(IAAL) Most of the comments here relating records retention for audits or compliance purposes are dead on.
That said, nearly every company that I've worked at could benefit from a new or updated records retention policy. Typically, the mentality is to just keep everything until someone finally realizes that certain records are 27 years old and starts asking around: "hey, can we just delete this?"
The better approach is to actively look for stuff to toss, and do so on a monthly or quarterly basis. Not only is it cheaper to store, but for most industries, *not* having the records available for many common causes of litigation is beneficial.
Statistically speaking, an "immortals" probably wouldn't typically live much longer than 500 years anyway.
Although I don't have the link, I remember reading a study on just this question some time ago. The authors made the assumption that each person would retain the body of a 35-year-old forever, and then calculated an average lifespan, given current rates of disease, accidents, and other causes of death, other than those that are related to aging.
Of course, the implicit assumption was that people's behavior wouldn't change, which is probably not correct. However, the study did usefully suggest a plausible average lifespan.
I don't know about you, but living for about 500 years sounds just about right; its long enough to see everything, but short enough not to get too bored.
Don't bother with a warranty return. Go buy an identical drive from a local or online retailer with a decent return policy. Then, the following day, return your dead drive in place of the new one for a full refund.
Make sure you tell the store that the drive is dead. The store will then send it back to the drive vendor for a credit or free replacement, costing the drive vendor the full shipping costs.
One of the major hassles of downloading music from alternative sources is gettings songs that are badly ripped. Unfortunately, secure ripping, proper encoding (with a decent encoder) and complete tagging takes a fair bit of work, and the average PC user evidentally doesn't want to go through that. So we have a huge bunch of crummy MP3s floating around.
By limiting the ability of a clueless user to rip CDs, the average quality level of pirated MP3s should go up nicely. And that is a good thing for all of us.
The problem is that this person doesn't place any value on your time. The way to educate them is make them spend as much time as you do fixing each problem, so that they begin to understand and value the relationship between lost time and certain undesirable behaviour (e.g. opening e-mail attachments, failing to update virus software, etc.)
The best ways that I've found to do this are:
1) Make the person bring the PC over to your home or other location for service.
Most of these types of people can't even be bothered to unplug a PC, let alone bring it somewhere; if they can't spend 5 minutes, why should you spend hours?
2) Force them to sit next to you and watch while you perform the fix.
Better yet, sit beside them and force them to do, while you walk them them through it. They may even learn something, and if not, at least they have an appreciation of the effort required.
3) Be blunt with them.
With these sorts of people, its usually not fixing a range of problems so much as the same problem multiple times (usually virus or malware problems). Explain that once you fix a certain type of problem once or twice, its no longer your responsibility to get the user out that type of jam.
The basic question that needs to be answered here is: "do you want to deal with this or not?"
If so, then consider going thru the steps to form a business, as described here.
If not, then find some way to force them to spend some of their time to in order to get yours.
My approach is to tell people that they have to bring the computer over to my house and that I'll get to it in the next day or so. That is usually enough to dissuade them (these types don't like to even unplug cords), and if it isn't, then I know they have a genuine problem that they need help with, and I do my best to fix it in a timely fashion. Its funny how someone can consider it reasonable to demand that you take several hours and drive over to their house and yet be unwilling to take a few minutes to box up a computer.
I've used this approach with a couple of annoying (and distant) relatives, and its worked wonders.
Several warez groups jointly released a Steam server emulator within hours (like maybe 24 at most) of HL2 being officially released, effectively eliminating most of the anti-piracy features of steam.
Of course, legit consumers still get to deal with all of Steam's annoying aspects, regardless.
This is why many gamers use a no-cd crack, or something similar, even with a legit copy of a game. Sorry, but I just can't be bothered to hunt around for the original install media every time I want to use software that I purchased.
In the case of HL2, the funny thing is that the cracked version runs even runs slightly faster, because all the texture files are permanently decrypted instead of being decrypted on the fly as they are loaded.
Faced with the same problem, I just got longer VGA/mouse/keyboard cables and put the whole PC in the next room. Its cheaper, less hassle, and even more quiet. With a USB CD-Rom drive, I only have to get up to use a floppy.
They provide 3 different java-based tools for XML; an editor, XML Schema tool, and a XSLT tool.
As a package, these rock. They are stable, and support multiple platforms, including Windows, Linux, Mac, and several commercial unices. Together are slightly more feature-rich than XMLSpy alone. They aren't open-source tools, but they do have a 30-demo download and are somewhat cheaper than XML Spy.
I still prefer XML Spy for pure editing (I use the cheap cut-down version, not the enterprise edition), but tibco's XSLT tool blows everything else that I have seen out of the water, and their schema tool compares very favorably to XML Spy.
Downside is that the whole package is written in Java and can be slow to load, although its plenty responsive once its up and running on my Win2K P3-800.
You might also check out Stylus Studio for XSLT and XML schema stuff, although after I monkey'ed with their demo for a while, I went back to the Tibco tools, mainly because Tibco offers good support and seems to be backing their product fully. Stylus, however, was recently sold to another company and is a bit behind on the newest XML standards. Stylus also Windows-only.
That is (generally) true for screws, but not for services or IP.
Screws (and most other "goods") are covered under the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), which, in the absence of party agreement to the contrary, mandates that parties act to mitigate, or "cover" damages.
Services, and the scenario you present, wouldn't be covered by the UCC.
Back when it was released, it was roundly maligned for offering shitty performance for Win95 users. "Buy a Pentium 233MMX" all the magazines screamed.
Well, the PPro turned out to be one of the best chips of its day, and the 200Mhz version performed within 5% of the Pentium II 300mhzs that were released 18 months later. I still have dual-PPro system running my CVS/MP3/print/etc. server.
Linus may be a god in the linux software universe, but I wouldn't discount Intel on this just yet.
Actually, that was an opinion offered in Justice Sandra O'Connor's dissent. She recoginized even when Roe was written in 1973 that this would eventually become an issue.
If you are serious comparing MP3 encodings, I highly recommend getting something like the Stereo-Link (www.stereo-link.com).
Its a simple USB device that bypasses your sound card altogether; you just plug your stereo/headphones directly into it.
Soundcards, in general, suck for music reproduction. I have a SBLive, and didn't realize how bad it was until I got a Stereo-Link and a good set of Sonneheiser (spelling?) headphones.
Only downside is that I now need to re-rip all those MP3s I did at 160, since I can now hear some glitches/artifacts that were generally inaudible before. Damn annoying!
MHZ does accurately describe the speed of most PCs because most all national vendors tend to sell the same general class of peripherals with any given processor.
For example, Gateway, Dell, Compaq, et. al., all offer hard drives of about the same speed for any box based on a given processor. For example, notice that most mid-range P3s come with 7200 RPM IDE drives. In fact, they don't even market the brand of the drive in a given machine; this week it could be Quantum, next week Seagate.
And while processor is only about 30% of the total performance equation, the other 70% comes from components that don't vary as much in performance. For example, all of these mid-range p3 boxes have the same speed ram, similarly-performing video cards, and hard drives that are fairly similar in terms of performance.
So: the only remaining variable is the Proc, which does vary somewhat in performance.
Thus: for most consumers, MHZ is a reasonable performance gauge for a new box (assuming its purchased from a national vendor).
My $.02
I recall a story from Tom's (or Anandtech, or one of those), the newer "annihilator" drivers are supposedly already doing something like this. (it was a beta win '98 driver that was mistakenly released/leaked by NVidea, if I recall correctly)
In 3D games, one of the biggest problems is moving the textures in and out of the cards' memory rapidly enough.
By compressing the textures before moving them around, the driver boosts both the usable texture size and effective bus speed.
What was most interesting was that the overhead of compressing/decompressing the data was more than compensated for by the increase in speed that data that could be pushed over the AGP bus.
So, once again, we see a sitation where gaming (and game programmers) is/are pushing the edge of the envelope.
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(IAAL) Most of the comments here relating records retention for audits or compliance purposes are dead on.
That said, nearly every company that I've worked at could benefit from a new or updated records retention policy. Typically, the mentality is to just keep everything until someone finally realizes that certain records are 27 years old and starts asking around: "hey, can we just delete this?"
The better approach is to actively look for stuff to toss, and do so on a monthly or quarterly basis. Not only is it cheaper to store, but for most industries, *not* having the records available for many common causes of litigation is beneficial.
Statistically speaking, an "immortals" probably wouldn't typically live much longer than 500 years anyway.
Although I don't have the link, I remember reading a study on just this question some time ago. The authors made the assumption that each person would retain the body of a 35-year-old forever, and then calculated an average lifespan, given current rates of disease, accidents, and other causes of death, other than those that are related to aging.
Of course, the implicit assumption was that people's behavior wouldn't change, which is probably not correct. However, the study did usefully suggest a plausible average lifespan.
I don't know about you, but living for about 500 years sounds just about right; its long enough to see everything, but short enough not to get too bored.
Don't bother with a warranty return. Go buy an identical drive from a local or online retailer with a decent return policy. Then, the following day, return your dead drive in place of the new one for a full refund.
Make sure you tell the store that the drive is dead. The store will then send it back to the drive vendor for a credit or free replacement, costing the drive vendor the full shipping costs.
One of the major hassles of downloading music from alternative sources is gettings songs that are badly ripped. Unfortunately, secure ripping, proper encoding (with a decent encoder) and complete tagging takes a fair bit of work, and the average PC user evidentally doesn't want to go through that. So we have a huge bunch of crummy MP3s floating around.
By limiting the ability of a clueless user to rip CDs, the average quality level of pirated MP3s should go up nicely. And that is a good thing for all of us.
The problem is that this person doesn't place any value on your time. The way to educate them is make them spend as much time as you do fixing each problem, so that they begin to understand and value the relationship between lost time and certain undesirable behaviour (e.g. opening e-mail attachments, failing to update virus software, etc.)
The best ways that I've found to do this are:
1) Make the person bring the PC over to your home or other location for service.
Most of these types of people can't even be bothered to unplug a PC, let alone bring it somewhere; if they can't spend 5 minutes, why should you spend hours?
2) Force them to sit next to you and watch while you perform the fix.
Better yet, sit beside them and force them to do, while you walk them them through it. They may even learn something, and if not, at least they have an appreciation of the effort required.
3) Be blunt with them.
With these sorts of people, its usually not fixing a range of problems so much as the same problem multiple times (usually virus or malware problems). Explain that once you fix a certain type of problem once or twice, its no longer your responsibility to get the user out that type of jam.
It was translated from an article originally written in Dutch. Pretty sure english was not the translator's first language
Screw him. Its the "marketplace of ideas" not the Neiman Marcus of ideas.
Cops and ER personnel have claimed for decades that crime rates, accidents, etc., all tend to increase slightly when there is a full moon.
I wonder if there are spikes that correlate to lunar cycles?
The basic question that needs to be answered here is: "do you want to deal with this or not?"
If so, then consider going thru the steps to form a business, as described here.
If not, then find some way to force them to spend some of their time to in order to get yours.
My approach is to tell people that they have to bring the computer over to my house and that I'll get to it in the next day or so. That is usually enough to dissuade them (these types don't like to even unplug cords), and if it isn't, then I know they have a genuine problem that they need help with, and I do my best to fix it in a timely fashion. Its funny how someone can consider it reasonable to demand that you take several hours and drive over to their house and yet be unwilling to take a few minutes to box up a computer.
I've used this approach with a couple of annoying (and distant) relatives, and its worked wonders.
Several warez groups jointly released a Steam server emulator within hours (like maybe 24 at most) of HL2 being officially released, effectively eliminating most of the anti-piracy features of steam.
Of course, legit consumers still get to deal with all of Steam's annoying aspects, regardless.
This is why many gamers use a no-cd crack, or something similar, even with a legit copy of a game. Sorry, but I just can't be bothered to hunt around for the original install media every time I want to use software that I purchased.
In the case of HL2, the funny thing is that the cracked version runs even runs slightly faster, because all the texture files are permanently decrypted instead of being decrypted on the fly as they are loaded.
Faced with the same problem, I just got longer VGA/mouse/keyboard cables and put the whole PC in the next room. Its cheaper, less hassle, and even more quiet. With a USB CD-Rom drive, I only have to get up to use a floppy.
www.tibco.com/solutions/products/extensibility/def ault.jsp
They provide 3 different java-based tools for XML; an editor, XML Schema tool, and a XSLT tool.
As a package, these rock. They are stable, and support multiple platforms, including Windows, Linux, Mac, and several commercial unices. Together are slightly more feature-rich than XMLSpy alone. They aren't open-source tools, but they do have a 30-demo download and are somewhat cheaper than XML Spy.
I still prefer XML Spy for pure editing (I use the cheap cut-down version, not the enterprise edition), but tibco's XSLT tool blows everything else that I have seen out of the water, and their schema tool compares very favorably to XML Spy.
Downside is that the whole package is written in Java and can be slow to load, although its plenty responsive once its up and running on my Win2K P3-800.
You might also check out Stylus Studio for XSLT and XML schema stuff, although after I monkey'ed with their demo for a while, I went back to the Tibco tools, mainly because Tibco offers good support and seems to be backing their product fully. Stylus, however, was recently sold to another company and is a bit behind on the newest XML standards. Stylus also Windows-only.
That is (generally) true for screws, but not for services or IP.
Screws (and most other "goods") are covered under the Uniform Commercial Code (UCC), which, in the absence of party agreement to the contrary, mandates that parties act to mitigate, or "cover" damages.
Services, and the scenario you present, wouldn't be covered by the UCC.
Back when it was released, it was roundly maligned for offering shitty performance for Win95 users. "Buy a Pentium 233MMX" all the magazines screamed.
Well, the PPro turned out to be one of the best chips of its day, and the 200Mhz version performed within 5% of the Pentium II 300mhzs that were released 18 months later. I still have dual-PPro system running my CVS/MP3/print/etc. server.
Linus may be a god in the linux software universe, but I wouldn't discount Intel on this just yet.
Actually, that was an opinion offered in Justice Sandra O'Connor's dissent. She recoginized even when Roe was written in 1973 that this would eventually become an issue.
If you are serious comparing MP3 encodings, I highly recommend getting something like the Stereo-Link (www.stereo-link.com).
Its a simple USB device that bypasses your sound card altogether; you just plug your stereo/headphones directly into it.
Soundcards, in general, suck for music reproduction. I have a SBLive, and didn't realize how bad it was until I got a Stereo-Link and a good set of Sonneheiser (spelling?) headphones.
Only downside is that I now need to re-rip all those MP3s I did at 160, since I can now hear some glitches/artifacts that were generally inaudible before. Damn annoying!
The first Mummy cleared some 400+ million in worldwide revenue. That, and only that, is why the Mummy has yet again risen from the grave...
MHZ does accurately describe the speed of most PCs because most all national vendors tend to sell the same general class of peripherals with any given processor. For example, Gateway, Dell, Compaq, et. al., all offer hard drives of about the same speed for any box based on a given processor. For example, notice that most mid-range P3s come with 7200 RPM IDE drives. In fact, they don't even market the brand of the drive in a given machine; this week it could be Quantum, next week Seagate. And while processor is only about 30% of the total performance equation, the other 70% comes from components that don't vary as much in performance. For example, all of these mid-range p3 boxes have the same speed ram, similarly-performing video cards, and hard drives that are fairly similar in terms of performance. So: the only remaining variable is the Proc, which does vary somewhat in performance. Thus: for most consumers, MHZ is a reasonable performance gauge for a new box (assuming its purchased from a national vendor). My $.02
I recall a story from Tom's (or Anandtech, or one of those), the newer "annihilator" drivers are supposedly already doing something like this. (it was a beta win '98 driver that was mistakenly released/leaked by NVidea, if I recall correctly)
In 3D games, one of the biggest problems is moving the textures in and out of the cards' memory rapidly enough.
By compressing the textures before moving them around, the driver boosts both the usable texture size and effective bus speed.
What was most interesting was that the overhead of compressing/decompressing the data was more than compensated for by the increase in speed that data that could be pushed over the AGP bus.
So, once again, we see a sitation where gaming (and game programmers) is/are pushing the edge of the envelope.