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Slashback: Courseware, Warranties, Subscraption
But will they distribute diploma blanks as PDF files? perlmunger writes "Linux Journal highlighted this in the 'up front' section of the June 2001 issue (I knew I keep these old issues around for a reason). Apparently, MIT will (finally) be opening their Open Course Ware initiative on September 30th to the public. Looks like a great start from many departments."
Answer: it's a strong possibility. skinfitz writes "Following on from Google returning to China, New Scientist is reporting in this article that Chinese surfers searching Google are finding their Internet connection dropped for five minutes if they enter "politically sensitive" keywords, such as the Chinese president's name! Will this new technology find uses elsewhere? Is this the future of the web?"
My human transporter is still a station wagon. An anonymous reader writes with the text which by now many people have seen regarding the status of the world's most famous unavailable scooter; apparently it's not necessarily as far from available as an automated message from Amazon implied.
"Greetings from Amazon.com.You recently received an e-mail from us regarding the Segway Human Transporter (also known as "Ginger" or "IT"). This e-mail was sent accidentally by an automated system and the information in it is incorrect.
In fact, there is no new information on Segway's availability. Consumer versions of Segway Human Transporters are currently being piloted in various communities throughout the U.S. The Segway HT is expected to be released to the general consumer market in 2003.
We apologize for the confusion. We will keep your e-mail address on our list of customers who wish to be notified about this item.
Sincerely,
Amazon.com Customer Service
Strong Opinions softsign writes "Apparently, Tim O'Reilly's recent article addressing the topic of Switchers was so popular and generated so much response that he felt compelled to respond to reader comments in his MacDevCenter column this week. It reads almost like the Apple Switch website, but there are some really insightful emails peppered with Tim's comments. Worth a read."
The moon's been asking for this for years. cscx writes "The mysterious space junk, or apparent "other moon" reported a few weeks ago, now is more likely to be an old Saturn V (from the Apollo program) rocket booster. Bad thing is, there is a 20% chance it could strike the moon sometime next year. More details at MSNBC."
We'll let you you borrow it for a while, sign here. An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft has scrapped plans for subscription-based licensing of consumer products following the end of a 12-month trial in several countries including New Zealand. The Story says people were getting confused as to why they had to pay after the 12 months had gone by."
I find your lack of confidence disturbing. Longinus writes "Ars Technica is reporting that Western Digital is going to follow Maxtor's recent decision to cut their warranty of future drives from three years to one, with an extended warranty being offered at an additional price. The article goes on to mention that Seagate is rumored to also be considering such a cut, but nothing official has been confirmed. One can only wonder if this increase in price is to due to corporate cost saving measures or the fact that hard drives are becoming less stable magnetically as they increase in storage space."
(Generally, midrange buisness that can't afford regular backups will be hit hardest by this)
Backups are a necessity, not an option.
In the most primitive case, you just mirror to one or more remote sets of drives. Cost is not that monumental.
If you can afford to staff a company, you can also afford a tape drive, if you want a better long-term solution.
You _will_ have drive failure or some other data-destroying event happen once every few years. A wise business must plan accordingly (or plan to recover from having all of their data eaten).
I agree. I just bought a new hard drive, and the smallest thing I could get was 40 gig. What the FUCK do I need 40 gig for unless I'm an MP3 freak? I wanted to get a small, rock solid drive. I got something bigger than I need, insanely faster than I need, and I just hope to god it lasts a while (No, of course I didn't get a Western Digital!). Fuck size. I want reliability.
I believe that all electronic devices sold in the USA automatically carry a one-year manufacturer's warranty, no exceptions. (Is this law BTW?)
Given this one-year manufacturer's warranty, I am actually surprised that some hard drive manufacturers were still offering longer warranties. I am surprised they didn't convert warranties to one-year ones a long time ago, or simply have one-year ones from the start.
Loomis
"The television is the retina of the mind's eye" - Videodrome
Now take IBM. Please. My new mac's (1st Quicksilver) HD crapped out after 2 Months!!!
I'll stick with WD, thanks.
yeah but I expect these things to work for more than a year. Hell I expected my 24x CDRW to last more than 4 months.
I don't care if everyone considers at $100 piece of hardware "throw away". I still have my USR Courier 28.8 (56k) from when it first came out. I still have 3Com Ethernet cards from way back (ISA), and I still have a TON of other random hardware (including other HDs).
This stuff is always able to be reused (especially for other poor college students that have shit that breaks and need it replaced quickly and for free).
I am sick and tired of recent hardware breaking and the fucking manus not taking responsibility.
Make some decent hardware and put a 1 yr on it. Fine. Otherwise make shit hardware and put a long one on it.
My rant is over.
These are cool toys, but the 40-60 pound weight means that they're not something you want to carry around.
However, as a longtime cyclist commuter, the 10-15 mile range is easily done on a bicycle. Better for you and the environment than a scooter. Yes, hills suck, but not as much as fighting with cars in traffic.
There are some collapsable bicycles, but I've never found these to be worthy of riding more than 1-2 miles at a stretch.
If your local transit company is forward thinking and has bike racks on the bus, then you're set. (Santa Barbara, I recall, had one bus per hour that dragged a trailer meant for bicycles, and I'd usually see it with 10 bikes on board.)
Buy yourself something theft-proof, like a Schwinn, which is still great quality. My Schwinn mountain bike is my city commuter, outfitted with street slicks, fenders, a rack, and hasn't been touched or mauled once in 12 years. I've ridden it through snow, rain, below-zero weather, and it saved me a bundle and kept my weight down.
Everyone comments that riding a bike in cold weather is cold, but it isn't as cold as you think I frequently had to ride slowly so as to not break a sweat. Your legs are very big muscles, and they generate a lot of heat once you get going. I'd be cold at the start of my 3 mile commute, then I'd be warm after 4 blocks, and perspiring for the last mile.
Snow was no problem with street slicks, but ice is. Fresh, untracked snow is easy to ride in, but once the cars start packing it, your tire wants to follow the random crossing tire tracks, and it gets squirrely.
If you're going to commute, get a good, reflective vest, a strong headlight, two tail lights (and clip a third one on you), and get another headlight for your helmet. Shining that head-mounted light into left-turning drivers, who are looking for a break in traffic and not anything else, are stopped cold by a bright light hitting them in the face.
Finally, always carry a cell phone. It depends upon the area, but some areas have motorists that enjoy scaring cyclists. I've had cars cross four lanes of traffic, coming toward me, just to try to scare me. Or they'll speed up past me, dynamite the brakes, and cut me off in a right-hand turn. Ride defensively, live to be old.
Above all, skip recumbant bicycles. Neato, but when you're sitting down that low, you can't see as well, and that little orange flag on a stick isn't going to protect you from motorists. Quite frankly, it is better to be thrown over the hood of the car that cuts you off, than to be whacked in the chest by the grill because you were riding a recumbant.
I live in a giant bucket.
I just recently bought maxtor. Four of them in fact, the 160GB ones. Had I completely lost my mind? No, I was assembling a RAID. I think that's where these drives belong - where failure does not cause catastrophy. By the time these fail, (and I'm very sure they will) they will quite possibly be out of warranty, but at that point I won't really care. I'll just buy another one and slap it in and toss the old one in the can. Anything worth keeping that can't be RAIDed is stored on a Seagate or one of the pre-maxtor-buyout Quantums.
In Australia, Under the trade practices act, a product has to be fit for purpose. If all our tax laws for depreciation etc are based around a 3 year time frame for computer parts, then the Australian Consumer watchdog may well argue that the product must be designed to meet that purpose.... this argument has already started, with the ACCC looking into mandating certain products having certain length warranties....
Will be interesting to see how it pans out.
lounge around on the blue couch
One thing you have to consider is that your Ethernet cards have no moving parts. Your soundcards have no moving parts. Your video card has no moving parts. Your RAM has no moving parts. Your hard disks, however, move quite a lot. True it seems older hard drives seem to live longer, but you also have to take other factors into consideration such as capacity, speed, and overall quality.
Although I know very little about hard drives, it seems logical to assume that there is a direct correlation between storage capacity and drive capacity. For more space, you've got to have more platters and a higher storage density. This means you have more mechanics to deal with these finer details, which is just another place for something to go wrong.
It is rather easy to see why faster drive speeds would decrease the MTBF (Mean Time Between Failure) of a hard drive. The mechanics are moving faster, and more work has to be done to keep then spinning properly. On top of this, you get the extra friction, wear, and tear that increased speeds cause. You may be able to walk at 1 mile an hour for a few hours, but you can't run at 25mph for nearly as long.
And finally, you have drive quality. It is my opinion that as time has passed, hard drive demand has increased as well. In fact, I"m sure somebody could prove this given the proper numbers, graphs, calculators, and secretary. I would imagine that drive manufacturers, in order to meet increased demands, have substituted quality for price. And thus, drives have become much cheaper at the expensve of high MTBF.
So what is my point in this comment? I'm merely pointing out that there are many factors that need to be taken into consideration before saying, "Hey! My other hardware lives much longer than these new crappy hard drives!" I'm sure if you were in the place of the manufacturers, you'd shorten the warranty if you could get away with it. I don't necessary enjoy having shorter warranties, but I see why it is necessary. After having three IBM hard drives die on me within a yaer, it became crystal clear to me that drive manufacturers were losinga pretty penny on RMAs.
Beware, Nugget is watching... See?
Your backside will definitely thank you. As will your wrists and neck.
If your wrists and neck hurt, you've obvious got the wrong handlebar/seat setup going. I can easily make the "wedgy" claim that i get to where I need to go in comfort. It's quite simple, I walk upright, thus I can bike upright. Oh, and I really want to see a recumbent try to handle some Boston potholes and curbs. The upright bicycle (& motorcycle) setup is the more maneuverable and easier to handle position. If I wanted to go recumbent to work, I'd move somewhere uphill from the office and get a street luge.
You seem to expect O'Reilly to act as a shill for open source. Why does O'Reilly's position as a book publisher mandate that he is not allowed an opinion? Or that he is obligated to behave in a fashion approved by open source dogmatics? He is under no obligation to even try and give any consideration to anyone's opinions about ODX, good, bad, or indifferent. He's simply making the point that a number of Linux users have dropped that OS and moved to OS X. No one except fantatics cares if OS X is r-e-a-l-l-y Unix or not or if buying a Mac threatens the open source movement. There are people who think having religious opinions about operating systems makes about as much sense as having religious opinions about automobile transmissions.
Besides, if you'd read the piece, you'd see that it contains criticism of Apple as well as praise.
-- Slashdot: When Public Access TV Says "No"
Yeah, that's pretty much it - one of the ones used on Apollo missions was called a Thumper. Then there were the mortars which lobbed explosive charges, after the astronauts had taken off. See this or this.
They used active seismometers to do things like measure the depth of the regolith, i.e. the layer of mostly loose rock fragments and sand/dust that make up the outer mantle of the moon (and the Earth for that matter). The moon's regolith was found to be about 35 feet deep in the places they measured, compared to 300 feet in some parts of the Earth.
Actually, under certain circumstances, it does. It isn't uncommon for dealers (at least in rural areas) to give someone a "loaner" car while their vehicle was being repaired if the repair was expected to take more than a day.
Now, part of that is a belief that people are more likely to buy things in the future from a dealer that treats their customers with respect. But not all states allow for limitation of liability in the case of loss of business due to defects in manufacture, particularly if lemon laws come into play. And, of course, you won't know if the car is a lemon until it has been repaired several times, at which point the dealer can't go back in time and give them a loaner for the previous repairs....
California, for example, explicitly allows for recovery of consequential damages in the case of a lemon. Which might work for a delivery truck, particularly if the dealer doesn't provide a loaner.
For a hard drive, though, it would be extremely difficult to prove that you couldn't reasonably protect yourself from such a loss, which as best I can tell, is one of the requirements. In short, with a hard drive, you might be able to get consequential damages for the loss of productivity while the drive is being repaired, but it seems unlikely that you'd be able to get money for the loss of data unless you could prove that the company shipped defective drives with malice of forethought, and maybe not even then.
Caveat Emptor, IANAL.
120 character sigs suck. Make it 250.
The MTBF ratings on modern hard drives belie your statements. Seagate's top-end 15k RPM drives carry MTBF ratings of over a million hours (more than 100 years). Even much-maligned consumer drives like WDC's Caviar line are rated at 500,000 hours MTBF.
Think about it this way. The outer track on a 3.5" platter running at 7200RPM is going at over 60MPH. The read head is precise enough to find a single sector in a track 1/40,000th of an inch wide while it's whizzing by that fast. A car moving at 60MPH would be lucky to hit a dime and has hardly a prayer of lasting 57 years (500,000 hours), let alone running that long.
I hate car analogies, and I think a 1-year warranty sucks but even so, do we really need to be bitching about hard drives? The price per megabyte has dropped by a factor of 1000 in under 10 years; reliability (based on MTBF ratings) and speed have increased by a factor of 5-10 in the same time frame. Name me one other computer component that can boast the same.
High-speed Road Trip (18.000KPH)
I'm going to roll a reply to a previous comment about someone being afraid to ride. What anyone who commutes by bicycle has to do is simply understand natural law...not the crap that "the man" has beat us over the head with, or the things we've learned from Warner Bros. cartoons. Natural law implies that when a 1/4 hp., sub 300lb. vehicle is occupying the desired space of a semi-hairless primate(bored, anxious, distracted) behind the wheel of a 2+ton moving block of metal and plastic that the union of these two systems will result in some really nifty physics...often to the physical detriment of the previous occupant, and the slightly higher premiums of the second. Simply put, always consider yourself invisble to the vehicles unless you make eye-contact and recieve non-verbal acknowledgement from the motorist. Having done that, the cyclist has only to understand natural law and human stupidity to enjoy their commute.
And with that out of the way, onto the good stuff.
I have been commuting by bicycle since 1988, and I only have a car because my kids are still too young and stupid and my wife has a bad knee, otherwise the whole whining lot of them would be on bikes (everyone in the family has a bike).
Bravo to you sir for giving your previous nag a new home. My recommendation is a multi-vectored approach to getting a good bicycle. You have to consider the bike shops in your area, and look for a franchise, like Cycle Spectrum (but not necessarily them, because other bike-shop franchises exist, I just don't remember them now). There's a good chance that both regular shops and esp. franchises have what they consider a less stylish, less trendy bikes taking up space they would rather fill with faux shocks and bad alloys and other candy to attract the unwary. These bikes are usually going for about $300, which in sales terms is an impulse purchase for someone who wants something useful.If you can find a simple hybrid--a style that no longer sells like hotcakes--make sure it's nothing hard to maintain like shocks. Look for grip-shift,with quick-release hubs front and rear, and get yourself a blackburn mtn rack. Most of the time a shop-keeper will feel your love for the bike and in a synergistic desire to sweeten the deal will almost impulsively add it as a perk. That rack will hold two good u-locks (that's one of the best kept secrets in the business--enjoy), which are invaluable if you have to tether the beastie outside the workplace. However, if you really love your horse, you'll whine-bitch-plead and maybe even argue intelligently to bring it into the building with you. If you love it, bring it inside.
If your commute takes you through suburban areas filled with bored kids or goatheads, you need to invest in a bit of SLIME. It's green, it costs a bit, but unlike the wannabe competitors products(cough-mucous-cough), slime will not let you down unless the laws of physics require it to. You also need high thread-count nylon tires. Slicks or invert treads have less rubber and are reinforced with a lot of nylon threads. When shopping for tires, take one down and open it up and see how dense the threads are. You should also invest in 4.5mil thick thorn-proof tubes. Schwinn, and Bontrager and some other companies import and repackage/resell these. Combined with the slime and good tires there's a chance you will only have to walk a little before reinflating the tire. I've often pulled some really evil stuff (nails, glass, industrial staples, plant thorns) out, spun the wheel for a minute and still had enough pressure to make it home.
Another point to consider when buying a good bike is not so much the up-front cost of the bike (top-ramen is your friend), but the kind of service and warranty a shop will provide you. For a franchise, sometimes this is free tune-ups and labor for the life of the beastie. Granted, the shop you bought the bike from will change hands like a 30yr mortgage, you'll still have your bike taken care of. Usually what happens with the cheap kit is that within a week after you've purchased it, everyting flexes and stretches a bit...it's supposed to. However, Walmart, or whatever-mart isn't responsible for those changes. A bike shop is.
Another thing to consider is the way you approach the gearing. The more you move through your gears, the faster you wear your drive train. There's a simple way to look at wear-and-tear here: If you like to pedal like mad (and think you're a porsche) and go through your gears, making more than three or four gear changes until you're cruising, then don't expect to stay in tune. You're much better off being in the biggest chainring (front gear) during the warm months, and at least starting off in the middle chainring when it's colder, and then figuring out the best place to start with the cog. YMMV depending on the commute. I have my bike tuned only once every few years...I've had it five years and I put over 4500+ miles are year on it just commuting year round. I start out in 17th gear and go up to 19th, only to the highest gears two gears when I'm spinning fast to get in to work because I'm late (or because I'm chasing a pack of spandex goddesses for a quick double-wammy: endorphins and a pheromone fix-heheheh)
I wish you happy hunting--don't buy at the first shop you go into! (been there, done that)p
Every new form of media has it's own Requirimento