Microsoft with their Hotmail registered user account (when in reality most people use their accounts for junk mail garbage bins and registration accounts), Skype with their hundreds of millions of registered users and hundred thousand new accounts *per day* in China alone when in reality any time you log in you see at most few million connected users (and no doubt part of that number is due to Skype by default starting up automatically after install, most people won’t, or don’t know how, to turn it off).

So it’s a pretty standard practice at large. It is not entirely invaluable either when it comes to collecting investment money. Those registrations can be considered as sales leads (depending on the registration process, more or less qualified). Qualified leads are valuable to, say, a media company interested in advertizing. Furthermore, any investor worth their salt will look at the % of those leads currently being monetized, evaluate the company’s strategy to monetize additional % of those leads and based on that make their valuation.

That’s not 30,500 users of course…I’d be interested to see comparative stats for multiple accounts in various MMO’s.

What they failed to mention was that the PC power supply only provided 2 watts of power to the ISA card, which made their 8-watt op-amp moot.

I also wonder about sound cards that advertise 20-bit DACs… We had a 16-bit DAC, but could never get more than 13 bits of signal-to-noise, which made the last 3 bits pointless. Unless ground plane design and shielding has been ramped up for 20-bit cards, which it probably hasn’t, they still only get 13 bits before noise takes over.

And even if 20 bits means 20 bits, you’d only notice if you were in a perfectly quiet room and playing games that had very quiet sections in them… which doesn’t happen.