As a former best buy employee, yes. The plans are 80% profit for the store. So, fuck it, if you buy it, then use it. Backup your 2.8 year old laptop, then microwave it (wipes eproms). Flash that computer's motherboard with a bios from some other manufacturer's board. Scuff your feet on the carpet and touch everything you bought from best buy. Put a bowling ball in your dryer.
I sold a lot of service plans with this strategy when I worked at best buy. I'd tell people straight up - they're a rip off if you don't use it, but if you do use it, it completely screws best buy over. And if your product should *convieniently break* (wink), then, hey, you got a service plan.
It works even better when you realize that it's covered by home owner's insurance. Call them up, get them to cut you a check, and then get the product replaced at best buy for free, and use the check to buy $x of DVD's or whatever, so that you can show the insurance people a best buy reciept.
It's illegal and immoral, but then, I pay more because other people do it, and i'm losing out to the people that do, i want my piece of pie, too.
Does anyone know if any spam filters pick up on this patern or lack of pattern (after all there are no words in the body usually.)
Um, only read emails in plain text? Use mh. inc; scan; show last By the way, those images are baaaad. Usually they're something like img src="blahblah.jpg?userid=32898392" and then, when you open it, there's a log of the image with the userid 32898392 being fetched. Therefore, they know that your email address is valid. So, it's a good idea to filter out images anyway.
But, come on. Email is a medium for transmitting text. It's not supposed to have flowery backgrounds, blinking text, and embedded images. Mabey i'm a purist? But, it's another thing that use to be beautifully simple that the explosion of advertising on the internet has rendered unuseable.
Good point, though. If I buy a $3k workstation, I'm not really worried about games probably, i'm probably buying it for one or two specific apps (dreamweaver and photoshop for instance).
Eh, i guess if you want it and can afford it, it's a good idea. I just can't spend $3k on a computer.
Please don't take this the wrong way, i really value your input and don't want you to think i'm arguing just for the sake of arguement. I really value feedback and responses.
I just wanted to point out that the price that I got for the G-4 was from apple's website. It's here: http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebOb jects/A ppleStore.woa/71302/wo/Vu6KTiVTVxV52Y76Op2QqG0SnH4/0.0.7.1.0.5.21.1.8.1.0.0.0.1.0
That url may have a problem because it's a session ID. If you go to apple, click store, and scroll down the G-4's are right there.
I don't know what the frontside bus is on an apple, g4 or g5, but it's most likely that it's less than 800 mhz in the p-4's.
It comes down to some people will buy apples. I've kind of been thinking about buying a G4 powerbook for a while now (but, can't because of money). I love OSX. And there will be some things that apples are faster at, like photoshop. I still think that few people use photoshop enough to justify buying a computer to increase it's performance, especially when you're not talking minutes of difference to render, just 1.2 seconds versus 1.4. Some people will think it's worth it.
But, apples will never have better games or more compatability with software. If you walk into best buy and look around, it's rare that you'll find mac hardware. Mabey a warcraft disc that works for both. But, mac's have less available software (it goes with the proportionally less market share).
It's really all preference. They'll do some things better, and some things not. I don't think i'll ever be able to justify the price of a mac tower. Mabey a laptop, because you buy it as much for the power as for the design and weight (soemthing that PC manufacturers haven't been able to get right - i'm typing this on an 8 lb PC laptop with a desktop P-4 in it).
Agreed, and I didn't double the speed in the estimate, because i'm really not sure if hyperthreading is bullshit or not, and I think it might be.
But, at any rate, the clock speed is 2.8 Ghz, and then it also has HT enabled. I'm not claiming that it's 5.6 ghz, or even 3. I'm just saying it's 2.8.
Regardless, without hyperthreading, it's still 300 mhz faster. And how many apps that people use on desktop are really multithreaded? Photoshop, mabey, and photoshop has been mac's fanboy claim to fame for years and years.
However, so is a 2.8 P-4. It's been out for about 6-7 months. Granted, not the 800mhz version, but the 533 has.
I know G-4 is older. I felt it was good to compare 32bit to 32bit arch. Reason is that any comparason I made to a 32 bit vs. 64 bit apple, people would clammour that the 64bitness would make up for it, and there would be no measure to see if they were, indeed, full of shit.
Plus, the p-4 is older too. It's been out for, what, almost 3 years now? All that's changing is clockspeed.
She knows it would be hard field work, and little gratitude, probably. But, i dunno, she's really into iguanas. We have a 2 year old iguana, female named donut. She's a sweetheart.
I dunno, whatever she wants to do. I back it. I just don't think i'll like 95 degrees at 8PM all year around, regardless if it's a freakin dry heat or not. I've fallen in love with my mountains (southwest virginia) and I don't really want to leave them.
My little iMac can encode MPEG4 video in realtime. Show me an x86 that can do that. Or, shut up about x86 performance.
In the house where I live, there's a 2.4Ghz Pentium four.
It can encode a DVD in Divx 5.05 in realtime. Using two pass. Seriously. If you rip a DVD to the hard drive, then put it in a DVD player, by the time the movie is done, you'll have a 2 pass encoded divx rip sitting on the hard drive.
Basically it comes down to this: There are very few flame wars that I'm willing to participate in. But mac users who claim their hardware is cheaper than a comparable speed PC or faster than a comparable priced PC are so full of crap they've got living spaces in their septic tanks.
I will concede the following things: 1.) mac hardware is stable 2.) mac hardware is fast 3.) mac hardware is (some) 64 bit 4.) mac looks good 4.) at a given clock speed, mac hardware will be faster than the windows counterpart
BUT. I hate the megahertz mith of the P-4 as much as anyone, but the fact remains that the p4 is damn fast, and all the clock speed DOES make up for the poor engineering. PERIOD.
When mac fanatics claimed that their hardware was faster, it might have been true at the time when mac hardware was 333 mhz and PC was 450 Mhz. But, it took mac a year to go from 333 to 500. In that time, PC hit 933 and 1.0 Ghz. Sorry fanboys, your 1 Ghz PowerPC doesn't hold a candle to a 3.2 Ghz P-4. Show me a mac that can do 240 fps in quake 3. Please.
Real world numbers on price: MAC - $1800 Dual 1.25 Ghz G4 Proc 256 MB DDR333 80 GB ATA HDD DVD / CD-RW GeForce 4 Ti 128 MB Sound card (not specified) No Monitor
Dell - $1677 2.8 Ghz Hyper Threaded P-4 800 Mhz bus 512 MB DDR400 dual channel ram 120 GB 7200 RPM hard drive ATI radeon 9800 pro 128MB DVD / CD-RW combo drive Sound Blaster live! 5.1
Let's examine: Mac has essentially 2 processors totalling 2.5 Ghz. PC has one processor that acts as two because of hyper threading, totalling 2.8 Ghz Mac has 256 MB of DDR333. PC has twice that and faster ram at DDR400 Dual channel. Mac has 80 GB hard drive (RPM not specified). PC has 120 GB hard drive (50% bigger) and specified at 7200 RPM. Mac has DVD-CDRW combo drive. PC has DVD-CDRW Combo drive. Mac has unspecified level of Geforce 4 Ti, w/ 128 MB of video ram. PC has radeon 9800 pro, with 128 MB of ram. Radeon 9800 beats any Geforce 4, even Ti 4600, by significant margin. Mac has sound card. PC has creative soundblaster live 5.1.
Mac costs $1,799. PC costs $1,677. PC is better in every measurable context, price and performance included. Well, mabey it doesn't beat it out in the "cool case with shades of grey and handles" department.
Macs are not for everyone. They are for people who want pretty computers that work well without hassle and that look good. Mac is all that. Mac is NOT, however, the faster type of computer, nor is it the cheaper type of computer.
My girlfriend wants to study Iguanas. She's got a degree in animal science, focus on neurochemistry or something, and wants to go to grad school to study reptiles.
She wants to move to airazona or something. I keep telling her to check out and see what schools have satelite programs in the polynesian isles.
It's a testiment to how closely Microsoft guards their security for the X-box that, even when you eliminate more than 90% of the available keyspace, you still have no hope of finding the correct key via brute force in one lifetime. 2048 bit encryption is rediculous. Banks use 1024, and that's overkill.
Of course, if you look at it from microsoft's perspective, the xbox may be the equivilant of a bank. In a year or two, it might start making money.
Honestly, I have a theory about pirating Photoshop.
I don't think adobe cares if the average high school kid or script kiddie pirates Photoshop. Why? Brand familiarity.
See, if someone pirates photoshop, they'll learn how to use it and get over the learning curve, etc. Then, when they move into a professional setting where they need a professional image editing program, they'll tell their technology guys they like photoshop, and the company will buy photoshop.
Bam, sales for photoshop.
Kinda like Quake, I think. Like how you could install it on all your friend's computers. Makes it popular.
Thank you for your reply (really - replying is always appreciated).
Honestly, this is the crux of american society. I don't want you to lose your job. Sincerely. But, I also want cheaper ram prices.
It goes the same way for everything - I don't want my buddy to get laid off, but then, i'd rather pay less for the product that he makes. American culture is less often likely (as compared to other cultures i.e. french or germany) to pay more for a product to get a quality product.
Proof? Don't have numbers. I used to work at best buy. Overwhelmingly, the most popular comptuer brand was not sony, hp, compaq, alienware, or micron, it was emachines. We sold more volume and more dollars of emachines than any other brand. And most of the people that purchased knew it sucked. They didn't care, they just wanted a cheap computer.
I think it's conspicuous consumption. Computers are cool, fun, make your life easier. Therefore, it is necessacary to have one. Any one.
*sigh* Why is it so hard to support american industry and at the same time be a discerning consumer?
Dude, check it out. I'm not trying to put micron/crucial out of business. That's not what I meant. I'm not trying to take food off of your table, that's not what I meant.
I buy ram from Micron. Only from Micron (if i buy online). It's worth the extra money.
But, what I'm saying is, while i know Micron costs more because it's better memory, i'd like to see it cost less than it currently does. If the cheapass ram gets down to $30, good for it. I'm saying i'd be pissed if it gets down to $30 and micron is charging $110.
What I'm saying is: I'm all about micron's prices going down. I just think it's lame that, when they started having a hard time competing with overseas manufacturers, they asked the govt. to bust in and help them out. I'd rather they found ways to do it cheaper.
That's all.
To recap: I never buy ram from anyone but micron. I support micron. But i also support micron playing fair, and lowering their prices to be competative, not asking for a 44% tarrif.
Yeah, but on the other hand, if you by ram from anyone but micron online, you're stupid. If fly-by-night-pricewatch-only-generic-ram company A sells 512 for $66+shipping and micron sells it for $78, you're stupid to not buy from micron.
as long as one country is proping up some sectors and allowing them to undercut the rest of the market free trade without sanctions is kind of a pipe dream.
Who gives a fuck? Seriously? All I care about is the price of 512MB sticks of PC2700.
You don't hear about it because the pron industry has figured out that more exposure = more sales. If you download a video that has a marker in the corner that says "(C)2002 ideepthroat.com", and you like what you see, you're much more likely to surf on over there and check out what's going on, and mabey buy a subscription if you think that heather girl is hot.
As if "download[ing] someone else's copy" removed their copy! I challenge Mr. Lackey to find ONE store that would mind if I walked in, picked up a copy of Star Wars, ran my hands over it and put it back on the shelf, unharmed. Oh wait, I used my Evil P2P Gloves (Pat. Pend.) to make a "perfect digital copy" and store it on the harddrive attached to my belt...
Good point, bad analogy.
If you did this in a video store, it would decrease the likelyhood of you buying or renting the video.
Say, rather, that no one would mind if you went to your friend's house and waved your gloves over it to get a magical copy, then left the DVD there.
they have a right to backbill you (with penalty) as if those servers were participating.
I disagree. What if I want support for 1 machine, but I have 4 machines running their OS. I should either:
1.) be able to buy one support licence and bind it to the one computer that I want to have support, and thus if any other of the computers break, I'm SOL, or
2.) Buy one licence, and the first one that breaks, use it for that computer, and then bind it to that computer permanantly (if I'm sneaky).
Analogy: You go out to buy a DVD player, but the store is running a Buy-One-Get-Two-Free. Your budget allows for one DVD player and one extended warranty. So, you buy one DVD player and one extended warranty. But, you take the two free ones anyway, and put them in different rooms of your house. You should have a right to designate the one in the living room as the "purchased" player with the extended warranty, and the other two - if they break, oh well, you're out of luck. They were free anyway.
But the electronics store sure as hell doesn't have the right to bust up into your house and examine the number of DVD players you have so that they can demand you pay backpayment for 2 more extended warranties.
This is a similar situation to the Kazaa problem. A situation which could have legitimate uses, but that also has non-legit uses. Buying one software pack and one licence, but putting the software on multiple computers, has legitimate uses, as long as you understand that you can only get support for one computer. Mabey you wanted to try it out on a non-production machine, or something. But it also can obviously be misused. You can buy 10 licences and put the software on 100 computers and expect RH to do 10 x the support.
The problem people are having is that redhat is assuming that you're using it for bad. Same as MPAA/divx rippers, Direct TV/smart card programmers, RIAA/Cd burners, AT&T/Wiener whistles, etc etc. It puts redhat in the category with the other people we don't like.
The solution is simple. Stop using redhat. Redhat is the windows of linux, anyway. I mean, we use it at work, cause it's what people want, but if someone asks for debian/gentoo/freebsd/whatever, we're more than happy to accomidate them. I'm really worried that redhat is no longer going to be supporting plain old redhat 7.3 anymore, since it was the last one that was useable in a webserver environment. It's rediculous that they switched to 9.0, glibc changes aside. I hope they're going to be supporting back to 7.3 for a while, considering it's only slightly more than a year old.
And I really feel that the redhat advanced server is BS. I mean, I think it exists to market a product to CTO's that expect software to cost a lot of money. If you expect to pay $1000 for your OS, redhat can accomidate you. But what happened to the whole "give the os away, sell the service" model? What if I want redhat advanced server, which in theory is mostly GPL'd, and one would assume that the differences in the software on the distro's are based on / compiled against GPL'd libraries? What if I want it, and I understand that I won't get support. What if I don't want support? What if I can't afford support? Shouldn't I have access to free software (beer and speech), as long as I'm willing to be my own support?
I dunno. I guess I'm proud of redhat bringing linux to the masses, and of them trying to be a profitable company, but mabey this just goes to show, in order to be profitable in this marketplace, you have to use the same strongarm techniques and high prices as everyone that we don't like.
From what I understand, we're moving away from cable and satelite. I have a friend who gets digital on a big freakin antenna on top of his house. It only broadcasts major stations (abc, nbc, fox, cbs), and only during primetime and sports events, but it looks *stunningly* good, and it's free.
Course the equipment is hella expensive, but by the time we get all the equipment cheaply, we should be able to get a lot of signals.
It's friday. On friday, verizon=bad. However, alternating days starting sunday with "good" lead to friday being "bad", followed by saturday, which is also "good" verizon day.
Slashdot Mirror
As a former best buy employee, yes. The plans are 80% profit for the store. So, fuck it, if you buy it, then use it. Backup your 2.8 year old laptop, then microwave it (wipes eproms). Flash that computer's motherboard with a bios from some other manufacturer's board. Scuff your feet on the carpet and touch everything you bought from best buy. Put a bowling ball in your dryer.
I sold a lot of service plans with this strategy when I worked at best buy. I'd tell people straight up - they're a rip off if you don't use it, but if you do use it, it completely screws best buy over. And if your product should *convieniently break* (wink), then, hey, you got a service plan.
It works even better when you realize that it's covered by home owner's insurance. Call them up, get them to cut you a check, and then get the product replaced at best buy for free, and use the check to buy $x of DVD's or whatever, so that you can show the insurance people a best buy reciept.
It's illegal and immoral, but then, I pay more because other people do it, and i'm losing out to the people that do, i want my piece of pie, too.
~Wx
Whether or not he gets it, psycologically, you can't discount that almost all the browsers used on the internet came from redmond.
t ml
For example:
http://www.google.com/press/zeitgeist.h
Check out the browser chart. Look at IE 5.0, 5.5, and 6.0. Compare to everything else combined.
~Wx
Does anyone know if any spam filters pick up on this patern or lack of pattern (after all there are no words in the body usually.)
Um, only read emails in plain text? Use mh.
inc; scan; show last
By the way, those images are baaaad. Usually they're something like img src="blahblah.jpg?userid=32898392" and then, when you open it, there's a log of the image with the userid 32898392 being fetched. Therefore, they know that your email address is valid. So, it's a good idea to filter out images anyway.
But, come on. Email is a medium for transmitting text. It's not supposed to have flowery backgrounds, blinking text, and embedded images. Mabey i'm a purist? But, it's another thing that use to be beautifully simple that the explosion of advertising on the internet has rendered unuseable.
Holy batshit, dude. 1Ghz Frontside bus?
Christ on a cracker. Amazing.
Good point, though. If I buy a $3k workstation, I'm not really worried about games probably, i'm probably buying it for one or two specific apps (dreamweaver and photoshop for instance).
Eh, i guess if you want it and can afford it, it's a good idea. I just can't spend $3k on a computer.
SCO sues the RIAA for stealing their business model
My friend and I were discussing this article, and I read your comment to him aloud.
He looked at me blank faced. Then, he said, "Oh, that's a comment", and busted out laughing.
But, for a dreadful second, he wasn't sure.
~Will
Please don't take this the wrong way, i really value your input and don't want you to think i'm arguing just for the sake of arguement. I really value feedback and responses.
b jects/A ppleStore.woa/71302/wo/Vu6KTiVTVxV52Y76Op2QqG0SnH4 /0.0.7.1.0.5.21.1.8.1.0.0.0.1.0
I just wanted to point out that the price that I got for the G-4 was from apple's website. It's here:
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPLE/WebO
That url may have a problem because it's a session ID. If you go to apple, click store, and scroll down the G-4's are right there.
I don't know what the frontside bus is on an apple, g4 or g5, but it's most likely that it's less than 800 mhz in the p-4's.
It comes down to some people will buy apples. I've kind of been thinking about buying a G4 powerbook for a while now (but, can't because of money). I love OSX. And there will be some things that apples are faster at, like photoshop. I still think that few people use photoshop enough to justify buying a computer to increase it's performance, especially when you're not talking minutes of difference to render, just 1.2 seconds versus 1.4. Some people will think it's worth it.
But, apples will never have better games or more compatability with software. If you walk into best buy and look around, it's rare that you'll find mac hardware. Mabey a warcraft disc that works for both. But, mac's have less available software (it goes with the proportionally less market share).
It's really all preference. They'll do some things better, and some things not. I don't think i'll ever be able to justify the price of a mac tower. Mabey a laptop, because you buy it as much for the power as for the design and weight (soemthing that PC manufacturers haven't been able to get right - i'm typing this on an 8 lb PC laptop with a desktop P-4 in it).
Agreed, and I didn't double the speed in the estimate, because i'm really not sure if hyperthreading is bullshit or not, and I think it might be.
But, at any rate, the clock speed is 2.8 Ghz, and then it also has HT enabled. I'm not claiming that it's 5.6 ghz, or even 3. I'm just saying it's 2.8.
Regardless, without hyperthreading, it's still 300 mhz faster. And how many apps that people use on desktop are really multithreaded? Photoshop, mabey, and photoshop has been mac's fanboy claim to fame for years and years.
G-4 is so last week, i agree.
However, so is a 2.8 P-4. It's been out for about 6-7 months. Granted, not the 800mhz version, but the 533 has.
I know G-4 is older. I felt it was good to compare 32bit to 32bit arch. Reason is that any comparason I made to a 32 bit vs. 64 bit apple, people would clammour that the 64bitness would make up for it, and there would be no measure to see if they were, indeed, full of shit.
Plus, the p-4 is older too. It's been out for, what, almost 3 years now? All that's changing is clockspeed.
~Wx
she's pretty realistic about the iguana study.
She knows it would be hard field work, and little gratitude, probably. But, i dunno, she's really into iguanas. We have a 2 year old iguana, female named donut. She's a sweetheart.
I dunno, whatever she wants to do. I back it. I just don't think i'll like 95 degrees at 8PM all year around, regardless if it's a freakin dry heat or not. I've fallen in love with my mountains (southwest virginia) and I don't really want to leave them.
~Wx
My little iMac can encode MPEG4 video in realtime. Show me an x86 that can do that. Or, shut up about x86 performance.
In the house where I live, there's a 2.4Ghz Pentium four.
It can encode a DVD in Divx 5.05 in realtime. Using two pass. Seriously. If you rip a DVD to the hard drive, then put it in a DVD player, by the time the movie is done, you'll have a 2 pass encoded divx rip sitting on the hard drive.
Basically it comes down to this: There are very few flame wars that I'm willing to participate in. But mac users who claim their hardware is cheaper than a comparable speed PC or faster than a comparable priced PC are so full of crap they've got living spaces in their septic tanks.
I will concede the following things:
1.) mac hardware is stable
2.) mac hardware is fast
3.) mac hardware is (some) 64 bit
4.) mac looks good
4.) at a given clock speed, mac hardware will be faster than the windows counterpart
BUT. I hate the megahertz mith of the P-4 as much as anyone, but the fact remains that the p4 is damn fast, and all the clock speed DOES make up for the poor engineering. PERIOD.
When mac fanatics claimed that their hardware was faster, it might have been true at the time when mac hardware was 333 mhz and PC was 450 Mhz. But, it took mac a year to go from 333 to 500. In that time, PC hit 933 and 1.0 Ghz. Sorry fanboys, your 1 Ghz PowerPC doesn't hold a candle to a 3.2 Ghz P-4. Show me a mac that can do 240 fps in quake 3. Please.
Real world numbers on price:
MAC - $1800
Dual 1.25 Ghz G4 Proc
256 MB DDR333
80 GB ATA HDD
DVD / CD-RW
GeForce 4 Ti 128 MB
Sound card (not specified)
No Monitor
Dell - $1677
2.8 Ghz Hyper Threaded P-4 800 Mhz bus
512 MB DDR400 dual channel ram
120 GB 7200 RPM hard drive
ATI radeon 9800 pro 128MB
DVD / CD-RW combo drive
Sound Blaster live! 5.1
Let's examine:
Mac has essentially 2 processors totalling 2.5 Ghz. PC has one processor that acts as two because of hyper threading, totalling 2.8 Ghz
Mac has 256 MB of DDR333. PC has twice that and faster ram at DDR400 Dual channel.
Mac has 80 GB hard drive (RPM not specified). PC has 120 GB hard drive (50% bigger) and specified at 7200 RPM.
Mac has DVD-CDRW combo drive. PC has DVD-CDRW Combo drive.
Mac has unspecified level of Geforce 4 Ti, w/ 128 MB of video ram. PC has radeon 9800 pro, with 128 MB of ram. Radeon 9800 beats any Geforce 4, even Ti 4600, by significant margin.
Mac has sound card. PC has creative soundblaster live 5.1.
Mac costs $1,799. PC costs $1,677. PC is better in every measurable context, price and performance included. Well, mabey it doesn't beat it out in the "cool case with shades of grey and handles" department.
Macs are not for everyone. They are for people who want pretty computers that work well without hassle and that look good. Mac is all that. Mac is NOT, however, the faster type of computer, nor is it the cheaper type of computer.
~Wx
My girlfriend wants to study Iguanas. She's got a degree in animal science, focus on neurochemistry or something, and wants to go to grad school to study reptiles.
She wants to move to airazona or something. I keep telling her to check out and see what schools have satelite programs in the polynesian isles.
Now, I'll have to push a little more steadily.
It's a testiment to how closely Microsoft guards their security for the X-box that, even when you eliminate more than 90% of the available keyspace, you still have no hope of finding the correct key via brute force in one lifetime. 2048 bit encryption is rediculous. Banks use 1024, and that's overkill.
Of course, if you look at it from microsoft's perspective, the xbox may be the equivilant of a bank. In a year or two, it might start making money.
~Wx
Honestly, I have a theory about pirating Photoshop.
I don't think adobe cares if the average high school kid or script kiddie pirates Photoshop. Why? Brand familiarity.
See, if someone pirates photoshop, they'll learn how to use it and get over the learning curve, etc. Then, when they move into a professional setting where they need a professional image editing program, they'll tell their technology guys they like photoshop, and the company will buy photoshop.
Bam, sales for photoshop.
Kinda like Quake, I think. Like how you could install it on all your friend's computers. Makes it popular.
~Wx
It's a strategy, like any other.
"Stupid jock to A4"
"Tractor Trailer to A4 for capture"
"king to queen for reproduction"
I guess queen isn't probably the best choice of word, but it does cover alternative sexuality, as well as traditional mating...
~Wx
One time, my friend went into petsmart and asked to buy some fish.
The lady asked him, "What size aquarium will you be putting these in?".
He replied: "Aquarium? I was just going to chuck them at passing cars in the parking lot!"
~Wx
Thank you for your reply (really - replying is always appreciated).
Honestly, this is the crux of american society. I don't want you to lose your job. Sincerely. But, I also want cheaper ram prices.
It goes the same way for everything - I don't want my buddy to get laid off, but then, i'd rather pay less for the product that he makes. American culture is less often likely (as compared to other cultures i.e. french or germany) to pay more for a product to get a quality product.
Proof? Don't have numbers. I used to work at best buy. Overwhelmingly, the most popular comptuer brand was not sony, hp, compaq, alienware, or micron, it was emachines. We sold more volume and more dollars of emachines than any other brand. And most of the people that purchased knew it sucked. They didn't care, they just wanted a cheap computer.
I think it's conspicuous consumption. Computers are cool, fun, make your life easier. Therefore, it is necessacary to have one. Any one.
*sigh*
Why is it so hard to support american industry and at the same time be a discerning consumer?
~Wx
...flying airbags and broken glass and bodies in the street...
/me drives a honda.
And pieces of "type R" stickers and rear deck spoilers *everywhere*.
Dude, check it out. I'm not trying to put micron/crucial out of business. That's not what I meant.
I'm not trying to take food off of your table, that's not what I meant.
I buy ram from Micron. Only from Micron (if i buy online). It's worth the extra money.
But, what I'm saying is, while i know Micron costs more because it's better memory, i'd like to see it cost less than it currently does. If the cheapass ram gets down to $30, good for it. I'm saying i'd be pissed if it gets down to $30 and micron is charging $110.
What I'm saying is: I'm all about micron's prices going down. I just think it's lame that, when they started having a hard time competing with overseas manufacturers, they asked the govt. to bust in and help them out. I'd rather they found ways to do it cheaper.
That's all.
To recap: I never buy ram from anyone but micron. I support micron. But i also support micron playing fair, and lowering their prices to be competative, not asking for a 44% tarrif.
~Will
Yeah, but on the other hand, if you by ram from anyone but micron online, you're stupid. If fly-by-night-pricewatch-only-generic-ram company A sells 512 for $66+shipping and micron sells it for $78, you're stupid to not buy from micron.
as long as one country is proping up some sectors and allowing them to undercut the rest of the market free trade without sanctions is kind of a pipe dream.
Who gives a fuck? Seriously? All I care about is the price of 512MB sticks of PC2700.
~Wx
You don't hear about it because the pron industry has figured out that more exposure = more sales. If you download a video that has a marker in the corner that says "(C)2002 ideepthroat.com", and you like what you see, you're much more likely to surf on over there and check out what's going on, and mabey buy a subscription if you think that heather girl is hot.
Hello? Metallica?
~wx
As if "download[ing] someone else's copy" removed their copy! I challenge Mr. Lackey to find ONE store that would mind if I walked in, picked up a copy of Star Wars, ran my hands over it and put it back on the shelf, unharmed. Oh wait, I used my Evil P2P Gloves (Pat. Pend.) to make a "perfect digital copy" and store it on the harddrive attached to my belt...
Good point, bad analogy.
If you did this in a video store, it would decrease the likelyhood of you buying or renting the video.
Say, rather, that no one would mind if you went to your friend's house and waved your gloves over it to get a magical copy, then left the DVD there.
~Will
they have a right to backbill you (with penalty) as if those servers were participating.
I disagree. What if I want support for 1 machine, but I have 4 machines running their OS. I should either:
1.) be able to buy one support licence and bind it to the one computer that I want to have support, and thus if any other of the computers break, I'm SOL, or
2.) Buy one licence, and the first one that breaks, use it for that computer, and then bind it to that computer permanantly (if I'm sneaky).
Analogy: You go out to buy a DVD player, but the store is running a Buy-One-Get-Two-Free. Your budget allows for one DVD player and one extended warranty. So, you buy one DVD player and one extended warranty. But, you take the two free ones anyway, and put them in different rooms of your house. You should have a right to designate the one in the living room as the "purchased" player with the extended warranty, and the other two - if they break, oh well, you're out of luck. They were free anyway.
But the electronics store sure as hell doesn't have the right to bust up into your house and examine the number of DVD players you have so that they can demand you pay backpayment for 2 more extended warranties.
This is a similar situation to the Kazaa problem. A situation which could have legitimate uses, but that also has non-legit uses. Buying one software pack and one licence, but putting the software on multiple computers, has legitimate uses, as long as you understand that you can only get support for one computer. Mabey you wanted to try it out on a non-production machine, or something.
But it also can obviously be misused. You can buy 10 licences and put the software on 100 computers and expect RH to do 10 x the support.
The problem people are having is that redhat is assuming that you're using it for bad. Same as MPAA/divx rippers, Direct TV/smart card programmers, RIAA/Cd burners, AT&T/Wiener whistles, etc etc. It puts redhat in the category with the other people we don't like.
The solution is simple. Stop using redhat. Redhat is the windows of linux, anyway. I mean, we use it at work, cause it's what people want, but if someone asks for debian/gentoo/freebsd/whatever, we're more than happy to accomidate them. I'm really worried that redhat is no longer going to be supporting plain old redhat 7.3 anymore, since it was the last one that was useable in a webserver environment. It's rediculous that they switched to 9.0, glibc changes aside. I hope they're going to be supporting back to 7.3 for a while, considering it's only slightly more than a year old.
And I really feel that the redhat advanced server is BS. I mean, I think it exists to market a product to CTO's that expect software to cost a lot of money. If you expect to pay $1000 for your OS, redhat can accomidate you. But what happened to the whole "give the os away, sell the service" model? What if I want redhat advanced server, which in theory is mostly GPL'd, and one would assume that the differences in the software on the distro's are based on / compiled against GPL'd libraries? What if I want it, and I understand that I won't get support. What if I don't want support? What if I can't afford support? Shouldn't I have access to free software (beer and speech), as long as I'm willing to be my own support?
I dunno. I guess I'm proud of redhat bringing linux to the masses, and of them trying to be a profitable company, but mabey this just goes to show, in order to be profitable in this marketplace, you have to use the same strongarm techniques and high prices as everyone that we don't like.
~Will
From what I understand, we're moving away from cable and satelite. I have a friend who gets digital on a big freakin antenna on top of his house. It only broadcasts major stations (abc, nbc, fox, cbs), and only during primetime and sports events, but it looks *stunningly* good, and it's free.
Course the equipment is hella expensive, but by the time we get all the equipment cheaply, we should be able to get a lot of signals.
~Wx
It's friday. On friday, verizon=bad. However, alternating days starting sunday with "good" lead to friday being "bad", followed by saturday, which is also "good" verizon day.
So, we hate verizon 3 out of 5 week days.
Sheesh, you must be new here.
~wx