Contributory negligence requires that there be a clear and well understood alternative. You can't charge a company with contributory negligence unless you have a better answer. So, unless you have a bunch of diffs for XP, sit down and quit whining. Believe it or not, they're actually doing an excellent job, considering the enormous size of windows and the value of a compromise. I'd tell you to compare it against defects in other applications, except I have no doubt you'd have no idea where to start.
Funny how the next thing out of your mouth is almost guaranteed to be "well why don't you show me these statistics I should have had before I opened my poorly educated mouth," acting as if it's my responsibility to educate you if I don't want you to keep spreading around mindless FUD.
Quit pretending to be an engineer. Don't bother telling me you aren't pretending to be an engineer; only an engineer understands engineering practices and engineering defect rates, and you're talking about taking a major corporation to court for not doing well enough with those rates. "Well they're Microsoft, there should be no defects." No large project in the history of mankind has no defects.
Welcome to the real world. When the Justice Department wanted to break Microsoft, if they could have sued for negligence, they would have. They have done that to some companies. They just couldn't do that to Microsoft, becuase to suggest that a project would be illegal to release before zero-defect proof is to wipe all software off of the face of the map and start at a speed so slow that we will never compete with any other country again. Believe it or not, national-scale spite lawsuits would have major repurcussions.
Insightful my ass. Mod parent down through the Earth's mantle, to play with the Morlocks where it belongs.
Don't be absurd. The class of attacks F-Secure purports to be protecting against cannot be caught in a virus scan. This is F-Secure trying to arrange a license to tax corporations. Nothing more, nothing less.
The problem with reminder TLDs is that the only people who need the reminders are the people who are unable to check, if and when they notice the domain name at all. Having a.safe or a.worry or a.payattentionthismaynotbeyourbank doesn't actually do any good in the practical sense; TLDs themselves don't offer any security, and the people with the sophistication to check don't need a reminder in the domain name. All this really is is F-Secure preparing to approach ICANN/ARIN/IETF by astroturfing first (something the.XXX people should have done,) so that when it comes time to vote, the idea seems reasonable.
The real issue is that if F-Secure owns.safe, they can hand out.safe domains for $1,000, because "spammers won't pay that much and we'll background check and rah rah rah." Nevermind that most spammers make >$50k/week.
This is just F-Secure positioning to try to create a license to print money.
Why is it that everyone seems to think a company that transfers money and holds money in accounts is a bank? Your utility companies do that, credit cards are issued by non-banks all day, et cetera. You might as well argue that Final Fantasy Online is a bank - you can purchase in-game currency, give it to someone else, then have it converted back to real currency. Do rechargeable, releaseable gift cards make every store in the mall a bank? Is my cellular phone company a bank? My cell phone can make payments for me, even.
Bank regulations aren't about little-guy money transfers, and wouldn't help in virtually any of the "omg paypal skrooed me" situations (which, I might note, I've never actually seen be anything other than the fault of one of the two end-users. Yes, PayPal freezes accounts too easily, but frankly, if you can't tolerate a several-day money lag, you shouldn't be transacting online at all.) Bank regulations are about the investment of held capital and so forth, to prevent messes like the 1914 commodity crash or the 1980s savings and loan scandal. Say what you will about PayPal, but their back-end investments are safe, conservative and shrewd. No bank regulations would affect PayPal in any way that the end users would find significant, other than to increase existing rates (not by enough to affect most transactions, but it would kill the micropayment system dead.)
The next time you go complaining about regulations, maybe you should name the specific regulation you want. That way, when people read what you say, they won't do what I did, and assume you're some clueless whiner who just wants to repeat what everyone else says to sound smart, when bitching about an online business that they heard screwed a friend of a friend of a friend.
Of course, that'd require knowing what you were talking about.
Blizzard is arguing that using any programs in conjunction with the World of Warcraft constitutes copyright violation. Apparently accessing the copy of the game client in RAM using another program infringes upon their rights. Under that logic, users do not even have the right to use anti-virus software in the event that the game becomes infected.
Er. How do you figure?
Blizzard's concern is using third party software to affect the game in play. This is to stop cheaters, people using game hacks, and so on. An anti-virus app wouldn't have any effect there.
If the game is infected by a virus, the user is not the one altering the game.
If antivirus is going after the virus, then the product isn't what Blizzard sold you.
These things still have to be willingly imposed. Blizzard hasn't shot anyone down for antivirus yet.
Under what interpretation of an antivirus program does the AV app "access" other apps in RAM? Or do you think a heuristic scan counts?
Surprising as it might be to the language experts on Slashdot, "mating" means things other than sex. Call a plumber and ask them what mated joints are. The satellites really are mating.
If there's one thing I've learned, it's that the vast bulk of my customers are refugees from other hosting, not new hosters. I gather that the things that I say only tend to ring true with people who've already been through the wringer once or twice. So, hey, knowing I'm in that folder makes me teh happies, because that means when you run the gamut of a bad host - and everyone does, sooner or later - then there's a chance I'll pick you up there.
's actually why I put the money back guarantee in PayPal's hands, instead of my own - to make sure people realize just how low-risk I want their checking me out to be. That's where my business comes from - people smarting from a recent wound and testing the waters, looking for a better answer.
Most hosts are jerks, so statistically speaking, your current host is probably a jerk.
OK, this may just be a hell of a coincidence, but the day you post this on/. you raise your price by $9.04?
The base price is the price before time or quantity discounts apply. The price I cite in the slashdot post as "if you pay for a long time" and the price on the price chart for two-year payment are the same. The prices in that post are correct; they're just phrased in a confusing fashion. My apologies. I will endeavour to be clearer in the future.
No, it isn't coincidence that I updated the prices before I made my slashdot post. They went up by one dollar, though, not nine, and the price update was before I posted to SlashDot, not after.
Your obviously not yet updated Plans page says... Single slices start at $21.96/mo
Yeah, that's correct. The cheapest available price for a slice is the two-year prepay rate, which is $21.96/mo. The base price for one slice - the price you pay if you're paying monthly - is $31/mo. Therefore, the two year rate is about a 30% savings. I probably just shouldn't have mentioned the base price rate without mentioning the calculation method.
The calculation is simple. Base_price * quantity_discount * timeframe_discount = total_cost. Total_cost / months = monthly_cost. If you buy 24 months, you only pay for 17 of them, and there's no quantity discount for a single slice. Therefore, the cheapest price possible for a single slice is (31*1*(17/24)) for two years, or $527; divided into 24 months, that works out to $21.958333. I rounded up the extra one sixth cent.
So, yeah. One thing I've learned today is that I need to be much, much clearer about pricing, and that I need to choose my terminology more carefully. The term "base price" is apparently confusing. However, if you'll look at the "one slice" row in the price chart, I think you'll be pleased to find that all the numbers hold up, and that the problem is simply my choice of phrasing.
I am NOT saying it's a bad price, since I really don't know what the value for what you're charging is, I'm just amazed at the timing of the increase.
The timing of the increase is no coincidence; I've been planning to increase prices for new customers anyway, and the SlashDot article just gave me the immediate reason. However, the prices I cited in my post are correct (for once.) One slice costs [$31.00.. $21.96] per month, depending on how much time you buy up front.
As far as the price, well, just look at my competition. There are a lot of places that sell less than what I call a starter slice for more than $50/month, and very few places sell VPS at all at prices competitive with my two-slice package. Most VPS companies don't say anything about your CPU guarantee or your base bandwidth, and they almost all cap your total throughput.
I am only aware of eleven VPS companies whose prices I consider legitimately competitive, and I've investigated approx. 350 competitors. (No, I'm not gonna tell you who the good ones are.;) ) I would give a list of the other 339, but it seems kinda tacky. Besides, it's a lot more effective to tell someone to "just google vps;" the places that come up high in the list, and that advertise, are the ones whose prices make me laugh under my breath.
I am proud of my prices. Maybe, um, not so proud of the phrasing; I'll work on that.:D But the numbers are awesome.
Thank you for taking me to task. If more people called hosting providers on what look like lies or dirty tricks, my job of getting customers would be a hell of a lot easier, since about half of my competition would disappear overnight.
Plumbness refers to deviation from perfectly straight, correct? So the document I linked, and my own statements, were both referring to a maximum 75mm deviation from perfectly straight, along the entire length of the vertical beam.
Jesus, do I have to draw you a diagram? The error in a floor is HORIZONTAL. Why is this hard for you to understand? If a floor is at three degrees, that means one side of it is higher than the other. Plumbness measures deviation from VERTICALLY STRAIGHT. A plumb is a big chunk of metal on the end of a rope. You use it to tell if something is going up and down straightly. Now, I don't know about you, but most floors in the buildings I've been to - even weird places like the Mystery Spot - are horizontal.
This really isn't that complicated. Get a piece of string. Put something heavy on it. Now, imagine where a pipe might be if it was just five degrees wrong. Don't try to change that number. Five degrees. Just barely wrong. See how it's almost straight up and down? Now, imagine where a floor would be if it was five degrees wrong. Don't try to change that number. Five degrees. Just barely wrong. See how it's almost perfectly horizontal?
"Well but the error for a floor is measured vertically." Yes, it is. Error for a measurement is perpendicular to the real direction. You're trying to compare plumbness to floor error. That's broken. You do not compare an accuracy with an error. Plumbness is vertical, error horizontal. Floor evenness is horizontal, error vertical.
YOU ARE MEASURING IN THE WRONG DIRECTION. Use your common sense example-making muscles. This really isn't that hard.
But then you go saying things like "if one side of each floor was 75mm higher than the other, the whole building would be uneven by 12 feet when you reached the top". The measurements I'm talking about have nothing to do with height.
Ok. So, a perfect floor is perfectly horizontal. A floor's perfection has nothing to do with its extent in the direction of the floor plane. If the error component of a horizontal floor isn't horizontal, and if you claim it isn't vertical, where exactly is the error component?
Let's get back to our common sense example, shall we? Start with a piece of cardboard, or something else that forms a rigid almost-plane. That's your floor. Now, hold it out in front of you with zero error (or as close as you can get.) Imagine a 3d coordinate grid in your head, such that Z is from floor to sky. You'll notice that all corners of the cardboard have the same Z value; this is how one defines a perfect-angle floor.
Now, hold it with a 10% grade error. See how the Z value of either two or three corners has changed? That is the vertical error.
The reason a horizontal floor has a vertical error is because any non-perfect floor is a hill. Think it through.
I don't know why you keep insisting it does, or insisting that MY statements do, but you're clearly misunderstanding something. I've not been talking about height differences at any point.
All errors in floor accuracy are height errors, by definition.
I don't see any reason or you to believe [that Giza is the most accurate building] Actually they do. Look in almost any text and you'll find it.
Yeah, that's classic evasive behavior. I asked for a citation because the citation doesn't exist. "Almost any text" isn't a citation, and I happen to be looking at one such text right now, Corinna Rossi's excellent "Architecture and Mathematics in Ancient Egypt," and it says no such thing.
Quit handwaving. Cite an actual book and page, or quit pretending the quote exists.
Attempts have been made to explain it away, too:
I really don't believe you. Y'see, anyone with even a basic understanding of architectural engineering knows that a structure built on sand will eventually settle plumb; the amount of time it
I should point out that I run a small VPS company called "guaranteed VPS." It's just starting up, but the premise is simple: I don't oversell boxes, ever. I guarantee all five major resources as either minimums or fixed amounts, and I give details that not many companies seem to give regarding the system's configuration. The prices are cheap, there are good discounts for pre-pay, and the bandwidth is awesome.
On the downside, it's a two-man operation, and we both have day-jobs, so the tech support is pretty poor. The actual MegaPOP is awesome, and all the disks are RAID1 pair mirrors, so we're not going to have any downtime because someone didn't hot-swap a dead drive, or whatever, but this is really a service made for people who know how to run their own stuff.
Anyway, it's 21 bucks a month for root and a guaranteed 100k/s at all times, and twelve bucks a month for 50k/s, if you pay a long time up-front. Plans get bigger, too, and discounts get pretty big pretty quick; that 100k/s is called a slice, and if you want to stack slices, I'll give you every third for half off.
Anyway, it's hosting, so there's a million options, and I don't really need to break it down here. Just look at the price chart. My customers seem to be happy with what they're getting. Since you've got root, you can take down Apache and put up something else, if you want (lightstreamer and YAWS come to mind.) Need six million weird programming languages? That's cool, just download and compile them; you've got GCC, perl, whatever you need. 'Course, if it's in RPM or Yum, it's prolly dead simple anyway.:D
But seriously, it's cheaper than the alternative, namely a dedicated box, if you need funky stuff like Erlang or Rails or Twisted Python or whatever, and I'd like to think my prices are more than competitive with the other VPS vendors out there. Give us a look. You can't go wrong when you know exactly what you're getting.
In addition, your last paragraph completely misunderstands the document I linked. The 75mm limit was over the entire height of the building, as was clearly stated.
Er. "The measurement you're referring to is the plumbness of a column from building top to building floor." I should think it clear that I understood that quite thoroughly. What I'm trying to explain to you is that you're looking at the wrong direction. You don't measure vertical drift against building height, you measure it against building width; the issue is the angle of the floor. The floor of a 50 story building which is higher on one side by two inches is no less uneven than a 20 story building which is higher on one side by two inches. The height of the building has nothing to do with it.
Please re-read what I said previously. There is a reason I said exactly what you've chosen to repeat as a rebuttal. I knew what I was reading. You would do well to be less dismissive of what other people say to you, when they kindly point out mistakes; certainly you would be wise not to phrase things in so nasty a form as "your last paragraph completely misunderstands the document I linked;" you'll find that when, like now, you are simply repeating the error you previously made, as Matlock said in his first, weirdest season, "the egg on your face will not in fact make a breakfast."
When looking at a slope, and when measuring slab rise as the vertical component, you have to make a right triangle to get the slab arc. There's a reason that the remaining arm is horizontal. There's a reason these things are measured in angles. C'mon.
While I'm certainly prepared to believe that fabrication plants are extremely precise, I'm having a hard time picturing why the Boeing site, for example, NEEDS a floor that deviates by less than half a millimeter over 98 acres.
Because planes are built at varying lengths throughout their infancy, if you'll excuse the metaphor. As such, Boeing can make more efficient use of the floor space if they don't have to partition it according to their buildings' arbitrary floor positioning.
It would be phenomenally expensive to create such a structure.
As evidenced by that their factory is 100 acres, and that it was originally 50, they obviously need and can afford the space. Besides, the cost of such a structure makes the efficient use thereof all the more important.
However, it doesn't seem like it's inappropriate to point out that it's more precise (by several powers of 10) than all but the most advanced modern buildings, all of which are built with modern technology.
I wish you would quit saying this. The numbers do not uphold it, nor does common sense, nor have you cited an authority giving anything other than raw measurements. I don't see any reason for you to believe this. There is no authorative document comparing the pyramids' accuracy to those of any other building, nor did the supposed accuracy of the building have anything to do with the original topic.
Anyway, if you're going to continue to reiterate things that are under dispute without appropriate repudiation, I guess this conversation isn't worth following through.
You said scrapers over 50 stories... so say, 50 stories (about 500 feet), assuming the same 75mm tolerance
The bigger it is, the more sensitive it is to problems. Treehouses can deviate by a foot. By the by, I suggest that next time you read more carefully. The measurement you're referring to is the plumbness of a column from building top to building floor. The germane quote is alignment of horizontal members: in plan to within 1:1000, except that plus or minus 3 mm is always acceptable and more than plus or minus 6 mm is never acceptable. It's important to realize that the primary measurement is 1:1000 as measured against the thickness of the structure in question, so the 3mm will be hit on almost every occasion; the limiting range is there for stress tolerance calculations and for dealing with small foundations.
That said, you really can't compare an absolute failure limit to an instance. They're apples and oranges. The number you're talking about is the number where it falls apart. No sane contractor will allow things to get anywhere near that number. It is typical for a contractor to aim for 10% of a tolerance range during construction, suggesting a real-world error of.3 millimeters. Given that the typical commercial 50-story building has a base of 150 feet or more, and given that the tunnels you're describing are in the parts of the pyramid that are roughly 250 feet across, the skyscrapers are thus weighing in at a typical 14% of margin as compared to the pyramids. Mind you, that's just for an average skyscraper, whose accuracy does not in any way compare with that of a modern fab plant. The Boeing Everett WA fabrication site is 98 acres, and has a total floor deviance of less than half a millimeter, suggesting a floor error less than one one hundred thousandth of Giza.
I suspect there are many buildings on Earth whose floor tolerance makes Boeing's site look sloppy by comparison. One thing that seems likely to me to be a good candidate is the building housing a particle accelerator ring; there is no doubt in my mind that the floor accuracy of the Large Hadron Collider is enough to make a mason fall to his knees and cry.
I mean, think it through. If every story was 75mm off edge to edge, at 50 stories, one side of the building would be 12 feet and change, or just under one and a quarter US stories, taller than the other. The Washington Monument is 55 feet at the base and 34 feet at the top; that suggests a floor slope of 19 degrees and change. The building would curve like a Khopesh. That is/not/ safe.
Correlation does not imply causation. It may simply be that people with small hippocampi are at a serious disadvantage when taking that test. In order to suggest causation, you would need scans of the brains of those individuals from before they started learning the street layout.
What these scientists are doing isn't providing a filter before the biological input device. They're creating new input devices that can use the biological input devices' connection points. As you'll note, if you rfta, the scientists are in fact talking about their apparent inability to junction directly to the brain, due to not knowing how the brain speaks.
Yes, we're aware that when the article talks about things we've done in the past, that they're not new. Please don't complain about the last few sentences in the story as if they're the only thing that got said.
Given that peasants in Egypt weren't paid, did not own their homes, had no control over their occupation, could be bought and sold with or without their families, and could be killed at the whim of any upper class citizen with no ramifications, I'm curious what you believe the distinction between peasant and slave is. Is it just the ostrich feather?
As far as I know, Carthage was the only empire in that area and timeframe which did not make significant use of slaves, and even they still traded in slaves as a luxury commodity between other empires.
There were paid laborers among the slaves (who some choose to call peasants,) but the vast bulk of the manual laborers were unpaid and were not there by choice in most pyramids, as evidenced by the detailed payment records of only a small subset of the workers in each location.
Er, where is this research, please? I ask because we've known there were paid craftsmen there since the 1800s, and I'm a little confused what makes you believe that those cities full of barracks sleeping with little actual comfortable houses all around them would be full of something other than slaves. Or did you believe that paid craftsmen sometimes just lived in slave quarters?
Please cite the research you name, if you're going to name it. It is contrary to everything I've studied.
Oh for christ's sake, you mean physical alignment? Dude, there are chip fabs that can't tolerate deviances of a thousandth of an inch over half a mile. If you think this is the most accurate building on Earth, you don't know a thing about buildings on Earth.
We could make them more precise, but we don't because A) it's expensive to do so, and B) we don't need to.
Don't confuse your ignorance of when we do and when we need to for that we never do and have no need. Building characteristics are frequently critical properties in fabrication plants. The tolerances you describe are way larger than acceptable tolerances for a skyscraper over fifty stories, too. Or did you think you can just stack a bunch of metal with a bunch of little mistakes and expect it to hold up?
We have aligned rail from the 1800s with better characteristics than the ones you're now pretending are the best on Earth. Go read a book.
Er, the pyramids aren't even the most accurately aligned buildings of the ancient world, let alone the modern world. Several of the stone circles (though not Stonehenge itself,) many of the Aztec calendars and several of the Greek solar calendars are significantly better physically aligned than are the pyramids. Or, did you think people who could make something like the Antikythera Mechanism couldn't align things to the sky?
Now, if you want to talk about *modern* buildings, if you think the pyramids are better aligned than satellite receiving grids, airport transponder towers and so on, well, I'm just not sure what to tell you.
The "amazing alignment" you're speaking of is about a degree and a half of error, which when measured against the size of the pyramid, works out to be about twelve feet. Is that amazing for an ancient people eyeballing the sky? Hell yes. Is it competitive with modern buildings? Dude, the game of geocaching, played with $100 GPS units, is more accurate than that, ffs.
250,000 slave years, not hours. Sigh. Much more impressive that way. If you lay the slaves end to end like one of those M&Ms from Los Angeles to New York things, you'd get a line of unbroken work stretching back to the seperation between H. heidelbergensis (barely apes) and H. rhodesiensis (barely human.) That's almost exactly the time where neanderthals and homo sapiens split apart.
Yeah, or you could just watch the history channel special where a bunch of modern people did it using no modern tools, in order to show that it was in fact quite possible.
I wonder which part of piling sand onto the side of rocks in the desert you think couldn't be handled by tens of thousands of slaves over the course of decades. Is it the finding the sand? The moving it? I mean, is it also difficult for ancient people to get saltwater at the coast? Wood in the forest, perhaps?
For every person that remembers how much work it is to move a bunch of sand, I'll show you a person who forgets just how many slave-years were put towards shit like this back then. The pyramids were how Egypt showed social, technological, religious and cultural superiority. They weren't just about kings' egos; they were important tools in establishing position during trade, in scaring slaves into not rebelling, and so on. In the age where a two story house seems unlikely, man-made mountains are no joke.
When you hear ten thousand slaves for 25 years, it's not an exaggeration. Do you really think that this is more than 250,000 slave-hours? There are entire support towns excavated around the base of most of the pyramids; these things were obviously engineered from the perspective of city planners. It's no simple matter to coordinate, feed and home 10k people today, let alone when rocks still seem like a good thing to make weapons from.
They weren't just sitting around playing hackeysack, y'know.
Slashdot Mirror
Contributory negligence requires that there be a clear and well understood alternative. You can't charge a company with contributory negligence unless you have a better answer. So, unless you have a bunch of diffs for XP, sit down and quit whining. Believe it or not, they're actually doing an excellent job, considering the enormous size of windows and the value of a compromise. I'd tell you to compare it against defects in other applications, except I have no doubt you'd have no idea where to start.
Funny how the next thing out of your mouth is almost guaranteed to be "well why don't you show me these statistics I should have had before I opened my poorly educated mouth," acting as if it's my responsibility to educate you if I don't want you to keep spreading around mindless FUD.
Quit pretending to be an engineer. Don't bother telling me you aren't pretending to be an engineer; only an engineer understands engineering practices and engineering defect rates, and you're talking about taking a major corporation to court for not doing well enough with those rates. "Well they're Microsoft, there should be no defects." No large project in the history of mankind has no defects.
Welcome to the real world. When the Justice Department wanted to break Microsoft, if they could have sued for negligence, they would have. They have done that to some companies. They just couldn't do that to Microsoft, becuase to suggest that a project would be illegal to release before zero-defect proof is to wipe all software off of the face of the map and start at a speed so slow that we will never compete with any other country again. Believe it or not, national-scale spite lawsuits would have major repurcussions.
Insightful my ass. Mod parent down through the Earth's mantle, to play with the Morlocks where it belongs.
Don't be absurd. The class of attacks F-Secure purports to be protecting against cannot be caught in a virus scan. This is F-Secure trying to arrange a license to tax corporations. Nothing more, nothing less.
The problem with reminder TLDs is that the only people who need the reminders are the people who are unable to check, if and when they notice the domain name at all. Having a .safe or a .worry or a .payattentionthismaynotbeyourbank doesn't actually do any good in the practical sense; TLDs themselves don't offer any security, and the people with the sophistication to check don't need a reminder in the domain name. All this really is is F-Secure preparing to approach ICANN/ARIN/IETF by astroturfing first (something the .XXX people should have done,) so that when it comes time to vote, the idea seems reasonable.
.safe, they can hand out .safe domains for $1,000, because "spammers won't pay that much and we'll background check and rah rah rah." Nevermind that most spammers make >$50k/week.
The real issue is that if F-Secure owns
This is just F-Secure positioning to try to create a license to print money.
Why is it that everyone seems to think a company that transfers money and holds money in accounts is a bank? Your utility companies do that, credit cards are issued by non-banks all day, et cetera. You might as well argue that Final Fantasy Online is a bank - you can purchase in-game currency, give it to someone else, then have it converted back to real currency. Do rechargeable, releaseable gift cards make every store in the mall a bank? Is my cellular phone company a bank? My cell phone can make payments for me, even.
Bank regulations aren't about little-guy money transfers, and wouldn't help in virtually any of the "omg paypal skrooed me" situations (which, I might note, I've never actually seen be anything other than the fault of one of the two end-users. Yes, PayPal freezes accounts too easily, but frankly, if you can't tolerate a several-day money lag, you shouldn't be transacting online at all.) Bank regulations are about the investment of held capital and so forth, to prevent messes like the 1914 commodity crash or the 1980s savings and loan scandal. Say what you will about PayPal, but their back-end investments are safe, conservative and shrewd. No bank regulations would affect PayPal in any way that the end users would find significant, other than to increase existing rates (not by enough to affect most transactions, but it would kill the micropayment system dead.)
The next time you go complaining about regulations, maybe you should name the specific regulation you want. That way, when people read what you say, they won't do what I did, and assume you're some clueless whiner who just wants to repeat what everyone else says to sound smart, when bitching about an online business that they heard screwed a friend of a friend of a friend.
Of course, that'd require knowing what you were talking about.
Er. How do you figure?
This is Gamecube homebrew, not Wii homebrew. The Wii is simply backwards-compatible.
OK, these satellites aren't really mating.
Surprising as it might be to the language experts on Slashdot, "mating" means things other than sex. Call a plumber and ask them what mated joints are. The satellites really are mating.
For a company whose motto is "don't be evil," it strikes me as hilarious that Google is now responsible for more corporate piracy than Microsoft.
If there's one thing I've learned, it's that the vast bulk of my customers are refugees from other hosting, not new hosters. I gather that the things that I say only tend to ring true with people who've already been through the wringer once or twice. So, hey, knowing I'm in that folder makes me teh happies, because that means when you run the gamut of a bad host - and everyone does, sooner or later - then there's a chance I'll pick you up there.
... well, see you soon. ;)
's actually why I put the money back guarantee in PayPal's hands, instead of my own - to make sure people realize just how low-risk I want their checking me out to be. That's where my business comes from - people smarting from a recent wound and testing the waters, looking for a better answer.
Most hosts are jerks, so statistically speaking, your current host is probably a jerk.
Therefore?
OK, this may just be a hell of a coincidence, but the day you post this on /. you raise your price by $9.04?
... Single slices start at $21.96/mo
.. $21.96] per month, depending on how much time you buy up front.
;) ) I would give a list of the other 339, but it seems kinda tacky. Besides, it's a lot more effective to tell someone to "just google vps;" the places that come up high in the list, and that advertise, are the ones whose prices make me laugh under my breath.
:D But the numbers are awesome.
The base price is the price before time or quantity discounts apply. The price I cite in the slashdot post as "if you pay for a long time" and the price on the price chart for two-year payment are the same. The prices in that post are correct; they're just phrased in a confusing fashion. My apologies. I will endeavour to be clearer in the future.
No, it isn't coincidence that I updated the prices before I made my slashdot post. They went up by one dollar, though, not nine, and the price update was before I posted to SlashDot, not after.
Your obviously not yet updated Plans page says
Yeah, that's correct. The cheapest available price for a slice is the two-year prepay rate, which is $21.96/mo. The base price for one slice - the price you pay if you're paying monthly - is $31/mo. Therefore, the two year rate is about a 30% savings. I probably just shouldn't have mentioned the base price rate without mentioning the calculation method.
The calculation is simple. Base_price * quantity_discount * timeframe_discount = total_cost. Total_cost / months = monthly_cost. If you buy 24 months, you only pay for 17 of them, and there's no quantity discount for a single slice. Therefore, the cheapest price possible for a single slice is (31*1*(17/24)) for two years, or $527; divided into 24 months, that works out to $21.958333. I rounded up the extra one sixth cent.
So, yeah. One thing I've learned today is that I need to be much, much clearer about pricing, and that I need to choose my terminology more carefully. The term "base price" is apparently confusing. However, if you'll look at the "one slice" row in the price chart, I think you'll be pleased to find that all the numbers hold up, and that the problem is simply my choice of phrasing.
I am NOT saying it's a bad price, since I really don't know what the value for what you're charging is, I'm just amazed at the timing of the increase.
The timing of the increase is no coincidence; I've been planning to increase prices for new customers anyway, and the SlashDot article just gave me the immediate reason. However, the prices I cited in my post are correct (for once.) One slice costs [$31.00
As far as the price, well, just look at my competition. There are a lot of places that sell less than what I call a starter slice for more than $50/month, and very few places sell VPS at all at prices competitive with my two-slice package. Most VPS companies don't say anything about your CPU guarantee or your base bandwidth, and they almost all cap your total throughput.
I am only aware of eleven VPS companies whose prices I consider legitimately competitive, and I've investigated approx. 350 competitors. (No, I'm not gonna tell you who the good ones are.
I am proud of my prices. Maybe, um, not so proud of the phrasing; I'll work on that.
Thank you for taking me to task. If more people called hosting providers on what look like lies or dirty tricks, my job of getting customers would be a hell of a lot easier, since about half of my competition would disappear overnight.
I wish more people did as you did.
- John
Jesus, do I have to draw you a diagram? The error in a floor is HORIZONTAL. Why is this hard for you to understand? If a floor is at three degrees, that means one side of it is higher than the other. Plumbness measures deviation from VERTICALLY STRAIGHT. A plumb is a big chunk of metal on the end of a rope. You use it to tell if something is going up and down straightly. Now, I don't know about you, but most floors in the buildings I've been to - even weird places like the Mystery Spot - are horizontal.
This really isn't that complicated. Get a piece of string. Put something heavy on it. Now, imagine where a pipe might be if it was just five degrees wrong. Don't try to change that number. Five degrees. Just barely wrong. See how it's almost straight up and down? Now, imagine where a floor would be if it was five degrees wrong. Don't try to change that number. Five degrees. Just barely wrong. See how it's almost perfectly horizontal?
"Well but the error for a floor is measured vertically." Yes, it is. Error for a measurement is perpendicular to the real direction. You're trying to compare plumbness to floor error. That's broken. You do not compare an accuracy with an error. Plumbness is vertical, error horizontal. Floor evenness is horizontal, error vertical.
YOU ARE MEASURING IN THE WRONG DIRECTION. Use your common sense example-making muscles. This really isn't that hard.
But then you go saying things like "if one side of each floor was 75mm higher than the other, the whole building would be uneven by 12 feet when you reached the top". The measurements I'm talking about have nothing to do with height.
Ok. So, a perfect floor is perfectly horizontal. A floor's perfection has nothing to do with its extent in the direction of the floor plane. If the error component of a horizontal floor isn't horizontal, and if you claim it isn't vertical, where exactly is the error component?
Let's get back to our common sense example, shall we? Start with a piece of cardboard, or something else that forms a rigid almost-plane. That's your floor. Now, hold it out in front of you with zero error (or as close as you can get.) Imagine a 3d coordinate grid in your head, such that Z is from floor to sky. You'll notice that all corners of the cardboard have the same Z value; this is how one defines a perfect-angle floor.
Now, hold it with a 10% grade error. See how the Z value of either two or three corners has changed? That is the vertical error.
The reason a horizontal floor has a vertical error is because any non-perfect floor is a hill. Think it through.
I don't know why you keep insisting it does, or insisting that MY statements do, but you're clearly misunderstanding something. I've not been talking about height differences at any point.
All errors in floor accuracy are height errors, by definition.
You can host at GuaranteedVPS and get root and a bandwidth minimum with no cap starting at $13/mo, actually.
Then again, I own GuaranteedVPS, so whatever.
I should point out that I run a small VPS company called "guaranteed VPS." It's just starting up, but the premise is simple: I don't oversell boxes, ever. I guarantee all five major resources as either minimums or fixed amounts, and I give details that not many companies seem to give regarding the system's configuration. The prices are cheap, there are good discounts for pre-pay, and the bandwidth is awesome.
:D
On the downside, it's a two-man operation, and we both have day-jobs, so the tech support is pretty poor. The actual MegaPOP is awesome, and all the disks are RAID1 pair mirrors, so we're not going to have any downtime because someone didn't hot-swap a dead drive, or whatever, but this is really a service made for people who know how to run their own stuff.
Anyway, it's 21 bucks a month for root and a guaranteed 100k/s at all times, and twelve bucks a month for 50k/s, if you pay a long time up-front. Plans get bigger, too, and discounts get pretty big pretty quick; that 100k/s is called a slice, and if you want to stack slices, I'll give you every third for half off.
Anyway, it's hosting, so there's a million options, and I don't really need to break it down here. Just look at the price chart. My customers seem to be happy with what they're getting. Since you've got root, you can take down Apache and put up something else, if you want (lightstreamer and YAWS come to mind.) Need six million weird programming languages? That's cool, just download and compile them; you've got GCC, perl, whatever you need. 'Course, if it's in RPM or Yum, it's prolly dead simple anyway.
But seriously, it's cheaper than the alternative, namely a dedicated box, if you need funky stuff like Erlang or Rails or Twisted Python or whatever, and I'd like to think my prices are more than competitive with the other VPS vendors out there. Give us a look. You can't go wrong when you know exactly what you're getting.
In addition, your last paragraph completely misunderstands the document I linked. The 75mm limit was over the entire height of the building, as was clearly stated.
Er. "The measurement you're referring to is the plumbness of a column from building top to building floor." I should think it clear that I understood that quite thoroughly. What I'm trying to explain to you is that you're looking at the wrong direction. You don't measure vertical drift against building height, you measure it against building width; the issue is the angle of the floor. The floor of a 50 story building which is higher on one side by two inches is no less uneven than a 20 story building which is higher on one side by two inches. The height of the building has nothing to do with it.
Please re-read what I said previously. There is a reason I said exactly what you've chosen to repeat as a rebuttal. I knew what I was reading. You would do well to be less dismissive of what other people say to you, when they kindly point out mistakes; certainly you would be wise not to phrase things in so nasty a form as "your last paragraph completely misunderstands the document I linked;" you'll find that when, like now, you are simply repeating the error you previously made, as Matlock said in his first, weirdest season, "the egg on your face will not in fact make a breakfast."
When looking at a slope, and when measuring slab rise as the vertical component, you have to make a right triangle to get the slab arc. There's a reason that the remaining arm is horizontal. There's a reason these things are measured in angles. C'mon.
While I'm certainly prepared to believe that fabrication plants are extremely precise, I'm having a hard time picturing why the Boeing site, for example, NEEDS a floor that deviates by less than half a millimeter over 98 acres.
Because planes are built at varying lengths throughout their infancy, if you'll excuse the metaphor. As such, Boeing can make more efficient use of the floor space if they don't have to partition it according to their buildings' arbitrary floor positioning.
It would be phenomenally expensive to create such a structure.
As evidenced by that their factory is 100 acres, and that it was originally 50, they obviously need and can afford the space. Besides, the cost of such a structure makes the efficient use thereof all the more important.
However, it doesn't seem like it's inappropriate to point out that it's more precise (by several powers of 10) than all but the most advanced modern buildings, all of which are built with modern technology.
I wish you would quit saying this. The numbers do not uphold it, nor does common sense, nor have you cited an authority giving anything other than raw measurements. I don't see any reason for you to believe this. There is no authorative document comparing the pyramids' accuracy to those of any other building, nor did the supposed accuracy of the building have anything to do with the original topic.
Anyway, if you're going to continue to reiterate things that are under dispute without appropriate repudiation, I guess this conversation isn't worth following through.
You said scrapers over 50 stories... so say, 50 stories (about 500 feet), assuming the same 75mm tolerance
.3 millimeters. Given that the typical commercial 50-story building has a base of 150 feet or more, and given that the tunnels you're describing are in the parts of the pyramid that are roughly 250 feet across, the skyscrapers are thus weighing in at a typical 14% of margin as compared to the pyramids. Mind you, that's just for an average skyscraper, whose accuracy does not in any way compare with that of a modern fab plant. The Boeing Everett WA fabrication site is 98 acres, and has a total floor deviance of less than half a millimeter, suggesting a floor error less than one one hundred thousandth of Giza.
/not/ safe.
The bigger it is, the more sensitive it is to problems. Treehouses can deviate by a foot. By the by, I suggest that next time you read more carefully. The measurement you're referring to is the plumbness of a column from building top to building floor. The germane quote is alignment of horizontal members: in plan to within 1:1000, except that plus or minus 3 mm is always acceptable and more than plus or minus 6 mm is never acceptable. It's important to realize that the primary measurement is 1:1000 as measured against the thickness of the structure in question, so the 3mm will be hit on almost every occasion; the limiting range is there for stress tolerance calculations and for dealing with small foundations.
That said, you really can't compare an absolute failure limit to an instance. They're apples and oranges. The number you're talking about is the number where it falls apart. No sane contractor will allow things to get anywhere near that number. It is typical for a contractor to aim for 10% of a tolerance range during construction, suggesting a real-world error of
I suspect there are many buildings on Earth whose floor tolerance makes Boeing's site look sloppy by comparison. One thing that seems likely to me to be a good candidate is the building housing a particle accelerator ring; there is no doubt in my mind that the floor accuracy of the Large Hadron Collider is enough to make a mason fall to his knees and cry.
I mean, think it through. If every story was 75mm off edge to edge, at 50 stories, one side of the building would be 12 feet and change, or just under one and a quarter US stories, taller than the other. The Washington Monument is 55 feet at the base and 34 feet at the top; that suggests a floor slope of 19 degrees and change. The building would curve like a Khopesh. That is
Correlation does not imply causation. It may simply be that people with small hippocampi are at a serious disadvantage when taking that test. In order to suggest causation, you would need scans of the brains of those individuals from before they started learning the street layout.
What these scientists are doing isn't providing a filter before the biological input device. They're creating new input devices that can use the biological input devices' connection points. As you'll note, if you rfta, the scientists are in fact talking about their apparent inability to junction directly to the brain, due to not knowing how the brain speaks.
Yes, we're aware that when the article talks about things we've done in the past, that they're not new. Please don't complain about the last few sentences in the story as if they're the only thing that got said.
Fair enough, Dr. Sivana. ;)
Given that peasants in Egypt weren't paid, did not own their homes, had no control over their occupation, could be bought and sold with or without their families, and could be killed at the whim of any upper class citizen with no ramifications, I'm curious what you believe the distinction between peasant and slave is. Is it just the ostrich feather?
As far as I know, Carthage was the only empire in that area and timeframe which did not make significant use of slaves, and even they still traded in slaves as a luxury commodity between other empires.
There were paid laborers among the slaves (who some choose to call peasants,) but the vast bulk of the manual laborers were unpaid and were not there by choice in most pyramids, as evidenced by the detailed payment records of only a small subset of the workers in each location.
Er, where is this research, please? I ask because we've known there were paid craftsmen there since the 1800s, and I'm a little confused what makes you believe that those cities full of barracks sleeping with little actual comfortable houses all around them would be full of something other than slaves. Or did you believe that paid craftsmen sometimes just lived in slave quarters?
Please cite the research you name, if you're going to name it. It is contrary to everything I've studied.
Oh for christ's sake, you mean physical alignment? Dude, there are chip fabs that can't tolerate deviances of a thousandth of an inch over half a mile. If you think this is the most accurate building on Earth, you don't know a thing about buildings on Earth.
We could make them more precise, but we don't because A) it's expensive to do so, and B) we don't need to.
Don't confuse your ignorance of when we do and when we need to for that we never do and have no need. Building characteristics are frequently critical properties in fabrication plants. The tolerances you describe are way larger than acceptable tolerances for a skyscraper over fifty stories, too. Or did you think you can just stack a bunch of metal with a bunch of little mistakes and expect it to hold up?
We have aligned rail from the 1800s with better characteristics than the ones you're now pretending are the best on Earth. Go read a book.
Er, the pyramids aren't even the most accurately aligned buildings of the ancient world, let alone the modern world. Several of the stone circles (though not Stonehenge itself,) many of the Aztec calendars and several of the Greek solar calendars are significantly better physically aligned than are the pyramids. Or, did you think people who could make something like the Antikythera Mechanism couldn't align things to the sky?
Now, if you want to talk about *modern* buildings, if you think the pyramids are better aligned than satellite receiving grids, airport transponder towers and so on, well, I'm just not sure what to tell you.
The "amazing alignment" you're speaking of is about a degree and a half of error, which when measured against the size of the pyramid, works out to be about twelve feet. Is that amazing for an ancient people eyeballing the sky? Hell yes. Is it competitive with modern buildings? Dude, the game of geocaching, played with $100 GPS units, is more accurate than that, ffs.
250,000 slave years, not hours. Sigh. Much more impressive that way. If you lay the slaves end to end like one of those M&Ms from Los Angeles to New York things, you'd get a line of unbroken work stretching back to the seperation between H. heidelbergensis (barely apes) and H. rhodesiensis (barely human.) That's almost exactly the time where neanderthals and homo sapiens split apart.
So yeah, much more impressive that way.
Yeah, or you could just watch the history channel special where a bunch of modern people did it using no modern tools, in order to show that it was in fact quite possible.
I wonder which part of piling sand onto the side of rocks in the desert you think couldn't be handled by tens of thousands of slaves over the course of decades. Is it the finding the sand? The moving it? I mean, is it also difficult for ancient people to get saltwater at the coast? Wood in the forest, perhaps?
For every person that remembers how much work it is to move a bunch of sand, I'll show you a person who forgets just how many slave-years were put towards shit like this back then. The pyramids were how Egypt showed social, technological, religious and cultural superiority. They weren't just about kings' egos; they were important tools in establishing position during trade, in scaring slaves into not rebelling, and so on. In the age where a two story house seems unlikely, man-made mountains are no joke.
When you hear ten thousand slaves for 25 years, it's not an exaggeration. Do you really think that this is more than 250,000 slave-hours? There are entire support towns excavated around the base of most of the pyramids; these things were obviously engineered from the perspective of city planners. It's no simple matter to coordinate, feed and home 10k people today, let alone when rocks still seem like a good thing to make weapons from.
They weren't just sitting around playing hackeysack, y'know.