Posts by Chad Larson 36 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Oct 2007
"Back in the early days of the microprocessor (which was invented by Intel when it created the 4004 chip in 1971)..."
I believe a strong argument could be made that the Texas Instruments TMS1000 was the first microprocessor. See patent 3,757,306. That argument would be bolstered by the fact that when Intel and TI signed cross-licensing agreements on microprocessors in 1971 and again in 1976, Intel paid royalties to TI for use of its patents.
@Alex
The artists don't sell tickets. The promoters do. For the artists to be selling the tickets, they'd have to promote the show, a completely different business than performance (and one they'd generally do badly).
It works like this. A promoter (say, LiveNation) tells the artist's management, "I'll pay you $50,000 to play this here arena Tuesday night." He tells the arena, "I'd like to rent your venue a week from Tuesday." If they both agree, a show is on. Then the promoter hires himself someone (say, TicketMaster) to unload all the tickets to the seats in the venue for that show. The promoter sets the price he wants for the tickets. Ticket master makes its money off all those weird fees.
If the cost of hiring the artist and of renting the venue turns out less than the revenue generated by selling the tickets, the promoter makes money. If it does not, he loses. Either way (barring bankruptcy) the artist and the venue get paid.
So the artists like to do business with folks like LiveNation because they are very unlikely to go broke even if ticket sales suck, and LiveNation like to use TicketMaster because it doesn't cost them up-front money and TicketMaster has name-brand recognition.
Bottom line - If people buy the tickets at the asking price, those prices will stay the same. If not, the next promoter will offer the artist less money for a show ('cause the last guy took a bath) and the tickets will be cheaper.
This is generally a good thing. It's called capitalism. You could look it up.
"I do hope that Apple fails and Psystar are allowed to sell OSX on their hardware if for no other reason than EULAs are evil and illegally strip us of our rights to use what we bought in the way we want."
I just bought this keen new axe. I want to use it to chop down your front door. Still think people should be able to use things they bought any way they want?
"Having rubbed out the Hewlett-Packard brand, the HP Way and HP's competitive position against IBM and Dell..."
Not only is her sterling record at HP on the line, we must not forget her running Lucent into the ground whilst engaging in *cough*dodgy accounting*cough* to hide the red ink.
They got into the TJ Maxx (and therefore Marshall's and Bob's and others) by camping outside a store with a laptop, cracking the simple WEP key the store was using, and intercepting the data transfers between the wireless in-store terminals and the store back room system. The eventually got enough authentication information to log into the store's system. From there they created hidden back door accounts and started collecting information for them to get into the home office central computers. And from there, copied credit data on almost 100 million people.
"Please, anyone with any success with large-scale postgres systems that hasn't noticed serious performance hits hit me back."
We use PostgreSQL for our production ASP product. We have MySQL on several infrastructure boxes as we use some tools built against it. So, I've plenty experience with both, and I dispute your statement. PostgreSQL is faster and easier to administer, and more full featured than MySQL on anything more complicated than serving up web pages.
The FreeBSD project just completed some performance benchmark runs on their version 7 release. The benchmark suite they chose included some applications that ran against an SQL server. They used both PostgreSQL 8 and MySQL. PostgreSQL outperformed MySQL in all tests by around 15% to 20%.
Plus, PostgreSQL scales much better. MySQL claims ACID compliance, but until recently didn't even support roll-backs. Etc, etc.
Not convinced? Consider this: http://jamonation.com/node/734
"Anyone remember the early days of Redhat? Hundreds of people contributed for nothing..."
Those hundreds of people knew exactly what they were doing, and had no expectation of recompense other than peer status.
"... and then the bloke with the URL sold it as though it was his own."
Which it was.
These kinds of stories make me nuts. So VMware has a majority share of the market, and grew its business, and the stock takes a dump because they didn't meet the "analysts" expectations.
Apple stock was above $190 just before they announced their Q4 numbers, which were the best quarter they'd ever had, and up 48% over previous year. Now their stock is around $160. Why? "Analysts" expectations.
Where do these people get all that power? If they could run a company, they would. Instead they sit in the peanut gallery and throw recommendations, and punish the company if they aren't followed.
The stock market is becoming a joke. Para mutual wagering, like at the dog track. "I bet I can guess which way that stock will move better than you and the rest of your lot can do."
Time was, people bought stock in a company because they respected the company and wanted to own a piece of it. They expected to make return on their investment in dividends.
Now, a company that pays dividends is considered foolish. That money should be spent on some kind of acquisition to insure continued growth. And growth is necessary because movement is the way these short-term investors make money. Never mind if the company is solidly in the black, holding down their place in the market, returning steady profits. No, not good enough! They have to grow so funds managers can hold their stock for a year and then dump it for a profit.
Bah!
<here endeth the rant of an old fart>
"Therefore, it's acceptable for Comcast, as a matter of reasonable network management, to employ TCP Resets to prevent BitTorrent doing harm to the web browsing, standard file downloading, and VoIP sessions that are the typical behavior of the Comcast customer."
So your argument boils down to Comcast's behavior is acceptable because for them to do otherwise would be difficult and/or expensive.
Perhaps, instead, they should stop over-subscribing their network.
I think you're missing the point, which is rather than blacklisting some three letter extensions, Microsoft should have fixed Office so it can't be hijacked by a corrupted file.
"Validate your inputs" is like, programming 101. All those highly paid, big brain cased programmers they've got (those who haven't fled to Google, that is) and they still can't seem to get the clue.
"James Watson's recent comments have gone beyond the point of acceptable debate and we are as a result canceling his talk at the museum"
And where should the line be drawn in what is "acceptable debate" within the scientific community? At one time it was beyond acceptable to suggest the earth revolved around the sun.
All assumptions should be subject to debate.
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