If i buy something for $1000 new and sell on ebay for $900 used, i am not making money, and thus should not pay tax. I already paid tax when i received the original $1000 to buy the item with. You pay tax on PROFIT, not loss.
The price of gold has only gone up when measured in fiat dollars. What has really happened is that the value of your dollars (and the rest of the worlds fiat money) has gone down. The resources/labour expended (real cost) to extract an ounce of gold hasn't changed that dramatically in the past decade.
It doesn't matter what you can use it for, so long as it is a FINITE resource and isn't easily replicated. Gold costs labour and resources to extract. The government can't just whip up a million ounces out of thin air to inflate their currency with. That gold is a result of human labour and resources spent. Fiat (paper, electronic, non backed) money can easily be replicated for far less than the labour quantity required than the goods/services it can purchase. It is thus liable to abuse by a government via rampant inflation.
Back near the end of WW2 the german paper money was worth less than the firewood it could buy, so people were burning it to keep warm. The US is in real danger of that situation occurring over there in the next few years due to rampant government spending without the actual taxes to pay for it.
i would say that any currency is backed by the goods and services one can buy with it.
this is find and dandy if it is a fixed quantity of goods and the currency is bound to that by law. eg, the gold standard.
in the current situation with the us dollar (world's "reserve currency", lol) being backed in this manner by thin air, there is nothing to stop the government simply creating more to get themselves out of debt (inflation) thus reducing the value of goods your single dollar can buy (what you SEE as inflation).
OK. most of the games with a budget have consoles in mind. Those without a budget aren't pushing for quick hardware in any case, so bit of a moot point for the purposes of video card discussion really...
I doubt they'll sell all 1000 of them in the current economic climate, either. Unless there are some REALLY fuckin' stupid people over there in the states with lots of money, but big $ and small brain seems to be mutually exclusive elsewhere in the world.
Exactly. This thing is going to be desperately looking for a market. Fact is that PC games can be played on quite average hardware these days because they are either ported from, or intended to be ported to consoles.
Couple that with the fact that by the time games can really take advantage of that horsepower in about 12-18 months time, you'll be able to get the same throughput on a $400 card that takes up less space, runs cooler and uses less power.
...failed due to rampant piracy. as a DC owner, it wouldn't surprise me - as far as consoles go its the easiest machine to copy stuff for out there. no hardware hacks required, just a copy of discjuggler and you're away for the most part.
Good to hear, thanks for your input. I've used a recent thinkpad and was quite impressed. not as sexy looking as the E series, but much sturdier, much more friendly driver packages, and comparable performance. Am pushing hard to get a few eval units with a view to ditching dell ASAP.
No, i am pushing for eval gear. we simply needed 10 new machines ready to ship with 2 weeks notice. Getting alternative hardware sourced, tested, approved for purchase and the SOE altered in that time frame was simply not going to happen.
Question(s): how long have you been buying Dell hardware for, what other OEMs have you dealt with, and have you bought any hardware from them in the past 18 months?
Dell hardware used to be half decent - which is why we started using them as our OEM back in 2002. I still have D505 and D510 laptops out there in the field working perfectly, on bios revision A4 or similar.
The new stuff? E6500s are up to A20 or something, and still have firmware/hardware problems. The dell controlpoint garbage is not SOE friendly, the hardware feels flimsy in your hands, and our failure rate on E series machines has been well above 20% from the 50 or so E6400/E6500 machines we've bought in the past 12 months.
We have gold level support. I have had a single tech assigned to look into the E6500 down clocking issue. After 3 months, we eventually managed to get the ability to fast-track motherboard replacements. however on the new last batch of E6500s before the new E6510 model (about 8 machines), we have had a 100% failure rate on NICs (losing carrier, and dropping network connection at random). Unfortunately a number of these machines were shipped off to bumfuck africa before the problem was discovered - good luck getting a Dell tech to come out to some 5 person office several hundred km from the nearest city to replace...
We purchase roughly 100-120 machines per year, and the past 18 months has been a nightmare as far as failure rate on new Dells is concerned. we've had less OLD machines come in for repair than current models....
Will look into it. Not interested in building systems, so Asus would need to have equivalent models available to what we already order, and good global support - we are an international company with offices in 4 continents - the local OEM with PCs built by Bob or whatever will not suffice.
Will be loading our own SOE, so yeah the default OEM build full of crapola is irrelevant, we have volume licenses...
Corporate policy - takes about 30-60 days to get a new supplier set up, along with the rest of the logistical BS (tweaking our SOE, etc), and we simply needed new machines ASAP.
Additionally, we have yet to receive eval machines from a couple of other suppliers - better the "devil you know" until we can find something to shift to.
We're looking at either Lenovo or HP at the moment, if anyone has any other real suggestions, that would be great.
Yes, in the next 6 months or so, i think we are going to be purchasing elsewhere.
Thing with Dell is, they seem to go out of their way to blame your use of the product in cases like this. I dealt with the capacitor issue, and we ended up getting sent a stack of about 20 GX260 motherboards to replace ourselves (we were on a remote mine site and couldn't have a dell tech come out every time one died).
However, their handling of the E6500 and E6400 overheating and down-clocking problems has been appalling. They were sold as a high performance laptop, and dell's first question was what software I was running. I'm in an air conditioned office, using a "high end" laptop, it shouldn't fucking matter what software I am running. Despite sending through details of the mass problems people experienced on the internet, and listing the service tags of basically the entire first batch of E series machines we purchased, dell were "unable to replicate" the problem. I had to do a bunch of testing and send through snapshots of what i was seeing to get them to acknowledge that the problem even existed despite massive background info available from unhappy customers on the internet who were also ignored by Dell. Turns out there was a motherboard rev, hence they could not replicate on their newer machines.
Just recently we ordered about 10 more E6500s, all of which have constant network drop outs. The quality control really has gone to shit.
Slashdot Mirror
At 100% every 18 months, it will soon be less inflationary than the US government's fiscal policy (if not already)?
If i buy something for $1000 new and sell on ebay for $900 used, i am not making money, and thus should not pay tax. I already paid tax when i received the original $1000 to buy the item with. You pay tax on PROFIT, not loss.
On the verge of? You think the US is printing 1.6 trillion US dollars per year (thats just the projected budget deficit in 2011) in reality?
The price of gold has only gone up when measured in fiat dollars. What has really happened is that the value of your dollars (and the rest of the worlds fiat money) has gone down. The resources/labour expended (real cost) to extract an ounce of gold hasn't changed that dramatically in the past decade.
It doesn't matter what you can use it for, so long as it is a FINITE resource and isn't easily replicated. Gold costs labour and resources to extract. The government can't just whip up a million ounces out of thin air to inflate their currency with. That gold is a result of human labour and resources spent. Fiat (paper, electronic, non backed) money can easily be replicated for far less than the labour quantity required than the goods/services it can purchase. It is thus liable to abuse by a government via rampant inflation.
Back near the end of WW2 the german paper money was worth less than the firewood it could buy, so people were burning it to keep warm. The US is in real danger of that situation occurring over there in the next few years due to rampant government spending without the actual taxes to pay for it.
this is find and dandy if it is a fixed quantity of goods and the currency is bound to that by law. eg, the gold standard.
in the current situation with the us dollar (world's "reserve currency", lol) being backed in this manner by thin air, there is nothing to stop the government simply creating more to get themselves out of debt (inflation) thus reducing the value of goods your single dollar can buy (what you SEE as inflation).
OK. most of the games with a budget have consoles in mind. Those without a budget aren't pushing for quick hardware in any case, so bit of a moot point for the purposes of video card discussion really...
Back in the day we played games at sub-20 fps and we liked it.
I doubt they'll sell all 1000 of them in the current economic climate, either. Unless there are some REALLY fuckin' stupid people over there in the states with lots of money, but big $ and small brain seems to be mutually exclusive elsewhere in the world.
Exactly. This thing is going to be desperately looking for a market. Fact is that PC games can be played on quite average hardware these days because they are either ported from, or intended to be ported to consoles.
Couple that with the fact that by the time games can really take advantage of that horsepower in about 12-18 months time, you'll be able to get the same throughput on a $400 card that takes up less space, runs cooler and uses less power.
...failed due to rampant piracy. as a DC owner, it wouldn't surprise me - as far as consoles go its the easiest machine to copy stuff for out there. no hardware hacks required, just a copy of discjuggler and you're away for the most part.
You know how md5 hashes work, right?
So you're saying a travel agent organising flights for someone smuggling cocaine in their luggage is an accessory?
Sorry, but unless they were explicitly told of this (and its not their place to ask) then I seriously doubt that would stand up in court.
College in the US, right?
We've had *several* bad batches over the past 18 months. Not ONE bad batch.
For values of "interesting" == "predictable".
I am an unapologetic apple fanboy at the moment. I've "been there" and "done that" with regards to using Linux, FreeBSD and Windows.
I still DO use all of the above.
I use/admin Windows because I have to. I use FreeBSD and Apple products because I want to.
...the answer to that question had already been answered?
Good to hear, thanks for your input. I've used a recent thinkpad and was quite impressed. not as sexy looking as the E series, but much sturdier, much more friendly driver packages, and comparable performance. Am pushing hard to get a few eval units with a view to ditching dell ASAP.
No, i am pushing for eval gear. we simply needed 10 new machines ready to ship with 2 weeks notice. Getting alternative hardware sourced, tested, approved for purchase and the SOE altered in that time frame was simply not going to happen.
Question(s): how long have you been buying Dell hardware for, what other OEMs have you dealt with, and have you bought any hardware from them in the past 18 months?
Dell hardware used to be half decent - which is why we started using them as our OEM back in 2002. I still have D505 and D510 laptops out there in the field working perfectly, on bios revision A4 or similar.
The new stuff? E6500s are up to A20 or something, and still have firmware/hardware problems. The dell controlpoint garbage is not SOE friendly, the hardware feels flimsy in your hands, and our failure rate on E series machines has been well above 20% from the 50 or so E6400/E6500 machines we've bought in the past 12 months.
We have gold level support. I have had a single tech assigned to look into the E6500 down clocking issue. After 3 months, we eventually managed to get the ability to fast-track motherboard replacements. however on the new last batch of E6500s before the new E6510 model (about 8 machines), we have had a 100% failure rate on NICs (losing carrier, and dropping network connection at random). Unfortunately a number of these machines were shipped off to bumfuck africa before the problem was discovered - good luck getting a Dell tech to come out to some 5 person office several hundred km from the nearest city to replace...
We purchase roughly 100-120 machines per year, and the past 18 months has been a nightmare as far as failure rate on new Dells is concerned. we've had less OLD machines come in for repair than current models....
Will look into it. Not interested in building systems, so Asus would need to have equivalent models available to what we already order, and good global support - we are an international company with offices in 4 continents - the local OEM with PCs built by Bob or whatever will not suffice.
Will be loading our own SOE, so yeah the default OEM build full of crapola is irrelevant, we have volume licenses...
Corporate policy - takes about 30-60 days to get a new supplier set up, along with the rest of the logistical BS (tweaking our SOE, etc), and we simply needed new machines ASAP.
Additionally, we have yet to receive eval machines from a couple of other suppliers - better the "devil you know" until we can find something to shift to.
We're looking at either Lenovo or HP at the moment, if anyone has any other real suggestions, that would be great.
Yes, in the next 6 months or so, i think we are going to be purchasing elsewhere.
Magical and revolutionary, even.
Thing with Dell is, they seem to go out of their way to blame your use of the product in cases like this. I dealt with the capacitor issue, and we ended up getting sent a stack of about 20 GX260 motherboards to replace ourselves (we were on a remote mine site and couldn't have a dell tech come out every time one died).
However, their handling of the E6500 and E6400 overheating and down-clocking problems has been appalling. They were sold as a high performance laptop, and dell's first question was what software I was running. I'm in an air conditioned office, using a "high end" laptop, it shouldn't fucking matter what software I am running. Despite sending through details of the mass problems people experienced on the internet, and listing the service tags of basically the entire first batch of E series machines we purchased, dell were "unable to replicate" the problem. I had to do a bunch of testing and send through snapshots of what i was seeing to get them to acknowledge that the problem even existed despite massive background info available from unhappy customers on the internet who were also ignored by Dell. Turns out there was a motherboard rev, hence they could not replicate on their newer machines.
Just recently we ordered about 10 more E6500s, all of which have constant network drop outs. The quality control really has gone to shit.
Apple :D