read the article, it's clear this company just doesn't get it.
PVRs are revolutionary because they free the viewer from the normal constraints of television. They give the viewer control. It lets you see an entire show without having to ignore the phone or your need to go to the bathroom or your spouse. It lets you make your own schedule, without having to rush to get home by 9pm on Sunday to watch X-Files. This article, though, is basically about providing a PVR without giving up control, and that eliminates the major benefit of PVRs.
In the article they talk about restricting viewers from fast forwarding through commercials! I mean, how stupid are they? The advertising industry KNOWS we don't watch commercials NOW, even watching live TV (without a PVR). We get up. We go to the bathroom. We go to the kitchen. We talk to our family members or friends.
With a Tivo, we probably pay more attention to commercials than without -- when I am watching a show on Tivo and a commercial break comes up, I hit fast forward. BUT, I am watching the screen very closely to see when the commercials end.
If you remember the Max Headroom movie, in that movie the advertising industry created blipverts -- 30 second ads compressed into 2 seconds in order to not lose your attention. Well, guess what -- Tivo has created blipverts for the advertising industry! And here are people trying to get rid of it thinking they are going to benefit the ad industry by *forcing* people to watch ads at normal speed.
The ad industry needs to get a clue -- ads are supposed to *sell* something. Ads that people are *forced* to watch cause resentment, and are more likely to make the viewer think "Dammit, I'll never buy from these assholes" than sell anything.
Taking a leak during a TV commercial is different, and here's why: Web sites usually get paid per banner impression. For every thousand banner ads that are loaded they get 50 cents or so (Slashdot probably gets more, smaller sites probably get less, but it's a lot less that the $2 and up that was obtainable just 6 months ago). If you block the banner ad, that website earns less revenue, because they have fewer banner impressions.
Going to the bathroom during a commercial break doesn't deny the TV station or network any revenue. TV ads are paid based on ratings of the shows, not "how many people saw the commercial".
What about the Election 2000 fiasco with the major networks calling FL before the people in CA had finished voting?
The networks *always* call east coast states before the west coast polls close. That's not news.
What's news is that in 2000, they called Florida before the people *in Florida* had finished voting. They apparently didn't realize that not all of Florida is in the same time zone. And, of course, they called it for Gore, which ultimately turned out to be wrong.
Because ICANN is basically interested in protecting the interests of large companies and their trademarks. They don't want to control content.
.kids implies that the content of.kids sites is kid-safe. But who is to determine that. If you are ICANN, do you want to set up a department to handle complaints and enforcement to keep.kids sites clean? What happens when someone puts a porn site in.kids? (Believe me, *someone* would do it.)
.xxx implies that the content is porn. It also implies that anything non-.xxx is NOT porn. Who dictates this? What happens to all of the non-.xxx porn sites out there now? Who is ICANN to tell them they most change their domain name?
Also, who gets microsoft.xxx?? Or whitehouse.xxx?
The trademark issues are pretty significant.
Bottom line is.xxx and.kids will not work. They are subjective, and they will not be followed anyway. ICANN is smart to reject them.
Given the choice, I'd vote Browne. But given that Browne's not gonna win, I'll take Bush.
This is one of the problems with our political system: People who will only vote for the candidate most likely to win.
You should vote for the person you WANT to win, not for the person you believe WILL win.
It is an election, not a popularity contest. Voting for the person who WILL win simply perpetuates our broken pseudo-two-party democracy.
Everyone complains that we have no choice. The truth is, we *do* have a choice, but we are so afraid to take a step outside of normality that we don't exercise that choice.
If you would like Browne or Nader or someone other than Bush or Gore to win, but you vote for Bush or Gore anyway, you are giving implicit consent to keep things the way they are. If we are ever to see true reform to our political system in this country, it's not going to happen from people voting for the 'lesser of two evils'.
It's ok to vote for a candidate that loses. Honest. Even if they don't win, your vote sends a message to the rest of America, including the big political parties.
- Pirating music is often compared to shoplifting. This is an invalid comparison because shoplifting takes something away from someone, and copying music does not. When I download an MP3 from you, you still have the MP3, the record store still has the CD, the record label still has the copyright, and the artist is still recognized as the creator of the music. You can't argue that somebody just lost $15 because I downloaded an mp3 instead of buying a CD, because you don't know if I was going to buy the CD or not. In fact, I may download the mp3, decide I like it, and then go by the CD.
- Music has been around for as long as people have, and intellectual property law is a very recent 'advance'. Before IP law there were still plenty of musicians. Some of the best music ever written was created before any IP law existed. Musicians don't need a financial incentive to create music.
- There are still plenty of ways for musicians to get paid. CDs will still sell, people will still pay to see live performances.
- In my opinion copyright law should protect the creator of something in a way that prevents someone else from 1) claiming it to be theirs and/or 2) making a profit from distributing it. It should not give the creator the right to otherwise control its distribution or use. (Hmm, kinda sounds like open source...)
- Napster is a revolution. Napster is not about making money. It is not about ripping off artists or record companies. It is about changing the recording industry and changing the way we get music.
- Napster will die. Whether or not Napster wins this case, they will eventually go away. They have zero revenue. ZERO. They've managed to raise some money to finance operations and lawyers, but this will eventually run out and they will have to shut down. Maybe when that happens they will open it up so that people can run their own Napster servers, decentralizing it. (Kinda sounds like Gnutella...)
www.havenco.net, ns1.havenco.net, and www.sealandgov.com are all the same server at the same IP address which, according to a traceroute, appears to be in Pennsylvania, several thousand miles from the Principality of Sealand.
http://www.fruitsofthesea.demon.co.uk/sealand/ is cited as the "real" website for Sealand in this article which exposes the fake website which sells fake passports. But the FruitsOfTheSea site and the Sealandgov.com sites, which both claim to be official, don't link to each other at all.
sealandgov.com claims you can know it is the 'real' website because they are not selling anything. (See their FAQ, second to last question.) Umm.. what about all that colocate space you're pushing??
sealandgov.com and havenco.net were both registered on the same day, *less than a week ago*.
Although http://www.principality-sealand.net/540.htm is pretty clearly a fake, the pictures seem to be legit. Check out the pictures of the "island". Where exactly do you place a server farm? According to the Guardian article (link above) it is under 1000 square yards in size. That's smaller than a football field.
As someone else mentioned, the cast of characters is rather.. odd. Did The NY Times contact any of these people to verify this story?
When your only method of getting Internet access is through your government, what expectation of online privacy could you have? Here in the USA we have been fighting to keep the government from passing laws to be able to monitor internet traffic. Having your government as your ISP sounds very big-brotherish to me.
Standing on moral ground until the market is large enough just looks very hypocritical.
I don't think the American government is backing off of their moral ground in the case of China. There is the argument that opening up trade will in fact make it possible to bring about change in China. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't, but that seems to be the goal.
China is big enough and has enough of it's own resources that restricting trade in not likely to have much of an impact.
Websites get revenue from advertising -- and any decent site gets a CPM revenue model, which means the website gets paid a flat fee per one thousand banner *impressions*. Clickthroughs mean nothing. Any website that is getting paid per-click is getting ripped off because advertisers know that nobody clicks on banners anymore.
If you block the ads, you are denying the website revenue. The advertiser doesn't care, because if you block the ad they don't have to pay the website. But the website still has to server its content to you, but this time for free.
All of you people out there who think you are sticking it to the nasty advertisers have got it wrong. You are sticking it to the websites that are trying to provide you interesting content at no charge. Running a webserver is not free. Without some sort of revenue to support the costs of running the site, the site will go away.
The analogy of muting TV commercials is invalid. The revenue model is different. Advertisers pay TV networks based on how many people watch the show. They don't pay based on how many people watch the commercial. Whether you watch the commercial or not, the network still gets the revenue it needs to pay the costs of creating and delivering the programming.
I run a website. I don't care if you click on the banners. I don't care if you look at the banners. But please, download the banners. It's the only way I get paid.
I thought the E*Trade monkey commercial was awful. "Well, we just wasted $2 Million. What do you want to do with your money?" Ummm... how about, for starters, I not send it to a someone that's going to waste it??
I also thought the Christopher Reeves commercial was awful, and tasteless. If it were for a charity, or maybe even for some medical company, I could understand. But an investment firm?? C'mon!
My favorite commercial by far was the cat herding commercial (download a crappy realaudio version of it at www.eds.com). They showed it a second time and I laughed even more because there were little bits I missed the first time (from laughing so much) -- like the guy rolling up the ball of string.
Other good commercials:
The "He's got money coming out the wazoo!" ad was great (I think this was an E*Trade commercial too). The 7-Up guy putting the soda machine in a "high-traffic area" (the center lane of a freeway) was great. There are a few others but those stick out the most in my mind.
Other bad commercials:
The car commercial that was a rip-off of a gap commercial. This was not a parody, because there was nothing funny about it. It was just a dumb rip-off.
The "Pepsi One tastes just like Coke" commercial. First of all -- ewww! Those people are giving each other germs. Second of all -- Pepsi One does not taste like Coke. At all. Get over it.
To the people who don't like football:
You don't have to like football. That's your choice. But for some reason a lot of you come out of the woodwork around the super bowl to try to make those who like football feel guilty about it. The only reason I can think of for this is that you are jealous that a lot of people are enjoying an event that you aren't enjoying, even though you *choose* not to enjoy it. Maybe I'm wrong.
And for the person who thinks wives are mistreated because of football -- get real. First of all, there are lots of females that love football. Second of all, I don't know of any guys that hide their football 'habit'. The women who get involved with these men know what they are getting into. If a woman doesn't want to be ignored 20 Sundays out of the year, she should not get involved with a guy who ignores everything but football when it's on. There are plenty of football fans (like me) who enjoy it but are fanatical about it, and don't have to watch every game. Bottom line: Don't blame football for people's relationship problems. Those people need to take responsibility for their own problems.
No, Excite@Home is the entire company. Each cable company (Shaw, Comcast, etc.) is involved in the operation of the service to their own customers, but when Excite@Home speaks, it represents all of @Home. Excite and @Home merged last year, the resulting company, Excite@Home, is partially owned by each of the major cable companies that the service is offered through.
The problem with this is that you are denying Slashdot income by blocking their banner ads. The fact is Slashdot is providing you a free service and it is supported by advertising. By blocking that advertising you are hurting their revenue stream which ultimately impacts their ability to operate this website.
Contrary to popular belief, most banner ads pay per view, not per clickthrough. Pay-per-click is common for lower volume sites, but larger sites like Slashdot, Yahoo, etc., are getting paid based on the total number of impressions.
Slashdot Mirror
For the 3 months ended September 2002, the first number on each line below is revenue, the second number is operating income/(loss), in millions of dollars:
Client $ 2,892 $2,482
Server Platforms 1,523 519
Information Worker 2,385 1,879
Business Solutions 107 (68 )
MSN 531 (97 )
CE/Mobility 17 (33 )
Home and Entertainment 505 (177 )
Reconciling Amounts (214 ) (455 )
Overall $ 7,746 $4,050
Yes they are losing money on a lot of other things, but the amounts of those losses are pretty insignificant to Microsoft. Even the comparitively low-margin Server Platforms division could use its profit to cover the losses of Biz Solutions, MSN, CE, and XBOX combined. The overall profit margin (4050/7746) is still 52% -- an astoundingly high margin for any business. After income taxes, Microsoft's profit for the quarter (yes, for a quarter, not a year) is "only" $2726 million, which is a net margin of 35% (that's 2726/7746), still extremely high.
Well, Bill Gates has been selling shares in the millions, not thousands. He appears to have sold about 10 million shares in October.
But I'm not sure what that has to do with the companies profitability or monopoly status. Microsoft is a profitable company, regardless of stock-option loopholes. If the price of MSFT stock goes down, that would actually reduce MSFT's expense for exercized stock options, if it chose to expense stock options. I'm guessing that's what you are referring to when you talk about "tax-stock-option loopholes".
MSFT-stock is not sold by Microsoft, except at the IPO and any secondary offerings. When MSFT stock is bought and sold on the open market, Microsoft doesn't get any of that money. The shareholder who sells the shares gets the money.
If more people would take responsibility for their own lives, instead of blaming someone else when things go wrong, those people would probably enjoy much happier lives with less silly lawsuits like this one.
There are so many ways this woman could have taken more responsibility for the situation.
According to the article, the company "presented her with a $214 charge for 14 months of service that had gone unbilled because of an accounting error. Carter said she agreed to pay half..."
There's problem number one. She should have paid the whole bill. She got the service (with deferred payments even), she should pay for it. There is no reason why she should only pay half. Failure to receive a bill doesn't relieve you of your obligation to pay. Now, if they were tacking on late charges that would be a different story, but that doesn't seem to be the case here. She claims they intially accepted the offer of paying half but later rejected it. I suspect the truth is more that they agreed she could pay half now and half later, and when time came for her to pay the other half, she balked. But, I'm speculating.
According to the article "she terminated the account". They didn't cancel her service, she did. So why didn't she notify her contacts of her new email address? According to the article "Carter and her potential employer had exchanged telephone messages about the position". There's the next problem -- obviously she had been in phone contact with them, she should have notified them of her new email address, or at least notified them that her old email address was no longer valid. BTW, the email was "from a potential employer encouraging her to apply" -- it was NOT a job offer, nor does it even sound like it was a personalized email. It sounds to me like it was a job-posting spammail.
When you are trying to get a job, it is YOUR responsibility to keep in contact with the potential employer. For her to fail to get an email but not bother to follow up until "some three and a half weeks" later, well it sounds to me like she wasn't that interested in the job.
If *she* had taken responsibility and paid her bill in full when it was presented, this wouldn't have happened.
If *she* had taken responsibility and notified her potential employer contact of her new email address when it changed, this wouldn't have happened.
If *she* had taken responsibility and followed up with her potential employer when she didn't hear from them, this wouldn't have happened.
Whether or not her "potential employer" got notified that her mail was undeliverable is the least of her problems.
Does she think that if her former ISP had merely sent a bounce message back to her potential employer, they would have immediately offered her the $65,000? If I were the potential employer and I sent an email to a job candidate and it bounced, I would not even bother to try to contact the person anymore. If they follow-up with me, fine. There's lots of qualified people out there looking for jobs, I'll just go on to the next person.
Ummm... donate to Abiword by putting more money into an account that is apparently insecure? I don't think so.
From the Abiword page:
In order to donate money, you must have a PayPal account.
I tend to side with the folks in this thread who suspect a bad password or something like that -- there's been no evidence presented that I have seen which indicates any responsibility on PayPal's part.
Whether PayPal or Abiword is to blame, there needs to be some assurance that donations are secure before *anyone* donates more money, especially to the same Paypal account.
Tivo service, as of Nov 1, 2002, is $4.99/month on top of your DirecTV service, unless you have their high-end programming package, then it is free.
Tivo stores program guide data from sat too (10 days of data). Two tuners, but no mpeg encoder. Tivo also has a save-to-VCR feature.
The new DirecTV-tivo box (due out this month) will be $199, 40 GB drive (about 35 hours), USB 2.0.
I'm not familiar with the DishPVR but it does sound very similar to Tivo. Tivo's best feature in my opinion is the Season Pass, which records every episode of a particular show on a particular channel, so you never have to miss your favorite show even if they change the time on you.
Even with my Tivo, I sometimes watch the commercials. Why? Because I'm not really paying that much attention to the TV in the first place. How many people just have the TV on as 'background noise' while they are doing something else?
Even if it's a show I am truly paying attention to, I will occasionally watch a commercial if it looks interesting.
But even if you do get rid of commercials, that shouldn't matter, because I am still paying to watch the programming. Last time I checked my DirecTV bill was around $60/month. If the broadcast channels haven't figured out how to get a cut of that money from DirecTV, that's their problem, not mine. The shows I really like to watch tend to not have commercials anyway -- they are mostly on HBO (Six Feet Under, The Sopranos, etc.). And because they are quality programming, I don't mind paying for them.
No way am I going to pay extra for Jerry Springer or American Idol or any of that other crap. So maybe that means without commercials, that type of programming will go away, and we'll end up with better programming overall.
"It appears MSNBC is reporting that Linux has failed as an operating system. By citing the large Linux hype as reason for Linux to be dominating the market, they draw the conclusion that the "open source" alternative has flopped as an operating system. They briefly mention the success of Linux in the server community, but really the article gives Linux as little credit as possible."
Hmm... Looking at the article in my browser, I can't find the words "hype", "dead", "failed", or "flopped" anywhere in the article. In fact, the article has some rather positive statements about Linux's success as a server platform, and rather accurately describes the challenges Linux is facing as a home PC platform.
The concept of a "home PC" is likely to go away in the next few years anyway, replaced by a variety of devices, some of which already have embedded Linux (Tivo, for example). So I doubt you will find many companies trying to sell Linux as a home PC platform. Even Microsoft has acknowledged that this market doesn't have much of a future.
A lot of people here are simply saying "Yes, he has to disclose it." It's not that easy. There are two big problems to this that I can see. First, the customers are NOT the victims here. Second, the sysadmin clearly has ethical obligations to his employer; whether he has ethical obligations to his employer's customers is less clear.
When a credit card number is used fraudulently, the credit card company is the victim. The holder of the credit card (the consumer) has no responsibility to pay for fraudulent charges; he only has a responsibility to notify the credit card company that the charges are not legitimate.
Some may say that the consumer is ultimately the victim because the credit card company will pass losses from fraud to their customers in the form of higher fees. If you believe this then you probably also believe that copying a CD actually takes money out of the music industry's bank accounts. The credit company has the power to change their system to stop fraud -- it is simply more profitable for them to absorb the losses instead.
This is one of the reasons I've never been afraid to use my credit card number online -- why there was ever fear over this is beyond my understanding. If someone steals my credit card number (it happened to me once), I just call up the credit card company and tell them. I don't have to pay for something I didn't buy. Period.
Anyway, my point is that there is not an ethical obligation to the customer because the customer is not a potential victim here. Some have said there is a legal obligation but I do not believe that (i am not a lawyer). If a restaurant discovers a waiter has been stealing credit card numbers they are not going to notify their customers. They will fire the waiter and notify the credit card company and possibly the police.
The second part of this -- who the sysadmin has an ethical obligation to -- goes like this: As a sysadmin you have an ethical obligation to your employer to not harm your employer. You also have an ethical obligation to not use your employer's customer data to contact the customers directly -- you would be stealing data just like the credit card thieves and could face prosecution from your (by this point, former) employer. You also have an ethical obligation to understand your position in the company and operate within those bounds -- you are a sysadmin, not a lawyer, not a PR person, not a manager. You also have an ethical obligation to your employer to notify an appropriate person *within the company* when someone else is behaving unethically. The company has an ethical and probably legal obligation to notify the credit card company -- since the credit card company stands to lose money of the stolen numbers are used.
Credit card companies have entire departments to deal with fraud -- they have the expertise the handle this situation. Joe sysadmin doesn't. Joe sysadmin's employer doesn't. And the customers certainly don't. The credit card company is really the one that should be notified here -- and since the credit card company is the potential victim, it should be up to them to decide whether or not to involve law enforcement.
If I were the sysadmin in this situation I would first try to convince my manager to involve the company's legal dept to find out what our legal obligations and risks are. I would encourage them to notify the credit card company and offer my time to work with the credit card company to investigate whether or not something actually happened. If the company decides to keep quiet, I would put my objections in writing and make sure they are known, and I would look for another employer. In this case, though, I wouldn't take it upon myself to notify anyone outside the company. If the crime involved human victims rather than corporate ones, I think I would feel obligated to notify law enforcement.
It's cool that he apparently found a way to improve signage and help motorists.
What's not cool is how he did it. He did not get approval from anybody. He did it covertly -- going so far as to disguise himself as a construction worker and create a fake work order in order to deceive the police if they showed up. His actions were unethical. It wasn't volunteer work, either. It might have been considered that if he volunteered his services to somebody, but that's not what he did. He took it upon himself to change the state-owned signage, whether the state liked it or not.
What if what he thought was "helpful" turned out to be detrimental? Fortunately in this case the guy was apparently pretty smart and made an intelligent modification. What if the next guy decides it would be better if all of the exit numbers were changed? Or the speed limit?
The summary is a little misleading because this really has *nothing* to do with Tivo. It's another company trying to compare themselves to Tivo (although it's kind of strange that neither Tivo nor UltimateTV are mentioned in the article).
But if you read the article, it's clear this company just doesn't get it.
PVRs are revolutionary because they free the viewer from the normal constraints of television. They give the viewer control. It lets you see an entire show without having to ignore the phone or your need to go to the bathroom or your spouse. It lets you make your own schedule, without having to rush to get home by 9pm on Sunday to watch X-Files. This article, though, is basically about providing a PVR without giving up control, and that eliminates the major benefit of PVRs.
In the article they talk about restricting viewers from fast forwarding through commercials! I mean, how stupid are they? The advertising industry KNOWS we don't watch commercials NOW, even watching live TV (without a PVR). We get up. We go to the bathroom. We go to the kitchen. We talk to our family members or friends.
With a Tivo, we probably pay more attention to commercials than without -- when I am watching a show on Tivo and a commercial break comes up, I hit fast forward. BUT, I am watching the screen very closely to see when the commercials end.
If you remember the Max Headroom movie, in that movie the advertising industry created blipverts -- 30 second ads compressed into 2 seconds in order to not lose your attention. Well, guess what -- Tivo has created blipverts for the advertising industry! And here are people trying to get rid of it thinking they are going to benefit the ad industry by *forcing* people to watch ads at normal speed.
The ad industry needs to get a clue -- ads are supposed to *sell* something. Ads that people are *forced* to watch cause resentment, and are more likely to make the viewer think "Dammit, I'll never buy from these assholes" than sell anything.
Taking a leak during a TV commercial is different, and here's why: Web sites usually get paid per banner impression. For every thousand banner ads that are loaded they get 50 cents or so (Slashdot probably gets more, smaller sites probably get less, but it's a lot less that the $2 and up that was obtainable just 6 months ago). If you block the banner ad, that website earns less revenue, because they have fewer banner impressions.
Going to the bathroom during a commercial break doesn't deny the TV station or network any revenue. TV ads are paid based on ratings of the shows, not "how many people saw the commercial".
Okay this is off-topic but:
What about the Election 2000 fiasco with the major networks calling FL before the people in CA had finished voting?
The networks *always* call east coast states before the west coast polls close. That's not news.
What's news is that in 2000, they called Florida before the people *in Florida* had finished voting. They apparently didn't realize that not all of Florida is in the same time zone. And, of course, they called it for Gore, which ultimately turned out to be wrong.
Why doesn't ICANN want .kids and .xxx?
.kids sites is kid-safe. But who is to determine that. If you are ICANN, do you want to set up a department to handle complaints and enforcement to keep .kids sites clean? What happens when someone puts a porn site in .kids? (Believe me, *someone* would do it.)
.xxx and .kids will not work. They are subjective, and they will not be followed anyway. ICANN is smart to reject them.
Because ICANN is basically interested in protecting the interests of large companies and their trademarks. They don't want to control content.
.kids implies that the content of
.xxx implies that the content is porn. It also implies that anything non-.xxx is NOT porn. Who dictates this? What happens to all of the non-.xxx porn sites out there now? Who is ICANN to tell them they most change their domain name?
Also, who gets microsoft.xxx?? Or whitehouse.xxx?
The trademark issues are pretty significant.
Bottom line is
This is one of the problems with our political system: People who will only vote for the candidate most likely to win.
You should vote for the person you WANT to win, not for the person you believe WILL win.
It is an election, not a popularity contest. Voting for the person who WILL win simply perpetuates our broken pseudo-two-party democracy. Everyone complains that we have no choice. The truth is, we *do* have a choice, but we are so afraid to take a step outside of normality that we don't exercise that choice.
If you would like Browne or Nader or someone other than Bush or Gore to win, but you vote for Bush or Gore anyway, you are giving implicit consent to keep things the way they are. If we are ever to see true reform to our political system in this country, it's not going to happen from people voting for the 'lesser of two evils'.
It's ok to vote for a candidate that loses. Honest. Even if they don't win, your vote sends a message to the rest of America, including the big political parties.
- Pirating music is often compared to shoplifting. This is an invalid comparison because shoplifting takes something away from someone, and copying music does not. When I download an MP3 from you, you still have the MP3, the record store still has the CD, the record label still has the copyright, and the artist is still recognized as the creator of the music. You can't argue that somebody just lost $15 because I downloaded an mp3 instead of buying a CD, because you don't know if I was going to buy the CD or not. In fact, I may download the mp3, decide I like it, and then go by the CD.
- Music has been around for as long as people have, and intellectual property law is a very recent 'advance'. Before IP law there were still plenty of musicians. Some of the best music ever written was created before any IP law existed. Musicians don't need a financial incentive to create music.
- There are still plenty of ways for musicians to get paid. CDs will still sell, people will still pay to see live performances.
- In my opinion copyright law should protect the creator of something in a way that prevents someone else from 1) claiming it to be theirs and/or 2) making a profit from distributing it. It should not give the creator the right to otherwise control its distribution or use. (Hmm, kinda sounds like open source...)
- Napster is a revolution. Napster is not about making money. It is not about ripping off artists or record companies. It is about changing the recording industry and changing the way we get music.
- Napster will die. Whether or not Napster wins this case, they will eventually go away. They have zero revenue. ZERO. They've managed to raise some money to finance operations and lawyers, but this will eventually run out and they will have to shut down. Maybe when that happens they will open it up so that people can run their own Napster servers, decentralizing it. (Kinda sounds like Gnutella...)
www.havenco.net, ns1.havenco.net, and www.sealandgov.com are all the same server at the same IP address which, according to a traceroute, appears to be in Pennsylvania, several thousand miles from the Principality of Sealand.
http://www.fruitsofthesea.demon.co.uk/sealand/ is cited as the "real" website for Sealand in this article which exposes the fake website which sells fake passports. But the FruitsOfTheSea site and the Sealandgov.com sites, which both claim to be official, don't link to each other at all.
sealandgov.com claims you can know it is the 'real' website because they are not selling anything. (See their FAQ, second to last question.) Umm.. what about all that colocate space you're pushing??
sealandgov.com and havenco.net were both registered on the same day, *less than a week ago*.
Although http://www.principality-sealand.net/540.htm is pretty clearly a fake, the pictures seem to be legit. Check out the pictures of the "island". Where exactly do you place a server farm? According to the Guardian article (link above) it is under 1000 square yards in size. That's smaller than a football field.
As someone else mentioned, the cast of characters is rather.. odd. Did The NY Times contact any of these people to verify this story?
Hey yeah! After all, there is that big hole down there left over from the UFO that took off in The X-Files...
When your only method of getting Internet access is through your government, what expectation of online privacy could you have? Here in the USA we have been fighting to keep the government from passing laws to be able to monitor internet traffic. Having your government as your ISP sounds very big-brotherish to me.
I don't think the American government is backing off of their moral ground in the case of China. There is the argument that opening up trade will in fact make it possible to bring about change in China. Maybe it will work, maybe it won't, but that seems to be the goal.
China is big enough and has enough of it's own resources that restricting trade in not likely to have much of an impact.
Why would Larry Ellison wish he was Bill Gates? Larry has more money.
Websites get revenue from advertising -- and any decent site gets a CPM revenue model, which means the website gets paid a flat fee per one thousand banner *impressions*. Clickthroughs mean nothing.
Any website that is getting paid per-click is getting ripped off because advertisers know that nobody clicks on banners anymore.
If you block the ads, you are denying the website revenue. The advertiser doesn't care, because if you block the ad they don't have to pay the website. But the website still has to server its content to you, but this time for free.
All of you people out there who think you are sticking it to the nasty advertisers have got it wrong. You are sticking it to the websites that are trying to provide you interesting content at no charge. Running a webserver is not free. Without some sort of revenue to support the costs of running the site, the site will go away.
The analogy of muting TV commercials is invalid. The revenue model is different. Advertisers pay TV networks based on how many people watch the show. They don't pay based on how many people watch the commercial. Whether you watch the commercial or not, the network still gets the revenue it needs to pay the costs of creating and delivering the programming.
I run a website. I don't care if you click on the banners. I don't care if you look at the banners. But please, download the banners. It's the only way I get paid.
I thought the E*Trade monkey commercial was awful. "Well, we just wasted $2 Million. What do you want to do with your money?" Ummm... how about, for starters, I not send it to a someone that's going to waste it??
I also thought the Christopher Reeves commercial was awful, and tasteless. If it were for a charity, or maybe even for some medical company, I could understand. But an investment firm?? C'mon!
My favorite commercial by far was the cat herding commercial (download a crappy realaudio version of it at www.eds.com). They showed it a second time and I laughed even more because there were little bits I missed the first time (from laughing so much) -- like the guy rolling up the ball of string.
Other good commercials:
The "He's got money coming out the wazoo!" ad was great (I think this was an E*Trade commercial too). The 7-Up guy putting the soda machine in a "high-traffic area" (the center lane of a freeway) was great. There are a few others but those stick out the most in my mind.
Other bad commercials:
The car commercial that was a rip-off of a gap commercial. This was not a parody, because there was nothing funny about it. It was just a dumb rip-off.
The "Pepsi One tastes just like Coke" commercial. First of all -- ewww! Those people are giving each other germs. Second of all -- Pepsi One does not taste like Coke. At all. Get over it.
To the people who don't like football:
You don't have to like football. That's your choice. But for some reason a lot of you come out of the woodwork around the super bowl to try to make those who like football feel guilty about it. The only reason I can think of for this is that you are jealous that a lot of people are enjoying an event that you aren't enjoying, even though you *choose* not to enjoy it. Maybe I'm wrong.
And for the person who thinks wives are mistreated because of football -- get real. First of all, there are lots of females that love football. Second of all, I don't know of any guys that hide their football 'habit'. The women who get involved with these men know what they are getting into. If a woman doesn't want to be ignored 20 Sundays out of the year, she should not get involved with a guy who ignores everything but football when it's on. There are plenty of football fans (like me) who enjoy it but are fanatical about it, and don't have to watch every game. Bottom line: Don't blame football for people's relationship problems. Those people need to take responsibility for their own problems.
No, Excite@Home is the entire company. Each cable company (Shaw, Comcast, etc.) is involved in the operation of the service to their own customers, but when Excite@Home speaks, it represents all of @Home. Excite and @Home merged last year, the resulting company, Excite@Home, is partially owned by each of the major cable companies that the service is offered through.
www.puremp3.org is a website which promotes keeping porn off of mp3 sites. It's a good effort; check it out.
The problem with this is that you are denying Slashdot income by blocking their banner ads. The fact is Slashdot is providing you a free service and it is supported by advertising. By blocking that advertising you are hurting their revenue stream which ultimately impacts their ability to operate this website.
Contrary to popular belief, most banner ads pay per view, not per clickthrough. Pay-per-click is common for lower volume sites, but larger sites like Slashdot, Yahoo, etc., are getting paid based on the total number of impressions.