But but... school students are funny. I think the stories of zany grammitcal and spelling errors made in school essays are hilarious whether they are attributed to 1st grade or college students. I think the ones attributed to college students are funnier because they're "supposed to know better."
If this is in bad taste.. well.. maybe it is, or maybe tech-people just have a different sense of humor. I usually manage to laugh at my own mistakes while learning so at least I'm fair about it..
It looks like this marketing guy implied that she was the one that lied (to him) which is why he was "confused." Are you out there Kornelia? Are you still working for these guys?
That is exactly why giving away tech support is a bad idea in the first place. They should charge for tech support from the get-go. Then they could charge a lower price, make more profit, and penalize the users who have wierd system configurations or aren't capable of getting it working, or just like to call tech support and harass them.
Think about it.. what percentage of users actually need tech support? How many of those are lamers who do stupid stuff? How many of those are people who just didn't read the manual? How many of those are people who insisted on installing "Game blaster game acceleration software" or "registry tuning software" and so fscked up their machine that it won't work? That probably covers most of them, and if a couple of innocents have to pay.. oh well. They will have paid less for the boxed software in the first place, it will probably about balance out.
I think it would be a much better "value-add" than free tech support to *supply* a stripped down linux distribution that they can install that definitely will work with the game software.. heck that might solve a lot of windows users problems anyway.
I think this represents a much better economic model (of course I think the software should be free too, but I realize that can be difficult to apply in the gaming world). But I wouldn't expect GT or anyone else to think that "out of the box"... uk uk.. pun intended.
I think you are definitely in the realm of if you want it, make it! As far as I know, there is no complete open source solution out there, but it doesn't seem like it will be long before there is. Everyone I know has been pretty unhappy with Legato and various other proprietery and *hideously* expensive solutions.
If you are considering rolling your own, try NDMP, which is actually a protocol (client/server) designed for network backups, like a "super rmt." It seems like it was mostly developed by Network Appliance for their boxen, but it is open source: http://www.ndmp.org
It seems to be built around the premise that you will buy commercial software to use the NDMP interface provided by their servers. But an open source client/server is available which can build (easily!) under just about any UNIX.
The stock ndmp client and server basically support dumping and restoring, but the API supports controlling a mechanical tape loader and someone has written an open source utility to manipulate a StorageTek loader (10 or 20 dlts). Not the same scale, I know but I would imagine that StorageTek uses the same command interface for all of their loaders. This utility is available from: http://now.netapp.com/download/tools/ndmputil You might have to register for a free login to get in there.
Also, you can roll your own from scratch! Our StoragTek loader came with a pretty clearly documented manual, and all of the commands for moving the robot arm are simply SCSI commands sent over the SCSI bus. The linux SCSI API is probably "reasonably" easy to program to send arbitrary SCSI commands to arbitrary devices. I know that someone (somewhere) has implemented a Solaris utility (and I am almost certain it is open source) to manipulate the robot arm of a StoragTek via the Sun SCSI driver.
I think that a *lot* of the robots out there are StorageTek too, just simply relabelled, but I'm pretty sure that most of the non-StorageTek ones (if there are any) also talk to the robot arm over the SCSI bus.
Nothing to worry about. Companies are just having a hard time figuring the new model out. They are used to.. well.. Sun produces Solaris. That's all, noone else.
My employer's software product used to be released for RedHat version X. But they have since learned that not only can people run different versions which have all the libraries etc. required to run the binary, but they can also run distributions. Our next release will simply require, eg: libc6.0, libXm2.x or whatever. Everyone else will figure it out too. The linux market is small enough without cutting out large chunks of it by limiting the distribution.
I couldn't agree more -- it is wrong to force the cat to undergo that when you can't meaningfully get an acknowledgement that it is okay.
Otoh, I'd probably volunteer for that because I think it is cool, and could definitely have a lot of applications and uses.
At least it is "sort of" better than all the un-scientists who keep repeating meaningless tests on new species just so that they can publish. Like -- okay, we've established that Chimps act like they've been hurt when we blast electricity across their temples.. let's see what apes do..
I have to say that my experiences with my Ultra 5 hasn't been as bad as yours, although I don't think the graphics have any 3d acceleration as a Permedia chip would. I understood that it was an Ati Rage pro chip.
The big problem here is that Sun doesn't keep up with PC pricing. When Ultra 5's came out, you could basically take a bottom of the line Ultra 5, and it would keep up with a PC of equivelant price for CPU speed, at least.
Then 3D graphics started to get much cheaper, and more common on PC's, chip prices fell at their usual rates... what did Sun do on pricing? Nothing.
This price reduction should have happened a long time ago, and I think the Ultra 5 should be around $700 now to even be close to the PC market, which is where it was targetted.
If Sun is going to use commodity components (commodity memory, IDE, made-in-taiwan motherboard and cheap case, PCI cards), then they *have* to keep up with the "commodity" market's pricing structure.
Or rather.. they can choose not to price things that way, and then the only people who will buy them are people who have a vested interest in Suns, develop for the platform, etc. -- right back where you started, only now these unfortunate people are getting crappy hardware for their extra dollars.
If Sun wants to compete with the commodity market, they had better get serious about it, and they'd better get a *LOT* more serious than this.
Hey, that's easy, you've already got buy-in from upper management. Get him to mandate printing quotas, reduce the number of available printers, and place the available printers in locations where people have to walk as far as possible to get to them. Also, keep paper and toner supplies under lock and key, with very few people having the key. Then place only a minimum of extra paper near the printers, no toner.
People are afraid of technology, but they are also lazy. I am inclined to thing that laziness will win out, but it is worth an experimental try anyway.
Heck, you probably only need management buy-in to institute quotas, the rest you can do on your own.
Someone mentioned bugzilla, and I think that CVS, rsync and other open source distributed development tools point to an inevitability -- a lot of open source is based on "scratching an itch", so it is only a matter of time before someone develops a complete package to do it (presumably with documentation).
I've given it some thought at such a system would be entirely web-based for information, and some command line driven for speed of development. It would ideally tie in the user end of things -- easy ways to download the latest alphas, and the developers side -- easy ways to upload the latest alphas, comments automatically generated into HTML documentation, org charts, automated software tests.. the whole 9 yards.:-)
Are you a geek? A nerd? Well then don't worry about it. Worry about your job skills and marketability, and such. Figure out what you're going to do with your life. Forget about the processor.
2 years will pass. Surprise -- you're making more money than you know what to do with, and you're donating your still useable old dual 500Mhz system to a school or something because you can afford a 12 processor 3000Mhz system without even thinking about it.
Hey, just go for it. If you're that handy with a soldering iron, try replacing the clock crystal and see if you can overclock those suckers.
Think about it -- the worst you can do is nuke one of them. I think if you are careful about how you dismember it, and take good notes, you could even hook the dismembered one back up well enough to function.
I usually end up with junk for my hardware hacking troubles, but I always have fun.
I would think your duty as a manger would be to do the best thing for the business, which is not necessarily the cheapest thing.
I'm not saying that the Celeron was not the best thing for you, but if that's your attitude as a manager it won't be long before you get burned by some of your decisions.
I could be wrong, but I'm sure that "on board" SCSI and UDMA (as in, placed on the motherboard) would provide just the same performance with just the same CPU load as putting in say, a PCI expansion card.
The reason for this is that while "on board" is built onto the motherboard, it is not in any way more dependant on the CPU. It still resides on the PCI bus, it just has traced connections to the bus controller instead of a card-slot connection. Most of the on-board SCSI/UDMA setups use exactly the same chipset (eg: Adaptec 7940 or whatever) as the off-board ones as well.
No capitalism isn't fair (its more laize faire.. hehe), but it works and the US proves it.
Oh you are so so so wrong. Lets look at your definition of the word "works." Who does it work for? The gigantic corporations which can give huge contributions to campaign funds to control politics, which can hire high-caliber lawyers to control the law.Sure yeah, it "works" for them, but what about the other guy -- the individual who gets taxed on gross income, verses the business who gets taxed only on profit. The small business which has none of the legal benifits and incentives that large businesses do. Nothing that is "not fair" can work. It may *seem* to work, but that is all dependant on your perspective.
In the Middle ages, feudalism "seemed" to work for kings, queens and propertied gentry. In all less than 5% of the population. It "worked" for many hundreds of years. But for the majority of the population it did not even close to work.
I think if you asked "everyone", the majority would say "yes, capitalism is working." The thing is that unlike the medieval peasants, they _don't even know_ that they are getting screwed by the system. That as a wage earner a person barely makes enough to stay even and in an industrialized society which has capacity to produce far more food and goods than are needed, the average wage earner still has to take out a *huge* loan to buy a house, and even a vehicle and get raped for years by interest.
No way are those chicklet packets real keyboards. A real keyboard is something that my hands can fully position and type at. My brain/hands automatically switch into hunt-n-peck mode when the keyboard is too small, which is just as slow, if not slower than graffiti.
There are other problems with that. Suppose not all 8 people put in equal effort (quite likely, even if unintentional). How do you fairly decide who gets paid what?
In the world of free software where recognition *is* how are you are paid, you might get hurt or offended if some slacker gets more recognition than you, but if you get paid less than some slacker.. that will create some serious problems. (burn bridges)
MPEG 2 HDTV recording would *definitely* be a big win. I believe that if you do not do it, then someone else will. Soon.
The problem with your fat pipe is that it has high latencies, making it difficult to use for interactive stuff. I think it may be sort-of okay for web browsing, but obviously that has been done, so you should just look at some of the other systems that do it and see what they are like.
I think a *big* market would be ISPs. ISPs have very very large bandwidth needs, and a good portion of it does not need to be interactive, for instance, news. If you could have one of these things broadcasting USENET news, that would be great, and ISPs would be able to take some load off their DS3s for their customers to use.
ftp server mirroring would also be useful this way.
Funding for this sort of thing is based on potential returns. I have a friend who is a physics Postdoc at McGill University (Montreal, CA) and is very bright. He has no stake in this research, and has told me that the amount of money required for this research does not even come close to making sense in terms of reward, considering that even if they were getting results, it would take on the order of at least 100 to 120 years to make it feasable for general use. There is more promising and rewarding energy research going on (although he didn't say what). I will be sure to ask.
But you're wrong. Software bloat used to be like that, but to my perception it no longer is. You can run Word 97 on the same PC that ran Word 95 with very very minimal performance difference. Try that with word 6.0 vs word 2.0 (yes, they skipped a few version numbers, I believe).
Playing animations is a totally different task, and I suspect you would have found that older versions of media player would have skipped and dropped just as much. If you have different requirements for what you *do* with the software, then you hvae to get a different machine, but it is no longer simply the "required" software upgrades *themselves* that are forcing machine upgrades.
Using ads to pay for the entire cost of something is a time honored tradition. Many school newspapers and publications use this. In most cities there is at least one free print news publication which is entirely paid for by ads. I say, go for it, let the market decide. (and I firmly believe that there will be a place in the market for this.. there will be people willing to be blitzed with ads to get something for "free"... always)
That said, I've had a taste of open source software, and that has been my taste of delight. I'm not going back.
This is probably not a very good idea. When you encode a regular wav file to mp3, it is a lossy process, so you lose information and quality by doing so (albeit not much). When you recreate the wav (with a decoder), that wav shows the resulting loss of quality. If you use that decoded mp3 to create a minidisc, then it gets compressed again, with lossy compression. So you get two different styles of loss. That's probably not going to give you very good results.
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But but... school students are funny. I think the stories of zany grammitcal and spelling errors made in school essays are hilarious whether they are attributed to 1st grade or college students. I think the ones attributed to college students are funnier because they're "supposed to know better."
If this is in bad taste.. well.. maybe it is, or maybe tech-people just have a different sense of humor. I usually manage to laugh at my own mistakes while learning so at least I'm fair about it..
It looks like this marketing guy implied that she was the one that lied (to him) which is why he was "confused." Are you out there Kornelia? Are you still working for these guys?
That is exactly why giving away tech support is a bad idea in the first place. They should charge for tech support from the get-go. Then they could charge a lower price, make more profit, and penalize the users who have wierd system configurations or aren't capable of getting it working, or just like to call tech support and harass them.
Think about it..
what percentage of users actually need tech support?
How many of those are lamers who do stupid stuff?
How many of those are people who just didn't read the manual?
How many of those are people who insisted on installing "Game blaster game acceleration software" or "registry tuning software" and so fscked up their machine that it won't work?
That probably covers most of them, and if a couple of innocents have to pay.. oh well. They will have paid less for the boxed software in the first place, it will probably about balance out.
I think it would be a much better "value-add" than free tech support to *supply* a stripped down linux distribution that they can install that definitely will work with the game software.. heck that might solve a lot of windows users problems anyway.
I think this represents a much better economic model (of course I think the software should be free too, but I realize that can be difficult to apply in the gaming world). But I wouldn't expect GT or anyone else to think that "out of the box"... uk uk.. pun intended.
I think you are definitely in the realm of if you want it, make it! As far as I know, there is no complete open source solution out there, but it doesn't seem like it will be long before there is. Everyone I know has been pretty unhappy with Legato and various other proprietery and *hideously* expensive solutions.
If you are considering rolling your own, try NDMP, which is actually a protocol (client/server) designed for network backups, like a "super rmt." It seems like it was mostly developed by Network Appliance for their boxen, but it is open source:
http://www.ndmp.org
It seems to be built around the premise that you will buy commercial software to use the NDMP interface provided by their servers. But an open source client/server is available which can build (easily!) under just about any UNIX.
The stock ndmp client and server basically support dumping and restoring, but the API supports controlling a mechanical tape loader and someone has written an open source utility to manipulate a StorageTek loader (10 or 20 dlts). Not the same scale, I know but I would imagine that StorageTek uses the same command interface for all of their loaders. This utility is available from:
http://now.netapp.com/download/tools/ndmputil
You might have to register for a free login to get in there.
Also, you can roll your own from scratch! Our StoragTek loader came with a pretty clearly documented manual, and all of the commands for moving the robot arm are simply SCSI commands sent over the SCSI bus. The linux SCSI API is probably "reasonably" easy to program to send arbitrary SCSI commands to arbitrary devices. I know that someone (somewhere) has implemented a Solaris utility (and I am almost certain it is open source) to manipulate the robot arm of a StoragTek via the Sun SCSI driver.
I think that a *lot* of the robots out there are StorageTek too, just simply relabelled, but I'm pretty sure that most of the non-StorageTek ones (if there are any) also talk to the robot arm over the SCSI bus.
Good luck!
Hey, FWIW, it is my understanding that most politicians *are* lawyers.
Nothing to worry about. Companies are just having a hard time figuring the new model out. They are used to.. well.. Sun produces Solaris. That's all, noone else.
My employer's software product used to be released for RedHat version X. But they have since learned that not only can people run different versions which have all the libraries etc. required to run the binary, but they can also run distributions. Our next release will simply require, eg: libc6.0, libXm2.x or whatever. Everyone else will figure it out too. The linux market is small enough without cutting out large chunks of it by limiting the distribution.
I couldn't agree more -- it is wrong to force the cat to undergo that when you can't meaningfully get an acknowledgement that it is okay.
.. let's see what apes do..
Otoh, I'd probably volunteer for that because I think it is cool, and could definitely have a lot of applications and uses.
At least it is "sort of" better than all the un-scientists who keep repeating meaningless tests on new species just so that they can publish. Like -- okay, we've established that Chimps act like they've been hurt when we blast electricity across their temples
I have to say that my experiences with my Ultra 5 hasn't been as bad as yours, although I don't think the graphics have any 3d acceleration as a Permedia chip would. I understood that it was an Ati Rage pro chip.
The big problem here is that Sun doesn't keep up with PC pricing. When Ultra 5's came out, you could basically take a bottom of the line Ultra 5, and it would keep up with a PC of equivelant price for CPU speed, at least.
Then 3D graphics started to get much cheaper, and more common on PC's, chip prices fell at their usual rates... what did Sun do on pricing? Nothing.
This price reduction should have happened a long time ago, and I think the Ultra 5 should be around $700 now to even be close to the PC market, which is where it was targetted.
If Sun is going to use commodity components (commodity memory, IDE, made-in-taiwan motherboard and cheap case, PCI cards), then they *have* to keep up with the "commodity" market's pricing structure.
Or rather.. they can choose not to price things that way, and then the only people who will buy them are people who have a vested interest in Suns, develop for the platform, etc. -- right back where you started, only now these unfortunate people are getting crappy hardware for their extra dollars.
If Sun wants to compete with the commodity market, they had better get serious about it, and they'd better get a *LOT* more serious than this.
Hey, that's easy, you've already got buy-in from upper management. Get him to mandate printing quotas, reduce the number of available printers, and place the available printers in locations where people have to walk as far as possible to get to them. Also, keep paper and toner supplies under lock and key, with very few people having the key. Then place only a minimum of extra paper near the printers, no toner.
People are afraid of technology, but they are also lazy. I am inclined to thing that laziness will win out, but it is worth an experimental try anyway.
Heck, you probably only need management buy-in to institute quotas, the rest you can do on your own.
Someone mentioned bugzilla, and I think that CVS, rsync and other open source distributed development tools point to an inevitability -- a lot of open source is based on "scratching an itch", so it is only a matter of time before someone develops a complete package to do it (presumably with documentation).
:-)
I've given it some thought at such a system would be entirely web-based for information, and some command line driven for speed of development. It would ideally tie in the user end of things -- easy ways to download the latest alphas, and the developers side -- easy ways to upload the latest alphas, comments automatically generated into HTML documentation, org charts, automated software tests.. the whole 9 yards.
Are you a geek? A nerd? Well then don't worry about it. Worry about your job skills and marketability, and such. Figure out what you're going to do with your life. Forget about the processor.
2 years will pass. Surprise -- you're making more money than you know what to do with, and you're donating your still useable old dual 500Mhz system to a school or something because you can afford a 12 processor 3000Mhz system without even thinking about it.
Hey, just go for it. If you're that handy with a soldering iron, try replacing the clock crystal and see if you can overclock those suckers.
Think about it -- the worst you can do is nuke one of them. I think if you are careful about how you dismember it, and take good notes, you could even hook the dismembered one back up well enough to function.
I usually end up with junk for my hardware hacking troubles, but I always have fun.
I would think your duty as a manger would be to do the best thing for the business, which is not necessarily the cheapest thing.
I'm not saying that the Celeron was not the best thing for you, but if that's your attitude as a manager it won't be long before you get burned by some of your decisions.
I can't think of a better way to let Intel know exactly *how* much money they are losing, and stand to lose by not disabling it.
"Uuuh boss.. I've got this petition here.. all these people want us to let them cost us $XYZ"
No *you* don't understand. Of *course* you can uniformly access menu entries under NT for *all* of the WM because it only provides 1.
You can simulate this effect under linux by only using 1 WM. You will find that all your menus are uniform.
Duh.
No, you have a choice about where/how much you work. The birds were never given the choice.
I could be wrong, but I'm sure that "on board" SCSI and UDMA (as in, placed on the motherboard) would provide just the same performance with just the same CPU load as putting in say, a PCI expansion card.
The reason for this is that while "on board" is built onto the motherboard, it is not in any way more dependant on the CPU. It still resides on the PCI bus, it just has traced connections to the bus controller instead of a card-slot connection. Most of the on-board SCSI/UDMA setups use exactly the same chipset (eg: Adaptec 7940 or whatever) as the off-board ones as well.
You said:
No capitalism isn't fair (its more laize faire.. hehe), but it works and the US proves it.
Oh you are so so so wrong. Lets look at your definition of the word "works." Who does it work for? The gigantic corporations which can give huge contributions to campaign funds to control politics, which can hire high-caliber lawyers to control the law.Sure yeah, it "works" for them, but what about the other guy -- the individual who gets taxed on gross income, verses the business who gets taxed only on profit. The small business which has none of the legal benifits and incentives that large businesses do. Nothing that is "not fair" can work. It may *seem* to work, but that is all dependant on your perspective.
In the Middle ages, feudalism "seemed" to work for kings, queens and propertied gentry. In all less than 5% of the population. It "worked" for many hundreds of years. But for the majority of the population it did not even close to work.
I think if you asked "everyone", the majority would say "yes, capitalism is working." The thing is that unlike the medieval peasants, they _don't even know_ that they are getting screwed by the system. That as a wage earner a person barely makes enough to stay even and in an industrialized society which has capacity to produce far more food and goods than are needed, the average wage earner still has to take out a *huge* loan to buy a house, and even a vehicle and get raped for years by interest.
Capitalism does not work.
No way are those chicklet packets real keyboards. A real keyboard is something that my hands can fully position and type at. My brain/hands automatically switch into hunt-n-peck mode when the keyboard is too small, which is just as slow, if not slower than graffiti.
There are other problems with that. Suppose not all 8 people put in equal effort (quite likely, even if unintentional). How do you fairly decide who gets paid what?
In the world of free software where recognition *is* how are you are paid, you might get hurt or offended if some slacker gets more recognition than you, but if you get paid less than some slacker.. that will create some serious problems. (burn bridges)
MPEG 2 HDTV recording would *definitely* be a big win. I believe that if you do not do it, then someone else will. Soon.
The problem with your fat pipe is that it has high latencies, making it difficult to use for interactive stuff. I think it may be sort-of okay for web browsing, but obviously that has been done, so you should just look at some of the other systems that do it and see what they are like.
I think a *big* market would be ISPs. ISPs have very very large bandwidth needs, and a good portion of it does not need to be interactive, for instance, news. If you could have one of these things broadcasting USENET news, that would be great, and ISPs would be able to take some load off their DS3s for their customers to use.
ftp server mirroring would also be useful this way.
Funding for this sort of thing is based on potential returns. I have a friend who is a physics Postdoc at McGill University (Montreal, CA) and is very bright. He has no stake in this research, and has told me that the amount of money required for this research does not even come close to making sense in terms of reward, considering that even if they were getting results, it would take on the order of at least 100 to 120 years to make it feasable for general use. There is more promising and rewarding energy research going on (although he didn't say what). I will be sure to ask.
But you're wrong. Software bloat used to be like that, but to my perception it no longer is. You can run Word 97 on the same PC that ran Word 95 with very very minimal performance difference. Try that with word 6.0 vs word 2.0 (yes, they skipped a few version numbers, I believe).
Playing animations is a totally different task, and I suspect you would have found that older versions of media player would have skipped and dropped just as much. If you have different requirements for what you *do* with the software, then you hvae to get a different machine, but it is no longer simply the "required" software upgrades *themselves* that are forcing machine upgrades.
Which is very cool, in my humble opinion.
Using ads to pay for the entire cost of something is a time honored tradition. Many school newspapers and publications use this. In most cities there is at least one free print news publication which is entirely paid for by ads. I say, go for it, let the market decide. (and I firmly believe that there will be a place in the market for this.. there will be people willing to be blitzed with ads to get something for "free"... always)
That said, I've had a taste of open source software, and that has been my taste of delight. I'm not going back.
This is probably not a very good idea. When you encode a regular wav file to mp3, it is a lossy process, so you lose information and quality by doing so (albeit not much). When you recreate the wav (with a decoder), that wav shows the resulting loss of quality. If you use that decoded mp3 to create a minidisc, then it gets compressed again, with lossy compression. So you get two different styles of loss. That's probably not going to give you very good results.
wav -> mp3 -> wav -> minidisc
lossy lossy