This is actually pretty interesting...
on
MP3beamer Released
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· Score: 2, Informative
If you check out the site, they're offering the software only for around $70 which makes it a more viable solution for many of us unwilling to buy a box for $400.
The only box that has to be running Linux is the main beamer, so you could easily work this right into an existing home M$ network.
It even looks like you can beam your collection remotely to work.
Also, different users can play different tunes at the same time.
All this looks like to me is credit card companies trying to generate a new revenue stream by getting existing merchants to pony up for the new technology required to use this system.
Is it really so hard to swipe your card through a reader as you checkout? Does Visa really think people are so lazy that swiping a card is too much work?
This is an example of technology being used simply because it exists. This adds ZERO value for the consumer and opens up huge security holes. Who believes for one second that this technology is actually 100% secure?
I guess we're supposed to be reassured by the quote from the Visa rep in the article reminding us that there is no consumer liability for fraud.
I can only imagine what is going to happen if they roll out debit/checkcards linked to actual bank accounts with this technology!
"Once MS disables this, crackers will resort to patching the activation code... It's just a matter of time, like the XBox was cracked eventually."
Actually, the activation code has been stripped out of Windows XP in the pirate community since before day 1 of its official release.
Almost any type of copy protection, activation or otherwise is rapidly stripped out of software by cracking groups and released into the pirate community.
This announcement is a non issue for actual pirates of XP. It has zero impact to them. It impacts the PAYING user the most by making a procedure they shouldn't have to deal with in the first place an even bigger pain in the ass.
These types of measures always punish the paying customer and leave the pirates shaking their heads in disbelief over M$ not getting it.
I didn't say you WERE one, just that the comment made you come off like one.
Anyways, it would appear our discrepancy is due to the fact that the Primedia deal was a stock swap with no cash involved.
Further research shows that when the deal was ANNOUNCED it was valued at your posted figure of $690 million, but when it was actually consumated it was for around $430 million based on stock price.
From forbes.com:
"When the About.com deal with Primedia was first unveiled, it was said to be a $690 million stock price. But the Internet bubble was already deflating, and by the time the stock swap deal actually closed, the real transaction price was about $430 million. "
I'm not sure what else they're actually good for, but searching for these with Prime95 is a great way of putting the flame to your CPU.
Prime95 (which searches for these primes) really puts a load on the CPU and raises the temperature in a hurry. It's commonly used to test the stability of overclocking configurations since it stresses the chip and is able to detect if there is an error in the computation.
Generally, if you can run Prime95 for 24 hours straight, most people will consider the overclocked PC a stable configuration.
If you're going to try to correct someone, how about posting a link and doing it courteously instead of coming off like a smug prick.
According to cbsmarketwatch.com:
"The purchase price of About represents a multiple of more than 10 times its revenue, and more than 30 times its cash flow, in 2004. It's also slightly more than the $401 million that Primedia itself paid when it acquired the company back in March 2001. "
Did they overpay? Yeah, probably in the short term, but let's look at the situation...
While the deal was certainly rich by price to cashflow and cash to revenue metrics, there are a limited number of these internet spaces for sale. CBSmarketwatch.com just went for over $500 million as a comparison.
The NY Times currently has a market cap of around $5.4 billion. They expect this deal to be accretive to earnings two years out. It doesn't represent an enormous purchase, just a pricey one by many measures.
The ad market for printed newspapers has been flat. Growth is expected to be anemic this year.
Newspaper circulations in general are down.
They picked up approximately 22 million unique eyeballs a month to target ads to via this deal, and a high traffic established internet site. The internet advertising market is growing.
Digitial media / advertising is a growth industry compared to the lackluster printed newspaper market that is unlikely to get better any time soon.
Traditional media outlets like the NYT need to continue to build internet presences to avoid obsolesence.
The deal while a bit expensive makes a whole lot of sense to stay competitive as media evolves and changes.
"Bill Gates once said that he was planning to give away most if not all of his fortune to charity - I bet he wasn't labelled "evil" back then..."
Just to chime in, I hate M$ as much as the next red blooded/.er, but Bill Gates has given away more than most people in the history of philanthropy. He's already donated about a third of his net worth to charity. Cut the guy some slack on this front. I don't know how anyone could criticize this guy from a philanthropy perspective.
From http://www.beliefnet.com/story/34/story_3450_1.htm l
regarding his contributions:
"I don't mean the actual figure, which is itself an unimaginable $22 billion. Rather, I refer to the percentage of his wealth he has donated. Still in his early 40s, Gates has now distributed about one third of everything he has to charity."
Would someone please mod this parent down as a troll?
Go ahead and fiddle while Rome supposedly burns if it pleases you...
What both parties above fail to realize is that economic trouble for the US benefits noone. I'm not going to go into the details for a troll, but picking up a rudimentary economics textbook might be helpful as a starting point.
It's deja vu all over again circa 1980s Japan and the supposed setting of the sun on the US economic machine...
The trouble with ideas like this is that once it becomes acceptable to use this technology on criminals, it may seem less repellant to using it on the general populace.
It also opens the door to criminalizing larger portions of the population for greater control. If you think this isn't likely to happen, take a look at the current effort to criminalize copyright infringement, and the fact that the US has so many non-violent drug offenders crowding up its prisons under the current draconian war on drugs. Combine this with the current political climate in the 'War on Terrorism' and the Patriot Act, and you should be left with a very bad taste in your mouth.
This doesn't even go into the idea that someone on parole might possibly be entitled to some measures of privacy.
There is a lot to think about here other than just chiming in that since it involves 'guilty' criminals, screw em, they don't deserve any rights...
"And what about the mmuch older automata, that played chess etc... "
"The Turk" to which you refer was actually a fraud, a well done one albeit, but a hoax nonetheless.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk
An industry that doesn't even exist commercially yet has to start out somewhere.
With this attitude, the Wright Brothers may not have bothered to get off the ground for the short time/distance/altitude that they did at Kitty Hawk.
Suborbital flights have the possibility of leading into full blown orbital visits to an orbiting hotel, which could lead into commercialization of the Moon, Mars, and eventually the outer solar system. These goals are definitely viable and achievable without government funding if entrepreneurs can find a way to make them work.
Suborbital flight has a novelty factor, cache, and is the first baby step towards breaking free of this mess we call Earth.
"This is foolish. They should have released it under a free license for anyone except those who deny the same right to use their bio-patents."
IMO, this is the wrong attitude towards this license. Do you honestly expect a commercial enterprise to turn over its entire internally funded portfolio of bio-patents to their competitors in order to use any technology that has been developed under an open source license like BIOS? It is naieve to believe that such a license would be widely adopted.
This would be like forcing IBM to turn over ALL of its IP to whoever would like to use it in order to be allowed to support LINUX.
If you want open source biology initiatives to have any chance of success, the license in its current state is likely to give it the best odds.
What you propose here is untenable in any type of commercial environment.
The US is eventually going to have no choice but to go back to the nuclear "well" like it or not if we want to keep this standard of living.
In all likelyhood, extractable oil supplies are finally in the process of peaking, permanently altering the supply/demand equation for crude.
Coal will work for awhile, but IMO should be considered much dirtier than nuclear power.
We may be able to switch to a hydrogen based fuel cell economy for cars, but the hydrogen is going to take a lot of energy to generate. It's going to have to come from nuclear; there just aren't any other commercial technologies available to take its place.
The US is shooting itself in the ass by not beginning to build new nuke plants now. I'm glad to see someone is actually moving this technology forward. Nuclear waste is manageable.
There was nothing new or innovative in the article, and it had the depth of Paris Hilton as far as actual real world cooling suggestions.
There are a ton of different solutions out there both onchip and off including aircooling via different heatsink designs, watercooling, peltier cooling, and self contained refrigeration units.
This article barely scraped the surface of anything useful or interesting related to cooling.
The Mozilla Foundation has a very big opportunity to prove WHY people should switch to Firefox from IE by making security the number one priority.
If the Firefox development community responds quickly to these threats as they arise, they will continue to win away informed users from the headaches of IE through word of mouth among other avenues.
There is always going to be a war going on between spyware makers and browsers. The browser maker who can respond quickly will continue to grow marketshare.
Features aren't enough, and complacency is dangerous. They need to respond to security vulnerabilities and spyware exploits in a rapid manner to stay ahead of M$.
If they don't already have one in place, I think the Mozilla Foundation should form a rapid response SWAT team to patch vulnerabilities and battle spyware with truth and justice for all!
One thing I've learned as I've gotten a little long in the tooth at the ripe old age of 33, is that the world is not full of black and white issues, and there are a near infinite amount of shades of grey.
I used to consider myself a dyed in the wool libertarian or Liberal with a capital 'L' in the Milton Friedman school.
A funny thing happened on my way to the University of Chicago though...I noticed the devastating effects of often capricious capital flows across the globe ala the Asian Crisis, corruption and capitalism at its very worst in the former USSR, and the debacle in utility deregulation that came to a head with Enron.
In many cases, I am still all for unfettered markets, free trade, and the endless drum beat of globalization. I've also come to realize that markets left to themselves don't always work themselves out with the invisible hand.
I am still a libertarian on many issues, but have come to dislike labels, and reducing one's beliefs to a pigeonhole. I'd like to think the tapestry of thought is a little more complex than that.
My point is just because someone is in favor of a public project in one particular area shouldn't brand them automatically as a 'socialist.' Life is a lot more complicated than throwing labels around.
Slashdot Mirror
If you check out the site, they're offering the software only for around $70 which makes it a more viable solution for many of us unwilling to buy a box for $400.
The only box that has to be running Linux is the main beamer, so you could easily work this right into an existing home M$ network.
It even looks like you can beam your collection remotely to work.
Also, different users can play different tunes at the same time.
It seems pretty cool and useful at first glance.
All this looks like to me is credit card companies trying to generate a new revenue stream by getting existing merchants to pony up for the new technology required to use this system.
Is it really so hard to swipe your card through a reader as you checkout? Does Visa really think people are so lazy that swiping a card is too much work?
This is an example of technology being used simply because it exists. This adds ZERO value for the consumer and opens up huge security holes. Who believes for one second that this technology is actually 100% secure?
I guess we're supposed to be reassured by the quote from the Visa rep in the article reminding us that there is no consumer liability for fraud.
I can only imagine what is going to happen if they roll out debit/checkcards linked to actual bank accounts with this technology!
"Once MS disables this, crackers will resort to patching the activation code. .. It's just a matter of time, like the XBox was cracked eventually."
Actually, the activation code has been stripped out of Windows XP in the pirate community since before day 1 of its official release.
Almost any type of copy protection, activation or otherwise is rapidly stripped out of software by cracking groups and released into the pirate community.
This announcement is a non issue for actual pirates of XP. It has zero impact to them. It impacts the PAYING user the most by making a procedure they shouldn't have to deal with in the first place an even bigger pain in the ass.
These types of measures always punish the paying customer and leave the pirates shaking their heads in disbelief over M$ not getting it.
We didn't use separate memory for video processing...
We used custom video coprocessors named Denise running at 7 mhz and we liked it.
Back then we didn't need all these fancy colors, 4096 was plenty!
I didn't say you WERE one, just that the comment made you come off like one.
2 00 5/02/08/generalnypost_2005_02_08_eng-nypost_eng-ny post_033344_4232868471241990790.ew.html?partner=ya hoo&referrer=
Anyways, it would appear our discrepancy is due to the fact that the Primedia deal was a stock swap with no cash involved.
Further research shows that when the deal was ANNOUNCED it was valued at your posted figure of $690 million, but when it was actually consumated it was for around $430 million based on stock price.
From forbes.com:
"When the About.com deal with Primedia was first unveiled, it was said to be a $690 million stock price. But the Internet bubble was already deflating, and by the time the stock swap deal actually closed, the real transaction price was about $430 million. "
http://www.forbes.com/technology/feeds/general/
So, I guess it's a matter of choose your poison. Can I have a hug?
I'm not sure what else they're actually good for, but searching for these with Prime95 is a great way of putting the flame to your CPU.
Prime95 (which searches for these primes) really puts a load on the CPU and raises the temperature in a hurry. It's commonly used to test the stability of overclocking configurations since it stresses the chip and is able to detect if there is an error in the computation.
Generally, if you can run Prime95 for 24 hours straight, most people will consider the overclocked PC a stable configuration.
If you're going to try to correct someone, how about posting a link and doing it courteously instead of coming off like a smug prick.
% 7B CD97F4BD%2DCDE3%2D458B%2DA601%2D3131D8929FE6%7D&si teid=yhoo&
According to cbsmarketwatch.com:
"The purchase price of About represents a multiple of more than 10 times its revenue, and more than 30 times its cash flow, in 2004. It's also slightly more than the $401 million that Primedia itself paid when it acquired the company back in March 2001. "
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story.asp?guid=
If you run into this again, you can avoid having to pull the hard drive by booting from floppy and formatting from there.
Did they overpay? Yeah, probably in the short term, but let's look at the situation...
While the deal was certainly rich by price to cashflow and cash to revenue metrics, there are a limited number of these internet spaces for sale. CBSmarketwatch.com just went for over $500 million as a comparison.
The NY Times currently has a market cap of around $5.4 billion. They expect this deal to be accretive to earnings two years out. It doesn't represent an enormous purchase, just a pricey one by many measures.
The ad market for printed newspapers has been flat. Growth is expected to be anemic this year.
Newspaper circulations in general are down.
They picked up approximately 22 million unique eyeballs a month to target ads to via this deal, and a high traffic established internet site. The internet advertising market is growing.
Digitial media / advertising is a growth industry compared to the lackluster printed newspaper market that is unlikely to get better any time soon.
Traditional media outlets like the NYT need to continue to build internet presences to avoid obsolesence.
The deal while a bit expensive makes a whole lot of sense to stay competitive as media evolves and changes.
Primedia payed $401 million for it.
"Bill Gates once said that he was planning to give away most if not all of his fortune to charity - I bet he wasn't labelled "evil" back then ..."
/.er, but Bill Gates has given away more than most people in the history of philanthropy. He's already donated about a third of his net worth to charity. Cut the guy some slack on this front. I don't know how anyone could criticize this guy from a philanthropy perspective.
m l
Just to chime in, I hate M$ as much as the next red blooded
From http://www.beliefnet.com/story/34/story_3450_1.ht
regarding his contributions:
"I don't mean the actual figure, which is itself an unimaginable $22 billion. Rather, I refer to the percentage of his wealth he has donated. Still in his early 40s, Gates has now distributed about one third of everything he has to charity."
Would someone please mod this parent down as a troll?
Go ahead and fiddle while Rome supposedly burns if it pleases you...
What both parties above fail to realize is that economic trouble for the US benefits noone. I'm not going to go into the details for a troll, but picking up a rudimentary economics textbook might be helpful as a starting point.
It's deja vu all over again circa 1980s Japan and the supposed setting of the sun on the US economic machine...
It's a bad thing because it essentially allows the same type of ridiculous patenting of software code that is prevalent in the US right now.
Copyrights are more than adequate to protect the rights of software producers. The idea of patenting code is patently ridiculous!
The trouble with ideas like this is that once it becomes acceptable to use this technology on criminals, it may seem less repellant to using it on the general populace.
It also opens the door to criminalizing larger portions of the population for greater control. If you think this isn't likely to happen, take a look at the current effort to criminalize copyright infringement, and the fact that the US has so many non-violent drug offenders crowding up its prisons under the current draconian war on drugs. Combine this with the current political climate in the 'War on Terrorism' and the Patriot Act, and you should be left with a very bad taste in your mouth.
This doesn't even go into the idea that someone on parole might possibly be entitled to some measures of privacy.
There is a lot to think about here other than just chiming in that since it involves 'guilty' criminals, screw em, they don't deserve any rights...
Orwell is turning in his grave...
It's Picassa.
http://www.google.com/downloads/
"And what about the mmuch older automata, that played chess etc... " "The Turk" to which you refer was actually a fraud, a well done one albeit, but a hoax nonetheless. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Turk
An industry that doesn't even exist commercially yet has to start out somewhere.
With this attitude, the Wright Brothers may not have bothered to get off the ground for the short time/distance/altitude that they did at Kitty Hawk.
Suborbital flights have the possibility of leading into full blown orbital visits to an orbiting hotel, which could lead into commercialization of the Moon, Mars, and eventually the outer solar system. These goals are definitely viable and achievable without government funding if entrepreneurs can find a way to make them work.
Suborbital flight has a novelty factor, cache, and is the first baby step towards breaking free of this mess we call Earth.
"This is foolish. They should have released it under a free license for anyone except those who deny the same right to use their bio-patents."
IMO, this is the wrong attitude towards this license. Do you honestly expect a commercial enterprise to turn over its entire internally funded portfolio of bio-patents to their competitors in order to use any technology that has been developed under an open source license like BIOS? It is naieve to believe that such a license would be widely adopted.
This would be like forcing IBM to turn over ALL of its IP to whoever would like to use it in order to be allowed to support LINUX.
If you want open source biology initiatives to have any chance of success, the license in its current state is likely to give it the best odds.
What you propose here is untenable in any type of commercial environment.
The US is eventually going to have no choice but to go back to the nuclear "well" like it or not if we want to keep this standard of living.
In all likelyhood, extractable oil supplies are finally in the process of peaking, permanently altering the supply/demand equation for crude.
Coal will work for awhile, but IMO should be considered much dirtier than nuclear power.
We may be able to switch to a hydrogen based fuel cell economy for cars, but the hydrogen is going to take a lot of energy to generate. It's going to have to come from nuclear; there just aren't any other commercial technologies available to take its place.
The US is shooting itself in the ass by not beginning to build new nuke plants now. I'm glad to see someone is actually moving this technology forward. Nuclear waste is manageable.
There was nothing new or innovative in the article, and it had the depth of Paris Hilton as far as actual real world cooling suggestions.
/. I forgot for a moment...
There are a ton of different solutions out there both onchip and off including aircooling via different heatsink designs, watercooling, peltier cooling, and self contained refrigeration units.
This article barely scraped the surface of anything useful or interesting related to cooling.
Oh wait, this is
Nerds clearly dictate that the needs of the few outweigh the needs of the many...
The Mozilla Foundation has a very big opportunity to prove WHY people should switch to Firefox from IE by making security the number one priority.
If the Firefox development community responds quickly to these threats as they arise, they will continue to win away informed users from the headaches of IE through word of mouth among other avenues.
There is always going to be a war going on between spyware makers and browsers. The browser maker who can respond quickly will continue to grow marketshare.
Features aren't enough, and complacency is dangerous. They need to respond to security vulnerabilities and spyware exploits in a rapid manner to stay ahead of M$.
If they don't already have one in place, I think the Mozilla Foundation should form a rapid response SWAT team to patch vulnerabilities and battle spyware with truth and justice for all!
Games should count. They drive much of the home PC market. They drive the cycle of video card development from Nvidia and ATI.
They are one of the main reasons I won't consider running Linux on my primary box.
Games are an incredibly important piece of the home PC market.
I'm still waiting for them to invent the 'Orgasmatron.' I'll know haptic research is ready for prime time when someone rolls those out.
One thing I've learned as I've gotten a little long in the tooth at the ripe old age of 33, is that the world is not full of black and white issues, and there are a near infinite amount of shades of grey.
I used to consider myself a dyed in the wool libertarian or Liberal with a capital 'L' in the Milton Friedman school.
A funny thing happened on my way to the University of Chicago though...I noticed the devastating effects of often capricious capital flows across the globe ala the Asian Crisis, corruption and capitalism at its very worst in the former USSR, and the debacle in utility deregulation that came to a head with Enron.
In many cases, I am still all for unfettered markets, free trade, and the endless drum beat of globalization. I've also come to realize that markets left to themselves don't always work themselves out with the invisible hand.
I am still a libertarian on many issues, but have come to dislike labels, and reducing one's beliefs to a pigeonhole. I'd like to think the tapestry of thought is a little more complex than that.
My point is just because someone is in favor of a public project in one particular area shouldn't brand them automatically as a 'socialist.' Life is a lot more complicated than throwing labels around.