The errors that the CD causes are interpreted by XP as a failure of the drive, so it permanently turns off DMA in the hopes that will make the drive usable. Here's an informative Usenet post about the problem. So Sony is wrong when they say the CD "...will not alter anything."
If this is what they're doing then it's just like the crap some of the the long distance companies pull. What's to keep Yahoo from removing the old "Finding a job or an employee" category and creating a NEW "Searching for jobs or workers" category?
Re:Hmmm. The story I read this morning...
on
Is MOXI Toast?
·
· Score: 2
I'd be surprised if Moxi is dead. Their not planning to lay anyone off...
Let me guess. You've never worked for a company involved in a merger or acquisition.
If these were big publicly held companies they might trumpet the layoff angle before the deal went through so the analysts and stockholders would recognize there were potential cost savings. For example, anyone who saw the massive overlap in HP and Compaq wanted some reassurance that there would be product line consolidation accompanied by BIG layoffs. It's the only way the deal made financial sense.
In this case it's much better to say nothing. Why scare the employees and encourage them to jump ship? It's much better if the company chooses who goes. Dump some after the merger goes through and the execs decide which product lines are being trashed. Then the managers swing the axe depending on who's least productive or most redundant. Or, maybe just on a petty personal grudge.
Wow, it must be great to do tech support in an office full of geniuses! In the offices where I've worked, Word users used tabs and spacing to get their formatting. The finance folks knew only the most basic stuff about Excel, and were hampered by their lack of math knowledge as well. Powerpoint presentations were endless slides full of text bullet points or canned clip art.
Microsoft's own Office group has research that 70 percent of the documents created with Word are one page or less. (When they need this kind of info they recruit paid volunteers who run specially instrumented versions of Office that collect keystrokes.)
Anyway, my point is that the Pareto principle can work here. There's no reason for Gobe to build a product that meets the needs of 100 percent of the users. Let Microsoft try to do that, and Gobe can focus on the majority of the market that does simple word processing.
I agree. Let me burn a couple of points here to whack on the moderators. I love a joke as much as the other guy, but this one isn't very good. Plus, I'm getting a little tired of the highest rated post in every thread being a cute comeback. Moderators, please make sure there are no useful or informative posts around before using your points on a lame joke.
I've included a bigger piece of the XP Pro license below to show what they were trying to do. You can see the 10-connection limit and that connections can only be made to MS-approved services (IIS, MS "File and Print Services", "remote access", and not much more). Note the important use of the proper name for File and Print services. One interpretation could be that it's against the XP license to run Apache or any custom-written app that might listen on a socket and send a response. You can't even have a time server!
What "remote access" encompasses isn't completely spelled out. I don't see why VNC wouldn't count as "remote access" though. The last half about "Except as otherwise permitted by the NetMeeting..." only makes sense if you also allow the things mentioned in the first half. After all, any use of File&Print or IIS will "use...executable software residing on the Workstation" right?
IANAL etc. Here's the license clause:
Installation and use. You may install, use, access,
display and run one copy of the Product on a single
computer, such as a workstation, terminal or other device
("Workstation Computer"). The Product may not be used
by more than two (2) processors at any one time on any
single Workstation Computer. You may permit a maximum
of ten (10) computers or other electronic devices (each
a "Device") to connect to the Workstation Computer to
utilize the services of the Product solely for File and
Print services, Internet Information Services, and remote
access (including connection sharing and telephony
services). The ten connection maximum includes any
indirect connections made through "multiplexing" or other
software or hardware which pools or aggregates
connections. Except as otherwise permitted by the
NetMeeting, Remote Assistance, and Remote Desktop
features described below, you may not use the Product
to permit any Device to use, access, display or run other
executable software residing on the Workstation Computer,
nor may you permit any Device to use, access, display,
or run the Product or Product's user interface, unless
the Device has a separate license for the Product.
I subscribe to this version of history. IBM worked hard to make OS/2 fail, and only after they finally realized it did they try to fix it. By then it was too late.
It was not possible to take a Windows application and compile it for OS/2; you had to substantially re-write your app. It wouldn't be quite as much work as re-writing your app from scratch, but it was close. Microsoft didn't want this. Microsoft wanted to make OS/2's windowing API compatible with Windows, but IBM had some other API they thought was better, and they insisted it be used.
Yup. I was at a developer conference in late 1996 when Steve Ballmer said that all developers would have to do to run their existing apps on "Protected Mode Windows" was to recompile. It sounded like the reasonable course of action, and of course the developers loved it.
By the time IBM announced OS/2 and the PS/2 in April 1997, they had hijacked the OS effort from Microsoft. There was no "just recompile" talk anymore, that was replaced by a reference to a "conversion tool" that never materialized. No wonder, because there were a lot of differences. There were even new UI standards and APIs for interoperability with character-mode 3278 terminals!
Once Microsoft saw the success of Windows 3.0 they decided they didn't need IBM and broke off the relationship. (Shortly thereafter there was a quiet surrender ceremony where IBM handed over the "Evil Empire" moniker to Microsoft.)
CPU utilization is only in HKEY_DYN_DATA for Windows 9x/Me. When you get to WinNT/2K/XP the interfaces are totally different and accessed through a complex HKEY_PERFORMANCE_DATA pseudo registry key.
I'm not an accountant but run my own business. Here's my understanding.
Loki can send a 1099 and say these guys were contractors, but the IRS may claim otherwise. If they were employees in 2000 then they most likely were employees in 2001. Loki should have paid 1/2 of the social security and medicare taxes.
If the 1099 status holds up these guys should be somewhat thankful. That will let them file a Schedule C and deduct their out-of-pocket expenses from income, although it sounds like they'll have to cough up taxes on the net after these expenses.
Wow, I never thought about this scenario, I've been lucky enough to never be there. A lot of companies issue corporate American Express cards to their employees so they can charge company expenses such as airline tickets, small equipment and software, etc. The employee is supposed to then file an expense report and be reimbursed for those expenses. Regardless, the employee is responsible for paying the card balance.
In this case it sounds like the employee was royally screwed by this arrangement. It's also possible that they never got around to filing an expense report. A few years ago I worked with one guy who hadn't filed expense report for eight months and was owed a few thousand dollars; the company sent him a letter saying he had to file by the end of the year or they wouldn't reimburse him.
...of why DRM is not ready for prime time. MightyWords goes out of business and legitimate content licensees (uh, users in normal-speak) are denied access to their content. The same thing happened with Circuit City DivX. Any DRM scheme that can't even outlive its parent company should never escape from the lab.
There are real costs to running a site like this. Nobody at Slashdot is going to get rich with a $5 CPM. Slashdot isn't even preventing free speech at this site, they're just offering relief from ads.
I agree that it seems unfair to have contributors pay more. For simplicity's sake, I'd prefer a simple annual subscription fee. The pay-per-page plan seems like too much of a hassle to me. Plus I have the feeling it's not going to be a bang-up success, so it isn't worth applying lots of development effort on a complex pay scheme.
I agree the forum is good; the editor basically just summarized (very well) the research and information that was provided by the forum members. One guy was using Terraserver to look at pictures of the addresses used at the DSLMonster web site, and another actually went to one of the addresses. Imagine if Slashdot's audience could be focused that way...nah.
You are assuming an Ideal Net where the wires and boxes between your Ethernet card and the destination Ethernet card will leave your packets alone. With NAT, proxies, firewalls, and the like in between, it doesn't work out that way. Examples: 1) The SonicWall NAT firewall/router on my cable modem terminates idle connections after 15 minutes. 2) Some HTTP proxies impose a 1024 character limit on GET requests. 3) Comcast's "transparent proxy" ignores the destination IP address and uses a DNS lookup on the Host header instead.
Re:Story not complete
on
.NETly News
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Exactly. All Cigital seems to be saying is that unmanaged (unsafe) code is still subject to buffer overflow problems. This is not news, and it's why you have to jump through some hoops in.NET to use unmanaged code. Those of you who visited Slashdot yesterday may remember this item about.NET that explains it a bit.
Microsoft's alternative, of course, was to create a totally safe environment that wouldn't run any legacy code and wouldn't allow direct calls into the OS. But of course that's been done before (Java). Remember,.NET isn't just for developing network apps, it's for developing local ones as well. If there's already a proven DLL, COM object, or system call that does what I want to do for a local app, I would prefer to use it than reinvent the wheel inside the sandbox.
Some XP users have noticed that their CD/DVD just falls out of DMA mode and starts using PIO. This seems to be because XP backs out of DMA mode if too many errors are recorded on the drive, figuring that something is wrong with the DMA implementation. Guess what? Reading just one copy-protected CD can cause enough errors to do this.
> the measure of usability is not how
> closely is mimics windows.
It is *exactly* the measure if you're trying to switch from Windows with the least amount of retraining. And if we took a poll of users on the planet, most would be switching from...?
Prius sales volume has been limited by Toyota's production, not price--there was a five-month waiting list in the middle of 2001.
People don't seem to understand the economics of mass production and are saying Toyota must be losing their shirt on these cars selling them at $20K. By the same token you could say that Ford is losing their shirt on the first redesigned Explorers to come of the line because they invested millions in R&D and design but can only charge $32K for it.
Of course Toyota can't recoup their Prius R&D costs overnight; some of their hybrid patents go back 10 years so they've been working on this for a while. If you amortize these costs out across a few million cars produced over the *next* 10 years, as you should, then the finances make sense. Also, I believe that Chrysler has licensed the Toyota hybrid technology for use with a future car. That'll bring in some money.
The park is pretty much cashless if you stay at a Disney hotel. You can use your hotel card to charge stuff anywhere and get the combined bill when you check out.
Each new project will have completely new ways of failing in addition to the old ones (full disk, unplugged cables, etc.). Testing will help find those but if you think you'll find most you're in denial. Take your own moderately complex piece of code, cross it with dozens of other complex pieces of code and operating system versions, then give it wide distribution across the Internet. Now you've got thousands of permutations and interactions that were never imagined by the designers and programmers.
You'll never eliminate the errors in the field, and thinking that you can eliminate them just lets you rationalize why you didn't develop a good bug-reporting procedure. But the bugs will still be there. With open source the "all bugs are shallow" philosophy seems to mean that the end user is expected to pull up the source and solve the bug when it happens on their own system. That doesn't cut the mustard for the general computer user, or for Nick Petreley it seems.
The Great Satan actually has a pretty elegant solution for this with Windows Error Reporting. When a problem occurs, IE offers to send a dump to Microsoft and they can analyze the failure. This gives them valuable information about what the most common problems are and lets them do much better bug fixes. You can argue the privacy issues--sending the report is totally voluntary--but at least they've thought about fixing errors and are trying to do something about it.
I tuned into the webcast for the NY launch event at 10:30am eastern time. Here's my quick summary.
It started with a gospel group singing America the Beautiful and then an appearance by Mayor Rudy. Bill Gates talks for a while about XP (fun, reliable, rich media, blah, blah), and "shuts down DOS for the last time" by typing "exit" at a C prompt. A voice says "Are you sure you want to to that, Bill?" in the style of 2001 A Space Odyssey. Then Bill introduces Jim Allchin who talks for while about XP too.
Then Regis Philbin comes in and they do a WWTBAM take-off. Regis does the obligatory millionaire jokes ("Sure this is worth your time, Bill?") and do a few lame questions and answers about XP. After this, Bill leaves the studio while Regis gets a lesson on the great new features of XP. The MS guy tries to do a voice command demo and three tries later it finally works. Regis is whining at him mercilessly. ("You see? This always happens to me with computers!")
Bill reappears on screen a bit later as he's visiting a record store and showing a kiosk at a music store that's built with XP. He scans a CD at the kiosk and it comes up with samples from the CD. Next they try to do a webcam setup and that screws up for a while (Regis: "See!") but finally they get a picture.
At this point I can't say I was paying much attention, I had the audio on but the picture wasn't worth watching.
Face it, the numbers don't work.
on
Slashdot Updates
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Pull a napkin out of the holder and write down some numbers. Let's say the servers and bandwidth are $10K a month. Add four employees at $72K/year including benefits and overhead for another $24K. That's $34K of expenses each month. Revenue? Banners are going for about $2 CPM net--if you're lucky--after commissions and fees. Assuming you can sell 16 MILLION page views you can break even for the month.
The OSDN media kit says Slashdot gets 30MM views, so no there's no problem right? Just sell all your ad inventory and you can CLEAR $30K each month after expenses. Bzzt, wrong. The Internet is swimming in ad inventory, you'll have a hard time selling that many banners at a good price. It's a buyer's market, so you either overdeliver to whatever advertisers you can find to please them or "remainder" your ads to a low-cost ad network. Ad networks like Tribal Fusion are offering sites sub-$1 CPMs, and sites are taking it because there's no better offer.
Advertisers are demanding the big obnoxious billboard ads or popups and they're getting it because sites are desperate for money. You can get a net $10 to $20 CPM on some of them! These new ad formats are all that seem to be selling lately. You either get with the program or do without ad revenue.
Some people are talking about how things will get better once the Internet ad market recovers. What makes them think the current prices are too low? Internet page views continue to increase even if the rate is slowing, so we're faced with more ad inventory instead of less. And how can an advertiser justify the price? If I'm selling a gizmo for $20 and buy banner ads on this site, I can expect best case maybe 0.1% click-throughs or one click for every 1000 impressions. If I pay a $4 gross CPM for the ads then it costs me $4 per click-through. Even if one of every 10 people who click through buy something--unusually high in my experience--it costs $40 to get one person to buy a $20 product. I need something more like a $1 CPM for this deal to make any financial sense.
If you don't like my numbers make up your own, but the bottom line is that nothing short of a bug in Microsoft Excel is going make Slashdot look wildly profitable.
I speak from experience here. The site I work on has been through all the money making schemes in the last 18 months--affiliate programs, Paypal/Amazon donation boxes, banner ads, big Cnet-style ads--and none of them work. We're not even covering our very meager expenses.
Next stop, subscriptions?
Slashdot Mirror
The errors that the CD causes are interpreted by XP as a failure of the drive, so it permanently turns off DMA in the hopes that will make the drive usable. Here's an informative Usenet post about the problem. So Sony is wrong when they say the CD "...will not alter anything."
If this is what they're doing then it's just like the crap some of the the long distance companies pull. What's to keep Yahoo from removing the old "Finding a job or an employee" category and creating a NEW "Searching for jobs or workers" category?
Let me guess. You've never worked for a company involved in a merger or acquisition.
If these were big publicly held companies they might trumpet the layoff angle before the deal went through so the analysts and stockholders would recognize there were potential cost savings. For example, anyone who saw the massive overlap in HP and Compaq wanted some reassurance that there would be product line consolidation accompanied by BIG layoffs. It's the only way the deal made financial sense.
In this case it's much better to say nothing. Why scare the employees and encourage them to jump ship? It's much better if the company chooses who goes. Dump some after the merger goes through and the execs decide which product lines are being trashed. Then the managers swing the axe depending on who's least productive or most redundant. Or, maybe just on a petty personal grudge.
Wow, it must be great to do tech support in an office full of geniuses! In the offices where I've worked, Word users used tabs and spacing to get their formatting. The finance folks knew only the most basic stuff about Excel, and were hampered by their lack of math knowledge as well. Powerpoint presentations were endless slides full of text bullet points or canned clip art.
Microsoft's own Office group has research that 70 percent of the documents created with Word are one page or less. (When they need this kind of info they recruit paid volunteers who run specially instrumented versions of Office that collect keystrokes.)
Anyway, my point is that the Pareto principle can work here. There's no reason for Gobe to build a product that meets the needs of 100 percent of the users. Let Microsoft try to do that, and Gobe can focus on the majority of the market that does simple word processing.
I agree. Let me burn a couple of points here to whack on the moderators. I love a joke as much as the other guy, but this one isn't very good. Plus, I'm getting a little tired of the highest rated post in every thread being a cute comeback. Moderators, please make sure there are no useful or informative posts around before using your points on a lame joke.
I've included a bigger piece of the XP Pro license below to show what they were trying to do. You can see the 10-connection limit and that connections can only be made to MS-approved services (IIS, MS "File and Print Services", "remote access", and not much more). Note the important use of the proper name for File and Print services. One interpretation could be that it's against the XP license to run Apache or any custom-written app that might listen on a socket and send a response. You can't even have a time server!
..." only makes sense if you also allow the things mentioned in the first half. After all, any use of File&Print or IIS will "use...executable software residing on the Workstation" right?
What "remote access" encompasses isn't completely spelled out. I don't see why VNC wouldn't count as "remote access" though. The last half about "Except as otherwise permitted by the NetMeeting
IANAL etc. Here's the license clause:
Installation and use. You may install, use, access,
display and run one copy of the Product on a single
computer, such as a workstation, terminal or other device
("Workstation Computer"). The Product may not be used
by more than two (2) processors at any one time on any
single Workstation Computer. You may permit a maximum
of ten (10) computers or other electronic devices (each
a "Device") to connect to the Workstation Computer to
utilize the services of the Product solely for File and
Print services, Internet Information Services, and remote
access (including connection sharing and telephony
services). The ten connection maximum includes any
indirect connections made through "multiplexing" or other
software or hardware which pools or aggregates
connections. Except as otherwise permitted by the
NetMeeting, Remote Assistance, and Remote Desktop
features described below, you may not use the Product
to permit any Device to use, access, display or run other
executable software residing on the Workstation Computer,
nor may you permit any Device to use, access, display,
or run the Product or Product's user interface, unless
the Device has a separate license for the Product.
Yup. I was at a developer conference in late 1996 when Steve Ballmer said that all developers would have to do to run their existing apps on "Protected Mode Windows" was to recompile. It sounded like the reasonable course of action, and of course the developers loved it.
By the time IBM announced OS/2 and the PS/2 in April 1997, they had hijacked the OS effort from Microsoft. There was no "just recompile" talk anymore, that was replaced by a reference to a "conversion tool" that never materialized. No wonder, because there were a lot of differences. There were even new UI standards and APIs for interoperability with character-mode 3278 terminals!
Once Microsoft saw the success of Windows 3.0 they decided they didn't need IBM and broke off the relationship. (Shortly thereafter there was a quiet surrender ceremony where IBM handed over the "Evil Empire" moniker to Microsoft.)
CPU utilization is only in HKEY_DYN_DATA for Windows 9x/Me. When you get to WinNT/2K/XP the interfaces are totally different and accessed through a complex HKEY_PERFORMANCE_DATA pseudo registry key.
> Whats left to develop? All AOL can/should ...
> do is make the code 100 percent bug free,
> optimize everything,
How can a post have a line like this in it and not be rated "Funny"? Come on guys, we're talking AOL here!
I'm not an accountant but run my own business. Here's my understanding.
Loki can send a 1099 and say these guys were contractors, but the IRS may claim otherwise. If they were employees in 2000 then they most likely were employees in 2001. Loki should have paid 1/2 of the social security and medicare taxes.
If the 1099 status holds up these guys should be somewhat thankful. That will let them file a Schedule C and deduct their out-of-pocket expenses from income, although it sounds like they'll have to cough up taxes on the net after these expenses.
Wow, I never thought about this scenario, I've been lucky enough to never be there. A lot of companies issue corporate American Express cards to their employees so they can charge company expenses such as airline tickets, small equipment and software, etc. The employee is supposed to then file an expense report and be reimbursed for those expenses. Regardless, the employee is responsible for paying the card balance.
In this case it sounds like the employee was royally screwed by this arrangement. It's also possible that they never got around to filing an expense report. A few years ago I worked with one guy who hadn't filed expense report for eight months and was owed a few thousand dollars; the company sent him a letter saying he had to file by the end of the year or they wouldn't reimburse him.
...of why DRM is not ready for prime time. MightyWords goes out of business and legitimate content licensees (uh, users in normal-speak) are denied access to their content. The same thing happened with Circuit City DivX. Any DRM scheme that can't even outlive its parent company should never escape from the lab.
There are real costs to running a site like this. Nobody at Slashdot is going to get rich with a $5 CPM. Slashdot isn't even preventing free speech at this site, they're just offering relief from ads.
I agree that it seems unfair to have contributors pay more. For simplicity's sake, I'd prefer a simple annual subscription fee. The pay-per-page plan seems like too much of a hassle to me. Plus I have the feeling it's not going to be a bang-up success, so it isn't worth applying lots of development effort on a complex pay scheme.
I agree the forum is good; the editor basically just summarized (very well) the research and information that was provided by the forum members. One guy was using Terraserver to look at pictures of the addresses used at the DSLMonster web site, and another actually went to one of the addresses. Imagine if Slashdot's audience could be focused that way...nah.
You are assuming an Ideal Net where the wires and boxes between your Ethernet card and the destination Ethernet card will leave your packets alone. With NAT, proxies, firewalls, and the like in between, it doesn't work out that way. Examples: 1) The SonicWall NAT firewall/router on my cable modem terminates idle connections after 15 minutes. 2) Some HTTP proxies impose a 1024 character limit on GET requests. 3) Comcast's "transparent proxy" ignores the destination IP address and uses a DNS lookup on the Host header instead.
Exactly. All Cigital seems to be saying is that unmanaged (unsafe) code is still subject to buffer overflow problems. This is not news, and it's why you have to jump through some hoops in .NET to use unmanaged code. Those of you who visited Slashdot yesterday may remember this item about .NET that explains it a bit.
.NET isn't just for developing network apps, it's for developing local ones as well. If there's already a proven DLL, COM object, or system call that does what I want to do for a local app, I would prefer to use it than reinvent the wheel inside the sandbox.
Microsoft's alternative, of course, was to create a totally safe environment that wouldn't run any legacy code and wouldn't allow direct calls into the OS. But of course that's been done before (Java). Remember,
Some XP users have noticed that their CD/DVD just falls out of DMA mode and starts using PIO. This seems to be because XP backs out of DMA mode if too many errors are recorded on the drive, figuring that something is wrong with the DMA implementation. Guess what? Reading just one copy-protected CD can cause enough errors to do this.
When I finish reading these posts I feel like singing: "Life is a rock, but the radio rolled me..."
> the measure of usability is not how
> closely is mimics windows.
It is *exactly* the measure if you're trying to switch from Windows with the least amount of retraining. And if we took a poll of users on the planet, most would be switching from...?
Prius sales volume has been limited by Toyota's production, not price--there was a five-month waiting list in the middle of 2001.
People don't seem to understand the economics of mass production and are saying Toyota must be losing their shirt on these cars selling them at $20K. By the same token you could say that Ford is losing their shirt on the first redesigned Explorers to come of the line because they invested millions in R&D and design but can only charge $32K for it.
Of course Toyota can't recoup their Prius R&D costs overnight; some of their hybrid patents go back 10 years so they've been working on this for a while. If you amortize these costs out across a few million cars produced over the *next* 10 years, as you should, then the finances make sense. Also, I believe that Chrysler has licensed the Toyota hybrid technology for use with a future car. That'll bring in some money.
The park is pretty much cashless if you stay at a Disney hotel. You can use your hotel card to charge stuff anywhere and get the combined bill when you check out.
> The guy seems to be more interested in
> ruggedness and battery life than the cost.
Cost is never a problem--until you tell them the cost.
Each new project will have completely new ways of failing in addition to the old ones (full disk, unplugged cables, etc.). Testing will help find those but if you think you'll find most you're in denial. Take your own moderately complex piece of code, cross it with dozens of other complex pieces of code and operating system versions, then give it wide distribution across the Internet. Now you've got thousands of permutations and interactions that were never imagined by the designers and programmers.
You'll never eliminate the errors in the field, and thinking that you can eliminate them just lets you rationalize why you didn't develop a good bug-reporting procedure. But the bugs will still be there. With open source the "all bugs are shallow" philosophy seems to mean that the end user is expected to pull up the source and solve the bug when it happens on their own system. That doesn't cut the mustard for the general computer user, or for Nick Petreley it seems.
The Great Satan actually has a pretty elegant solution for this with Windows Error Reporting. When a problem occurs, IE offers to send a dump to Microsoft and they can analyze the failure. This gives them valuable information about what the most common problems are and lets them do much better bug fixes. You can argue the privacy issues--sending the report is totally voluntary--but at least they've thought about fixing errors and are trying to do something about it.
I tuned into the webcast for the NY launch event at 10:30am eastern time. Here's my quick summary.
It started with a gospel group singing America the Beautiful and then an appearance by Mayor Rudy. Bill Gates talks for a while about XP (fun, reliable, rich media, blah, blah), and "shuts down DOS for the last time" by typing "exit" at a C prompt. A voice says "Are you sure you want to to that, Bill?" in the style of 2001 A Space Odyssey. Then Bill introduces Jim Allchin who talks for while about XP too.
Then Regis Philbin comes in and they do a WWTBAM take-off. Regis does the obligatory millionaire jokes ("Sure this is worth your time, Bill?") and do a few lame questions and answers about XP. After this, Bill leaves the studio while Regis gets a lesson on the great new features of XP. The MS guy tries to do a voice command demo and three tries later it finally works. Regis is whining at him mercilessly. ("You see? This always happens to me with computers!")
Bill reappears on screen a bit later as he's visiting a record store and showing a kiosk at a music store that's built with XP. He scans a CD at the kiosk and it comes up with samples from the CD. Next they try to do a webcam setup and that screws up for a while (Regis: "See!") but finally they get a picture.
At this point I can't say I was paying much attention, I had the audio on but the picture wasn't worth watching.
Pull a napkin out of the holder and write down some numbers. Let's say the servers and bandwidth are $10K a month. Add four employees at $72K/year including benefits and overhead for another $24K. That's $34K of expenses each month. Revenue? Banners are going for about $2 CPM net--if you're lucky--after commissions and fees. Assuming you can sell 16 MILLION page views you can break even for the month.
The OSDN media kit says Slashdot gets 30MM views, so no there's no problem right? Just sell all your ad inventory and you can CLEAR $30K each month after expenses. Bzzt, wrong. The Internet is swimming in ad inventory, you'll have a hard time selling that many banners at a good price. It's a buyer's market, so you either overdeliver to whatever advertisers you can find to please them or "remainder" your ads to a low-cost ad network. Ad networks like Tribal Fusion are offering sites sub-$1 CPMs, and sites are taking it because there's no better offer.
Advertisers are demanding the big obnoxious billboard ads or popups and they're getting it because sites are desperate for money. You can get a net $10 to $20 CPM on some of them! These new ad formats are all that seem to be selling lately. You either get with the program or do without ad revenue.
Some people are talking about how things will get better once the Internet ad market recovers. What makes them think the current prices are too low? Internet page views continue to increase even if the rate is slowing, so we're faced with more ad inventory instead of less. And how can an advertiser justify the price? If I'm selling a gizmo for $20 and buy banner ads on this site, I can expect best case maybe 0.1% click-throughs or one click for every 1000 impressions. If I pay a $4 gross CPM for the ads then it costs me $4 per click-through. Even if one of every 10 people who click through buy something--unusually high in my experience--it costs $40 to get one person to buy a $20 product. I need something more like a $1 CPM for this deal to make any financial sense.
If you don't like my numbers make up your own, but the bottom line is that nothing short of a bug in Microsoft Excel is going make Slashdot look wildly profitable.
I speak from experience here. The site I work on has been through all the money making schemes in the last 18 months--affiliate programs, Paypal/Amazon donation boxes, banner ads, big Cnet-style ads--and none of them work. We're not even covering our very meager expenses.
Next stop, subscriptions?