These jerks are targeting everyone. PC and console, Microsoft and Sony.
The GP's point was that Starcraft is possible to play on a server unlikely to get DDoS'd. When my friends and I play Starcraft, it's over a LAN with no internet access at all. If you wish to DDoS my game server, you'll have to trespass to do it.
Targeting any given company's game servers doesn't affect the titles who don't require that players be online to play them.
That said, perhaps DropBox could sell a self-hosted version of their software and bring over their ease-of-use.
The challenge DropBox faces with a self-hosted iteration of its software is that it stops being 'simple'. Existing Dropbox clients would have to be completely rewritten to go from asking "username and password, please" to "username, password, server address, and port, please". Even if we hand-wave away that problem by assuming that users can either correctly type a server name and port number, or that Dropbox will still have 'accounts' but essentially become a DynDNS clone and simply handle network traversal and matching users to their data repositories, we then have to deal with the Dropbox Server software. There may be a market for Dropbox to sell drives like these, but I don't see Western Digital wanting to partner with Dropbox to provide redundant functionality to their existing apps, and I don't see consumers paying more for a Dropbox branded drive if they're already in the "self-contained NAS" market - a handful might, but now Dropbox, for all intents and purposes, finds itself with all the challenges of being an external hard drive vendor...with the added bonus of directly competing with the vendors from whom they're sourcing their parts.
The obvious alternative to this would be for them to sell their software and let it run on a LAMP/WAMP stack, on whatever hardware is on hand, and market it to the enthusiast/enterprise market, like UnRAID or Nexenta. That might be a short term win, especially if they do some fancy stuff with LDAP/Active Directory integration. Conversely, I see it potentially being a support nightmare based on how it deals with storage. Will it install on an Ubuntu desktop containing a hodgepodge of hard disks? Would it be more like FreeNAS where it makes its own software RAID, but requires hardware to be dedicated (or its own VM)? Even at that, how do they bill for the software? One-time use seems like it wouldn't be a good long-term plan, but I don't see too many users being okay with Dropbox charging them an annual fee to use their own hard drives. CALs could be a useful method (arguably the most workable one), but they'd have a hard time managing their consumer-friendly image on one hand with Oracle-style licensing on the other.
Levie is right; 'free' isn't a business model. Dropbox's 2GB number is only sustainable because they're betting that a certain number of those users will go for a paid tier. Either every Dropbox customer will pay, or they start advertising, or they data mine. To my knowledge, those are the three business models that have sustained themselves on the internet. 'Everyone Pays' may be a viable model if Dropbox can do things like sell gift cards for their service (for users unable/unwilling to fork over their Mastercard) and come up with the right formula of how much customers are really willing to pay for storage+ubiquity+simplicity. Although Levie must certainly be feeling the pinch from Microsoft's 1TB of OneDrive for $60/year, the one client we attempted to migrate to that service went back to dropbox VERY quickly because the desktop client was utter crap; I'm left to believe that Dropbox's simplicity still has an edge just yet. Conversely, I don't think that $50/month for 500GB is worthwhile, either - That's only slightly less than it'd cost to buy a 500GB hard disk outright from Newegg every month.
Dropbox is still a well-recognized brand that I'm certain many consumers are still willing to pay a premium for, and Microsoft and Google are competing not only with more storage for less money, but with integration as well - editing a spreadsheet in Sheets or Excel and seamless saving of attachments is not the kind of thing that Dropbox can effectively compete with. Dropbox's best bet right now, in my half-asleep opinion, is to see how much value-add they CAN provide to their existing tiers. I can't quite fathom what that is (a trivial example off the top of my head would be an IM client add-on), but one thing is for sure: they can't easily compete against companies who sell their own gigabytes by selling someone else's gigabytes.
I use Apple products, but I'm by no means a fanboy, as my signature suggest (fanboys should NEVER have mod-points). I support Apple products at work, use a 27" iMac at work (which I rather like, and I've put TotalTerminal and other utils on to make it more Linux-like and comfortable for me), and I've got a work iPad 2, all of which I like.
I'm actually a Linux/Android guy.
Why I like Apple better under cook:
Less lawsuits. They're slowly settling/arbitrating old ones and filing less new ones. I developed a deep hatred of Apple under Jobs due to his temper-tantrums and deep ingrained need to shit in everyone else's punch bowls.
I'm seeing less new intenentional handicaps of their own products, and some of the old ones are getting less rigid (iOS is becoming slightly less user-hostile).
They've finally declared hardware the source of their profits and allowed free upgrades to the OS. (I refuse to use the nomenclature of "Free Operating System" that's been used here on Slashdot too damned many time to describe Mavericks since it's still tied to a mandatory purchase to run it)
What Apple still needs to work on:
Drop all user hostility - make so people can release source code for iOS apps they write. Stop attempting to strong-arm exclusivity out of the iOS platform.
ADOPT FRIGGIN NORMAL CABLES FOR YOUR IOS DEVICES
USB-C connectors are on their way, go with those. All the advantages of your Lightning cables but not "just ours".
Give me an editable path bar I can enable (it can be off by default) like every other OS. As a tech moving around yoru file system is more of a pain than it's worth. Don't spout anything at me about using muCommander or something, I'm a tech, I support other peoples stuff and I don't want to install crap or run utilities that have to be imported somehow every time I sit at a different system.
Drop the artificial restrictions on OS updates "when it was manufactured" isn't a good yard-stick for install eligibility and everyone knows it. Those Mac Pros that are six months too old to run Mavericks are more than capable of doing so and everyone knows it, it just makes you look like a bunch of pricks by barring install.
So we can thank you for the success of the Linux desktop then? Fine.
Do you think that your carefully crafted arguments convinced him, or anybody? (Outside of 4chan)
Apparently anybody that disagrees with you is a fool, liar, and a paid stooge of ${ORG}.
Linux would be better off if it had fewer poison pen advocates like you.
It's public record who passed the law. The Democrats own that law, lock, stock, and barrel, for better or worse.
Not really, no. At least not in the US.
In the US the public is armed, and the government doesn't threaten to kill the public. Things are the way they are because of laws.
That's kind of the point - there was no "well controlled manufactured drug" since there was no standard dosage.
Oral colchicine had been used for many years as an unapproved drug with no prescribing information, dosage recommendations, or drug interaction warnings -- FDA approval
.
And it has some dangerous potential side-effects beyond simple drug interaction.
Without dosage and interaction information you're in the supplement world.
I'm pretty sure that interactions with drugs created or repurposed in the recent past don't have a history going back millennia.
The drug ritonavir, which is used to treat AIDs, for example, was only approved in 1996 and it apparently has an interaction with colchicine. The shamans aren't going to be a help with learning that.
That still doesn't get you where you want to go since corporations don't "control" the government. Politicians are still voted into office by voters, not corporations.
A big part of the blame should go to the failed market and its greedy occupants that cause $1 worth of chemicals to cost more than many people make in a year.
A big part of the problem discussing this is clueless people that assign no cost or value to the development and maintenance of scientific and industrial facilities to support investigation of new drugs, and the many person-years of scientific research to identify new drugs, develop the means to economically manufacture them, test them to ensure that they are safe and effective, deal with the growing government bureaucracy, get them to market, and deal with the court cases from the outliers and mistakes.
How about this - we have two drug markets that you can sign up for. One drug market is pretty much as things are today, but maybe with a bit less regulation. The other drug market is one in which anyone that can scrape $1 of chemicals into a pouch and get it to drug stores can sell it for whatever they think it is good for. Maybe they could honor that second market name with a name: patent medicine.
Which will you be signing up for?
Except that the site was NOT required. Most states did NOT implement their own site, and either default to the federal site or formed a regional partnership.
In order to qualify legally for the subsidies under the law each state had to set up its own exchange. If the state is going to have an exchange then people need to have a way to access it. How are you going to do that without a web site? Snail mail? Telephone? Currier?
Obamacare’s Architect Agreed That Only State Exchanges Could Offer Subsidies
There are many states where people are not legally eligible for subsidies. They have been illegally receiving them, but they shouldn't count on that to last..
How about colchicine? It cost about $8/month. Then, one company did a million dollar study, generally considered to have contributed nothing to medical knowledge, and so got temporary exclusivity from the FDA and suddenly it costs $450 for the same thing.
I guess you consider dosage and drug interaction information to be overrated? You know that neglecting that sort of thing kills people?
Do you want your medicine based on modern science, or the "wisdom" of the ancient Greeks and various hill people?
Oral colchicine had been used for many years as an unapproved drug with no prescribing information, dosage recommendations, or drug interaction warnings approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA).[8] On July 30, 2009 the FDA approved colchicine as a monotherapy for the treatment of three different indications (familial Mediterranean fever, acute gout flares, and for the prophylaxis of gout flares[8]), and gave URL Pharma a three-year marketing exclusivity agreement[9] in exchange for URL Pharma doing 17 new studies and investing $100 million into the product, of which $45 million went to the FDA for the application fee. URL Pharma raised the price from $0.09 per tablet to $4.85, and the FDA removed the older unapproved colchicine from the market in October 2010 both in oral and IV form, but gave pharmacies the opportunity to buy up the older unapproved colchicine.[10] Colchicine in combination with probenecid has been FDA approved prior to 1982.[9
Based on the immensity of the pharmaceutical companies, they aren't exactly losing money.
And some people think thriving businesses can lose money on every sale but make it up "in volume."
That is "Really Big-O" notation, to which you can add, "Oh no!"
If God had not given us sticky tape, it would have been necessary to invent it.
