Usually I’m pretty “anti-law”. That is, more laws are not good – especially around software. However, with more and more scams coming online, there ought to be a law which is quite simple. If you allow someone to signup for a recurring-billing product online, you must also provide a simple way for that user to cancel the service online. Like most of us, I accidentally got sucked into one; and now I can’t get out. I knew I was treading on thin ice when I signed up, and now I am really regretting it.
Author: mike
You know your marketing is good when…
You know your marketing is working when a 2 year old can see your logo as she drives by and say, “Ashley wants to go to McDonalds.”
Her vocabulary is probably somewhere around 400 words right now, and “McDonald’s” is one of them. “Google” is too, surprisingly. I guess I should get her a T-shirt.
Windows XP and the 1GB limit
Every morning, when I come into work and login to my machine with 3GB of RAM running windows XP, I start waiting. Each application takes 30-40 seconds (literally!) to “come back to life” as I try to use it. Each one slowly swaps in.
What is going on? I’m only using 1GB of ram in my applications, with 2GB of free memory. I left the computer on, and idle. There are no background file scanners, background indexers, or other software running on the machine.
The answer is the Windows XP 1GB limit. It’s not in the documentation from Microsoft, but XP has a fundamental limit that it can’t use more than 1GB of RAM without swapping. It was designed in 1998 when the average computer had about 128MB of RAM. So, when memory use goes above 256MB of RAM, it automatically starts paging out, assuming you will soon run out of memory. Unfortunately, it does this without checking how much free RAM you have, which is the cause of this slowness.
A second issue is the IBM large-memory DRAM patent. The patent has a claim on software algorithms that concurrently access more than 1GB of data within any 24 hour period. To avoid paying royalties on this patent, Windows intentionally tries to not use the additional RAM in your system.
A 3rd reason my machine is slow in the morning is because of Microsoft’s energy-saving memory technology. It turns out that using fewer RAM slots in your system will significantly reduce the power consumption inside your PC. So the software is optimized to try to contain all the in-use memory to the first RAM slot. Unfortunately this leads to a fragmentation issue much like a disk that needs defragmenting; because it takes longer for the machine to lookup the larger RAM addresses than the lower ones.
Lastly, Microsoft tries to keep a significant amount of RAM free in case you try to run Microsoft Flight Simulator. Flight Simulator, being an early app to consume large amounts of memory, acquired an early license from IBM on the RAM patent when it was cheap, and also is a showcase of Microsoft Technology. So, it turns out that if you run Flight Simulator, it will startup extremely fast, and use the remaining RAM in my system. Unfortunately, I don’t play flight simulator, so I can’t access that memory.
There are probably other causes of the Windows XP 1GB limit. Anyone want to share?
The DMCA is Good. Mark Cuban is Wrong.
Marc continues his anti-Google/Youtube arguments (see also, and also, and also). He is so upset that his earlier predictions were wrong, that he can’t admit his error. Overall, Mark claims that what Youtube is doing is illegal. But, he’s talking through both sides of his mouth.
The fact is that Youtube is not breaking the law. There is a law, called the DMCA, which specifically says that online service providers are not liable if their users upload copyrighted materials as long as the service provider promptly removes content when requested by the copyright holder. This is exactly what Youtube does, and it is legal. It’s the law.
You may not like the DMCA, but that is the law. It’s legal, and there is no debate about it.
Marc says that Youtube ought to be able to recognize which material is copyrighted as it is posted, and not allow the post to occur in the first place. That might be doable, or that might not, (I don’t think it is realistic, and Marc has yet to propose an answer to that) but that is not relevant anyway. The law has very clearly specified how service providers must deal with copyrighted content, and YouTube obeys the law.
Marc knows this, stating that Youtube is “invoking Safe Harbor”. There is no “invoking” here. The law is clear about what service providers should do. So how can he claim that this is illegal? He obviously knows it is not. He is just jealous or irrational or something.
Marc – if you don’t like the law, go write to your congressman. Or better yet, get him a hooker and season tickets to the Mavs, and get him to change the law. Keep in mind, however, that if you eliminate DMCA, you’ll not only take down YouTube, but you’ll take down MySpace, Facebook, Yahoo!, Hotmail, and hundreds of other sites. The DMCA exists for a reason – and the DMCA allows most of us that don’t download or upload copyrighted content still be able to benefit from a host of online services that otherwise couldn’t exist because they’d get sued to smithereens.
Pick Your Favorite RSS Reader
For quite some time, I used Rojo as my RSS Reader. I still Rojo quite a lot. But I did switch to Google’s Reader quite a while back, because it’s frankly just a far superior interface.
New stats from TechCrunch (via Feedburner) show that users agree. While Google Reader is the newest entry into the market, it far surpasses Bloglines, Newsgator, Rojo, and Live.com for readership. They published lots of other interesting stats too.
I’m sure the competitors are going to copy Google Reader’s infinite page layout. I wonder what the stats will look like in a year or two?
Who Reads Your Code? Man or Machine?
I spent entirely too much time debugging the following today:
int foo(int num, int l) {
int baz = 1;
int bar = l;
return bar + baz;
}
What gets returned for foo(2,2)?
If you guessed 2, you are dumb like me. If you guessed 3, you noticed that the author of this broken code used a variable named “l”, and despite the fact that it looks like a “1”, it is not!
It’s easy to write code that machines understand. The hard part about being a software engineer is writing code that both machine AND man can understand.
Lookout for Outlook is Gone
In the past few days I’ve received a flurry of email from frantic Lookout users asking how they can get a copy of the product. I thought I’d help them out and go dig out the location for downloading from Microsoft, but after a fairly deep search, it appears it has been removed from the Microsoft site, as well as other distribution sites like CNet.
Since I no longer work for Microsoft, I don’t know why. I’m not surprised, though, as the product is getting a bit stale. If you are one of the many folks using the product, I don’t know what the support plan from Microsoft is. I don’t have a copy of it myself any longer.
If you do know how to get a copy, please post a comment for others!
John Chow’s AGLOCO
John Chow is aggressively promoting Agloco. John is a smart guy. But should you get in on Agloco too? Should you use their viewbar? Probably not. The only thing you’ll accomplish by using the viewbar is to help John Chow get rich!
Agloco seems like a neat idea. Agloco aggregates of advertising, referral and affiliate fees generated by their “Viewbar” (yet unreleased), and then shares back 90% of that to their users.
But what is in it for you? Well, if you are John Chow and have the ability to build a large network of referred users, you might be able to bring in some decent cash. But if you are an individual, why would you use this Viewbar? Maybe you have a secret crush on John Chow and you just want to help him get rich. That’s fair. Or maybe you’ll like the viewbar and don’t care (I doubt it, people generally don’t like more advertisements – but it isn’t released yet and maybe they have a really cool product). But what will your cut of their profits be? Let’s estimate.
Let’s say the average Agloco user spends $250 per year online. And lets assume that Agloco is somehow able to tap into half of it. And, lets assume that Agloco manages to negotiate a very generous 10% commission on those sales. That means that on average, a user will be worth about $11.25. If you trust Agloco, you believe them when they say they’ll pay out 90% of revenues. That means each user should get a monthly check for $0.84 ($250*.5*.1/12)! Not bad! But, don’t forget that your contribution will be shared with up to 4 people that referred you (like John Chow). After splitting it 5 ways, your check is now reduced to $0.17 per month.
Next, lets look at advertising based models. Let’s say the average user views 10 pages per day, and that Agloco gets $10CPM for it’s page views. That means that each user generates about $0.10 per day. By the time you take out overhead and divide it through, you might generate $0.54 per month.
The Agloco fanatics will probably try to convince you that they’ll somehow generate more per user. Maybe they will. Say they magically double, triple, or heck, even get 10 times more than what I estimated. That means you’ll get $1.70 per month or $5.40. But that’s only if they do 10x better than what we seems to be a realistic estimate.
For Agloco, of course, this is a great business. They make 10% of the whole deal. If they amass a sizeable user base, they’ll generate solid cash.
And even for John Chow, this is still a good deal. John has the ability to sign up 5000 or more users. 5000 * $0.17 = $800/mo, which is decent money.
But for you – is the extra advertising and junk on your desktop really worth John Chow getting rich and your $0.17?
No thanks!
Note: John references this completely bogus report that looks well done, but provides zero facts to support it’s hopelessly optimistic and unsubstantiated claims. (He estimates Agloco could generate $30 or more per user, but it is completely made up!)
No Single Drop
No single raindrop believes it is to blame for the flood.
No single driver believes he is to blame for the traffic.
No single polluter believes she is to blame for global warming.
No single spammer believes he is to blame for ruining e-mail.
No single politician believes she is to blame for our tax system.
No single litterbug believes he is to blame for the mess.
No single lawyer believes she is to blame for frivolous lawsuits.
No single employee believes he is to blame for the quarterly loss.
No single American believes she is to blame for child labor in China.
Mac/PC Ads
I’m probably the 2,938,344th person to blog about this, but you should check it out. This is the PC version of those Mac ads.
I particularly liked the 4th one.